unanumun wrote:


Oy, no. That's not accurate...and it is not even what I meant.

First, I see this expressed here frequently, so let me just say that just because a thing is known by a guy with 2, 5, 10 or 20 years of sobriety time, does not mean that what they are saying is something they just figured out after all those years! But that's just an aside.

Second, 90% of whatever conscious gifts (insight) I have been given I never figured out at all. They just occurred to me in the natural course of working real recovery when G-d decided it was time for me to get them. They were recognized after the fact. And that's also an aside.

Third, the insights themselves are not so precious to me. Rather, it is the growth that enabled me to be a k'li (so far) for the insights is what is so precious to me. This is a major point that few seem to grasp. When you wrote that my insights were the product of fifteen years of thinking, you demonstrate that you are coming from an entirely different perspective on that. One that just is not the way life really is, at least for me and many sober guys I know. If I have insights they were not the product of thinking, but the product of getting beaten to a pulp by my own behavior again and again. But please, if you can think your way put of this habit and it really works, kol hakavod! I just doubt many here will actually do that. Instead, many just condemn themselves to a longer, more insidious descent into stupidity and ugliness, like in the 15 years I was referring to above.

So let me take a step back now, and explain


that those 15 years were the 15 years before I became sober, not the first 15 years of my recovery, at all. They were ages 20-35...when I tried yiddishkeit, mussar, chassidus, psychologists, lots more masturbation, more psychologists (3), working on sholom bayis, rabbonim (4 or 5), saying lots of p'sukim, visitng Rebbes, more mikvah with and without tikkun klali, more mussar, going away to EY for two years, marriage (with lots of sex of course), kiruv rechokim, and therapy with and without medication - all to try and finally control this thing...and all to no avail. And let me be clear: even our masturbation was often just to try and control it - because sometimes we were weary of fighting, and sincerely felt that the only way to finally feel truly free of the bitter struggle and obsession even just for a while - was to get it over and give into it (please see the Nuclear Reset Button).

During the latter 11 of those 15 years, I was married. I was then an active sexaholic not yet even close to recovery. The most important issue on my mind was not getting caught...and the second most important issue on my mind was how to quit and stay clean (of course, impossible). Naturally, marriage just made my problem sicker and worse. I was terrified when it became evident that sex with a real woman (my wife) was never going to solve my hunger...in fact no one woman could. But I did not see that yet...

And as I said before, it was not understanding that brought me to me knees and to being ready to do whatever it would take to never act out my lust again - rather, it was just plain suffering. I had to get beaten down, there was no other way for me. My ego was just too big to admit defeat.

Finally I got sober out of shear fear, and within a week was directed to SA in order to stay sober (sober in SA means never having sex with myself [masturbating] or with anyone other than my wife). Somewhere during the first 5 years of sober time, I saw most of the things I share here. Maybe it was in the first year, maybe later on. But more and more basic recovery concepts jelled for me as the years sober went on and they still continue be"H. I still understand very little - but I am sober and life is great nonetheless. For understanding does not bring sobriety. It is sobriety that brings understanding.

And I would gladly trade all the understanding I have and will ever have of recovery, for today's plain sobriety.

This is the main thing I am here to report, and it is the opposite of what you keep writing. Instead of thinking ourselves out of this problem and into right living - the experience of addicts on 12 step recovery is that we can only live ourselves into right thinking. And by 'live', we mean taking actions of sobriety and recovery. Those actions are attending regular meetings, getting and using a sponsor, and honestly working the steps one day at a time.

But that takes a bit of humility...or enough humiliation. Otherwise the brain keeps on trying to 'master' the lust and our sexuality in order to 'make us get sober'. It seems to be insulting to our intellect to make it follow our sobriety. Nu. But it's a living...

Sobriety and honesty with other real people that brings sanity and honesty with ourselves. The other way around just does not work for us.

