Hello to all,
i am new and not sure if this is the right place to post....
i just reached out ( a few days ago) and finally came to terms that i am and addict and cannot control myself when it comes the internet and pleasuring myself, when i get stressed out or overwhelmed i turn to the non kosher sites and that leads to....  i spoke to someone who is recovering for over 10 years and he says i should go to SA meeting, my question is how important is it to go to a meeting, cant i just join a conference call and/or get a sponsor and do everything over the phone?
Thanks

Welcome yidster! Youve made the right choice by coming here. And im gonna make the right choice by allowing people bigger and better to answer that question! :D But i would like to welcome our newest warrior. Check around the site, read threads, youll see theres so much to learn from this beautiful site. Hatzlacha with whatever you do.

Dear Yidster,

I am the admin of this forum. 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!

No need to jump right into an SA group. We have handbooks (see links below) that will guide you step by step, tool by tool, in progressive order. SA groups are tool #15. If tools #1 through #14 aren't enough, then you definitely should go to an SA group! 

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...

Make sure to install a strong filter. It will be almost impossible to break free of this while having all the garbage within a mouse click away. See this page for one good filter option, along with instructions on how to install it best - and give away the password to our "filter Gabai"... See this page for another 20 (or so) filter ideas and information...

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.

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.

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!

yidster welcome,
there are alot of different opinions on this forum and different things work for different people.
rav twerski is a well known addiction expert and he says only sa will do the trick.
some hold not.some hold yes.
read up on sa and see what you think of it.
it worked for many people.
iy'h it should work for you

SA definitely does work for a lot of people. I don't know the level of your addiction, but if it's serious then the only thing is probably SA.
Why don't you look through the handbooks and recognize where your holding before you take the steps towards recovery. 

Yidster wrote on 04 Jan 2010 23:14:
Dear Yidster -
You are so lucky that you have come to see what's wreally going on with you and that you are taking it seriously. I presume you have been having this problem for a while now, so this is quite a change to the better! I am an addict as well, and empathize. That's how I know that you are so lucky to finally be facing this seriously. May Hashem help you and me remain serious about it, without having to undergo any further humiliation or pain.

Speaking of humiliation, I have found with me and with others, that we tend to keep buffers between us and the simple truth about ourselves in order to save face. Ultimately, these measures serve one purpose - which we don't really intend.... Thay help us hold onto the lie that we were holding onto till we finally started to take our problem seriously: that we are essentially OK and will work it out, one day. Apparently not.
That mistake is really our only enemy in the beginning. Much more than the addiction, aveiro, the YH (or whatever you call it) is.
That's why I bite the bullet. I go to meetings and face the music. I lead with my weakness and speak it out clearly to others there - they understand because they are recovering from the same insanity as I am. No humiliation there, just humility to admit the truth. The first step.

This phone idea may be a nice bridge to eventually doing what you need to to finally get totally honest, but in the end, half measures availed us nothing.
Nothing.
You deserve better.
Take the humility and go for it, rather than just more humiliation.
"Kir'u levavchem, v'al bigdeichem", the novi told us.
This is what he meant.
You know you deserve better than taking measures that will not last a lifetime.
After all, isn't that why you are here?

Much love,

Dov

www.guardureyes.com/GUE/RTwerski/groupsforwho.asp

Dear Yidster,

Congratulations on taking this enormous step. As you can see I am also new to this place. You will receive alot of support here - I have experienced it. I, like you, also can't control my use of the internet or pleasuring myself. Recently I have "progressed" to far riskier behaviors than I ever thought possible. I have tried therapy, psychiatrists, psychotropic medicine (lots of them), meditation, on-line SA groups, informal shmoozing, you name it. But it hasn't worked for me.

With so many opinions who can we trust to lead us the right way!
By the way, I don't have anything against any of the above methods. I'm sure they all can be helpful with the right person and in the right combination. My question is who is to decide what the individual recovery plan for each person should be. I hope I have learned by now that it can't be me. I am not yet someone who can think for himself on issues that could G-D forbid destroy my wife and kids. So the OCD in me says that I still haven't sought out the world's biggest expert in addiction surely he will give me some real Atza Tovas. Check out what Dr. William D. Silkworth, M.D. wrote about the A.A. movement (substitue SA,GA,OA,NA) Dr. Silkworth was a chief physician at a nationally promient hospital specializing in addiction: "We doctors have realized for a long time that some form of moral psychology was of urgent importance to alcoholics (sub. sexaholics), buts its application presented difficulties beyond our conception. What with our ultra-modern standards, our scientific approach to everything, we are perhaps not well equipped to apply the powers of good that lie outside our synthetic knowledge...If any feel that as psychiatrists directing a hospital for alcoholics we appear sentimental, let them stand with us on the firing line, see the tragedies, the depairing wives, the little children; let the solving of these problems become a part of their daily work, and even of their sleeping moments, and the most cynical will not wonder that we have accepted and encouraged this movement. We feel, after many years of experience, that we have found nothing which has contributed more to the rehabilitation of these men than the altruistic movement now growing up among them (face-to-face 12-step meetings)...these men may well have a remedy for thousands of cases (that they thought were "hopeless"). YOU MAY RELY ABSOLUTELY ON ANYTHING THEY SAY ABOUT THEMSELVES."  So says the good Doc!

