Welcome. Great to have you aboard!

yosefthetzadik wrote on 15 Jul 2025 23:26:

Yosef - My heart goes out to you. I feel your pain. I've also had a very painful childhood (parents are divorced), though nothing compared to yours.
You are a real Tzaddik. The real thing. Hashem has his soldiers scattered around the world, and you are definitely one of them.
And one day you too will be zoiche to a wonderful wife with whom you'll be able to build a deep, emotional connection!! 

I didn't post in a while.

TY"H for 13 days.

After some smooth sailing since day 4, a gift from Hashem that I did not deserve, the last 2 days were very hard. The easy times are over!

I had to fight very hard yesterday and today to stay clean.

All the tools and methods I used for the past 13 days don't seem to work anymore (Observing the urge, find the fox, pushy salesman). Any ideas?

hope your day is a bit easier.

have you tried talking with a mentor or a friend to get those urges to disappear?

It has been a lot easier the past few hours. Thanks for your support. 

I've come to realize that I dont have any friends really. In yeshiva,  I don't connect to anyone really. My best friends are ranked by if I tell them good morning when I come in. I'm not sure what it's all about. But I think it's a mix of a couple of things. 1 I never have what to say or what to talk about, my life is pretty dull and uneventful. 2 I don't have patience to talk about nonsense that won't bring me any knowledge or information. 3 I'm scared of big judged, of sounding stupid, of coming off as desperate for connection. 4 I feel sometimes that people are not really introducing in me, they speak to me just to not make me feel like a nebech. 5 I lost my trust in the world, I hide my background from all my friends as much as possible, even my closest friends don't know nothing about me. 6 I'm always restless, I don't have the patience to build a meaningful relationship with a bucher, and definitely not taking in mind that we might part ways tomorrow. 

My day in social life in yeshiva basically boils down to a couple of 20 second conversations throughout the day. Usually a question about something/information that I need.

thanks for your post , its really hard feelings , and i can relate in certain way , may hashem help us all

Wow, painful!!

Feel free to reach out i can try to offer you some Chizuk!!

yosefthetzadik wrote on 22 Jul 2025 18:07:

Tottaly can relate. 
Thats the reason im a grown man and have almost no friends. i was convinced i would be laughed at, that nobody can like me, that i have nothing to offer. etc. 
It took me a VERY long time to realize that i was VERY wrong. People like me and they always did, and i am sure they like you. 
You seem to be a very bright, insightful, emotionally developed young guy, you are driven to become better, you have a ton to offer. 
my advise to you would be DONT underestimate yourself! DONT sell yourself short! DONT let your childhood traumas take away who you are! DONT let your Years in yeshiva go to waste! 
Make friends, its worth it. I see how important it is now. Its a game changer, like the famous saying "The opposite of addiction is sobriety, its connection" Truer words have rarely been spoken.............

Stay Strong, Stay Holy, Stay Sane

It took so many years, but I finally found something to help me with this type of stuff. I realized that a lot of what I was doing was ultimately really caused by my low self-esteem, which got me to sabotage everything (and be miserable and depressed). As hinted to in the religious pain thread, it was very difficult to get anywhere with that, because my low self-esteem always tied in to religious stuff, to the extent that I thought that my low self-esteem was entirely connected to religious matters, which makes sense because they were so important to me. And I thought all my negative views were the reality (that is the truth in Judaism), and I am terrible and doomed. Over time I found a lot of sources that proved otherwise, which I am discussing some of in the Religious Pain thread over time. (Also see Appendix A in the back of The Battle of the Generation, which is gold for this. Link is below in my signature.)

But what I really wanted to discuss today is that I found something that really helped me with my low self-esteem without having to get involved in religious ideas at all. It's the Lefkoe Method, where you remove and erase your negative self-esteem beliefs from your brain, and then just live your life without them (without having to convince myself that I'm greater than Moshe Rabbeinu to feel good about myself, which was the old method and it never worked). Try some parts of it out free at www.recreateyourlife.com/free .