And I submit that it has not worked for you, either - rather, I suggest that your path of thinking is precisely what made you the frum sexual compulsive guy who sits in that chair posting for help on GYE, in the first place. In AA they say, "Our very best thinking is what got us here." No shame, there. It's just the way it is.

A very hard thing to accept. Especially for frum guys, who have a ready excuse that can 'separate' the problem from ourselves: blaming it on G-d by saying it was not me and my thinking, but this external force called the 'YH'. But after a while passes in sobriety, maybe six months to a year, we begin to see that the problem was never in our penises, but in our minds. A whole new world...very far from the old temptation/sin/good-bad thing. And it works.

Is this making any sense at all, chaver?

- Dov

OK, let me clarify, Cordnoy/Avrohom (cuz you brought up the point). I guess there are two bechinos of "powerlessness":

One is that a person is unable to withstand the temptation and is guaranteed to succumb. For example, an alcoholic and his entire family knows, that he will definitely drink again.

The second is that whether he will drink again or not, one thing is absolutely clear: unlike normal people, this guy cannot drink well.

Sure he can drink a lot...but never well. Meaning that if he drinks, he will become a mess even if he does not become drunk. Once he resumes drinking it is just a matter of time before he runs his life and family into the ground by missing work, lying to his closest loved ones about where he is and why, wasting time and money secretly, not being present emotionally cuz he is worried about his next binge, and just generally puking his life away, because he is dependent on it.

If I consciously take in lust by intentionally viewing porn, people being sexual with each other in their car or home, reading a dirty book, or touching myself in a sexual way - I am finished. Not only will I just ejaculate before even being able to get an erection, but I will feel very crazy inside and it will rather quickly seem undeniably logical that I absolutely need erotic satisfaction and cannot live another hour without it. My entire sense of logic will change and there is no way out of that, because the truly crazy person cannot see himself as crazy...till after it will be over.

So once I start drinking, I cannot control it the way a normal person (Jew or goy) can. I cannot lst like a gentleman. I do not 'lust well' though most American's do. They watch a little porn and enjoy it - I could not 'enjoy' it at all, for it would take my mind over. Whenever I saw a movie with a little schmutz in it, my friends talked openly about the entire movie and that scene was in the discussion, too - while I was the quiet one...but that scene was all I thought about all night long!

15 years ago I could not go to my sister-in-law's high school graduation in a healthy way. I tried, but had to look away and walk out and turn my glasses upside down and my head inside out. Sex with my wife was so complicated and troubling that it made problems even when it was good. Relationships with females in my family and wife's family and my work were all filled with tension for me.

Now, I can do all those things, function and relax, w/o getting distracted by the lust, feminine power, or whatever.

In other words, if you stick a dirty image in my face I can surrender it and be fine. But if I intentionally examine it and take in the sweetness of it, I believe I will be lost. I even feel my 'engine' down there running, as described above and know I will get past that good old 'point of no return' (that is the horror of all 'partially masturbating' yeshiva boys right before we start trying to squeeze it back in, if you recall) and ejaculate, losing my sobriety.

Yet I can have normal nice sex with my wife without rushing it at all. Obviously, my sex isn't at all like erotic stealing, acting out, or porn use. And that's not simple. It requires frequent work on keeping it that way, I often stray and need an adjustment, and have used longer periods of mutually voluntary sexual abstinence to help get things back on track (wife still going to mikvah, just no sexuality) and not based on lust. Real life is not linear and not a smooth ride. It's OK. G-d helps and my friends are there for me to admit it all to - and they won;t try to convince me not to act out...they will just listen and understand. And that works! It helps me surrender when i need to.

So I believe I am even more sensitive to my own lust than before should I choose to use it - and generally not affected by other people's dirty talk, nudity, lust, schmutz, women scantily or normally clad, nor to comfortable sexuality w my wife. That is what i mean by my being powerless over lust, and actually even more powerless than ever. It's not the prospect of lusting that i am powerless over - it is active lusting. If I do that, my threshold is very, very low now. No clue why that is, but it is.

