Eye.nonymous wrote on 04 Aug 2011 06:32:


He should've cleaned up before his wife came home...

Sober 5 months, today, thank G-d.

We had some new neighbors move into our building.  Somehow, one of thier kids got lost in the shuffle and ended up at our house while his parents were at their old place.  He was with us until very late.  My wife was out, and all our own kids went to sleep already.

I had stuff I wanted to do, but had this really guilty feeling--how can I just leave this kid all alone, ignore him, leave him unsupervised.

He was stuck in our house just long enough until I realized...

Wait a second!  Why don't I have this feeling towards my own wife and kids?  Why do I feel okay to walk off and use the computer, to leave them alone, to ignore them!

So, this is something I need to work on more.

--Elyah

Wow! Good point!

As I recall, didn't one of the lost nametags say "jerusalem sex addict?"  ;D I seem to remember that was even more difficult to explain than "holy man"!

Eye.nonymous wrote on 05 Aug 2011 07:31:


Mazel Tov on the five months! Whatever you have been doing for about 5 months, feel free to keep doing it more and more one day at a time b'kamus ub'eichus, or else I'll come over and tickle you with a black jelly bean.

What you wrote strikes me as a real important recovery thought there. Playing house, playing adult, playing father, husband, yeshiva guy, etc. We get too comfortable convinced that we are exactly what everybody else has assumed we are. We slip behind a very comforting mask we ourselves may have created. Then we harbor resentments and lusts that distract us from real life - and we become other than we appear.

That is the story of 90% of the guys here on GYE, if you ask me. Nothing at all to be ashamed of or guilty about. Just something to face and admit freely and do something about.

The shakran took 20 years to build - and we expect the right-sized, sane, and sober me will take 90 days?! Who are we fooling? It takes real time to have real change. And we need to remain clean one day at a time, or nothing really happens. And patient for the real changes that take months and years to really take hold.

It's a good deal, in the end. We get 60 or 70 years of sober and sane good living out of the deal.

Um...(raising hand emoticon)...can you elaborate, Dov?

I was referring to a typical path of addicts working the steps one at a time.

We begin to discover that we do not really have a basic lust problem, after all. We have a living problem. Life either scares the heck out of us, frustrates, or angers us for various reasons, ad k'dei kach that it really does become unlivable without a little lust to 'take the edge off'. Our lusting and masturbating were actually a symptom of our problem. Lusting wasn't our problem, sobriety was! Life as it is for us inside us, is intolerable:

"Living (playing husband) with this woman is tolerable - as long as I can play with the virtual shiksas in the porn (they can be depended on to respect and adore me)";

"...being stuck as a 'regular guy' among so many idiots in my shul, family, yeshivah, or business, is tolerable - as long as I have my fantasy life (I'm kind of like James Bond alone with the big secret)";

"...being a loser because of all my past, present and future failures in my life (in yiddishkeit, business, or any other aspect I can compare myself to others in) is tolerable - if I can feel like 'The Man' in my secret masturbation in the bathroom whenever I want to (I always felt at the center of a big self-pleasuring adventure in there); Etc., etc..."

But in sobriety, it takes just a few months to discover that we don't use only porn or sex with ourselves (masturbation) to make life tolerable. We also use rage, resentment, overeating, spending money, overworking or 'overlearning' escape from humanity behind a sefer (at a sheva brachos with our wife and friends sitting nearby!!?)....to cope. We begin to see our withdrawal from our private little societies in our real lives as an abdication of G-d's greatest gift to us: real life itself.

Accepting the 3rd step mainly means we begin to see the life G-d has made for us as an expression of His Will for us....even if we do not like it very much. Once we admit that, our approach to life becomes unacceptable and has to go. That is what the 4th step is for. 

People who are forced to work the 4th step sequence (like me) come face to face with their real character defects. So...

Instead of playing husband, we may admit we are just too selfish to live with our families. We need Hashem to help us give that up and be a part of - not apart from. Boruch Hashem there are steps 5-9;

...we may admit that we have so much pride, that others must be idiots, unworthy of our trouble, and unfairly demanding on us. We need desperately to learn how to connect and be useful, rather than see everyone else as 'competition';

...we may admit that the main reason we feel we are such failures in past, present and future, is because (in our pride) we cannot accept that we are in fact mediocre in many ways! We put expectations on ourselves that Hashem never intended - then we find we cannot live with ourselves - cuz we are living as someone else! We cannot get comfortable in our own skin, because we insist on wearing someone else's! Perhaps we heard a mussar schmooze - and misused it, got yelled at by a raging parent and internalized it, whatever. Oohh, those things may be hard to die. We'd rather blame ourselves for moshiach not coming yet, for our parents' marriages falling apart, for our wives unhappiness, for not being an outstanding guy in the beis midrash or the respected talmid chochom we 'should be already' or the posek ha'ir yet... We'd rather fantasize that we really should be those things  or that we have all that power, livro olamos ulhacharivon...just what the nochosh tempted us with back in the garden. Nu.

