The Library

I would like to recount a story that happened to me a year ago on Rosh Chodesh Elul. I was in a very low mood with bad thoughts in my head. I was on my way to Israel for the Chaggim. I had to take a stopover. The first plane I was on got delayed for a few ...

I had built-up a very close kesher with my rebbe who knew everything about me, for better and for worse. Although I was a very good bachur, I still had my quirks, and I hid nothing from him. Except for one secret. There was a whole side to me that I had never revealed to ...

"Ovadia" posted on the forum: Hi, I am joining the forum for the first time today. I am married and we have B"H a number of children. I spent ten years in Kollel. After ten years learning, I had to leave full time learning for parnasa reasons and work in an office. The in...

  I was in Israel, 14 years old, from a regular non frum family, the typical half Israeli / half American Jew. I put on Tefillin every day, but that was about it. Every time I saw a frum Jew, I identified with him, I wanted to be like him, but that spark was not bright en...

Today is 100 days clean for me, and I would like to try and describe how I got to this point, and how I think I have changed over the past 3 months. I am a thirty something professional living in a large North American city. I attended several yeshivos over the years and ...

RATM writes to someone who was unable to make it more than 3-5 days at a time for the past year or so, yet who still never gave up: You know, this 90 day chart is very, very important to me, and I do think it is very important... When I saw this site and started getting i...

Uri writes to someone who had fallen into addictive behaviors that included live relationships: Hi, my name is Uri.We're coming from the same place, my friend.And you should know that the addiction to porn, masturbation, or sex are all very much from the same place.It is ...

I've been slipping a lot lately and I felt like a total failure. This past Shabbos, the last thing I felt was holy. Then out of the blue I picked up the sefer 'The garden of Emunah' by Rav Arush and I opened it to a random page. And this is what I read as soon as I opened...

Although going strong for 28 days now, I almost just lost it due to "a regular everyday news story". As I was logging on to my e-mail account, there was a story about a controversial picture on the front cover of a magazine. Out of habit I clicked on it, but soon came to ...

This is the first time I had some major insights FROM A CLOSE CALL, instead of FROM A FALL, Thank G-d! First of all, I used the forum in a way I never have before. I was desperate so I sent out distress PMs to some familiar names there. Until now, I've felt sort of impers...

I was born into a very hareidi family... lots of brothers and sisters... my father is a well known posek and Rav... I learned for many years and even started on smicha... Since then, I've never been non-observant, chas veshalom, but I've rejected the seclusion of hareidi ...

... I got older and managed to find easy access to the net for my fix... This carried on until I was 18. I was hardly keeping anything at that point. I was in Israel, clubbing every night and still using p**n as my crutch and getting into deep trouble. I didn't actually d...

I was feeling down, thinking I'm fooling myself for thinking that I can be a clean and holy person... I aint holy... thinking it's gonna come a-crashin down soon... I went to get a bagel and I saw the cover of the New York Post and had a change of heart. It said: HOLY RAG...

I am doing pretty well and got to see first hand some of the hashgacha pratis that I have read about on this site. It happened two days ago. I was pretty low and it was late and I found myself typing out an all-too familiar web address. I told myself that I didn't really ...

Day 1 was surprisingly easy, but Day 2 was a perfect example of where I would have fallen before finding this website. Throughout the day, from doing work to lying in bed, my whole body was just screaming for release. There were a few times it got so bad that I couldn't f...

The program doesn't tell us how to stop - we had done that a thousand and one times - it shows us how to keep from starting again. We had it backwards; before, we always wanted the therapist, spouse, or God to do the stopping for us - to fix us. Now, we stop; and then, in...

Something pretty amazing just happened to me. I was about to start Googling certain things (with my fake "innocent" thoughts that "it's not so bad"), and all of a sudden my Internet just completely stopped working. I couldn't click on anything. Hashem was saying to me, "y...

Last night while waiting for a red light to change, I saw some poison. Except it looked appetizing. I looked away immediately, but felt the voices in my head saying, "hey, you looked! I think you looked for a second too long anyway, why not look again? You anyway blew it!...