Unfortunately, so much of the GYE chevra see lust as all about 'sin', the 'yetzer hora' and about women in the street that are so big and scary and 'grab your kedusha away from you if you don't watch out!'. Gevalt. As though lust is really 'out there' and gets you if you are not careful!

....well, I do not believe it is. It's right in here, 'beficho ubilvov'cho'!! And seeing a pretty woman isn't lust - it just turns lust on if we take her image in and try to use it as though we were normal people and can enjoy such things as normal people may. They can do that and get away with it, but we addicts cannot. We cannot lust well, just as alkies cannot drink well. When we try to, we start isolating, self-pitying, OCDing about kedusha and tahara, lying and faking (and using fake names in chat, phone, etc.), and Nobody ever grabbed our hands and forced us to masturbate and nobody ever forced us to lust and fantasize.

Does that make sense yet? It's very late and I am very sleepy, so forgive me if this was unclear.

- Dov

And as far as the first bechinah of powerlessness, I am sometimes afraid I wont be sober by next week...but it's not because of a specific temptation. Today I have the keilim to surrender that, be"H and G-d is really Good to us addicts.

Wow.

What gave you what you now have, though, was not introspection, right? It was the magic of opening up honestly to another. The 'battle' most of us professional hiders (read: porn and masturbation users - especially among the frum) have, is opening up. And believe it or not, it remains the battle!

We often open up as you have, then start to see the 'magical' self-honesty that results from our great act of honesty...only to start believing that now that we have made the 'right of passage' we are cured, different somehow.

Sadly, it's not that way.

You started finding that honesty with self does not come from introspection, but as a result of opening up to others. I implore you to keep doing what got you here, rather than what many of us do: run off enjoying a gift we really do not own. It was a gift we got by opening up uncomfortably - and will remain a gift we keep only by opening up uncomfortably.

You may find that your wife is not the best person for that job...

Hatzlocha whatever you find, chaver!!

- Dov

lookingforhelp wrote:


Not to make it personal, but just to illustrate a point, I will tell you the biggest difference between me and you. read your post. You ask how to handle nice-looking women. You still think you can handle them. You see them and think about them, and think about fighting your desire for them, and think about them some more, and think again even more about how you can fight your desire to connect to them in thought, vision, fantasy, and maybe eventually one day something a bit more.

I do not try to handle them because I have admitted to myself that I am powerless over lust and cannot manage my own life using lust at all. So I do not fight them, do not think about them and how to wrestle with them. It's a different attitude because I have different beliefs than you do. Your frumkeit makes you attach them to you even more. You do not let them go.

I surrender, you struggle.

If you really let them go, then you could do the decent thing and see them as frail people - just as you and I are. People who have needs and need tefilos. Life is hard, and everyone has tzaros. Fantasy erases all that because it tells us to see them as sex toys for us..."ein isha ella l'noy!" And our struggle for 'madreigos' is really just arrogance. That arrogance converts these real women into objects - a cheftza to struggle with...or maybe even into 'disgusting shiksas' to disdain. As if disdain will keep us from drooling about their perfect figure and beautiful faces? A lie. Quite the reverse. Our 'disgust' is feigned. Pretending we are 'disgusted' by them and that they are 'evil', actually just ends up providing us with more license to lust after them even more for they are not really real people in the full sense any more. Heh. it always backfires. While in truth, we - you - worship them for their beauty and sweet feminine power. If not, why all the struggle with them? What's the draw? Why do we keep coming back to their 'ugliness' for more, like a dog returning to his vomit?...i guess they are not vomit to me, in reality, are they. Keep trying.

Acceptance of reality is often a lonely, scary thing. We even misuse Torah in order to avoid it.

It hurts to admit you - we - worship - yes, worship - them.

