So, why am I writing this? Very out-of-character for me. (Hi, by the way)

It's bein hazmanim. Which means I am basically in 24-hour contact with the internet. And I want to make myself accountable for what I do with it.
I've already used it much more freely than I had planned, but b"h no falls yet. Just a few minutes ago, I think I was close to it, so I came to write this instead!

I'm unlikely to post much, but I want to thank you for giving me a safe way to be accountable for myself.
(And I'm not using the 90-day tracker, because once bein hazmanim is over I won't be able to update it - that's only 30 days.)

There's a lot more I could say, and I could say what I have said much better and clearer if I took the time... but I've said enough. Even saying this much is surreal for me.

So, in that post I made very little sense, said very little - and yet, I suspect you all understand exactly what I'm saying. It's just I don't like saying it.

The Sefas Emes (under Tazria-Metzora Rosh Chodesh, can't be more precise) has a piece about how Rosh Chodesh is a time of special power in terms of overcoming physicality.
Good Chodesh.

Dear Beiny,

Yasher Koach for overcoming the fear of your first post! Welcome.

It sounds like you wanna do more reading than typing. That's fine. READ EVERYTHING GUARD HAS TO OFFER - even get on the Chizuk Emails for the month. Just realize that a lot of help, chizuk, and caring is available if you post, cuz then people see you and meet you and know how to find you. You don't have to describe yourself if that's difficult, the best is to ask questions you have about overcoming this Yetzer Hara.

Even tho you'll only have access for 30 days, those 30 days are gonna be very tough as temptations and hormones meet. AND THE EFFECT OF ANY TUMAH YOU INGEST DURING THESE 30 DAYS WILL LAST A LIFETIME. Read up ASAP on filters, best one seems to be K9, and install it ASAP. Make an accountability partner with someone, to receive daily a list of the sites you visit, and the fear of slipping will definitely help.

Then make GYE the place where you spend most of your on-line time. AVOID MOVIES AND CLIPS LIKE THE PLAGUE, CUZ THEY ARE THE PLAGUE!

My last suggestion is to get yourself a REAL LIVE CHAVRUSA IN A BEIS MEDRASH OR SHUL for as much of the day as possible. BECAUSE HE EFFECT OF ANY KEDUSHA YOU INGEST DURING THESE 30 DAYS WILL LAST A LIFETIME.

Have a GREAT BeinHazmanim, my Holy Brother, and Stay Strong!!

Dear dear chaver,

I don't know how foreign this place seems, now that you've taken the great leap of jumping in. I've been around here a couple of months now, and I'm just starting to feel as if I know my way around a little bit. Kinda like a 5,000 guy yeshiva, I suppose. 

Anyhow, sh'koiach for jumping aboard.

You'll surely be getting an official greeting note from "Guard" soon, and if you've been hanging out and reading then you've probably already seen the basics. While there may be a draw toward reading and jumping into EVERYthing, esp with only a 30-day bainhazman of computer access to work with, I might recommend being somewhat selective about what you choose as your focus.

In other words, would you rather just "avoid" the shmutz? Or, "build" more kedusha to keep the shmutzy Y'H away? Or look at what life circumstances make the temptation seem so... tempting? Or... (lots of other options). I'm guessing there's 1-2 specific action items that would be your choice of a focus until you return to the flowing waters of Torah.

As for my own approach, I've found frequent public posting to be helpful in seeing through my own "stuff." I've also found occasional "private messages" with the other guys to be great chizuk. Everyone will have his own derech.  Feel free to PM (click on 'my messages', select 'new message' -- it goes to a box on this Forum that I check) with any questions/comments.

You took a brave, admirable, holy stand. L'chayil al choyil.  -- Briut

I think it's great that you want to be accountable! You can use the Wall of Honor, by the way, even for just 30 days.

Welcome, and thank you for joining. Post as much, or as little as you want - as long as it's as much as you need!

I'm not a very emotional guy, and yet reading your kind words of encouragement, and knowing that another person - despite the fact neither of us know who the other is - cares about what I care about, and is hoping with me, is a great feeling. Thank you.

I've done a chunk of learning today, but I've used the internet more. B"H, I have still not had a "fall." Possibly a "slip", though, which I'm concerned about, but - and this is nice - it was the kind of thing that can easily spiral out of control, and it didn't.
And twice, when I felt in danger, I checked for replies to my post here instead...

Steve wrote on 16 Mar 2010 15:00:

Someone told me recently that there are 3 types of mussar: 1) telling you why to be good, 2) telling you how to be good, 3) telling you to be good.
That last is, I think, what is refered to as "chizuk." If truth be told (which is the point of this forum!), I'm not such a fan... I know that I have to be good. That's not my problem. One of my Rebbeim told me that mussar means "teaching yourself to live in accordance with how you know you should." (The famous introduction of the Mesilas Yesharim makes a similar point.)
So what am I doing here? Mostly, I'm distracting myself. And so far, it's working! (One day. It's something.) Thank you!

