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Beautiful! Thanks for quoting!

Have you shared with us what your old username was?

If not, can you explain how there could be a reason to hide such a thing?

If so, then that'd be great - to look back and help others learn from what you posted in the past and see how you have grown - or not - or how you have changed in whatever way over the past two years. It is a learning experience that has great value to those willing to use it.

Hatzlocha!

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Hi whatsyourname

That's great! Yes the therapist must respect your confidentiality and since you are an adult he cannot share anything with your parents without your consent.

And the more open and honest you are the better he can help you. Don't hold back.

Much hatzlacha!!!

Gevura!

The only way to benefit from therapy is to be completely open and honest. A therapist who doesn't respect your confidentiality is not going to be effective, because then you will hold things back, (and you won't be open and honest.)

If the therapist is from your community, you can make up specific rules how you will interact when/if you see him in shul or on the street etc.

I wish you much hatzlocho with therapy. I found it very helpful, although I wasn't going for addiction, but for depression related issues.

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Use him/her, use him/her, use him/her! Please don't play 'nice guy', please don't play 'kiddush Hashem', and please use him/her! (oh, did I say that already?) And you will be matzliach, chaver.

(And anyhow, you already are a nice man and you already are a kiddush Hashem for trying to get better!)

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removed

I am responding to this post as you requested via private message.

I am happy to see that you got a therapist. I think Dov gave you some great advice, namely to make sure you rely on your therapist, because some of us have gone to therapists but not really used them.

There are two kinds of therapy, namely insight therapy and cognitive therapy. Insight therapy is based on the idea that your past experiences more or less determine your future behavior. So you dig and try to figure out why you are the way you are today. This can be useful but usually does not lead to true change. Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that your beliefs and behavior can change. When I was in cognitive therapy I would sometimes bring up ideas about how I was influenced by my mother, and I was annoyed to see that my therapist did not want to talk about that. My cognitive therapy was mostly training to identify the inner thoughts that determine my feelings so that I could change them if they were not objective. One stark difference I found between the two therapies was that my cognitive therapist clearly stated that the therapy takes place over a limited period of time, and gave me a sheet to evaluate the results. Having done insight therapy before I was very surprised. You might want to figure out what kind of therapist you got so you are not disappointed. Either way it will take effort.

In the book "Intimate Connections" by Dr. David D. Burns there is a story of one man he treated who was a pedophile and successfully developed an interest in adult women instead by using a wrist counter and actively engaging in sexual fantasies about every woman he ran into. At first he found them totally uninteresting, and after a few weeks he was getting aroused by adult women. He was already married and this had a positive effect on his marriage. I don't know if you will use this method. I wonder if this method would be considered a good method for a frum pedophile.

You wrote about your highs and lows. We all have those, and not very different from yours. People who engage in behaviors (such as viewing regular porn if you are frum, or child porn even if you are not) that contradict their own moral standard go through that roller coaster. They fundamentally believe they cannot stop but they don't want to see it.

When I read your long post I get the impression that the writer is a person who feels tremendously alone, because of the stigma that you mentioned before. I don't think it has to be this way, and the hatred of other and the self-hatred is the very source of the power of the yetzer ha-ra because your sense of self is at stake. Some dislike of things and people is warranted. The thing that's not okay is the free hatred, the hatred we pile on ourselves. Dislike has to be perfect, well-tuned, and today it's not well-tuned and that is why the beis hamikdash is not being rebuilt. The extra, free, dislike is manifested in dislike towards ourselves and towards others. Dislike towards ourselves manifests itself in exaggerated desire (because if we fall we are just dirt) and also in hatred of others. And in order to remove this extra hatred we have to act as if we do not have it. When we fall we still have to love ourselves, we have to motivate ourselves by identifying the benefit in moral behavior, how it benefits us, not by emotional blackmail, and when we are tempted to dislike others we have to act with respect and consideration towards them. So I hope that we'll be writing back and forth whatever dislike I have for you will become focused and limited to your unhealthy sexual desires.

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