Someone wrote:
I can get triggered by the SLIGHTEST touch of a woman!
Getting touched by the cashier handing me change has triggered me.
Even getting touched by a woman nurse taking my blood has triggered me!
Dov Replies:
I am not recommending any specific course of action and everybody is different and needs a different approach. But this is from my heart. Interpret it as you like:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sounds frum, but I think you are just making too big a freaking deal of a woman's power. She is a human being and not a godess. That is where the electrifying feeling inside us comes from when she walks into the room, when we make eye contact with her, when we hear her voice, or when we bump into her hand even if it was completely by accident. Gevalt!
Normal people can make a big deal out of this and consider it tzniyus - and it may work well for them!
But not sex and lust obsesses. We often do even worse with that derech.
You can say my words are just silly apikorsus, if you like. But I know for a fact that half of our problems with women are because we have been making their bodies, voices, and personalities our Higher Power for decades; our hope and refuge; and given to it so much of our precious mental/emotional power, for so long.
But they are just people, like you and me.
One proof of this is that sometimes the shiksah has more power than the frum woman (though sometimes it's the opposite way around). Why would the shiksah ever have more power? Isn't she even less of an important person to us, not being a Yisrael (and from klipas Nogah anyhow)....? Hmmm?
So what's happening? It's because we make her an inhuman object and deify her body, her smell, her voice, her smile, her image and her gender! She carries power for us. We give her our power - even if they are just an image on paper (or pixels on a screen)!
That's much of our problem. And it invades our understanding of all women, and certainly our wives. If you are a porn and lust obsesser and deny this, I believe you are blind. And that is the most opinionated thing I have ever said in GYE context, so far. So be it.
That's why I say that when you are triggered by someone,daven for her, be genuinely loving to her and respect her as a human being. Hashem wants this of us, for it frees us when done sincerely and we keep the halacha and make no stupid excuses for breaking normal boundaries.
Don't be afraid of her! She is just a person like anyone else, not special because of her shape or skin. Yitchak avinu neither hated the Yetzer Hara nor was afraid of it - that is the direction we need to go, not the other way that leads to isolation and paranoid fastidiousness. Heck, we have all used that before, right? All of us have sincerely tried to beat this thing with frumkeit and gedarim before, right? It fails because it just gives them more power, not less - then when the dam gets a crack - we explode!! Shocking, isn't it?
The fear makes her into a powerful monster that "can get you". She is not the monster - you and me and our own lust is the only monster in the room.
Get my point, or is it gebberrish? It is from my second step work and from living in the body of a sexaholic (mine).
- Dov |
Still Clean
