The Library

Someone who we helped convince to join the 12-Step groups, sent us an e-mail recently as follows:

I've had good groups of days, but the big picture is still horrible. I truly hope and am optimistic that one day I will climb out and help others too, but as of today it seems everyone is pulling out but me, I am desperate, I cry to hashem 24/7, I feel so close to him sometimes, yet 10 minutes later I'm surfing porn again.

I am in the process of figuring out steps 1,2 & 3, maybe you can enlighten me.

1. We admitted we were powerless over lust.

This is easy to understand. My willpower is getting me nowhere. However motivated I am, I am clearly powerless.

2. We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

This is also easy, Hashem has the power to do everything.

3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

I'm struggling to figure out how to implement step 3. Surrender to G-d means to do his will instead of your own will, so instead of looking at that pretty girl or going to that website, I look away because I surrendered my will to God's. I don't understand how this should stop me from my obsession more then the millions of other times I tried stopping what I was doing because God didn't like what I was doing and I was trying to surrender to his will.

Another person wrote us yesterday as well:

"How does giving it up to Hashem remove the desire? How does it work?"

Once again, we turn to our 12-Step expert Boruch. Here is his reply:

Firstly, my advice in general on anything to do with the 12 steps, is first to read the first 164 pages of the Big Book as soon as possible. If you have a Palm OS device, click here. (Every time you see the word drink, liquor, alcohol or alcoholic substitute the words lust or sexaholic, as appropriate).

Now, your question is how to do the Third Step.

I myself had tremendous intellectual and emotional difficulty with this step. I didn't understand what the steps were about and I did not get any satisfactory explanation. However I was determined at all costs to get them, and BeChasdei Hashem I now have my own understanding of the real goal here, having worked on the problem for weeks and having broken my head on the Big Book.

So here is my selection from the Big Book that captures what really works for me.

You asked how the Third Step is different than what you have done until now, that is "looking the other way because Hashem said so".

My answer to you is that before we even get to what it is that you are supposed to do, let's first see if the Big Book description of the reaction of the "holic" who is working the steps on being confronted with his addiction, sounds different than your old approach.

Here's how the Big Book (Page 85) describes the reaction of the "holic" to the object of addiction, once he has internalized the Third Step (I have substituted lust for alcohol):

"And we have ceased fighting anything or anyone--even lust. For by this time sanity will have returned. We will seldom be interested in lust. If tempted, we recoil from it as from a hot flame. We react sanely and normally, and we will find that this has happened automatically. We will see that our new attitude toward lust has been given us without any thought or effort on our part. It just comes! That is the miracle of it. We are not fighting it, neither are we avoiding temptation".

Too good to be true?

Well, that's how it works for me when I do it right.

The reason that we cannot do it that way on our own is because we hold on for dear life to all the cravings and desires and we only fight the behavior.

So we crave and are addicted to the thought of the beautiful woman and only fight the "looking". That's one losing battle that Hashem does not want us to fight.

So how to do it right? Next time you see an alluring sight, don't fight it. Go through steps 1 through 3. And here's my suggestion of how to do it:

Just say these three things:

1) Hashem I will not fight, I will just surrender to You and do what You want me to do.

2) Hashem, as Dovid Hamelech said, "negdecho kol taavosi - to you are all my desires", I offer up and give away all of my desires and craving to You. You can have my desires, I do not want them and they are my korbon (sacrifice) to You. Please take them away from me now.

3) Hashem, You do not want us to fight the Yetzer Hara head on. I am going to surrender to do what you want me to do, and I will change my focus immediately from what is tempting me to you and your Torah. I will forget the temptation totally.

To help with this, I will say from memory, over and over.

"venishmartem mikol dovor ro - and you shall guard yourself from every bad thing".

And I will think of how Chazal tell us from that possuk not to think about thoughts that could chas vesholom bring to tumah (impurity, such as nocturnal emissions).

I will head for the most immediate learning opportunity, be it a beis medrash, Torah phone line such as kol Haloshon, a sefer on my phone or PDA, or a pocket sefer I carry with me.

But don't panic. And don't try to use the sefer or the Torah to fight it, rather just calmly work the steps in your mind and surrender, and do it Hashem's way.

If you cannot do this on your own, call your sponsor immediately. If that doesn't help, go to the soonest meeting.

If I can try and sum up Boruch's reply in just a few words:

Instead of retaining the lust and trying to give up our will to Hashem, we need to surrender the lust itself to Hashem!

As Boruch wrote to someone else:

An addict's strongest will is his lust, that's why he's addicted. And no matter what he says, he is not ready to give that up without a fight. If he says he will give up his will, he really only means that he will give up the acting out - but not his will.

What he really needs to do, is to be mevatel his rotzon to the rotzon Hashem (nulify his will to the will of G-d). That means giving up the lust itself, as well as all expectation of ever achieving his lust, to Hashem.