Hi chevreh good evening, I hope all is well with everyone.



what just happened with me is something weird but this is how it goes, my phone has a filter so I can't go on shmutz but recently I got access to a friend of mines phone for a couple of days (he's with me and he uses his phone), and he doesn't have a filter on his phone, I'm not compelled to go on shmutz sites but a got the tickle.

i had a talk with myself and I told myself that I'm really! Powerless over p* and if i tell myself that I don't want it since it harms me, that I become a zombie, that I'll go wild for the next few days, I'll just fall flat on my face, so I feel that for the first time I really feel that i the great I I I who until today I thought that I have control over my life, I just don't! But now what, so I turned to hashem and told him the HE HE HE should take over control of me with the tools that he created me with and take over this particular field.



I think to myself who is this GOD that I never knew but I guess that it's left for me to be seen.



A gute nacht. 



Ps. When my friend will leave in the next couple of days I'll update my chart so ull be able to see if i fell, hopefully not, odaat.

dms1234 wrote on 24 Jul 2017 21:20:

There's a mistake in number 5.

12 steps on How to Work your own Recovery Program

1. Dont get a sponsor, chances are you probably know what works for you and what doesnt
2. If you already have a sponsor, make sure to never call him. If he calls you, never listen to his advice. Be sure to give your experience
3. Never go to a face to face meeting or attend a phone meeting because the people sharing are sex addicts and are sick people
4. If you do happen to go to a face-to-face meeting it is absolutely necessary to explicitly share your most intense fantasies and porn images that are stuck in your head.
​5. Always lie about your sobriety date to newcomers so they will ask you to sponsor them. Sponsorship is the best way to recover.
6. If you know someone in the program and their spouse/parents dont know they are in the program, it is pikuach nefesh for you to tell their spouse/parent
7. Old timers are old. They dont know what sex addiction is like nowadays. They are so far behind that they cant help you. 
8. Never make phone calls to any program member, the people calling you probably have less sobriety and will trigger you to act out. 
9. Always remember that God gave you this addiction so God cant take you out. He is testing you and you need to fight as hard as you can to beat the enemy and win the war.
10. Don't go to therapy. Therapists want your money. Remember that you know yourself better than anyone. 
11. You have no character defects. You dont hate anyone nor do you have any fears. So inventories or writing wont help you. All you have to do is roll up your sleeves, put on your gloves and get ready to fight! Ring, Ring. 
12. There is nothing wrong with looking at frum women. Only the shiksas. You wont have sex with frum women because its eishes eesh.

Welcome!  You definitely have a hard road if you "need" you tube etc.  It's very hard to recover when the entire recovery seems to hinge on blocking or reporting software.  That should be part of recovery, but when it is the main focus, I haven't seen it work that well.

Welcome!  You seem to recognize the psycological underpinnings of addiction and of the things that trigger you emotionally.  Have you ever seen a therapist?  Do you have a good friend and/ora good rav that you can speak to? 

What was your experience with the 12 steps?  What exactly did you do?

Looking forward to hearing more from you.  You may want to check out some of the links in my signature, specifically "dov quotes" and "dr Sorotzkin".

I've seen the question asked by several people if there are inordinate amount of frum people with sexual addiction issues. I usually say no and offer the many reasons that we can all come up with that may appear that way. That being said relationship and sexual issues are a huge problem in frum communities and the more the communities are "frum" about these issues the worse they are. So does anyone stop to think for one minute that maybe the way we separate women only feeds into these problems. I know I'm wasting my breath. 

Anyway Chaim there is a bigger issue here in my humble opinion. The fact that your yeshiva doesn't allow it means you would have to go around their rules in order to interact with girls and hide this fact from them and perhaps from your family. To do that would be dishonest and duplicitous.  Sadly our current system ends up breading dishonesty and duplicity in sexual matters that can and does  nebach carry over into marriage for many people. 

Dov said it all in one sentence on his call today. Too bad I couldn't write it down. It went something like this: Just do things because they are the right thing to do without worrying about the goal.