I think that today there are more than 800,000 recovering alcoholics attending groups all over the world. I don't know the statistics regarding SA groups which started much later (in the 70's). I also don't know who wrote the GYE handbooks and their qualifications to do so, but they are packed with wisdom and Atza Tovas. The handbooks do make some bold recommendations about participation in SA. Ultimately its your choice and mine. I have been discovering that good, stable groups have a tough interview procedure before just admitting anyone into the group room usually by someone with lots of experience. Anyway. Hotslacha and thanks for letting me share.

Yosef (a gratefully recovering sexaholic)

Yosef wrote on 05 Jan 2010 22:23:


Yosef,

Although I have no intention of getting into debates about AA and if their program is good or bad, I do feel the need to fill in a certain blank spot concerning the 'Doctor's Opinion' in the beginning of their book:

Bill Wilson published Doctor Silkworth's letter in the Big Book, and used it to imply that the medical establishment strongly approved of Bill's wonderful new plan to cure all of the alcoholics with the program he has developed. Later, in the second edition, Bill added an appendix called "The Medical View on A.A.", which listed five more doctors who said something nice about Alcoholics Anonymous.

What Bill Wilson didn't bother to mention, was the fact that the American Medical Association reviewed the book Alcoholics Anonymous when it was first published, and they found it to be of no scientific merit or interest. The real "Medical View" on Alcoholics Anonymous which was printed on October 14, 1939 in the Journal of the American Medical Asscociation reads as follows:

“The seriousness of the psychiatric and social problem represented by addiction to alcohol is generally underestimated by those not intimately familiar with the tragedies in the families of victims or the resistance addicts offer to any effective treatment. Many psychiatrists regard addiction to alcohol as having a more pessimistic prognosis than schizophrenia.

For many years the public was beguiled into believing that short courses of enforced abstinence and catharsis in "institutes" and "rest homes" would do the trick, and now that the failure of such temporizing has become common knowledge, a considerable number of other forms of quack treatment have sprung up.

The book under review is a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. It is in no sense a scientific book, although it is introduced by a letter from a physician who claims to know some of the anonymous contributors who have been "cured" of addiction to alcohol and have joined together in an organization which would save other addicts by a kind of religious conversion.

The book contains instructions as to how to intrigue the alcoholic addict into the acceptance of divine guidance in place of alcohol in terms strongly reminiscent of Dale Carnegie and the adherents of the Buchman ("Oxford") movement. The one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol. Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.”

2B

Thanks for the fill-in 2B. My feeling about the book "AA", you could guess, I'm sure. So I won't bother writing it! Ha!

However, I'd like to just say that I work in a health care field and see many drunks and drug addicts. The medical field does basically nothing for them, and never has. As Dr Silkworth admits.
They still do nothing beside their own version of "curious medical exhortations and social obedience propaganda" ("this drinking is killing your liver", and "it's not nice to drink").
They are still relatively clueless.

AA and it's offshoots has clearly succeeded in helping millions of addicted persons get better and even become very strong positive forces in society. I imagine that everyone sees that.

How many addicts has the average doctor "healed"? None? Oh, I forgot - nowadays they send them to AA meetings after getting them over the DT's and shaking a finger....

I love you and love your honesty, too, but feel this needs to be said, as well.

One more thingie. While the docs in power in the late 30s and 40s were heady with the supremacy of science, nowadays, the medical field has mellowed a bit.
Do you know what the position of the AMA, for example, is on AA now? I presume it's more positive.

Sorry if I come on strong with this stuff, even though I tried to play soft. But anyway, I'm a little bored and tired and like a good juicy argument sometimes....just kidding.....

I'm glad Dov answered here because I also had planned on saying 3 things (some of which Dov already mentioned).

1) The "medical field" is largely atheistic and therefore they will do all they can to negate a program that claims a "religious awakening".

2) The quote you bring is from the first time that doctors/medical associations took a serious look at the AA book back in the 30s, so obviously they thought it was just another "passing spiritual fad". This was way before AA's huge successes and if you'd ask doctors today, they'd all praise the AA program simply because it has proven itself to work.

3) On a separate note, I was gonna ask please that we don't bring quotes like this on the forum at all, for one simple reason. Like I tell everyone again and again, GYE is a place to share what works for you. And everyone is free to share the way they see things - and the way they recovered. And even if the way one person recovered seems to disagree or controdict the way another person recovered, that's fine. But what we can't accept on GYE is negating another person's recovery path. And posting quotes like this can possibly discourage or confuse those who may be currently succeeding with the Big-Book. And that would be the opposite of GYE's goal... So let's try and stick only to "what works for me" and not "this other way is wrong".  

Sorry if that came off as strong, but being that I am in general ultra-tolerant and open-minded, this is the only thing I ask people to refrain from on this forum (besides for p**n  ;D).

What's p**n?!




;D