I am an orthodox 14(turn 15 march 30) years old who home schools, i have come to the conclusion myself that homeschooling has nothing to do with my addiction because I don't have time to view porn during school hours do to homework. I first saw porn when I was nearing the end of 6th grade. I saw it accidentally while doing a book report for class. The character in the book was also the name of the porn star and pictures of her popped up. The first time i saw it I immediately closed down but i was curious and had just hit puberty so i opened it up again and looked. I did not know what s-x was at the time and only looked at nude pictures for a while but then I began looking for videos and could not find any for a while. I contented myself with opening multiple tabs at time viewing hundreds of non clothed females. One day I downloaded a virus thereby forcing my dad to buy a new computer. While at the store he bought me a laptop which until recently I never used because I did not want to betray my parents trust further. I found out the filters password and used it. I recently changed the password so I don't know it but no one knows it so hopefully that does not become a problem.There are still two other computers without filters.  No one knows about my addiction not even  my twin brother.  I don’t feel clean and I feel like I need to go to the Mikvah but I don’t know how to go by asking without people becoming suspicious. I feel really bad because I have a slight break before learning Gemmara and a few times I have watched porn right before learning.  I hope I can stop the addiction early in my life and continue to become a good Jew!

1. welcome...if you found your way here, you have alot of portential.

2.It's purim all around the world, so for once the boards are gonna be SLOW...to say the least

3. I see that GUARD is reading your post as I type this, so you should be getting your 'welcome pachage'

4. I don't normally type like this. iusualy rant and rave for 3 papagraphs

5. A freilachem PEErim, and a gutte vuch,

6. I see you are already making yourself at home, so continue to do so. Keep this place alive..

7. The greatest source of information, chizuk, and advice is found by going through old posts. ANdthing from DOV is worth reading, and a few chazaros.  For divrei torah, see the "Beis Medrash", and "battlewors corner". And it is always inspiring to follow a person's journey, from page one of their 150 page thread...  ok you can do it in multipple sittings

8. Why delay, start the 12 steps today..... DO STEP 1 ON PURIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You have no idea how great you really are for posting here on this forum. You have proven to hashem, and to yourself that this addiction is NOT you, and that you sincerely want better. This is the first step.

The most important thing right now, is for you to know........

1) To KNOW that you are  not alone. (so never ever feel isolated)... by thinking that you have to deal with this by yourself. Unfortunately there are so many people like you/us.....young, old, married, single, Rabbanim etc, that have fallen pray to this. We are all together, and we CAN heal from this, and in fact in the end it will be a blessing in disguise... by actually bringing us closer to Hashem. And, this is all that Hashem wants from us. Even if we need sometimes to walk through filthy mud puddles, and turn ourselves brown, but if in the end, it will  bring us closer to Hashem, then it was worth it.

2) You must KNOW, that you and this addiction are NOT one, and the same. You are YOU, and this addiction is an addiction...something separate from you, and we must/will try our best to keep it as separate as possible. Don't every identify yourself as  being bad. Yes, this addiction can cause us to do bad things, but you yourself are inherently good inside, and always pure.

    I ask you now to think of all of the people you know, and respect. Is there anyone that you look up to, and has helped you in the past? A Rabbi or someone that you could possibly confide in? Someone that you trust?

    Please post back. We will never leave you, and we who know what you are going through will help you through this. 

Purim sameach Chazak Amenu

Welcome to the Guardyoureyes family

I am the moderator of the [hidden!] womens forum and rarely post on the mens side anymore.
But I was so impressed by your plea for help that I wanted to welcome you personally.
The REAL you is hurting by these urges, and the fact that you are willing to face and fight at this young age says much about your true character and long term desires for holiness.

If I can help you in any way, feel free to send me a PM, and know that we are all  cheering you on.

Dear Chazak,

You are still a good Jew.  The fact that you are here shows you are determined to do something about this addiction.  This addiction is different
than drugs and alcohol.  Those are subtances.  This is a process addiction meaning you simply stop drinking or drugging.  But this addiction like a
food addiction is a naturally spiritual and physical act between two married adults.  So in a sense it is more difficult to stop. 

I would like to give you some food for thought. First of all there is a Rebbe In Baltimore who discusses these issues with his class.  If you would
like I can put you in touch with him privately.  Second, understand that what you are looking at is fake.  These people are actors and at the most
extreme level sometimes kids or adults who have been made human slaves and forced to do these things.  Imagine G-d forbid if you were put
in such a situation, you wouldn't want other people supporting the people that did this to you, would you?  So by watching that's kind of what
we're doing.

