My first day clean in what I hope will be a long but successful journey!

5 days in. Pretty easy so far, no real challenge yet but I'm not complaining, it will come soon enough. It always does. I hope to write more here in the future but for now thats all I have got.

This is amazing! Keep it up!

#makelifegreatagain wrote on 23 Apr 2020 03:00:

Hey, a clean day is worth a lot!!

Today I finally fell.

Im not surprised. Its happened to me lots of times before. But today I fell in such a way that I feel like I have to share just so I can get my frustration off my chest (don't worry. For anyone who is reading this, I will not be going into any gross details, just the situation that caused them).

I share a room with my brother, who has an ipad with almost no filter. I have 3 devices myself, but most of them have at least some sort of a filtering thing. My brother always uses his ipad when he's home but today my parents went shopping so he came along and left his ipad behind. Soon enough, I decided to use it.

At first I didn't do anything bad on there. I'm an explorer, so I love looking up new places and how to get to those places, so thats what I was doing for awhile. But eventually the dark part of my brain took over and reminded me of what device I was on and what horrible things I could see. To speed things up a bit, I lost a little control and I saw some bad stuff but at least I stopped myself before I could do anything bad. 

Once I gained that control I was determined to not let go of it. I went away from that Ipad, to my side of the room, and davened Mincha. After I was done I decided to watch a video on Youtube on the problem we all have. I found a very interesting video that explained the science of this addiction, it was extremely interesting (if anyone wants, I can give you the name of the video). But my streak of good took a terrible turn when he started talking about the mind, and what this addiction does to it. He said something along the lines of "it affects what you do" and "it makes you sick" plus he went through some examples of the kinds of things someone with this addiction might do. There was a lot more to it than that which I don't remember, but I remember what it did to me.

After I stopped watching the video I began to question every part of my life. Was I really doing so and so all this time because I was sick? If I wasn't sick, would I have done something else? I was so upset by this that I even began questioning my love for girl members of my family (ex: cousins) because, what if I only loved them because they were girls and my diseased mind was trying to get me to come closer to them just because of that?

This shook me so much that the dark part of my brain gained new life, even as I tried to convince myself that this couldn't be true. I love them because we're family and because of all the memories that we share together. Not because I was sick. But it was no use. From that point on, it became much harder to chase away the darkness. I just felt too tired, too emotionally drained to do anything to stop it.

But I still held on.

My self-control was so poor at that point that I kept picking up one of my devices with a filter and searching for bad stuff. When I realized that I couldn't find anything I put it down. Then almost immediately I felt like searching again, with still no luck, so I put it down again. This went on a few times until I picked up my cell phone, which I found out today that it does not have a very good filter, and searched for bad stuff.

I found it, along with the end of a terrible battle that lasted about 5 hours that ended in defeat for me. The most frustrating part was that my defenses were broken by a video designed to teach people more about this addiction but instead allowed mine to get stronger. Not that I'm complaining about the video. It was a great video that taught me a lot about how the addiction works, and how it doesn't matter how many filters you have. If your mind isn't filtered it doesn't mean anything. That's why its so important to guide our eyes from things that can trigger our addictions. The video was about an hour long but I only watched about 30 minutes, but I hope to continue it when I fully convince myself that I'm not "sick in the head."

But there are some things that I am proud of from today. 1) It took 5 hours for my defenses to fall. That means what I have learned is starting to really help me. 2) Usually the yetzer hara gets me in ways that are predictable (ex: laziness, boredom, etc.) but I never would have been able to predict what happened today. Hopefully that means the Y'H is running out of ways to beat me and that now he's starting to scrape the bottom of his disgusting barrel.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully next time if something like this happens again I'll know what to do about it. But for now, I wish you luck on destroying your own addictions too!!

Mazel tov on that long streak and the long resistance. You seem to have a good attitude for this and can really beat this.

Yeah, getting into autopilot downhill spiral isn't good. Pretty brutal at that point, you just have to stay off of all devices whatsoever for the day. It's especially brutal if you've been relying on an external circumstance such as someone else in the room.
Were you watching the
Ultimately though, slugging it out with the Yetzer Hara isn't great, which is why very strong filters are really nice (they ain't cheating). Let me know if you want any help with filters, I have over the last month helped a couple of college kids at my school on different devices with free filters especially android.  kornjaca55@zoho.com .

Thank you for the share. It definitely reminds me of my own insanity, eloquently laid out in front of me. You think being aroused by a video of addiction is bad? One (or maybe a few) time(s) I was turned on by lifting the little wick on a tealight candle to a straight upward position while preparing my wife's shabbos candles!!!

thanks for the advice!