Steve wrote on 16 Mar 2010 15:00:

Can anyone tell me how to sign up for that?
Many thanks.

beinhazmanim wrote on 16 Mar 2010 22:27:


There are a few of us on the forum who have this same cheshbon.

beinhazmanim wrote on 16 Mar 2010 22:27:


Try Covenanteyes.com

Distracting yourself is a good thing. But you can also gain more long-term tools that you can use later on, too!

The chizuk emails are a combo - they offer tips about how to be good, and sometimes discuss why to be good. And even the "telling us to be good" - it can be useful! It's like having your friends cheer for you, it can inspire us to keep on going when it would otherwise be difficult.

We can know what to do, but being inspired to do so can help.

Dear beinhazmanim,

I am the admin of this forum. Welcome to our community! Your name reminds me of a part of the GYE handbook (link below). In tool #3, there is a section called "Bein Hazmanim" that can help you plan a strategy on staying clean.

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... Listen to this powerful shiur from Rav Yosef Veiner about how important filters are for regular people, how much more so for someone who has stumbled in these areas before and is likely even addicted!

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...

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!

so, nu, vos macht a yid?

(also known as, you wanna share a little more about what brought you here, what you're doing here, and how it's going?)

just wanted you to know I haven't forgotten you....

That's one song I haven't heard for a while - Avraham Fried's Karahod. Not a bad one, even though I'm not much of one for nigunim.

Thanks for your concern!

So, here's the post I was thinking of writing last night and delayed till today:

B"H I've been having a good couple of days. A couple of times I've been tempted to click further than would be good for me, and I've stopped myself from doing so. I'm not sure how that happened, but... I have a theory. We say haba letaher mesayin oso. Since I signed up on this forum, I've found it that little bit easier to control myself. Perhaps this is Hashem's way of saying, good going! Keep it up!

Why did I never sign up before? A few reasons. One is that since Elul I've been in Yeshiva, without regular access to internet (which, incidentally, reduces the nisayon as well). And I only found out about this website a few months ago, when one of my Rebbeim mentioned it. (That talk he gave was very interesting. He went on a rant about how terrible and dangerous the internet is, which was completely out-of-character for him; he's not into scaremongering or telling people what to do. That's the only time I've heard him like that.)
Another reason is that while you might not think so if you met me, I'm very shy in some respects, and I don't like letting other people into personal things. And this problem of mine is about as personal as it gets. When I signed up for this, I used a service that redirects my email through another address, so it wouldn't even give out my name, and if this wasn't anonymous...

Why did I not post this last night?
Yesterday, I started to realise I have two distinct (but probably related) problems. One is a tendancy to certain material online, the other is a tendancy to spend too long on my computer - even on perfectly neutral things, even offline. I did a chunk of learning yesterday (I left for Shacharis at 8, came home at 11), but not as much as I would have liked, as I spent most of the rest of the day doing silly things (neutral, but silly). So, I decided that I'm going to spend as little time as possible on my computer for one day.
In truth, I've already broken that resolution in it's original form, but I learnt for longer this morning and I'm going out again to a nearby Beis Hamedrash soon.
My tendancy towards innapropriate sites came before my tendancy to waste time online, I'm pretty sure. But I wonder if the latter somehow triggers the former; online, late at night, going round and round without anything interesting to do, I gravitate downwards...
And, by the way, that is also why I'm trying not to spend too much time on this forum. Because I know I'd end up wasting my time, checking for replies every 15 minutes etc.

So what brought me here?
I'm not really sure. As I said above, one of my rebbeim mentioned this site, and I've looked at it before this bein hazmanim. And I suddenly jumped in, signed up and started posting. And somehow, it feels like I've taken a stand, said "I don't want to be like that anymore..." and it feels easier to not be like that...
We know that speach is mystically the connection between thought and action (Pesach thought: there's a super-famous Maharal about why Moshe Rabeinu had a speech defect - he was so much in the world of spirituality that he was somehow unable to connect with the physical world). Maybe this "written speech" is acting in lieu of the more difficult "real" speech, and making my desire to change a reality...

Sof sof, let's wait and see. I don't know what tomorrow will bring. Perhaps my real test is yet to come. But then, I like to think I made some sort of progress over the last couple of days. And it's thanks to all of you. Now it's up to me.
I can do anything I want. Will I?

See you soon!

A lot of depth, and a lot of truth - absolutely, hashem helps you when you want to do something, particularly when you take action! Add to that the fact that when you speak things out, it forces you to face them. When you speak this problem out loud (or type it so that other people can see), it helps you face it.

Or at least, it helped me!

Sometimes, we need a bit of silly time wasting, as long as it's not adversely affecting the rest of our lives - but doing that on the computer can be very dangerous. Sounds like you've got a good plan - keep on rocking!

I am home for bain hazimaninm also. Very dangerous. I have a partner who hardly writes me. I really want a partner for the next couple of weeks. I would be glad to chat and email you daily. If you would be so inclined IM me and I'll send you my email address.

I have been I have been on the site for about nine months and I know a little about this struggle. I would be glad to share it.