So my experience tells me to start with admitting they are people as frail as I am, that if I had been brought up with their nature and families, I might have become even worse than they are, and mayb, just maybe, I will be able to pray for their benefit. To really care for them instead of use them. To do what Hashem does - He shows His love for them (and everything in the briyah) and cares for them with His hashpo'oh every second. They have a mission in life. Each Jew and even each goy has a purpose in His plan. And if I find myself unable to just let her go, then I know one thing: I have elevated her to some degree of superhuman status. i worship her feminine power and it is time to bring her down to my own level. Frail, needy, real. Not lower than me - just equal. A fellow human being. I do that by praying honestly for her health, her family, her future and for her to come to have the right relationship Hashem wants her to have with HimHashem as you wish Hashem...just as He wants to have a certain relationship with you.

So simply put, it is really not about self control, but about actually believing differently than we do right now. And the first thing to do to practice that is to ignore these women. Stop practicing the drooling, the second looks and the obsessive thinking about them. Let them go. Accept that she - and certainly her body - has absolutely nothing to do with you. If you cannot accept that, you will know it, because you will keep right on fantasizing about her image and obsessing about her image.

The thing to do then is to let go of her 'object-ness' by praying for her. Not by self-reighteously praying for her to "do teshuvah and stop being such a slut"...heheh, that would just be furthering our arrogance and making her into veiter just an object. Once she is a bit less of a person, we lust a bit more with them. So we start by praying from the depths of your heart for her health and future, children, and relationship with hashem. Then you ask for each of these same things for your own wife just the same, and for your children, and for yourself.

If the first path of ignoring and surrendering what's not ours does not work for us, then we obviously are sicker and need more work so we move to the second path: sincere prayer for them.

If the prayer is sincere, the lust slips right off us and we can them move on with living without them in our lives and minds.

But if we find ourselves again and again fantasizing and obsessing, we just do it all over again. No problem. If it keeps up and does not work, then it means one thing: we still want them too much to let them go.

Saying that now, before trying the above, is meaningless. That just means we do not want to work at all. But if you really try to let the two paths above and it is still not working, then it simply means I still want her in my life - I am not really willing to surrender her.

If that is made clear, could you go on to admit just that? Or will you need to invent a philosophical or religious issue to excuse you...such as 'the yetzer hora makes me do it' (blaming G-d), or 'they just dress to pritzusdik' (blaming them), etc, etc.?

Good questions!

Not necessarily.

Often, being married while being a fake is even more lonely. Much more lonely.

andrewsh wrote:

Dr.Watson wrote:


1- An addict is just as responsible for his behavior as a non-addict. That's poshut. Playing the 'I am an addict' card is not a way to avoid guilt for wronging another or for sinning, at all. As far as I am concerned, it is irrelevant to my wife, to G-d, and to anybody I may have hurt. This is poshut. Odom mu'ad l'olam is for real. It is part of what makes us human.

12 steps recovery is actually 100% based on acceptance of self-responsibility. We choose recovery because we admit only we are responsible for ourselves and nobody else can be - not even G-d. Not our therapists. Nobody. We are alone with ourselves forever...we can invite G-d in, but that too, is up to us (as the Kotzker used to say). It is what Rav Elozer ben Durdaya (one of the rare cases of an addict in Chaza"l or in any sefer at all) meant when begged the mountains, sky, and earth to save him - and they all refused. He finally said, "ein hadovor tolui ella bee", and cried himself to death. That's recovery: completely up to me and dependent upon my choice to surrender to the truth and to G-d. It is dying to self, a bit. Giving up lust for today certainly feels like dying, to us. I do not mean thinking about it - that's fun philosophizing and we frummies love that with a geshmak rav Dessler and a hot chocolate...

But to actually do it. Give it up just for today. It's like dying. Terrifying. I know. But no one can recover for us - no one can surrender for us.

In this respect and others, 12 step recovery is completely different than (how I understand) Christianity in its doing away with the responsibility of keeping the mitzvos and of the batei din process, in general - and so much akin to (how I understand Yiddishkeit) for keeping them both. I believe that saying that a man died for our future sins, ultimately absolves one of personal responsibility for his actions. On the other hand lhavdil, Torah teaches we surely can be forgiven - but that life is about accepting personal responsibility and behaving the right way (the mitzvos and jurisprudence). No one can do Teshuva for me, any more than they can live right for me! Besides, doing Teshuvah is a priveledge and I would not want anyone to do it for me...