No, this video was actually labelled as a "Guard Your Eyes" video. It honestly was a very interesting video, and now I'm not sure why it affected me that way. Thats something I'll have to figure out quickly if I don't want to be caught in that trap again.

Whoa!!

thats rough! I guess things like this happen to everyone. Thats very good to know. Thank you!

You should feel proud of the 5 hour battle! -that's a long time to stay in the ring and fight. keep at it bro

TheFighter99 wrote on 28 Apr 2020 12:33:

I am! Thanks for the pep talk!

It's been 10 days since my last hiccup, so that breaks my previous record on the 90 day chart of 8! My real record, from before I started this, was 2 months, but I feel like Im in a better position now than I was during that streak. That streak was great, and I think about it a lot, but it happened because I was just too busy to mess up even if I wanted to, so I didn't really have the tools to keep it going much longer than that.
But ever since I started doing the 90 day chart I've picked up a lot of useful information that I didn't have before. I learned about withdrawal, which was huge because before this I never noticed thats what I was feeling after a week of not messing up. I just assumed my defenses were weakening and that if I didn't do something fast I would be in trouble. But now I know thats just part of the process. Its a step forward, not a step backward. I just have to keep going and I'll be fine.
I also learned that the most important thing is to run away when the Yetzer Hara goes on the attack. Don't fight, don't reason with it. Just go. This was something I had guesses for awhile, and something that I even kind of knew during my 2 months streak, but there's a big difference between guessing something and having it confirmed by an entire website. So now thats my go-to strategy for when the urge comes along again. Part of that strategy is another thing that I picked up from this site (something I probably should have thought of a long time ago) which is when the urge comes, avoid electronic devices. Its such a simple plan (at least for me) and it worked so well when I felt the urge yesterday that I never really felt like I was in danger of falling. I hope this continues for a long long time. Thanks for reading and good luck on your battles (AKA "retreats") too!!

I'm now celebrating 19 days of being clean (Baruch Hashem!).

I couldn't have done it without the help of this website and all the people on it, so thank you all! 

I've really had to work for it this week. The first 10 days or so were pretty easy, I barely had any urges so I didn't really have to do that much. But that changed around last Friday, when they started up and threatened my streak. I managed to avoid doing anything wrong (Baruch Hashem again), but it refused to give up. The entire week the urge came to me on and off, trying to wear me down. But like I mentioned before, this site taught me about withdrawal, something I didn't really know about before I came here, so knowing that it was withdrawal and not a sign that I should panic because I was losing I was able to keep my distance from anything bad. Not so coincidentally (at least in my opinion), a friend of mine gave a shiur on Lag Ba'omer on Zoom about putting up fences, a shiur I would've completely forgotten about if he didn't send a link for it because almost nobody was there (So far its the only time he has sent me a link to remind me of an upcoming shiur). I'm beyond glad that I listened to it, because now I have an image of what I need to do. I need to put up a fence. Strangely enough, I already knew that I had to put myself as far away from messing up as possible, but something about the image of a fence really made inside me click. I'm not sure why. I guess its kind of like the difference between somebody giving you step by step instructions of how to put something together and showing a picture of exactly how to do it. I'm glad that I got the picture.
      But even with that advice I've been challenged quite a bit. The urge is there, powered by my own brain, but so far I have been able to keep it "behind the fence."

  But now I need your advice. I know that  most of the time these urges are triggered by inappropriate images. I know that the key to stopping that is that you have stop looking at those images. But the problem is, even when I do stop I still have a lot of those images stuck in my head triggering the urge when my mind wanders. So I guess my question is, is there any way I can stop those images? Does anyone know a trick I can try?

But besides that, this has been the best 19 days I have had in awhile in terms of my addiction. Hopefully the next 19 will be even better!!!
      

A trick? First of all, I'd just accept it as normal, I mean if I've been pounding my brain with porn for the last 20 years of my life then have a 2-week streak and expect the thoughts to go away, well that's plain old ga'avah of the nth degree. Then other tools which do help I guess are gratitude lists, journals, phoning someone else, connecting

  you need to get those images away from your eyes, if its online then do whatever you can to get it away, For example: i watch on youtube alot and i noticed that i see alot of inappropriate images on there, im not ready to give up watching altogether so i bookmarked my subscriptions page on the google start tab, so at least i only see the channels i know are clean and watch only those, no surfing for me, if you need a filter, they are cheap in comparison with what they are saving you, techloq has a skin identification software and will block decently, it will take time but if you stop seeing innaproppriate images on the street (look away) online and everywhere else your current images will lose their strength over you and it will take time for that but you will have a much easier time







the fight starts when you do that NOW!