wow, after all these years it has dawned on me that i am an addict!

I have tried to fight it so hard, and succeded even for long periods at a time, but now i realise it will never just go away.

I am so scared to write anything...what happens if someone i know, somehow reads this and knows its me, particularly my wife

i am in a bad place, bh never gone as far as involving someone else, although dreamt about it enough, but its eating me up, both what i do now, and what i have done over the years.

help please, although my vagueness doesnt really help

True Andrew, Your vaguenessn does not help. But you are here now and thats all that matters. Welcome aboard! I am not sure what you could possibly say that would jeopordize your name. People dont say any specifics about themselves here. No real names. No specific communities mentioned. Only Jewish affiliation. And that doesnt even really matter. We are all here for a common cause and thats what matters!

-Yiddle

Welcome to the anonymous world of GYE. So long as you refreain from posting your rav's drasha (not that anyone would remember it anyway), or providing too many details about what you have been up-to recently...you will be fine.

When we got "featured" in Mishpacha, I read through all 403 posts of mine, to remove the many hints to my identity. But the decision to post them was for that exact purpose (I wanted to be recognized), and even so it painted a very vague picture. Trust me, that so long as you are not trying to fill people in on your identity, they will never recognise you. And if you are still concerned, for no good reason, you can create a fake identity, and hide behind that mask.  Above all, the details of your private struggle won't reveal anything, no-one knows them aside from you anyway. (Have a filter installed to block this forum, and enter the acess code every time you want to enter. It wil keep your wife from reading this. And If you don't have a filter, install one, and give the code to the site's filter gabai. But have that one leave an exception for GYE.)

Oh and welcome. You will soon get your welcome package from R GUARD himself, who launched this 'project' 2 years ago, and has subsiquently saved thousands of yidden (there is a ratio of about 3:1 guests to ever logged-in member), so far more people benefit from the ongoing struggle/growth of those who post, than those who actualy reply.

I would give you the whole intro packadge, but the last time I did that , no-one seemed to read the thread, whoops. SO i'll stick to a regular response.  Our Y"H for these areas is addictive. The sefer Pri Tzedek brings a zohar chadash in parshas noach to show this, if you are looking for a torah source.   Regular teshuva will not suffice.  We need to turn to Hashem and ask for help, dayly and hourly, in overcoming the YH.

Try starting your own thread in the 'wall of honor' and watch your progress on 'the wall'. You can choose to not have your name listed, if you like, and will still get all the email chizuk that come periodicly. Depending on your circumstances, try evaluating what are you primary triggers, and make a cheshbon hanefesh to decide of there is anything you can do to avoid them.

Read the handbook, GYE attitidude, and the stories on this site, and find the chizzuk to pull you through.  The site attempts to help people at every stage of a YH, even if one is not C"V addicted. So you have found the right place. Read through the 'GYE Handbook' to find what will help you, and what works for you, some of the ideas and strategies may not.

if you are looking for a torah-only approach to this, check the area of the forum entitled 'Battleworms Corner' in addition to the 'Beis Medrash'. There is a daily email on the topic of both addicton, and shmiras einayim (no connection to addiction), so feel free to sign up.

WHat else can I help you with? The bathroom is down the hall to your left. Not that door, the second one. And you need to bush the handle very hard to get it to open.  Feel free to help yourself to the fridge, and make yourself at home  

And if you have a gmail account, and want to buzz anyone from this site, block your following from veiw, to save their anonymity (and your own)

Andrew, Welcome to the club! You have been welcomed by others, but I"ll also add my two cents...

What you did in the past when you were trying on your own is not the same as you will be doing in the future.

You wrote: "its eating me up, both what i do now, and what i have done over the years." This SHOULD be corrected, take out the words "what i do now"! Now you are doing something great! You reaching out for help. I am new here too, less than a month, but the best month I had in over 15 years! You WERE in a bad place, now you are in a good place!

Yor wife may not know anything now, but it is guarranteed that after you succeed, with God's help, overcoming your struggles your whole demeaner and attitude will change. Your wife will have a much MUCH happier husband. (She won't know the cause of the change, though.)

Remember: Dead people don't fight, only the LIVE ones do!

Welcome, Reb Andrew!

It's a scary realization, to actually say that we have trouble controlling a part of our lives - that we are, to some extent, powerless.

And the fact that you've faced that is amazing, and tells me how much strength you have! Stick with us and let's all grow together - I know that I've reached places that I never would have been able to reach without this forum.

Being vague is fine - it's scary to open up about these issues, and anonymity is always important. As time goes on, you'll open up with what you feel comfortable with. There's plenty you can say without compromising your identity.

Dear Andrew,

Don't worry, no one will find you out 

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!

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. You're worth it.

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!

Hi Andrew Welcome.....

Congratulations!!!... Sounds like you exercised courage to take the move you did....

Don’t be shy, open up, we are on your team!!!!!!

its no big deal the only one who knows me on the forum is my shvigger

bardichev wrote on 18 Feb 2010 19:22:


I'm not your shvigger, I'm your shver! ;D

kedusha

you really got me

lets see if u are my shver?

whats my favorite room in your house?

do i daven with you when i am in boro park near the east coast?

do i bring my own matzos to the seder?

do i call you abba tatty "shver" TAAAAAAAAAA??!! pops  DERR SHVERR ZOLL ZAYN GEZINT  zayde ???

do i close my mouth when i chew??

do I bring sforim to the table??

did we ever play ping pong??

am i coming to you for shabbos??

bardichev wrote on 18 Feb 2010 20:20:


Stop asking such SHVER questions! > > > :D :D :D ;D ;D ;D

just realised i am an addict
« on: February 18, 2010, 10:39:38 AM » Quote Modify Remove Split Topic 





This "dawning" is the Ribbon shel Olam shining his precious light of rachamim upon you. A person cannot begin to heal if he doesn't even know that he is really ill. It is only then that he can take the neccessary steps for healing, and it is now that Hashem is lighting upon your way.
I have tried to fight it so hard, and succeded even for long periods at a time, but now i realise it will never just go away.




  Please always remember that just as you said:  It is the "place" that you are in that is bad, and NOT you. You, you are good. When you begin to stop being rodef yourself, as the y"h would like, and realize that "you" are good, then this will free up alot of koachos that will enable you to break free. And, we are all here to help you!

i just wonder, who told u this secret that u r an addict, how about u just lust & for that u need to learn a bit musar isnt that what ולא תתרו אחרל לבבכם ואחרי עיניכם stands for???

Most of us have tried that approach - and yet, we can keep doing terrible aveiros right after learning intense mussar. OK, not right after - on a good day, we wait a few hours.

I agree that learning mussar is a good start - and if that works, great! If it doesn't, though, how long do oyu keep trying, saying "just a little more learning, a little more mussar, and that'll do the trick?" Two months? Two years? Two decades?

Talk to some of the people on this site, and you'll hear people who've done exactly that.

Or, do you accept that you have a disease, and treat it, so that you can stop being sick?

Who cares what the approach is, as long as you can finally live life?

By the way, the fact that the learning/mussar approach alone doesn't work is NOT because of any lack in the torah, chas v'shalom. It's because we're not learning properly. See R' Dessler's understanding of how torah helps protect against the yetzer hora (chelek aleph, page 89).

Also, as I posted in another thread (and can send anyone a link to, if they want), almost all of us have symptoms matching the DSM-IV's criteria for substance abuse and dependence (The DSM is the book used by psychologists to help give diagnoses).