As an addict my goals can be ego driven and that may be okay for other's but not for me. 

Day 4: I had a pretty good day B"H. Read tool 3 (guarding your eyes) in the handbook today (no chizuk email). It talks about tips for guarding your eyes on the street and on the computer. I found that most if it doesn't apply to me. I never really had a problem guarding my eyes on the street, I am just too bashful to look. (Read: wouldn't want to be looked at as a creep )

Also, nothing is more triggering for me than having strong filters. In my experience it's not the triggers (as in sights of lust) that lead me to acting out. It's feeling angry/stressed/resentment that leads me to seeking out lust which leads to acting out.

In a word, if I'm feeling emotionally healthy I don't seek out lust, and if I'm feeling terrible no tip will help me I'll get my fix somehow. Like dov said once, I only act out when I feel I need it to survive

Actually if I would worry about all those rules it would probably just put an unhealthy focus on lust for me. Obviously for many people those tips are super useful. Just pointing out that even being a crazy addict you know yourself best sometimes. 

Why is it that it's so hard to like my family sometimes? Anyone?  (Maybe anyone who you live with for years would get annoying?) 

Day 5: My cravings are growing with each day that passes. They are most prominent in the morning when I wake-up, and in the evening. I have an ever-growing inner agitation, my body is craving some form of pleasure, and sadly I have no way to give it anything בהיתר.

  What am I doing about it? First and foremost I spend some time on the computer every morning and night writing this daily log, it keeps me attached to a ‘greater good’, a supportive community. I translate the views on this thread, as a measure of the importance of my sobriety and my recovery. If you were to ask me why I need to be clean, I could spew out for you a 10 page thesis on the benefits of being clean, and the real damage-harm-suffering of acting out. But those are empty words. Over my many years in SA, and the countless ‘shares’, I bared witness to hundreds of fellow addicts who replaced their system of values with the values they learnt in the 12 steps. They never go the point that the ‘program’ was found a place in their old perception. The result was a “two-faced” sober being, who lives in two worlds, the world he lived in until SA (where lust was pleasure and ‘worth-it’) and the world of SA where lust is bad. Without CONSTANT participation, (daily phone calls, 2-3 groups a week, conventions, sponsorship, and just chilling’ with SA members) he will enviably revert to his “old self” where lust-porn-whores-rape where “enjoyable pleasures”. I have witnesses it happen time and time again.                        For me, I never changed my identity, I found the truths of the program to hold true within my old ethical and moral values. Religion is the reason why I pay extra for an internet filter when I am acting out, instead of saving money and enjoying all the free shmutz on earth. Religion is the reason why I ask from myself not to look at any of Hashem’s “beautiful creatures”. Religion is the reason why my own sobriety definition has no “no tolerance” policy for any ‘forbidden pleasures’. Religion is why I don’t want to act-out with the myriad of mild forms of lust. My quality of life, and the suffering entailed, is the reason why I never want to “stumble” of hard-core falls.

Step one is easy to do when some-one fell deep into the muck of sex-addiction. Not that I haven’t crossed those red-lines occasionally myself. But on a daily basis, I don’t struggle with anything of that nature. Thus also I am part of the quandary, “am I really powerless?” “is my life unmanageable?” “am I suffering at all?”          Step one for me identified a list of areas that I am powerless (if anyone would “start with me”, staying up all night lusting in various forms, living with open internet), in turn I added my religious-beliefs and religious-guilt to the equation. It works for me, I honestly believe why I shouldn’t be acting out in any way, and I have no confusion between me religion and my program. For my they work in harmony, for me they enhance each other, and for me even when I lost contact with SA and GYE for over half a year I continued to work my program and my stepwork and benefited from a high quality of life… without the constant affirmation of the 12 step groups.

