Hey, welcome! 

Here’s a warm hand. It’s not as hard to keep going when you’re not alone. GYE is a place full of hope. It’s possible to break free, though it takes work. Stick around, read some threads, learn how it works! 

Accountability is an important step! So is making a connection . Some of the greats have been known to say that the opposite of addiction is connection. 
But take it one step at a time. 

Lots of Hatzlacha, and keep in touch! 

Chaim Oigen

thearpyheals22 wrote on 01 Jul 2024 21:16:

Continuing therapy should help with recognizing and learning how to react to triggers.  The connection that you crave can be redirected to connection with hashem.  If you read the book the battle of the generation by Hillel s it should help you feel a lot better about yourself.  

In my experience eroticising shame and weakness is a method used subconsciously to numb the pain of loneliness and isolation that you experienced growing up.  Unfortunately any pleasure is immediately followed by guilt and disgust that can only be numbed by repeating the behavior.  Although it is something that you may have used consistently in your fantasies, it does not define you and it is possible to break the cycle. 

best wishes
vehkam 

Hi guys just joined recently and while my streak is currently zero I wanted to get my story out. Ever since I was little I remember getting into fights with my parents. Which led to me not feeling comfortable at home or loved by my parents. From young ages I was into woman’s feet and stockings and my earliest memory of masturbating is in third grade to my teacher in stockings. It’s like hashem didn’t even give me a chance . I was masturbating before I even understood what it was. Through school I got bullied which added to my not feeling loved and I became a people pleaser kissing up to kids doing what they want even at the expense of me. And through this whole time I turned to masturbation to feel loved and connected. I felt like a piece of garbage that I devolved a fetish for being dominated by woman and would masturbate to videos of that. In 11th grade I was really depressed I hated hashem I remember yelling at him one day that he’s ruining my life and not giving me a fair chance. I hit really low that year there were times in private that I didn’t keep shabbos. Thought this whole time I had a really bad relationship with my parents and didn’t trust any rebbi to talk to so I kept this pain inside. In 12th grade I stated texting girls which gave me a sense of being loved but it didn’t last. In Beis medrash I read a article about someone who was frum and ran away from his wife and was holding parties with woman and it hit me if I keep masturbating all the time like this that will be me. So I did the hardest thing of my life I told my father I have a masturbation problem and he found me a therapist but I didn’t like him so I stoped going to him and continued my behavior. I tried to stop many times over the years but never went more than a few weeks. Finally a year ago I opened up to a rebbi and he sent me to a therapist that bh has helped me a lot but I still struggle mightly Bc a woman in stockings can turn me on and even frum woman dress like that. So every time I walk in the street it’s really hard for me I decided to join guard my eyes recently and I’m hoping this plus therapy can help me get over the top so I can start dating soon and end my fifteen year addiction.Thanks for reading and allowing me to share my story. Anyone else with stockings fetish plz reach out need tips how to manage. If you want to get in touch my email is rachiag13@gmail.com

Twitch is brain rot incarnate...

I was on all day watching other people play a game i used to be addicted to... anyways blocked that with web chaver as well as kick which is the only other thing I can think of that I would go to distract myself... 

Anywyays made some progress in my life tommrow should be easier accept I got to go to Jerusalem for a meeting but I think it will be okay. Debating if its worth going to the kotel again... 
Anyways that's the update for tonight. 
I want to get back in the groove again 

chosemyshem wrote on 27 Jun 2024 19:09:

Progress has been made regarding filters etc.  most people will still be exposed at some point.  The world is extremely sexualized.  Properly teaching how to deal with the feelings that come from being surrounded by this seduction as well as teaching how to get up when you fall has not had nearly as much or enough emphasis. Many yeshivishe rabbonim never speak about it at all.  Some rebbeim and rabbonim have a good mehalech but many have no clue.  The goal is to educate and centralize the resources that work.

vehkam wrote on 27 Jun 2024 18:35:

The frum word's response to the internet was slow and rocky. The response to the problems caused by the internet was slower and rockier.  Bachurim always had teenage drives (see the teshuva from the chasam sofer(?) about the yeshiva bachur who had an affair with the wife of the family hosting him) but it's gone from having to put in effort to get erotic content to having to put in effort to avoid it. And of course that's had an effect on the whole avir in the yeshivos.

GYE has an article from 2011 about meeting with Torah Umesorah. I wonder what came of that.

