iwant2begood wrote:
Gut Voch! Today is day 38 bh everything is going well. The problem is that I'm white knuckling the lust instead of letting go and letting god. Any advice??
I'm glad to hear that you're doing so well. I wanted to make 2 points:
"Letting go and letting G-D" is apparently not something you accomplish overnight. I quote from the GYE Handbook (Part 1, Tool 15):
Step 3: "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of G-D as we understood him". This is the core of the program, where we completely surrender our lives and will over to our Higher Power. "Let Go & Let G-D"...
The rest of the 12 steps are really about how to do step 3 properly. No one ever succeeds in completely giving their lives and will over to Hashem, but through the other steps of the program we consistenly grow in that direction...
It seems that you are learning about the 12 steps through the phone conferences, but I would say that as long as haven't reached the point where you can really "Let go & let G-D" then of course you should at least whiteknuckle the lust. This may not be your long term solution, but for today it can work.
This brings me to my 2nd point. I don't think you necessarily need to be "whiteknuckling" lust even if you're not following the 12 steps. There are other techniques and attitudes that may help you more easily get over your lust without fighting head-on.
I will quote here what I wrote elsewhere on the forums:
Welcome! Glad you decided to jump on the 90 day truck.
A perspective that has helped me immensely is when I realized that I need to shift my focus about this struggle. Until recently it was always a "religious issue". In other words, I really want all this shmutz and had I not been frum I would indulge myself in all these taavos and the only thing stopping me is because I know it's wrong. This is guaranteed to fail!
I learned to understand that I don't want to lust because life is hell with it, as you yourself attested to. Even if I wasn't frum, my lust will never be satisfied with porn, masturbating etc. And so I will forever be on chase for sex stimulation in some form or other and will always be miserable. So I've come to realize - I don't want to lust because I want to live a happy and content life!
This perspective has been a game changer because I really don't feel like I'm whiteknuckling for the most part. This is not to say that I don't lust at all or get aroused, but I don't feel like I'm fighting head-on because it's not so much Me vs the YH anymore since the real ME doesn't want it either.
Another potentially helpful technique is something called "Urge Surfing". I plan on writing on this more one of these days in the "Break Free" section, as I haven't really seen much written up about this. But for the meantime you may want to Google "What is urge surfing" and you'll find a lot of literature on this technique which essentially teaches you to sort of "surf" over the wave of lust instead of going against it head-on.
I hope you find some of what I wrote here helpful. I wish you continued Hatzlachah!
Warning: Spoiler!
