Had a clean day yesterday. First in what feels like a while. It felt good.

Hoping to be clean today too. 

Was thinking.
These forums serve alot of different purposes. They're a repository of really valuable knowledge. There's an aspect of joining a chevra of people working on this (whether the more limited connection of just online or getting introduced to people here and connecting offline). An aspect of getting pain/struggles off your chest in kind of a open diary. An aspect of sharing in order to receive advice, chizuk, or accountability. An aspect of getting chizuk from other people's successes and experiences. A purely social aspect that keeps people busy and out of trouble. Any social media platform (as this is to some limited extent) also has an aspect of people sharing because they want to be heard.

People post different flavors of all these posts and it's usually difficult to tell them apart from the content. No nafka mina though.

Sitting next to my wife on the couch on Shabbos and flipping through an old Mishpacha magazine I spotted an ad for GYE.

Had an interesting outcome, but can I just say I think the ad was extremely inappropriate.
The ad was a picture of a kollel-looking man, big beard and white shirt, sitting in his study doorway so that you could see his face but not whatever he was doing. The man was looking straight into the camera with a sad/guilty expression. The tagline was something like "Suffering from internet problems? There is help."

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the tachlis of GYE ads is to raise awareness that there is help for people with lust issues - not to raise awareness that there are people with lust issues. From my perspective, the ad had the message that there are people with lust issues, and your husband/father in his study may be one of them (you think he's learning but maybe not...) and by the way, there's help for them. It felt wrong.

GYE should definitely be advertising. In fact, I came to GYE because of an ad. A long time ago, I saw the ads that used to run with the little stick figure happily shaking someone's hand and the tagline was something like, "I no longer think 'if only he knew...'" I remember being so envious of that feeling, and when I finally got to the point of working on myself I went straight to GYE. Contrast that ad with this one. That ad focused on the positive feelings of being clean, this current ad focused on the negative feelings of lust addiction and seemed inappropriate.

Remember, the average reader of Mishpacha magazine is probably women and kids. The spouse/parent/child of the addict, not the addict himself. Why are we raising awareness amongst that population that some percentage of frum men are worshipping naked shiksas in their studies instead of learning? Wouldn't it be better to raise awareness that being clean from pornography is a joyful feeling?

Am I missing the boat here?

(Disclaimer: GYE is amazing, bad ads are better than no ads, and no doubt whoever put in the ad is getting oodles of schar for it. On top of all that, my feelings of what is appropriate or not are pretty messed up, and often innocuous things can bring up feelings of shame. That being said, I think I have a valid point.)

Anyway, ranting aside. My wife saw the ad and asked, "How do they help?" But we were at someone else's house so I just shrugged. But later I brought it up and we briefly talked about what GYE does. Interesting convo. Drove home that she does not, and would not, understand anything if she found out the extent of what I'm going through. But I did say I want to be in touch with some GYE folks to "mentor them" and she thought that was great.

This sounds ridiculous, but for work I need to look at a model's Instagram page (just to see something in the background of the pictures). I figured it's b'avidita k'tarid and muttar. Techloq blocked the heck out of the page, and even after chatting with them the page wouldn't load.

Taking this as a sign that perhaps God thinks people with lust issues should not ogle instagram models and ignoring that task. Someone else will probably do it.

Anyone else saw the ad in the post above and have any thoughts? I'm curious if I'm way off base here.

Checking in.

Lionfree raised a really great point tpday about "obsessing" over recovery. Which is something I've been thinking a lot about recently (obsessively so?).  

One particular kneitch about that I've been thinking about is in regard to connecting with other people from GYE. I think there are a few probable benefits to that. The most obvious is the positive benefits of being part of a chevra that's working on this (Rambam, cave etc.) and the more you connect to the chevra the more powerful the affect will be. CO has a theory about coming to terms with facing our hidden selves - if I understand it correctly, meeting people introduces our Hyde to our Jekyll and that is healing. (a la Dov's Captain Kirk post).

But I was thinking that one benefit is probably that talking to people involves you in recovery much more than anonymously posting on a forum. Talking to "real people" is very real (for lack of a better word) and involves you on a deeper level than doing a program, meditating on ideas like urge surfing, or interacting through posting. And it seems to me like the more you are involved in recovery the better a chance it has of sticking.
Here's a theory as to why "involvement" in recovery is crucial. Ideally, the best would be to be obsessively involved with hashem so that lust is naturally excluded. For those of us who somehow fall short of that level, we've got to be involved with something. Right now, that thing is all too often lust. So even forgetting about addiction/habit/learned responses, just saying stop lust is very difficult - this is something we are deeply involved in. But instead lchoira we can replace the involvement in lust with an involvement in recovery. 