Don't want to keep on beating the dead horse about awareness, but specifically when it comes to bachurim, probably in the last 25 years the numbers of bachurim who have seen erotic imagery of some flavor went from low to the vast majority. I don't want to make a wild guess about the intensity of bachurim's struggle with masturbation, but it probably went up along with that. Not porn addicts - normal bochurim dealing with normal bochur tayvos. And it seems like yeshivos for a long time were stuck in a mindset from a previous generation (where porn was something unusual) that is misaligned with the problem.

It's a delicate issue. I suspect it doesn't help much to say porn is filth and shouldn't be discussed if most bochurim already have been exposed. And overcorrecting and saying porn is normal will just ensure all bochurim are exposed. And there's so much shame, guilt, teenage hormones, and delicate personal issues that it's hard to deal with even one on one. And many rabbeim either never struggled or still struggle and either way can't relate in a helpful way. So it's rough.

That being said, I think preventative awareness is probably the biggest place the frum community is making progress in this area. It's now normal in many institutions to require parents to have a filter, it's becoming more normal to have a preventative "talk" with younger boys (From Boys To Men would not have been published 25 yrs ago probably), and yeshivas are wrapping around to being able to say that the problem is not just "movies" or "internet", its "porn". Of course there's more to do. But this is where there's progress.

Less progress seems to be being made for people currently struggling. Just my thoughts with no real experience or proof.

Dear Adam (and friends),
Thank you so much for sharing your story. You are not alone. I have been there. Done it in similar fashion. For me, surrendering my powerlessness over my addiction has helped me greatly. And continues to do so. I must work the steps for my daily reprieve from lust. I am not bad but I do have some kind of addiction or allergy to lust. I am actually a very good person and an Eved Hashem with a problem. 
I am certainly not going to suggest that you or anyone else has an addiction to lust or porn or internet or sex. This comes from one's own self enlightenment. 
I have made more peace with myself for who I am. True, it is the Yetzer Hora, but I have found that straight musar, Torah, Tefila and "fighting the yetzer hora" only lasts for a period of time until I come back to needed to work my SA 12 Step program (which is quite complicated despite it's simplicity and often misunderstood by many). 
Hatzlocho to you in your personal journey. Happy to assist you if I can. Much love and I am dovening for you and all of our friends who need support from the One Above in these inyanim. Kol tuv. 

eerie wrote on 26 Jun 2024 15:35:

your saying that GYE is not for people that do not struggle with porn? so it should be called GYEFP(orn)
the administrators say its also for regular yeshivish gaurding your eyes...........

(recenty they've been advertising, that its for people suffering from internet abuse....... whatever its confusing)

בשמגק

frank.lee wrote on 25 Jun 2024 20:13:

Absolutely. A boy, or young man, or anyone for that matter, that struggles with regular shmiras einayim issues, or even masturbation issues but doesn't use the internet much, has not struggled with porn, I wouldn't think he should come here. I think there could be another idea set up, maybe a helpline for rabbanim, run by HHM or the like, that can offer real ideas that really help. But the many, many people, like myself, who have struggled with worse than that, they can really use this place. And that's the message we gotta get out there.

Friends, there's a great tzaddik here that has some ideas. Might sound somewhat radical to some, but hey, I think it's a crazy, wonderful idea. Will share more later, beH

Good morning checking in: Still alive b"h.

Had a great schmooze with the legendary hall-of-famer Iwannalivereal. One nekuda he pointed out really got me thinking. 

The basic issue for many people on here is like this. We like porn/masturbation/other inappropriate sexual behavior. We like it a LOT. We clearly like it a lot, since we've been prioritizing it at the expense of other important things for a long time. And it's not like we don't intellectually "know" it's something we shouldn't be doing, since we've been trying to stop generally since the day we started.
So what's going to change that's going to stop us doing something we enjoy so much?

[For some people, it's enough to just sign onto GYE or have a quick schmooze with HHM and get a wake up call of the dangers + learn that it's [u]possible [/u]to stop. Add a drop of accountability (either with someone else or via the 90 chart) and that's enough for them to break the habit. Be'etzem, for someone like that, it's probably that their porn use was not so ingrained - not something they loved so deeply. But how is someone who's so deep into loving lust supposed to just flip a switch and stop loving it?]

One approach (advocated by iwannalivereal, proudyungerman, and others) is apparently laid out in the Battle of the Generation. And the basic yesod is that "winning" against that urge to indulge in this lust that we love so much is inherently more pleasurable than indulging. So if someone works hard to feel that pleasure, than they won't be faced with a choice of doing something they love or not doing that thing. They'll be faced with doing something extremely pleasurable, or doing something that is even more pleasurable. And that's not a terribly hard choice. 