Mikveh:  You know, men can go to the mikveh in a swimming pool.  So when the weather warms up a bit, that might be a better alternative
or a private lake. Or use Pesach as your excuse.  See if you can challenge yourself to stop one day at a time until Pesach.

I tell new people all the time to simply tell your parents, you've stumbled on this when you were doing a report, you don't want to see these things again, and please put a filter on the other computers.  You don't have to do into details about anything else.  They will respect you for it.  You can do it.


If you need someone to talk to.... anytime you can call the hotline number:  901-685-3256.

Dear Chazak Amenu,

I am the admin of this forum. Welcome to our community! Once you've arrived, there's no turning back. Everyone here will just grab a hold of you and pull you up, up, up!

You are very fortunate to have found our community at such a young age. If this addiction is left unchecked, it can later destroy our Yiddishkeit, our lives and our marriages. But here you will see that you are not alone and that there is real hope to find freedom from this...

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 strong filters in all the computers in your vicinity. It will be almost impossible to break free of this while having all the garbage within a mouse click away. If your parents ask why, say that a friend of yours send you a link to this shiur and you don't want to be tested.. Ask your parents to listen to the shiur too. You never know, you may be saving your father from being tested too! 

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.

Let me tell you a little about the two GuardYourEyes handbooks. They lay down the cornerstone and foundation of our work, and they make our network much more effective and helpful for people.

You see, until now, people would often get "lost" when coming to our website, not knowing what tips and techniques to try. For example, a beginner wouldn't jump straight into therapy or 12-Step groups, while on the other hand, someone whose addiction was more advanced wouldn't be helped by the standard tips of "making fences" putting in "filters" etc... So it was essential to develop a handbook which details all the techniques and tools to dealing with this addiction in progressive order. Now with these handbooks, anyone can read through and see what steps they've tried already, and if those steps haven't worked, they can continue on through the handbook where the steps become progressively more powerful and "addiction-oriented".

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.

Note: You might want to print them out to read away from the computer. Keep in mind though, that if you do this, you won't be able to click on the many web links in the articles. But you can always come back to them later. The truth is, it's anyway good to go through the whole handbook once without clicking on links, just to get an overview of all the tools available. Once you did that, you can start again from tool #1 and read each tool through more carefully, click the links and study each technique and assess whether you have tried it fully yet or not...

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!

Welcome, Rav Chazak Amenu!

It is truly incredible that you are fighting this at such a young age - you're so lucky! Many people here have waited till their much older, and as you can see, that doesn't make it easier!

I would recommend that you not worry so much about going to the mikva, for now - but let's work together, so that you can stop doing these things that you don't want to do!

I am incredibly inspired that you realize, with such a clarity, what you need to do!

I am really psyched because just the idea that other people know about my addiction is helping let alone all the tips and chizuk people are giving me, and the 90 day chart i feel like i can win this battle! thank you all! i know i have only been on this site for 4 days but i have not even thought about looking at p**n. So far i have guarded my eyes and have had success fending off fantasize when they come. I know that i will be challanged hard but right now i am feeling good. and when i am challenged  the idea that i can talk to someone on the I'm FALLING!! thread is a help also the idea of exercising looks like it could help. i have not read much of the booklets but i have started and i will continue to read them and in order to make it easier i am doing the chizuk email so i get bit by bit. Thank You and Hatslacha Rabah!

Amazing!

When you're feeling good, and strong, is a good time to figure out and plan what to do when the hard times come. That way, you already have a plan in place - like leaving the room, going for a jog, etc.

You rock!

I wanted to try going last year and when asking people about there experience they said that they stopped going because there are a lot of naked people walking around and i would not like it.

Not everyone likes going to the mikva...I don't go that often, but it doesn't really bother me when I go - but you can find some places, at the right times, are pretty empty.

How's your day going?

my day is going fine thank you for asking how about yours? i am soon going to interview a wwii veteran! between preparing for the interview and you guys baruch hashem i have not even had time to think about porn!

My day? Confusing and stressful, which is kinda par for the course these days, but from good things, so that's a plus.

Enjoy the interview? For fun, throw in references from WWII movies, and see if he gets them! (just kidding. mostly.)

