Dear Think Good,
Think wrote on 11 Oct 2012 08:27:
Sorry I don't get it.
How does reading Feeling Good remove the yetzer hara?
So you feel good about yourself,wife life .... but the yetzer hara is still there!
Great question!
Here is a post of mine a while back
http://www.guardyoureyes.org/forum/index.php?topic=5649.msg144861#msg144861, but the part I want to share w/you here is this (with a few adjustments):
And finally, a bit on being happy:
AA teaches that 'feeling good' is not the point of it all. And, of course, so does the Torah. And no, the directive to serve G-d with joy is not 'putting happiness as the goal'. Quite to the contrary, many tzaddikim (the Mesilas Yeshorim 300 years ago, and modern ones are Rav Noach Weinberg and Avigdor Miller, zt"l among many others) have told us that happiness is a
byproduct of living right. They explain that the function of true happiness is to 1- let one know they are on the right track, and 2- to energize right-living with real power. Zest comes from happiness. Hashem wants our zest! B'chol
levavchem, shteit. Happiness is nothing but power, energy - it is not life itself. Even Rav Noach, who taught the "Five levels of Pleasure" and that G-d
created us for happiness, explained (as does Mesilas Yeshorim at great length) that the only Happiness we were
really created for is the Greatest Happiness - Deveikus in Olam haboh. All else is nice, but ultimately false as a goal in and of itself. As Shlomo haMelech wrote: "and I said of simcha, mah zo osah? - What does it do?" He means what does it
do - it does not actually
do anything. Rather, it helps you do, for it energizes whetever we do, but it has no intrinsic value in the long run. Hey, this is Torah, here. Torah is about the long run - doing G-d's Will. Living right. Not "being happy". This is called growing up for me.
And as both my rebbis and l'havdil my goyishe sponsor told me, "if you are living sober and
still not happy, it probably means you are going about things the wrong way. Change the way you are doing it and get some help. Maybe it's chemical, or maybe it is something else that you do not see at all yet." Change (not just the cash kind of change!) is G-d's
gift to us. Feeling unhappy is the 'burr under the saddle'. It's not that much more, really.
So let's be sober
and happy.
![](https://guardyoureyes.com/components/com_kunena/template/default/images/emoticons/new/smile.png)
Dear Nederman,
That list of cognitive distortions was a great one, and b"H I learned each of them from my SA sponsor and buddies. Sure, I
heard them at times in shmoozen, with therapists or in sforim or books...but I started to actually
learn them in my own recovery from my sponsor. Learning how to let go of certain silly or dysfunctional inner beliefs is central to the recovery I was mekabel from the AA's, too. So thanks for that list of some of them.
Rav Leibeleh Eiger was asked by his father why he went to the Maggid (or someone, there are different versions of this story). He answered that he learned there is a G-d in the world. His father then called in the cleaning lady and asked her who made the world and she said "Hashem, of course!" and turned to his son and said something like, "apparently, you wasted your time there. You could have learned that from her right here, too!"
Rav Leibeleh answered, "She
says - I
know."
Books
tell us - even the Torah only
tells us. Learning from real people in the real adventures of daily living allows us to really know the great things you refer to. So let's keep posting about our struggles in living with these things today, calling and PM'd each other about them, and really growing together.