Interestingly enough, SA has the exact opposite approach (I don't know much about SA, just going off some recordings from Dov in the GYE library so if I'm wrong please let me know.) They say that we love lust even more than we love overcoming lust. That after fighting for so long we've determined that lust is the most important thing in the world to us, and we won't give it up even for the pleasure of overcoming lust. And so then the only possible sane decision is to stop fighting and to ask Hashem to take us out of the fight. 

[Note: both approaches require additional elements such as honesty and connecting to other fighters/addicts. But in this one crucial nekuda - how to deal with our overpowering love of lust - these two fundamental approaches are polar opposites.
I'm not explaining the secret to getting clean. For all I know, the secret to getting clean is to have a righteous dead grandfather. Just thinking out loud about this point.]

And so but there I was driving to work this morning and on the side of the road was a sight to really chap an eyeful of (sorry for the objectification). I shouted in my head "Don't you dare look!" and by the time I finished shouting that I was past her. It's interesting I had that reaction though, because I was thinking about the rest of this post at that very time and didn't use either approach. . .

proudyungerman wrote on 25 Jun 2024 23:04:

regarding bochurim.  bochurim by nature are extremely curious.  many of them will dig through the site to gather as much information as they can.  This is not inherently a disaster but it is not lechatchila.  Educating rabbonim and rebbeim with the yesodos of what works for many of us will help them teach bachurim how to deal with the yetzer hara.  Making sure that they are aware of books such as the battle of the generation will give them more resources.  From what i understand, there are people out there that are trying to spread these messages but it is a drop in the bucket.  I would love to see a conference for rabbonim and mechanchim geared specifically to this subject.    Until recently, much of the education has been in the direction of filters and avoiding smartphones.  These are important but they miss the core subject as pretty much everyone will still be exposed at some point.  

chosemyshem wrote on 25 Jun 2024 22:49:

Very valid points.
One he'arah: (It's nitpicky - just for you chooseurname!)
To me the age doesn't really matter as much as the level of exposure.
You can have younger bochurim exposed to way more garbage than a sheltered, temimusdike older bochur...

(One thing to keep in mind though, is that even for someone like me, who was exposed to a lot of stuff here, would be way worse off if not for this place...)

There was an idea suggested on the other thread about starting a bochurim's forum which I think is a great idea!

redfaced wrote on 25 Jun 2024 21:56:

I'm curious about that actually. I'd like to hear HHM's take on this. A very significant percentage of 15ish year old bachurim now have been exposed to porn and masturbation (maybe not hardcore porn, but erotic imagery on the internet). But they haven't been exposed to clubs, chatting, camming, cheating on a spouse, massage parlors, or many other topics on GYE (off the BB forum). I bet a kid who hasn't gotten in too deep would do better with an honest talk with a knowledgeable rebbi, a good read of TBOTG, a good talk with his parents so they filter the devices he's using to fall, and an accountability program. Zeh hu. If a knowledgeable rebbi is unavailable, gye can provide

GYE (the forum and even the F2F program maybe) would overwhelm and overexpose them.
A 20+ yr old bachur who's been exposed to more is a different story.

frank.lee wrote on 25 Jun 2024 20:21:

If you have a young 15 year old תמימותד'יג bachur who's addicted (or even not actually addicted but exposed) to porn and masturbation, Than GYE is the best bet that exists to make sure they don't fall in deeper. Maybe there should be a specific Bachurim Forum the same way there is a BB forum which can be much more heavily moderated

Reb @ProudYungerman - amazing letter! It is about time that something big is done to save the thousands who are suffering needlessly, and this sounds like it can be a huge impact, reaching all the leaders...

(I just posted this on Eerie's thread about this letter)

A small thing is - GYE is not a perfect solution for everyone. I think young bachurim who are suffering from or addicted to p/m, but not exposed to the underbelly of the internet or whatever, maybe they need something more safe, less explicit about certain things, just like the BB forum is off-limits officially? In other words, if I knew a 15 year tmimusdike bachur was having an issue, but does not have unfiltered internet, I think I would not want to send him here. Makes sense?

Of course, for people who are fully exposed to the world's garbage, send him over to GYE, and the Rabanim should know about this crucial and powerful resource, for those people.