What else works for me? Nothing that I “have” came easy, almost everything I write about on this thread came as a result of MUCH HARD WORK. At this point in time I am working on something which is new for me. As a quoted in an earlier post, Hashem made me as a being who seeks pleasure, and gave a variety of good-healthy-unhealthy-bad pleasurable options to choose between. So what I have been doing recently, is with every ‘craving’ I verbally repeat this idea to myself. This is how I worked many aspects of my 3rd step. With every ‘exposure’ to the problem, I respond with my new solution. My response will in-time become my perception, and as being my perception my feeling will also change accordingly. OK maybe I need to explain this a little more clear. 

 Psychology identified 4 factors in our own “reality”.  One we have the event, and we witness that event with our 4 senses. Each persons has their own dominant sense, and therefore 2 people will witness the same thing and take notice of different issues. The variations may be so drastic that it may be hard to believe that there saw the same event.

The next factor is our perception, did we see a police offices hitting a child, or a lethal arab rioter being dis-armed by a police officer who took pity on him and opted to endanger his own welfare in hand-to –hand combat, instead of just shooting the little murderer at point blank.

As a result of our perspective we will have feelings. In the example I gave we will either pity the arab youth, or glorify the officers self sacrifice (by endangering himself he truly saves lives all over the country, because we pay a heavy price for every casualty on their side).    Feelings are subjective, they depend on the perception we adopt.

The last factor is our response.  Now on one hand the most natural response reflects our perception-feeling, it’s sort of a chain reaction. On the other hand We can choose to respond otherwise. For example, our wife says something “not nice”, and our natural response would be “drop  dead you _%&#@_”, however we aren’t interested in paying the price… so every normal husband know to respond with the words “I’m sorry dear that you feel that way, I really would like to understand where you are coming from, are you available tomorrow night to go out with me to a restaurant”.

I use this framework to work my program.  Lust is the “reality”, my brain used to ignore most of the information gathered by my 4 senses (I would ignore the suffering involved in the ‘opportunity’ to act out). I perceived it as pleasure, would feel empty and exited, and I would respond by…. Guess…

In recovery: I change me perception.     Bad things-worried-anger, will be perceived with gratitude to hashem. גם זו לטובה, ואפילו עדיף ככה. If only I understood things properly, I would be begging from hashem to do it like this, but what do I know? That’s why it looks bad to me, but I trust hashem who knows everything the best, that this is “sooooo worth it!”                    Lust=Hashem you gave me the inborn desire to seek pleasure, and you gave me a lot of options bad and good. I want the best pleasure there is right now, and that is to use this moment to be close to you.

How do I make the change, by immediately verbalizing my new השקפה/outlook for the scenario. If I respond fast enough, I can preempt the old perception (lusting, yeh great, let’s go look at shmutz on the computer). At first it “sounds foreign”, then is “sounds familiar” then I start mentally voicing it even before I verbally say it. And the last stage the “new” perception works on auto-pilot.  Over years it will be “etched in stone”.

If you know anything about cats, you may appreciate this comparison to addiction. Cats are very instinctual (as I'm sure other animals are as well) and when their instincts take over they can be hard if not impossible to redirect. 

A friend of mine was saying how his cat would go out at night in the snow and come back all beat up. It had an injured leg and was not in the best of shape. And yet still the next night there was some other cat out there that he was pursuing and he would charge out into the cold and snow in pursuit. Are we much different when our desires take over and we are recklessly driven after something to fulfill them. 

To quote my Rosh Yeshiva from back in the day and also Harvey A. from SA: "Torah is 100% truth. It's what man does with it that isn't always emes." And Harvey added that it's the culture that has been corrupted, so separate culture from Torah and don't twist Torah to support dishonesty.

When it's about me then that's ego for me. Ego loves extremes. So when my addict is in control I'm either doing really well and I want acknowledgement for that and when I'm doing bad I want compassion. It's all about me.  

When I'm living a dirty life, of course God is blocked out because I'm not letting Him in. That however doesn't mean that God is distant from me. The fact is that distance doesn't apply to God and God is everywhere and in everything, how much more so is he specifically in his creations and especially human beings (and all the more so Yidden) who are created in His image. So the fact that I think He's separate is all about my ego. (When yidden look down on goyim it is not Torah and all and purely culturally induces. If you separate yourself from people you cannot have conscience contact with God. And if you allow in feelings of superiority to Goyim, your going to end up to feeling superior to other yidden as well. Superiority is all about ego gratification and breeds separation.)

