tz here today,
how's the court case going...
shkoiach for the radumsker wallabies...good chizzuk...and we really have to believe it, and LIVE it, esp. in the place that we are in it's more than a vort, its A LIFE PRESERVER

My Lovely R' Dov

Lets be open, we know your intentions are good, i started this thread, hoping to post by me or others, ideas, personal stories or solutions that actually helped someone in real life  to be misgaber, the least or totally unexpected was that this will become a discussion about myself.
"Perhaps the timing is right, the place is wrong"

Hope u understand.
A lechtigen shaboos to you and to all of GYE members

I'm glad you cleared that up, but it might have helped to write somewhere what your intention for this thread was. We aren't mind readers you know.

Dear Smart (I'll leave out the dumb part for I do not believe it),

The questions I asked you to 'get personal' may indeed have been at the wrong time, so I will share a story in the "Peninim al haTorah" from the yeshivah in Cleveland I saw today on the parsha about this very inyan, v'hameivin yovin:

A couple discovered their child had an unbreakable habit of eating sweets. The Dr told them he had to quit, they told him he had to quit, but it did no good. Being that they did not know many tzaddikim (and were probably not Jews, either), they spent a gazillion dollars to take him to India and meet Gandhi. They felt maybe he'd be able to connect with this child somehow.

So they  get there and Gandhi says, "You need to come back in two weeks." They go ballistic and argue...but what can they do? Two weeks (and another gazillion dollars) later, they come back to Gandhi and he takes the child aside. He says to him, "Son, you've really gotto quit eating all this candy - it's terrible for your health." And the kid shows an immediate change - it seemed to them all that he has no more interest in sweets! 

The parents were incensed. They asked Gandhi, "Why did we have to wait two weeks and spend all that money on the extra trip if that is all you had to tell him?!!"

He answered (and this is in Rav Dessler lehavdil, and lehavdil on the last page of AA in "A Vision For You" - ayen shom):

"At the time you came to me, I had the very same problem myself. So how could I be effective, at all, in helping him get better in that problem?"

Rav Dessler wrote that he never, ever, gave a shmuz suggesting to the yeshivah guys that they work on anything - until he was successful at doing it himself. This is not 'a madreiga'. It is just that such a schmooze could not possibly be d'vorim hayotz'im min halev. And that is why AA/SA/NA, etc., has discovered that the best person to help another fool addict  is another person who recognizes clearly that he or she is another fool addict themselves - but is living sober and free.

Gut Voch!! And I hope we can still be friends.

dON'T WORRY, DOV.
smart and d is just getting warmed up