I had been 21 days clean till friday then i fell and i just fell again, I was doing so well, looking forward to being back with my wife after nearly a year without being with her porperly (coz of sickness during pregnancy and post pregnancy), i should've been clean for nearly a month when the time comes but i blew it and I feel really bad about it.

as soon as pesach finished and the summer came i felt like a protective shield had been removed, i felt exposed and vulnerable and now i've fallen lower than I have for a while. How do i get started over again ? pesach and long cleanliness for my wife where incentives which I've lost.

some thoughts and chizuk would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

p.s just posting here and knowing that others are tackling this problem too is really helpful, thanks to you all!

welcome to the club - only teh best of the best are invited to join.

talk to your wife -
tell her you miss her - and look forward to being able to spend some time with her.

pick yourself up -
dust yourself off -

and start climbing agian

dov in israel

Realize that your true test is right now - how are you going to deal with this current situation? By letting it get you down (possibly leading to further falls, certainly taking away from the happiness in your house that your wife deserves, distracting you from her)? Or by realizing that you had a good clean streak, you're capable of continuing it, and focusing on your wife, and you relationship with her?

Keep on truckin!!

Just move along

Do what you've done

Be happy

The downness will just keep u down and out

Bards

While I agree with all the comments, could I add one add'l thought?

What was it that you were trying to do in sailing into mikveh night on a long clean streak? I'm guessing it was so that you could focus on your 'male' role in terms of words she'd like to experience: like give, protect, offer comfort & security, create a connection, show love.

(Have you read Rabbi Arush's Garden of Peace re shalom bayis? Sorry to be a broken record but the book changes people's lives. No joke! Read it through twice, try some of it, and see if you don't agree.)

A long clean streak might have brought you some of that, or at least a respite from the guilt etc that could interfere with that. BUT IT IS NOT THE ONLY WAY! You KNOW you have that capacity inside you now! You KNOW there's a way you can activate it, even with a shorter clean streak than you had hoped!!

In other words, don't let the length of your clean streak determine how much you can give. We all KNOW this already, but we sometimes FORGET that the prize is emotional intimacy and not distance from acting out. So let me add the wake-up call to the chorus of other nice comments.

For crying out loud calm down!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


(deep breath)


OK, just take it easy chaver. You are not alone, you are very fortunate, you are the envy of a bazillion people who have not even two days clean, nor a wife, nor some sanity. You are really a very lucky guy.

Whether you are happy about it is irrelevant! JUst know it and admit it, that's all. And have a decent day - on The House!

pass the woodford

lchaim!!!

So, nu, ehrlicher?
Vos macht a yid?
You okay?

Hi again

Sorry I didn't post for a few days 

I have had a bit of an up & down week but I'm feeling a lot better b'H. I had a long chat with my wife about stuff and we grew a lot closer as a result. I realised something, real love is SO much better than lust !! why do we even let it be a choice ? it doesn't even compare ! theres some emotional aspect to it all which im gonna discuss with me therapist and my wife is gonna help me work through it.

I thought of a silly mashal whilst I was cleaning the chulent pot ! at first its obvious that the pot is dirty the filth is everywhere and you can get it off quite easily. That's with round one of cleaning, then you look a bit closer and see there's dirt which is harder to get off so you scrub harder and have a another look and see more dirt etc....
mast.. is just the tip of the iceberg and the 'easiest'/most apparent thing to work on but there's so much more lust associated stuff beneath the surface which we have to get rid of too which isn't so obvious and each fall is really a way to think about whats still there that you haven't discovered or worked on yet.

Another issue which I still have a problem is that after succos/pesach, after the spiritual high & growth, the urge is always SO strong and it becomes really really hard. Any ideas on what might be causing that and how to deal with it?

one last question - does anyone know if you can set a password on a dvd function on the computer so that everytime someone puts in a dvd a password comes up that you need to put in before you can go further and watch it?

Many thanks to my fellow baalei teshuva !! may we all be zoche to grow closer to H'shm through this!!

thanks for your patience in listening...

good mashal - thanks for sharing your story.

I had a similar experience... (sorta)

many years ago as a bocher - we were helping one of the families to set up their new oven.

problem was the old one was up pretty high and they needed a few guys to help carry it - and bring it down.
after some struggling, grunting, and lots of sweating we got the thing down...rocked it slightly backwards to place the trolley under it..as we did a whole lot of black gookey stuff came oozzing out of the oven.

it was really gross - but we all figured...ok, whatever.

the "Rebbetzin" was so distraught and embarrassed. OY, she exclaimed...If I only would have know what kind of dirty and filth was inside I would have done a better job cleaning it out!

OY!
this has been a constant maashal for me.

OY !!!

If I had only known what kind of dirty and filth I was placing on my neshama!


OY!

an honest mouse wrote on 15 Apr 2010 10:07:


You're right, but real love, real connection, is based on giving, and that takes work - a lot of it. Which is hard to do all the time. So when we get tired, it becomes easy for us to slip into "taking mode," even though ironically, it's not going to make us happy!