And so, the 12 steps are based on acceptance of my own ultimate responsibility to: 1- do whatever it takes to get and keep sobriety for I cannot survive without it (step 1) (none of the 12 steps can be worked to good effect unless I am sober); and 2- taking the actions of recovery to accept sanity (steps 2-10) and get a spiritual experience (steps 3-12) by learning to live with my own G-d (as a Jew must say: "Elohai" - my G-d...not just 'G-d').

Does any of that make sense to you? I hope it was helpful.

[Now, I know there are gentiles, including religious Christians, reading this forum. If your understanding of your religion is very different than mine, I respect your opinion, and we can talk about it, but that discussion does not belong on the forum. I merely wanted to help the frum guys who have this idea that the 12 step program is somehow right in line with typical Christian ideas - so it can't be kosher, and they end up never using it. I appreciate your extreme tolerance.]



2- You are right - your question of "why do I keep falling at all?," is very important. I do not believe that insight and clarity about ourselves brings us to sobriety, at all. Rather, I know that it is sobriety that brings us to insight and clarity in ourselves.

So I would suggest that clarity about what's really going on with you and your relationship with your fantasy life (and private parts), will come as a result of being clean for a time. It will probably take about six months to start to see it. See, our porning fantasizing and masturbating are not 'the problem of our lives' (though many good religious people might try to convince you of that, cuz it 'feels nicer'). Rather, our porning fantasizing and masturbating are our solution to our lives. It is something (or things) about living that we find unbearable, sickening, unacceptable...and we cope with it by sexing out. It's just the only thing we really trust to 'make it feel OK'.

That's why you run into a wall at 3 weeks. Something gets exposed and needs to get covered up with either sex - or with the struggle against the 'aveiro' of sex. Same drug, really.

4 weeks will not 'do it'. You will need much more time than that, and lots of tefilloh, as well.



Regarding the dead skin on Shabbos issue:

Is the real reason you need to stop having sex with yourself that it is an aveiro? Or is it because it makes you meshugah and you feel like a 5 year old and an animal doing it. That you know you will keep doing it past the ages of 50 and 60. That you see this is just plain nuts?

Or is it l'Shaim Shomayim?

Seriously?

If it is, then Shaarei Teshuvah should be all you need, maybe, but still rebbe Elimelech was right - honesty with self comes from honesty with another human being. G-d is surely not real enough to you and I, becs if He were, we'd never masturbate ourselves with desperation the way we do right in front of him.

Chachaman wrote:


No, I cannot, chaver. I think that helping people perhaps get sober is far more important than whatever reason you may have for me being less explicit. And I respect you as a friend (at least a virtual one !). I also believe that sugar-coating is exactly what we all do in order to maintain just enough self-respect so that we can continue the same lifestyle of meshigineh 'struggling' and losing.

So why would I want to be part of the problem?

I respect you and what you do here, a lot, Chachaman. And much of what I wrote may not apply to you. I recognize that not all guys here are as bad as some others here. So let's make a deal. The last time I checked, the average porn-using frum guy here was not just looking at girl-scout cookie ads. When most of us here look at our porn or use fantasy in our heads, it's about terrible, embarrassing stuff: naked people having sex, plain and poshut - and worse. We are looking at the most explicit stuff there is. So I need to be explicit about recovery, too.

As soon as you can show me that 'impropriety' is not occurring over and over at the hands of us frummies here while we are at our computers going from image to image of schmutz, or while we are desperately masturbating ourselves to explicit fantasy, I will gladly tone down my descriptions of what our lusting is really all about. And I mean that seriously, respectfully, and as a real friend.