My addict wants to get closer to God because I'm looking at what I can gain out of that. On a very simple level it's like wanting to be the teacher's pet. Isn't is good enough for me to do my work because I'm a student that loves to learn? Do I need to ingratiate myself to the teacher as well? In program I try to just focus on doing the next right thing.  I try to change my focus and just practice doing what's right and not for the purpose of ego gratification. It makes it easier for me that I'm trying to make a living amends. That  means that I'm in negative column and just trying to make up for that; it's the least I can do.

Look at two different approaches in Torah. One says that the purpose of a human being is to attain shalmus or completion. That in and of itself seems like a very self-centered approach and perhaps it is.  Take a second approach that the purpose of your life is make a dwelling place for Hashem. That approach seems more selfless, it's for God not for me. Personally I think both approaches can be very selfish for me and feed into my ego and the second one even more so in a way. The people who propound both approaches claim their approach is superior and better to the other approach. And the second approach has this amazing component that I'm doing this mission of bringing God into the world. Both approaches become about people and ego for me instead of about being of service.

I guess I'm not really answering the question about me. So what I'm trying to say is that my approach to religion became about doing and being the best and being a part of the best and that gave me purpose and meaning in the world. I was going to change the world and me and my cohorts were better than everyone else. We are top of the food chain and all that. Not just as frum yidden  but Especially as Chabad we had a monopoly on Moshiach and were leading the fight to bring the redemption. For me religion fed into my need to be that special guy. 

By the way my ego and self-seeking expressed itself in religion and religion is a big part of life so I talk about in terms of my experience. Life could have gone another way and my need to be accepted could have been fulfilled in some other way and probably was in many ways like through family and education. When I was younger I made  a lot of trouble and eventually started to find acceptance in obedience to religion so that was path my people-pleasing self took me. Remember ego loves extremes so I went from one extreme as trouble maker to extreme obedience in religion. So I went from the kid who made trouble in shul to the kid who was the better than everyone else in shul and I felt superior to people. And, in the meantime I had this huge hole that I was filling with sex-with-self and with escape into alcohol which is strongly encouraged in Chabad.

I am allergic to lust. I am allergic to lust. I cant control it. Nope. I want to lust like a gentleman. I want to look at all the pretty women out there. It is so enticing but im allergic. Its like poison to my body. It makes my life completely unmanageable. I yearn for it. I want lust. That is going to fill the hole inside of me, wont it? I have come to believe that no matter how many women I look at or how many times a masturbate it just doesnt fill that God hole. I have learned that nothing can fill that God hole but....God! 

I have to be completely honest with my self. What are my motives? For example, i went running in a park. What was my motive to see very attractive girls in bathing suits and stare and look at them and hope to have sex with them. I am being honest. And sometimes being honest means i need to be descriptive (dont worry i wont be so descriptive on the forum) I called someone before and told them this and then i went running. I ended up finding what i wanted and i felt my body well up with lust. Its a miracle that God kept be sober. I am very grateful. 

Thats one example that i have to be very honest. Another example is i was at SA convention this past weekend (who knew being in a room with 700 sick people (addicts/wives) could be so incredible) and one girl there was single, frum and attractive and i was seeing her everywhere i went (match made in heaven!). I shared to a couple people that i really wanted to marry her. One guy told me that he was speaking to an old timer and the old timer told him that he has to be really honest, what does he really want to do to her? I wasnt ready to admit it but the next day i agreed. I didnt want to marry her! I wanted to see her naked and have sex with her. Thats really what i wanted. 

Rigorous, rigorous self honesty. And its not just about lust. Its about everything i do. What should i really be doing, thinking, acting like right now? What does God want me to do? Thats what i need to think about constantly. And its ok if i dont want to do something, thats fine. I just need to be honest. "I think God wants me to call my sponsor now. But i dont want to, I dont want to call him" Great. So God wants me to call my sponsor and i dont want to. So what do i do know. God, my best thinking gets me into trouble. I dont want to get into trouble. Your will is better. But i dont want to do your will. I am not willing. So what should i do. I should slow down and ask God for the willingness. God, Grant me the willingness to do your will, to call my sponsor. 

