But it just wasn't working. I thought "I can do this all by myself." But I found my early victory (5 days clean - Hah!) collapsed with a sense of helplessness and inevitability. Does any one else get the sense that your Yetzer Hara is laughing at you?

I will need a lot of help. My wife is leaving on a business trip soon,and this used to be an occasion for me to run to saturate myself in my addiction, because I thought I wouldn't get caught. But now, with the help of Hashem and this group, I know I can stay clean if I just take it one day, or one hour, or one minute at a time.

Gaavy, the Y"H will use any tool at his disposal (often within short periods of one another)--- including instilling you with courage (telling you you can do it alone), guilt (telling you you're too far gone to recover), minimizing your conduct (so you can convince yourself to do it again and not to teshuva), maximize your conduct (telling you it's so  serious that there's no hope causing depression which will trigger further outbursts) --- all to keep you in the lust trap.  The only way to fight back is to use every tool at your disposal and for frum people like us there is no jewish (or even non-jewish) site out there that has an many tools available as this website and community.  The support and encouragement you will get from the other members, the daily chizuk e-mails, the ability to anonymously express your feelings, the 12 steps meetings, partners, hotlines, etc.  I can tell you from 20+ Yom Kippur's gone by, you can try to do it alone, but the Yetzer Hora always manages to creep back in.  Join, work the tools, get an accountability partner, you'll see it's nothing to be afraid of, on the contrary it will have a life-transforming positive effect.

Welcome and if you ever need some chizuk, feel free to PM me.

Welcome to the forum Gavvy, and lots of luck to you.  Please keep up all posted on your day-by-day progress.

  --Eye.

Dear Gavvy,

I am the admin of this forum. Welcome to our community!

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.

One of our goals on GYE is to help people "hit bottom while still on top" so they will take recovery seriously. To explain better what I mean, please see this page. If you're here, it means you're already taking serious steps in recovery, so keep up the good work!

Let me tell you a little about the two GuardYourEyes handbooks. The lay down the cornerstone of all our work at GuardYourEyes. Before the GYE handbook people would often get "lost" when coming to our website, not knowing what tips and techniques to try. For example, someone with a low level addiction wouldn't jump straight into therapy or 12-Step groups, while someone whose addiction was more advanced wouldn't be helped by the standard tips of "making fences", putting in filters etc... For the first time ever, this handbook details all the techniques and tools dealing with this addiction in progressive order. Now, anyone can read it through and see what steps they've tried already, and if those steps haven't worked, they can continue on through the handbook to the next tools, as the suggestions become progressively more "addiction-oriented".

We suggest printing out the handbooks and reading it them at least once. Then, we suggest going back and reading them again slowly on the computer, and this time pressing on the many links that are found in the different articles.

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.

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 Gavvy, and Welcome.
Yes, I agree.  I couldn't do it alone either.  Also the isolation and double life was just oppressive.  Here you are understood, accepted, cared for, sometimes gently confronted, and given chizuk endlessly.  That's because we all need the encouragement.

At the end of the day, of course, there's the bitachon and the hishtadlus.  The private davening, imploring, crying to Tatti.  And davening with the tsibur.  Some of us have been making a point to have in mind all of us guys when we daven Refua Shleima in the Amidah.

We know we are powerless over this condition, and that only H" can ultimately free us.  But we do our work one little day at a time, and ask for help even with that.  And one day stacks on top of the next.  We ask H" just for today.

So I hope Guard has said hi and given you the loads of opportunities that are here for you and all of us. If you want to get a hold of me in particular, post on my thread in this forum.  I'll be checking in with you too.

Mazel tov for taking this big step.  Coiach l'coiach.