Pride destroys us on the inside - and they told us we needed more self-esteem to 'feel better'. How wrong. What we needed was to get right-sized. To really accept Hashem's Will for us (step 3). Our biggest obstacle was and is our pride, not our failures themselves. Hashem forgives aveiros and mistakes - He does not have much sympathy for pride, as the sforim tell us. Many of us have pride in spades, and we do not even know it. And for prideful people like me, there is no pleasure like the pleasure of getting right-sized, and knowing who I really am and being reasonably sure about what Hashem really expects from me today.

OK, so that was an elaboration, no?

And anyone who thinks they can experience any of this stuff with just a few weeks of sobriety or even with years of sobriety but alone....I think they are sadly mistaken.

:'(

אין מילים

wow!!!I gotta read that again.

Thank you, Dov. That was very helpful, and I think that a lot of it applies to me, right now. Because of various failures and difficulties, I've been feeling like i just can't deal with life, and a lot of it might be that I'm using to much ego, trying to do it alone, and feeling too self-centered, among other things.

thanks dov, that was an extremely clear and insightful post - one to be referred to many times over!

Quote:

"And anyone who thinks they can experience any of this stuff with just a few weeks of sobriety or even with years of sobriety but alone....I think they are sadly mistaken."

I know a guy who has not acted out for about 2 years. I myself am only about 100 days clean. But I will say, the chevra I established here has given me what I feel is a 'quality' in sobriety that I could not have otherwise achieved. There is a big difference between living sober and acting sober. Acting sober, while somewhat better than acting out, is still a cold counterfeit of what really living sober can offer us.

Eye.nonymous wrote on 09 Jun 2011 06:23:


I have re-evaluated this situation, not by myself in my own head, but with the help of an objective sponsor.

To be honest, I have to say it was really a fall.

--Elyah.

...61 days.  2 months.  (Not 5 months plus).

--Elyah

I'm not a counselour, but if u didn't mast* or have sex w/ a/o other than ur wife, ur sober. (I maintain that mast* even w/out being m'zl is a breach of sobriety, but machshava to me, even serious meditating on lust, doesn't make one need to reatrt the count.)

Ooh, we are stepping into a nest of 'dvoirim now....

Back On Track seems to be expressing SA's sobriety definition. Now, there are some in SA (many old-timers are among them) who would say that straying after lust in any way is also evidence that a recovering addict needs to reset his or her sobriety date.

Now here we are in GYE-land....GYE is not SA. Correct me if wrong, but I know of no program called 'GYE'. It is a resource for Jews who want to get clean. Probably most of them are not addicts, at all. They come here to get help, chizzuk, to admit the truth and move on, whatever. All good.

If they see themselves as addicts, then 'clean' can only come after first being 'sober' - and GYE has links and friends who will help those folks into phone groups, SA, SLA, SAA, a shrink's office, to a good Rov, whatever it is they need, be"H.

But there is a reason that SA's founders (and members over the years) chose to name the fellowship Sexaholics Anonymous rather than Lustaholics Anonymous.

Though lust is certainly our drug, sex is the main way it is expressed - whether with ourselves or with another person. Like a tree - the root is not seen, but is the energy behind the entire plant - and in our minds a tree is the parts we see: A trunk, branches, and leaves. What does the tree consider it's ikkar? (oops! )

In yiddishkeit, lust is another nisayon, just like sex is. But for addicts, lust is the root - work on it and refuah from it is essentially unseen. We take the actions of recovery (the 12 steps and the actions which derive directly from them, like: putting down the rock of shame by progressively opening up to others; progressively opening up to Hashem instead of hiding from Him; learning how to be honest with ourselves instead of just pleasing others; being progressively given to Hashem and his people (d'hainu, all people); letting go of our character defects which are mainly arrogance, pride, and self-centered fear of all kinds of silly things; learning how to love and thereby realizing how loved we are ourselves....and many other blessings of recovery, when we do the actual nitty gritty work).

The actions are not about sex, and often not at all about lust. But they hit the root and fix it by Hashem's hand, not ours. And that makes all the difference - that we did not do it. That we winners, did not do the 'winning'.

So. Yes, if you want to say that your lusting is "a fall", I say that's great. If it works for you, then who is so arrogant as to argue? (me probably, but I won't ;D) But SA is still growing in this area, and discussions abound about what to consider a bout of lusting. It is not a cut and dry issue like sex with self or others is.

Personally, I feel that operating under the belief that if I lust at all it is considered a fall would actually be my pride at work, not recovery. My sponsor has guided me that way, and the way is up, one day at a time, so far.

Sure, those who feel themselves but do not come to zera levatola will eventually have to act out, and are just playing a game. I played the game of peeking at porn and listening to lust stuff 'just a tiny bit' in my first few years of recovery. I admitted it in every meeting. My sponsor spelled it out like it is: I can keep doing that, but will not stay sober for long that way. The counting the days game was poison for me. It's been a long time since then and I am still growing in freedom from the tyranny of lust in my life....slowly and day by day.

I am not a machine, not a mal'ach, and not dead. So I cannot make my own lines and have to borrow SA's for the time being. If I do not progress in freedom from lust, I will lose the sobriety c"v and will need to begin the count over again (if I survive it, which is not likely).

Dishonesty with self and others is a guarantee for acting out.  And asking your sponsor was a very good idea, indeed. We should not be sole arbiters of this for ourselves.