This is speculative. But it sounds good to me and I'm trying to put my money where my mouth is. This is a long way of saying I finally set up a google voice number and please feel free to pm for it if you want to schmooze. Fair warning: I don't really do small talk well.

chosemyshem wrote on 28 May 2024 15:35:

I agree with all of this! I've learned a lot and read/heard many times that thinking about the problem too much is often a hindrance (maybe "obsessing" about a solution is different). Don't think of a pink elephant. 
On my introduction thread May 14 & 16 I wrote a bit about my personal history with this. I'm certainly not on the level to be obsessively involved with Hashem all the time. Lust and recovery aren't the only two options - perhaps there is something you are or could be interested enough in to make it a focus when not busy with daily responsibilities. 

Maybe I'll look into Google voice. I'm no small talker either, so we can either talk tachlis or share an awkward silence lol.

"Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change" -Milton H. Erickson

chosemyshem wrote on 27 May 2024 15:33:

I saw a similar ad but the one I saw didn't say what they were struggling with, it just said "can't look yourself in the mirror? we can help." and that was it, if I didn't already know what GYE was I don't know if I would have figured it out, but maybe their relying on the name to give it away. Anyways, I agree with your viewpoint that it's better to focus on the positive, but I also feel this hits a chord in a persons heart that they feel they can't go on any longer, so maybe there's tachlis both ways.

notezy wrote on 28 May 2024 16:07:

When I was in the midst of my life metamorphosis, I was trying to change all the main negative behaviors I was exhibiting. P & M, movies / shows, addictive game apps, . . . and secular music. For the life of me, I had no idea how I was going to give up the music. It was the outlet that would pick me up and get me through the day-in and day-out hard work. Hashem only expects us to do what we can, and I left that challenge for a later date. No sooner did I quit the other negative behaviors and, all on its own, I just couldn't listen to the secular music anymore. 
Hashgacha that soon afterward I heard a speech from Rabbi Zecharia Wallerstein AH where he related having the exact same experience. That was super cool.

Last month I was walking through a mechanic's garage and there was a rock song blasting. My first thought was "man, that is an awesome song, why haven't I been listening to it"? followed by an "oh yeah, silly, I stopped listening to any of those songs a long time ago". It made me appreciate my efforts and the resulting change - especially after that little reminder that I still like the music a lot, but chose to give it up on my journey to be a better me.

Back to the post, I think there are times for insight and sometimes, to quote another deep thinker: "Enough talk, lets fight" -Po, the Dragon Warrior

I was reading the kitzur shulchan aruch and he said somthing  and apropo to what you just said he quoted (yoma 38b) "a person who comes to purify himself is helped" 

hopefulposek wrote on 28 May 2024 16:29:

Could be I was so frozen up that I'm misremembering the text. Interesting.

Checking in.
Need to get a lot done today but procrastinating by reading old GYE threads. General life issue I need to work on. 
Better to procrastinate by reading GYE than watching porn.
It's sad to see how many people post a little then disappear. I like to imagine they all got so cured they don't think about GYE at all...

Set up a daily mutual accountability check in with a chaver from here. Hoping that'll be a powerful help.
Also thinking about considering 12 steps/therapy. I guess I've been making progress here, but I've been fighting this for a very long time, and I'm still way down in the trenches. Idk if pre-gye fighting counts so much because that was mostly just a series of banging my head into the wall with no chochma. But still. 
I don't want to take that step because 1) ego and 2) my wife would need to know. But I'll do whatever it takes to get clean.

Powerful post: guardyoureyes.com/forum/17-Balei-Battims-Forum/248487-Could-I-Fantasize-About-My-Own-Wife?limit=15&start=75#266081

Powerful collection of Dov essays: Link

Checking in.

Been a rough week. Totally clean without any urges really. But unproductive at work. Feeling alot of confusion though not really clear to me about what. Currently working on writing down my history of acting out and it's been intense to say the least. So prosaic yet so sh*tty.
(I don't mean to say that glamorous falls would be better. I mean that it's just a history of mundane failure, small choices that should've been so easy to make correctly and were not. Over and over and over again.)

Trying to be nicer to my wife, to the extent that she asked me why I'm being so nice to her and assumed I did something wrong lol. Which in a way is true.

Checking in.

Been speaking to alot of people in the past couple days. I guess once you start it's gains momentum fast. Really great people around, glad I finally worked up to speaking to some of them. Kinda wonder what the people at work are thinking that I'm spending so much time running out on the phone lol.

Other than that no real updates. Haven't had a fall in a few days (though a nasty slip on Friday while I was trying to generate my beautiful new avatar.) Haven't done F2F in awhile but that was helpful I think. Should get back to it. 
Finished writing out my history of acting out. It was painful. Kinda cathartic, but mostly painful.

Checking in is better than checking out