There is a famous chassidishe mashal

A man set out to a business meeting wearing a fine suit
To his bad luck a wagon quickly rode by into a puddle and dirtied his suit
He runs into his house to wipe the mud of with a shmatta. All he was accomplishing was to make his suit even more dirty
His wife tells him
Leave your suit alone. When the mud dries you will just dust it off!!

Yupp its called fell shmell and keep on trucking!!!!

Hey mouse, to reiterate what everyone else is saying, the biggest test is not when you start being clean, but after the first fall, when you want to give up and throw in the towel.

With regard to the dvd issue, if its on a pc, then you can set yourself up as an alternative windows user (as in not the administartor) then the administartor can set up which programmes you have access to using the parental controls, and then you would need to have the administrator password touse whatever programs you list.

I hope that makes sense, and helps!!

Good luck, enjoy your wifes return, give give give, and let her feel your excitement is not due to your lust/needs, but the closeness the intimacy brings.

an honest mouse wrote on 15 Apr 2010 10:07:

Hi, honest mouse. It's DovnotyetinIsrael, in green.


As I know absolutely nothing about the relationship you have with your wife, I should probably shut up. But as I am technically not talking, but writing, here goes: I found that the majority of the issues I had - particularly around lust - were way out of my wife's ability to truly comprehend. Oh, she definitely loved me and definitely thought she understood a bit about what must be vexing me, but she was making a few big mistakes. Like, that if I'd only be a really, really nice guy and really, really love her, I'd automatically be liberated from this garbage and be drawn to her and her alone. She honestly believed (or wanted to believe) that if I'd be faced with a really, really nice wife, I'd never "choose" to look to lust for help! She never understood that my allegiance and trust of lust never had anything to do with her at all, ever. Just like my childhood attachment to lust had nothing to do with her, of course. She thought I was the clean slate for her to paint a beautiful life on. Boy did I disappoint her. And myself.
Nu. I'm not talking about guilt. Guilt never helped me.

But I am just asking you to consider focusing on working with the shrink (or any third party) rather than with her, particularly in any inner emotional matter that affects your relationship with her. Particularly with respect to lust. I know this sounds crazy, cuz "aren't we supposed to be fostering communication and openness?" But it just didn't succeed that way for my wife and I. Even though the openness drew us closer at first, the fear and pain she felt and my unrealistic expectation of understanding from her always ended-up driving us farther apart. After about a year of my own sobriety, she began to notice positive change in my general (sexual and nonsexual) behavior. That seemed to give her the security she needed in order to begin tolerating a glimpse of my goofy inner maelstrom. Now I can and do share just about everything with her.

Her steadfast love for you is not in doubt! But her femininity=total obliviousness to what life is like with the very 'factory' for schar aveiro (yup, that's what the pleasure of lust is) and hefseid aveiro (it makes us depressed and then we usually turn to it even more!) built right onto your body 24/7!....now, that's just beyond any woman I know (except a shrink-type lady - unless she happens to be your wife!).

Finally, I believe that being your wife, this great lady is naturally dependent on your attachment and faithfulness to her in order to define her very wife-ness. It can be very frightening for a wife to actually begin to understand that her husband who is holding her right now, has a dark side. That he is not guaranteed to be fully in control of his desires for other women - be they in flesh, or even just in photos or mental fantasies of them. I believe that it is normal and healthy for a woman to feel this way, and it shouldn't be otherwise. Never lie to her about anything. But she truly deserves the fruit of your labors, not necessarily your labors themselves!

So, sometimes we get closer by giving each other some more space! (another weird paradox)




One possibility: As we get elevated a bit too quickly to an awareness that is beyond our actual day-to-day lifestyle, what we are actually missing becomes much more apparent. People who have a frozen shoulder generally quit feeling frustrated with their inability to reach the shelves after about a month. They adapt.

But after they start rehabilitation or have surgery to improve movement of their shoulder, they begin to be able to reach up a bit more and the can of mandarin oranges (in syrup) on the shelf starts to look real good. They were not even considering it before, but now it vexes them that it's a bit out of range! (remember the 'bas melech' in Mesilas Yeshorim. The peasant doesn't even lust for her, because he is absolutely certain that she'd never, ever be interested in a lowly man such as him!

So perhaps, because you gain a bit in awareness of Kedusha through the yomtov, you are left realizing you had a bigger hole than you thought!

Any of this feel right at all to you?

Ultimately, this frustration can come from a strange place - we'd never guess it.

It can come from Pride. Ga'avah. Deep inside we expect we aught to be able to connect with whatever madreigos we wish, whenever we wish. But that's not the way it works. We grow on His timetable, not ours. Addict-types do not tolerate perfectionism well. That's all. Hope you liked it.

to Dov(notyet)InInsrael...

that was very nicely written!
yasher koach!

my wife IS a perfectionist type!
no wonder we are always going head to head.

Any suggestions - I am the creative type - and she is the perfectionistic, practical type
(we;ve realized that in spite of all the obstacles we were able to get married - so it must be bashert...not always easy, but bashert)