Well, I haven't checked in for quite a while. I feel bad for that. For some reason I wake up planning to do the right thing: log on to GYE and do meetings, and when the time comes, I don't do it. Part of it is the amount of time I spend talking to my girlfriend on video chat. Like I feel she needs to talk to me for a significant amount of time each day. And I do enjoy talking to her. Long distance relationships are hard. It doesn't make it easier the fact we only see each other face to face once a month. My therapists are telling me that I have to wait a year of sobriety until I can marry her. In the meantime when I do see her, we are not shomer. It makes it that much harder, the stuff we do. After I acted out this past week, I told her we had to dial it down. And when I do act out the despair is so great, because I know I am delaying and ruining a possible great life ahead of me.
In the meantime, I can't bring myself to daven, not even five minutes. I wake up at the last possible second, throw on my clothes, and run to work. I can't bring myself to keep shabbos when I am alone. At work, I procrastinate my responsibilities, passing the time until I get to leave. I kills me because I have opportunities in front of me, and I know others are struggling to find jobs, and I'm busy screwing around, unable to get it together and do the right thing, by anything.I need major help! maybe i thought I could do this on my own by getting filters and blockers, but I can't. it won't work. I need to get sober. I need to get responsible. I need to get that life that I am destined for. I need to learn how to work for something, anything! Really, anything!I have so much I need to work on. Help.

Hi yitz, sometimes a bochur can relate better than those married. I'm already almost in the parsha of shidduchim and i always think to myself every time i fall will be pushing off my marriage later, b/c i cannot get married being a full blown addict, it'll ruin me. But after being on gye for a few months, i'm beginning to feel more hopeful. It's unbeleivable how much i've grown from it. Ok, i fall at times, but so what i know that the guys on gye will always be there to help. Guard has helped me alot. Hold on tight yitz, we'll give u the ride of your life. Keep posting on the forum and we'll always be there to help u through every stage of ur life. And who knows maybe in a month or two on gye, you'll be a changed person, and you'll be ready to get married. There's no guarentee you'll have to wait that long. We are looking forward to be keeping in touch with u. Yes, i really feel ur pain, i've been feeling alot of self-pity today. But not all is lost!

Hopeful322 wrote on 23 Dec 2009 19:48:
:'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( Dude my heart goes out for you. Im actually tearing reading your post. You wanna get better so much. Its beautiful. But its so hard. i know i know. Important, try and take things slow. Aybe join one of the phone groups. Maybe make up for a week youll daven for 5 minutes a day. If that works youll up it to 10. and so on and so forth. Try and tell yourself at least youll put on tefillin once a day. Im not sure having such a realtionship is healthy. For many reasons. But im not the real pro at that. My heart is with you bro. Feel free to email or char me up imtrying25@gmail.com. hatzlacha.

Hey - I'm sorry that things are so hard and confusing, but I'm glad that you're posting - Join us!

Dear Hopeful,

Welcome to our community! Once you've arrived, there's no turning back. Everyone here will just grab a hold of you and pull you up, up, up!

Scientific studies have shown that it takes 90 days to change a neural thought pattern that was ingrained in the brain through addictive behaviors. Did you join the 90 day chart on-line? Sign up over here...

We get cries for help every day, by e-mail and on the forum. Tzuras Rabim Chatzi Nechama    And that is why we created the GYE handbooks (links below). If you read them well, from beginning to end, slowly, and try to implement what you read, you will find the answers within them to enable you to completely turn your life around. You're worth it.

Also, join the daily Chizuk e-mail lists to get fresh chizuk every day, and post away on this forum. You will get tons of daily Chizuk and support. This disease can't be beat alone. It works best when you get out of isolation!

GuardYourEyes also offers various free anonymous phone conferences, where you can join a group of other frum Yidden, along with an experienced sponsor. See this page for four different options. Our conferences are taking place daily, throughout the week... This would be a tremendous step in the right direction for you and help you learn freedom from this addiction. Not only will you learn the secret of the 12-Steps - which is known to be the world's most powerful program for beating addiction having helped millions world wide, but joining the group will be another way of GETTING OUT OF ISOLATION and connecting with others who are going through what you are.

Let me tell you a little about the two GuardYourEyes handbooks. They lay down the cornerstone and foundation of our work, and they make our network much more effective and helpful for people.

You see, until now, people would often get "lost" when coming to our website, not knowing what tips and techniques to try. For example, a beginner wouldn't jump straight into therapy or 12-Step groups, while on the other hand, someone whose addiction was more advanced wouldn't be helped by the standard tips of "making fences" putting in "filters" etc... So it was essential to develop a handbook which details all the techniques and tools to dealing with this addiction in progressive order. Now with these handbooks, anyone can read through and see what steps they've tried already, and if those steps haven't worked, they can continue on through the handbook where the steps become progressively more powerful and "addiction-oriented".

And the second handbook, called the "Attitude" handbook, can also help anyone, no matter what level of addiction they may have. Often people write in to us saying that had they only known the proper outlook & attitude that we try and share on the GuardYourEyes network when they were younger, they would have never fallen into an addiction in the first place! So we hope that through this handbook, many addictions will be prevented.

The handbooks are PDF files, set up as eBooks, and they have bookmarks and hyper-links in the Index, to make them easy to navigate.

Make sure to read them, they contain a wealth of information on beating this addiction! And I'd love to hear your feedback on them...

Note: You might want to print them out to read away from the computer. Keep in mind though, that if you do this, you won't be able to click on the many web links in the articles. But you can always come back to them later. The truth is, it's anyway good to go through the whole handbook once without clicking on links, just to get an overview of all the tools available. Once you did that, you can start again from tool #1 and read each tool through more carefully, click the links and study each technique and assess whether you have tried it fully yet or not...

