jake08 wrote on 20 Jun 2016 17:52:

Do you really have to? Hey, this is the nisayon of our דור. Imagine your (great-)grandparents in America in the last דור. "I just had to go to the doctor on Shabbos; what could I do?" It would be ביזוי בזיונות

וזה הרי הוא יהרג ואל יעבור וחמור יותר מחילול שבת, ויחשוב נא בדעתו אילו היו מאיימין עליו עכו"ם ואומרים לו לך לרופאה ותהרהר ואם לאו תהרג, מה היית עושה ? מוסר נפשו עקה"ש? וא"כ למה תלך עכשיו בלי סכנת מוות?    י

You have a point. And maybe your right. But the problem is I will many times in life whether I like it or not that, be forced to be in a situation like that. And I will have to learn how not to lust or indulge myself. So possibly going back to that doc should not have been done, but the difference bet what you quoted and what happened was no was being meayiim me to be meharer. It was my own fault.
(Just for example, where I send my children to a very frum daycamp the building is shared by another frum girls daycamp whos director claims to have received a heter to have his counselors dance in front of the building to loudspeakers blasting girls singing. I now have to pass  them every day. The first day I got upset, spoke to a few people how crazy it is and looked most times I passed. The next day day I realized that the wrong way to go about it, no blaming others for my looking and no yelling about other people. Guess what, I totaly ignored them.)
 

156 days! That's almost half a year. Congrats on that. Did you feel greater kedusha during that 156 day time period? Was your learning better? Were you able to get deeper into a sugya?  Did your interpersonal relationship with your spouse, kids, and friends, etc. improve? Did you feel a tangible yeridah when you fell? Did the yeridah affect you Lemiysah? If yes, how so? When you fell, do you get up quick or does it become a long drawn out yeridah? 

Sorry that you fell. 156 days is nothing to sneeze at, you must have been doing something right. Maybe you should reevaluate what went wrong the last few days and fix that. I wish you continued hatzlacha.

Magnolia wrote on 06 Jul 2016 15:25:

Thanks. The few months actually were interesting. Learning davening etc got a little better simply cause I wasnt taking constant breaks for my indulgences. But the interesting part was that all these years my cycles would look like a while of lusting (several days, weeks..) filled with fantasizing p and m followed by a while of intense avodas hashem swearing off lust and feeling very frum and close to hashem. The past few months though didnt have those ups. At first I missed them and wondered whats wrong. But I think now that they were a part of the problem. They helped me think I really was normal and just giving in to a normal yetzer hara and could really do this if I followed the proper teshuva path. Thats probably  what drove me to such lengths learning and davening in  the first place.  Or maybe just it filled an emotianal hole in me. 
But now I feel better having a more wholesome equilibrium. No great highs. Because now when I work on improving in avodas hashem I think its more real. I hope this makes sense. Whatever.
Thanks all for the chizuk!

jake08 wrote:

Not sure how much sense it is but sounds pretty much my life. I have kind off "mellowed out" in my yidishkeit. But I think it was healthier. I don't mean to say that I don't want Aliyah. I do. Just trying to make it more steady and realistic (last little while have been shaky in general but that's besides the point). The roller coaster kind of exhausted me I guess. I refused to do anything but learn- and porn. Took me a while to find other thinks in life besides those two. 

This is probably a good time for me to point to Dr Sorotzkins website (see my signature).  He has some good stuff about perfectionism.  Dov quotes has some good stuff too on this topic, although he may not use the label "perfectionism".  He talks about the general concept of wanting aliyah or madreigos being detrimental.