So, right now, infront of all of you, I pray to God that to grant me the willingness to do your will. Your will, not mine be done. 

From my early childhood I was spoon-fed ‘ideas’ about אמונה ובטחון, mere theories. Why do I say that, because even as a child I knew that those who teaching me don’t “practice what they preach”. The religion I was taught it yeshiva wasn’t fake, but it wasn’t real. When I first came to the program, I quickly understood exactly what they mean by a ‘living God’. As a dear friend of mine once said “If only ראשית חכמה was on the street, and our נסיונות where on the shelf in the beis medrash.” As the program slowly stripped me of my drug-of-choice, and gradually weaned me off a myriad of unhealthy-methods of coping with my emotional turmoil, I was left with NOTHING. In that state of powerlessness, I had nowhere to turn but God. But thankfully I was ‘well versed’ in religion, all I needed to do was LIVE BY THOSE PRINCIBLES.

For me, steps 2-3, began with only one thing – a gratitude list. My sponsor told me that this alone was enough for him, and since I wanted recovery like his I was committed to adopting it as my new solution/response to life. I started to ask him, “How can a gratitude list solve my issues? I don’t believe in think positive-be positive, I don’t believe in that nonsense.” He took the time necessary to fully elaborate his intentions and clearly explain to me everything I needed to know “Do it!” or in hebrew “תעשה את זה”. So I started doing it…

Angry at my parents for depriving me of a childhood, thank you dad for treating me like a scumbag, thank you God for all the years of open internet access, my gratitude list got interesting. Every time I wanted to complain about something, I would remember what they taught me when I was young “גם זו לטובה”  so I started writing all the bad things with the words ‘thank you’ instead of ‘hate you’. Within 2 weeks it dawned on me that no everything about my childhood was bad, and the difficulties shaped me. I began to come to terms with much of my 20+ years of suffering. My angers and resentments where dissipating in step 3, I was left with only a handful of issues that I could not find anything positive about them.

With time I came to more realizations, they will not benefit you to hear about them, you need to just “do it” and discover them in your own lives! But one realization made all the difference. Good and Bad are relative, subjective, subject to interpretation. If my goal in life is self-preservation or survival, than many of my issues truly pose a problem. And the resulting dilemma (when reality fell-short of my dreams) was the driving force behind the NEED to seek escape in lust.      At one point a few short years ago God did me the glorious favor, of robbing me of everything I had. I had nothing left… but God. Even learning torah or investing time in עבודת המדות was a luxury I was robbed of (no time), I was left with only one place to turn, and that was to be close to him. 

I am no צדיק, case in point GYE-SA-etc… , but the only goal left for me in life is to be close to him. Normal people need to work on themselves to ‘forgo’ on all the other goals they set for themselves, in lieu of the ‘correct’ goal. By putting me on “the path of self-destruction” (addiction), and by ‘ruining’ my whole childhood, God gave me the greatest gift. He gave me nowhere to turn but him. He gave me a solution to ANY situation and problem in the galaxy. Because anything good, and especially anything bad, can be used as a springboard to getting closer to Hashem. Every curveball he throws my way, brings me closer to my goal, being close to him.

For me, the אמונה ובטחון that I learnt to live by, are a direct result of my participation in the 12 step program. The solution the program offers is God, the solution is better and more effective than any other system of recovery existent. But it only works, so long as I am focused on only 1 thing, being close to Hashem.                           I did not learn this from books, I earned it through practice. Reading this post will not make any difference in anyone’s life, only by adopting the practices we see by others will we ever experience what true RECOVERY is.

serenity wrote on 17 Jul 2017 18:13:

can you explain?

I couldnt control my lust, maybe you can, it is much too powerful for me. I am allergic to it. Perhaps you are different.