Right click on the links below and select "Save Link/Target As" to download the handbooks to your computer.

1) The GuardYourEyes Handbook
This Handbook details 18 suggested tools and techniques, in progressive order, beginning with the most basic and fundamental approaches to dealing with this addiction, and continuing down through increasingly earnest and powerful methods. For the first time, we can gauge our level of addiction and find the appropriate tools for our particular situation. And no matter what level our addiction may have advanced to, we will be able to find the right tools to break free in this handbook!

2) The GuardYourEyes Attitude
The Attitude Handbook details 30 basic principles to help us maintain the proper attitude and perspective on this struggle. Here are some examples: Understanding what we are up against, what it is that Hashem wants from us, how we can use this struggle for tremendous growth, how we can deal with bad thoughts, discovering how to redirect the power of our souls, understanding that every little bit counts, learning how to bounce back up after a fall, and so on and so forth...

May Hashem be with you!

YOU ARE SOMEBODY SPECIAL!!!

Man I feel so sorry for you, I wish there was some way for me to help you kick your situation.
It's painful to imagine what your going through.

You might not realize this, but I think your 1st and main issue is that you sound like you suffer from complete disconnect from G-d.
I think you should focus on this first, and let the rest of the corrections follow.
Take 5 miutes a day, or 3, or 2 whatever you feel your capable of, and talk to him in your own language.
Tell him how you feel and what you want, the way you would speak to a person your close to.
If this sounds corny to you, then you obviously haven't tried it yet.
It really works. It connects you - very deeply in fact.

You need to get a feel for the incentive to purify yourself.
I think your only experiencing the negative effect of being empty of it.
Most importantly, just hang in there and keep on fighting.
Don't give up!!

KG, hit the nail on the head!

Dear Hopeful,

Welcome to the forum!

Putting aside the Halachic considerations, your girlfriend no doubt is unaware what an impossible predicament you are being put in.  It reminds me of less than fully observant couples where the wife expects her husband to be physically affectionate with her during the time of month that relations are forbidden.  Putting aside the fact that such contact itself is forbidden, it makes it 1,000 times more difficult for the husband, whereas the wife may feel that everything is just great!

Wow! Thank you so much everyone for your amazing feedback! I do have to admit, I do suffer from a disconnection for G-d. I was born frum, but had a lot of philosophical queries as I grew up, which affected my faith. It was also an issue with my mother, who became substantially frummer when I was teenager and tried to drag our family with her by trying to restrict us and force us to do other things, making us resentful, and a little less observant. Tefila, Tehilim, and talking about Hashem reminds me of my mother, which makes me a little sick. I tried to get past it by going to a Ba'al teshuva yeshiva and learning everything they do, from the beginning, but it did nothing to help a connection or relationship. And without a relationship and beginning to live on my own, I began to observe less and less. That's my situation, and why i feel it will be so hard for me, even impossible to connect to G-d.
To get current, I hit my "bottom", or so I hope, last Thursday. I crashed my car into a tree right after doing 5 and a half hours of deliveries, for someone as a favor, in the middle of the night in the snow. The next day I expected everyone to pity me, and my dad to offer to pay the damage and new snow tires. Fat chance. It truly is a disease of insanity. When that didn't happen, I just thought about that, and how I myself didn't have enough money to fix my car completely. I started to hate my situation, that I had a job I didn't like that didn't pay that much, that I didn't make enough money to get the things I wanted, that my parents have been getting divorced for five years and I was never taught how to live alone, that I have constant drama with my girlfriend, that I have this addiction, and have to be different than everyone else, I hate it. I realized then my life was unmanageable and I could not do it alone. I REALLY needed to get help. I am now doing a 30 in 30, and looking to be in touch with anyone who wants to be. I cannot do this on my own. My girlfriend now asks me how my meeting was each day, and that is great for me. I look forward to hearing from and meeting a whole lot of you.

I apologize for my ignorance - what's a 30 in 30?

It's hard when unhealthy relationships and being frum are intertwined in our heads. Honestly, I'm not sure what advice to give, except that part of growing and moving forward is figuring out who WE want to be. it took me some time to do that.

Have you ever gone to therapy?

silentbattle wrote on 06 Jan 2010 00:47:


A 30 in 30 is 30 meetings in 30 days.
It isn't as much of an unhealthy relationship as much as we both have a lot of baggage to deal with. I have two therapists and a men's group. She had been in therapy growing up, but didn't deal with much relatively. Now she was procrastinating seeing a therapist, and issues beyond and within our control were piling up on us. I told her last night that if she didn't start working on her issues, I would never marry her. It hurt her, but she decided to get one and has started looking. I would have never been able to do that in the past. I always said what women wanted to hear and didn't say what they didn't. So this is recovery for me.

Actually, I was referring to your issues with your mother, and how that relationship has tainted your feelings towards being frum.

However, your current relationship with your girlfriend might need some examination, as well.

I could be wrong, but I don't think it's a healthy situation when someone is changing for their partner. A person needs to go to therapy and work on themselves because they want to get better. And if they don't...well, then they don't. And being forced to go to therapy and pretend to change may not help that.

Good for you h322 on your 30 in 30!! Big step and hopefully it will take you far!! If youd like you can contact me whenever, on my email. Im in israel so the hours arent great but if you need to talk i will do what i can. So keep it up bro. We all love you, just for who you are. And we love you even more becuase your joining our army of revolutionaries to get past this addiciton.

Like IT said, man - I love you, and I have the deepest respect for you, and the battle that you're fighting...