Chazak Amenu wrote on 28 Feb 2010 02:09:

Dear Chazak Amenu,
First of all, you already are a "good Jew". Perfect - no...but good - surely. There are many examples in chazal of yidden who did horrible things but had redeeming qualities. For example, did Rabi Elazar ben Durdaya keep Shabbos? It's not discussed. Did he do kibud av vo'eim? Any chessed? Learn Torah at all? All that seems to be a bit irrelevant in light of the issue that earned him Olam Haba, doesn't it? I guess we'll never know for sure whether he had any good character at all...he did have a lot of pain, though. Enough to be desperate for Hashem and take responsibility for himself. Rabi CA, I think that on some scale, you are truly a good Jew.
And you already are a good person, at any rate. Hashem certainly loves us even though you and I have weaknesses and may make terrible mistakes at times. As long as a child is honestly - though very imperfectly - trying to get better, any understanding father is proud of this child. And he understands everything. He is obviously so proud of us. And he loves you even while you are screwing up, obviously, cuz He put it in your heart to want better for yourself, and He even helped you get here to find understanding and help! A good start, to be sure. You are quite fortunate...luckier than many.

That having been said, I hope w/Hashem's help to share something with you that your post above reminded about. Not being an expert, it is based on all I really have to offer anyone: my own experience. Nothing more. So here goes, and sorry for the verbosity ???. I'm a bit sleepy right now.

I'm for going to the mikvah, in general, as long as you are comfortable with it (which you seem not to be)....but irrespective of all that, please consider this:
In the "bad old days", going to the mikvah seemed to help me feel better after acting out. But then, I'd use my drug (porn and masturbation, etc.) again in a couple of days! I was truly shocked. And things just kept getting worse over the years. It was clearly not the solution for me....so, do you want to get better, or just feel better? A good question, in general, as feeling better is related to the soltion and the goal, but is surely neither the solution - nor is it the goal, really.
Furthermore, in my own case, I went to the mikvah and did lots of other stuff along those lines (cold showers, not looking out of my 4 amos, hiding in a yeshiva, saying tons of tehillim, learning seforim about zera levatoloh [written 150 years ago for 1850's-yidden! :o]). Sometimes they gave me a feeling that "what's past is past - it's over! I am now starting fresh!". OK. Now, living in the present is an absolutely essential part of my recovery. Nevertheless, it comes with some real risk for an addict who is not yet in serious recovery. In fact, it can be a devastating handicap at that stage.
It was for me.
Thinking in those terms then, made me able to delude myself that there really was no pattern. I was able to remain in denial of the fact that there was really something in me that had to change. Gimmicks allow us to seem as though we are changing while remaining exactly the same inside. "See, I am better!"...not quite. That derech distracted me from the ikkar while I worked really hard on the peripheral. And I see this pattern over an over. All manner of mesiras nefesh-like behaviors abound, while the very thing that got us so screwed up in the first place - our own very best thinking - remains at the steering wheel! Our motivations have not truly changed.
Do you get me so far?

Until we face that there is something very screwy with our thinking, we don't seem to start getting better. And this is what the 1st and 2nd steps of AA's 12 principles of recovery are about. Accepting the facts about myself was the essential seed for recovery - whether one is an addict, or not.

Mind you, I am not at all implying that you are an addict. But if you, CA, are convinced that you use schmutz compulsively, that for you it is like a drug, and if you come to see that you cannot seem to really stop, then I suggest you consider that the problem is no longer the women on the street, your father's computer, nor even what you did yesterday! They are all tofel...just triggers - not the problem, at all. Rather, the problem is in you yourself, period. You are not bad, and it's not your fault - it's just the way it is. Nu. Iv'e got it too, buddy...and life is fantastic (in recovery)!!! Besides, now is as good a time as any to get free of it - and you can. For that, I need a lot of Hashem's actual assistance, and help from people (like other addicts in recovery) to learn how to get it. 

So...keep using the mikvah if you want to, or don't, but whatever you do peripherally, keep your eye on the ikkar and don't get tricked by behaviors that imitate real change. Consider opening up to safe people, staying open and honest, getting the help you need, and doing the work. Always talk to Hashem as you would to your very best freind, cuz He is and always will be. He needs nothing and has only our best interest at heart forever. After all, He's G-d!
Get started today.
Make sense?
Hatzlocha,
Dov

dov, you really gave me a lot to think about! i am going to focus on my main goal and that is beating this compulsive shmutz watching/addiction! i think i will try going to the mikvah once i reach my 90 days before going or if i feel like i am not ready even then maybe a year or so.