Sincerely,

Dov

P.S. So many guys say they 'opened up' to their Rabbi or a friend about this issue, or that they "pray to Hashem for help" for it, etc. Yet many are not telling the truth - for they are not explicit about it enough to give forth an honest picture of what's really going on with them!

For example, they say, "I was nichshol, rebbi, in shmiras eynayim and come lidei zera levatola, often b'ratzon....I am so ashamed." Or they say such things in sh'moneh esrei at Sh'ma koleinu or S'lach lonu...as if Hashem has time for such meaningless talk.

Here we were last night, sitting and chatting with some strange girl and using explicit and vulgar language - because it's expressing ourselves and our real desires (at the time)...but when it comes to talking with Yedid nafsheinu the Ribono shel Olam, we are indirect? All of a sudden makpid on nivul peh?! And no, I am not talking about using the F-word in davening at all! That's just cursing, and totally different than what I am referring to. No, I am not saying 'two wrongs make a right' - and I am not advocating the describing of sexual fantasies to Hashem or others in lurid detail. But there is a big difference between frivolous detail that is meant to excite - and between blunt, painful honesty that I can cry about. It's just the truth. It hurts to expose the truth - so it helps. Cuz it is the change that it hurting so much, not the shame!

So I use the phrase 'sex with my wife' in sh'moneh esrei when I am talking to Him about concerns I have with sex with my wife. I use the word 'masturbation' when I am talking to Him about masturbation, and if I was struggling with the desire to look at a certain woman's chest, I say to Him in Sh'emoneh esrei those exact words. He knows it all - He won't faint ! I see no reason to pretend I am really about bechinos of klipos, or something. He may see it that way, but it's none of my business. He wants my heart - Rachmonoh liba bo'ei. Your heart si your real heart...not what your heart 'should' be.

Isn't Emess the only avodah sh'bleiv there really is?

So I believe that anyone who says considerations of 'lashon nekiyah' gets in the way of being factual and honest, has a very different experience and understanding of tefiloh than I do. And such tefiloh would be useless to me now, just as it was all those years that I was busy masturbating myself in yeshivah and davening with 'propriety'.

But if it is working for you, that's great. And I mean it.

(Boy, another megillah! )

There is a lot of value in the collective tradition of addicts who have and are successfuly working the 12 steps in NA, AA, SA, etc. One of their basic discoveries - and the main surprise discovery of the writers of the AA big book that started it all - was that we are not alone.

Not that 'G-d is indeed with us', mind you - that was reported after a while, too, by most - but that among fellow humans, we are actually not alone. As long as we use strictly fake names (usernames) to hide from everyone, we are still alone. Until we open up to other real people who come to see us as we really are, we are alone.

And until we break that terminal uniqueness and loneliness, we will not find G-d. That may not sound frum, but it is very frum. Hashem did not put us into a relationship with Him...He put us into a family. The 1st half of the luchos is bein odom laMakom - and that is where kibud av v'eim is found. Meaning that relationships with other humans are the way Hashem teaches us we can have a relationship with Him. Not the parents, but the relationship a child has with his or her parents - forms the ability in a person to have true ahavas Hashem and yir'as Hashem (kibud and morah). That's just the way it is.

Rabban Yochanan ben Zakai told his talmidim (who were fellow tannoim), that people are far more real to us that G-d is. That's just the way it is. It is not about being religious, but about being real. And real relationships are with people first, and with Hashem second.

If we have spent years messing around with the sweetness of porn and our sex with self (masturbation and all we do with our privates along with that game), we are well-learned in being very alone. The shame and ugliness of our behaviors makes us hide it, naturally. And we take up the bitter, heiligeh struggle of 'fighting it' all alone , as well...often for years and decades. I did that for about 20 years. At times, I felt sure that Hashem was with me and I felt His presence. But based on my performance, it is clear that it was all a game. He was with me, but I was not with Him...and by that, I do not mean that I was 'bad'. I was just not with Him. I had no G-d of my very own, because - and this is always a shock especially to a good frum guy - I had another god of my very own in my fantasies, desperate porn searching, my privates that I thought about so highly of, and in my pay-off orgasms.

But opening up here can be the start for you! Even with a username!

If posting here together with other successsfully recovering men like you feels unnatural, scary, and really hard to do, then it is probably just what you need and may be enough for now. But as the terrible shame leaves, you may find it easier to open up more clearly about what you are doing that is a problem and about whats going on in your life...but the open forum may not be a safe place to do all that so you will find people who are safe to do that with, be"H.

It's about progress, not perfection. Keep on posting, man.

Love,

Dov

israel613120 wrote:

Maybe I am misreading your post...but if you two are in the shevha mekiim count together, then I gotta say:

G-tt in Himmel! You and your wife still count and check her nekiim together? This may seem like a small nekudah to you (...but lets see how easily you give in and try it vs how you and she struggle to keep it, before we dismiss it as just 'ah kleinikeit'.)

Don't you see how this practice tempts you and tantalizes you even more for her mutar body? And far more importantly: don't you see how this feeds you and her deeper into the mishega'as that only her sex can save you? Being involved in any way with her bedikas and 'how her count is going, so far' is poison for you, for her, and for the marriage. And it twists your married brains into even deeper confusion about sex in the long-run. Is sex not confusing enough to you guys?

At most, all you need to do is to bring the shaylos to your rov for her in a bag. She should label each bedikah with a paper in its individual baggie that says what day or onah it was from, if it was the hefsek, moch, whatever. Furthermore, you have no need to ask or know what day it will come out on that she will be going to the mikvah should all the shaylos be OK per the rov - that is her business. If she wants to tell you the day before or whenever for better scheduling of who will need to be home so she can go, then fine. It's up to her...but I wonder how tied up in a knot she is already about the issue of telling you the news, preparing you, 'disappointing' you, etc.

I am not saying you will not have some good rationalizations as to why this system of your is great...you are entitled to all the rationalizations you wish. But why would you keep doing something that clearly fosters sexual dependence (and sometimes 'control', too) on each other? Please give this a chance - if you want to argue or bargain together about the benefits of your way...fine. But I tell you: you will probably not even see what's really going on here until you are free of it for a few weeks.

There is another way. I hope you take this easier, simpler way. It will have ramifications in the dynamic of your marriage and in the currency of sex in how it motivates you to treat her during her early, middle, and later niddah periods. It will be an eye opener. That will bring reality into your home. Not necessarily immediate peace...but reality and freedom is the derech to true Shalom Bayis.

If I read you wrong, then please just ignore the above and correct me - but if not, then I hope you hear this in the way ot was intended.



And yeah, of course we are dissapointed when it gets delayed. But my wife and I have had a few periods of elective sexual abstinence for 4 months or so. She went to the mikvah each time but we just did not have sex. It was guided by my sponsor and many other well-experienced, sober guys, frum and not, have used abstinence to to open our eyes about what role sex plays in our marriages from both her side and mine.

For normal people that may not be healthy (though Hashem obviously thinks abstinence periods are a great idea). But I can say (and my wife will agree) that we have had some of our closest and most beautiful times together when we were on voluntary sexual abstinence. As long as it was mutually planned and agreed upon for the sake of the marriage, it never, ever hurt us in any way. I need that because I am a sexaholic, and she needs it because she is married to one, and that affects the marriage in funny ways. This is an exercise that clarifies and heals some of the 'damaged circuitry'.

So yes, I understand and sympathize with both of you when things do not work as we would like them to! And I wish you more of this good togetherness you obviously share.

Shulem ubrucha!

Sweet! Let me just tell you that what you aim for is a daily work in progress for me and others I know. It would be so nice for me to just have an event or a two week niddah period or even a long abstinence period and finally 'be grown up' after that! Well, it seems to be one day at a time for us in this, as it is in so many things. yes, we grow up a bit here and there when we really do the work, take the right actions, and really practice loving...but it is never 'over'. Nu. That makes life so consumingly interesting!