time2win wrote on 02 Apr 2025 23:18:

Have you considered joining the Vaad?
There are different time slots (with more on the way!) that may enable you to join without compromising on your secrecy.
Many of the guys gain alot from the oilam/chavershaft aspect of it.
Reach out to me or Shem for more details.

Cumulative Stats
Current Streak: 1 loss
Total Wins: 85 days
Total Losses: 6 days
Winning Percentage: 93.41%

Today's positive action towards recovery:
pushups for stress relief.

was triggered yesterday by some stupid April fools nonsense (on LinkedIn of all places). Wasn’t looking for trouble. Did some urge surfing and survived yesterday, but caved today:-(

I guess I’m just not that motivated to take it to the next level:-/ it’s so easy to rationalize an occasional relapse, plus the benefits of quitting are subtle but the sweet escape of porn and masturbation is anything but subtle.

If my wife knew about my addiction, I wouldn’t need to be so secretive about my recovery efforts. I wish I could join a chabura or go to SA or something, but that’s not possible without her finding out

Meh. Still spinning my wheels at the moment. Anyway, tomorrow is a new day.
Time2Win

TIL that when you hover over the button to decrease someone's karma it says "smite." I was urge surfing hard until I saw that but that triggered me so hard I lost all control. Sorry 

sytv2002 wrote on 16 Mar 2025 01:46:

This is definitely something that gets clearer and easier when you've got a few days clean.

There's definitely times where the urge hits and it seems like before you can even think about controlling yourself you are already giving in. But as you put in the work you'll begin to see that there's a moment of choice in between the urge and the response. And during that moment you can choose to do things that will stop yourself from giving in.

Some of the mindfulness tools in Flight to Freedom are very helpful for that. STAR, SOBER, Urge Surfing etc. etc. It's highly recommended to practice when you don't have an urge so you have tools ready to go when the urge hits.

But it's definitely something that become easier once you've gone a couple days clean and proven to yourself that it's really an option.

Day 1. Started with a stressful morning as usual. It took a bit to gain my footing after that. I came home to some chaos but it wasn't too bad. Overall I feel depressed. I can't mess up on Day 1 though, so I think I am good to go for the rest of the night.

I don't remember committing to trying urge surfing, but it sounds like something to look into. I have OCD+anxiety also, but I have found mindfulness and acceptance to be helpful, and to accept the OCD thoughts that come up at the time as part of the exercise. 

azivashacheit101 wrote on 20 Feb 2025 14:01:

Don't mind the spelling people, you see misspelling is part of my personal form of mindfulness........you see when you take a deep breath (with an unclear & unspecified amount of deapth, pace or time) and stare deeply into the utter deapth of a misspelled word... then eventually you will pass into a deep slumber and climb out of your mind to the realm of a spiritual  holyistic out of body experiance.... you will then decend in peacful meditation back into you battered body with a new and improved hallucanating mind and soul.....try it guys it may just work for you.


all kidding aside I'm not knocking mindfulness it just makes me personally crazy (or more crazy I should say I'm a wackjob without it too!)

well when ya got my illness of anxiety+OCD then try urge surfing, mindfulness and SOBER it ain't fun sir!

Wait an I doing this right???......Is this the correct way to do mindfulness????........how long, slow and deep is that breath supposed to be????????........is this actually gonna work or help?????...........what the bleepaty bleep do you mean veiw your whole body from above are you sopposed to see both your stomache and back at the same tme??? a 360 panamaric view??? just the front????.....this urge surfing thing is killing me!!!!.....why is it sopposed to work????....do i feel the urge too much????? too little???? just tottally wrong?????......AAAAARGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I just read through your whole thread. It is amazing to see how much you changed throughout your journey from your starting point. As HHM once posted, your problem seems to be anxiety and not masturbation. It is possible that the same is true for your religious practice. Perhaps through resolving your anxiety you will find it easier to be more involved in your Yiddishkeit. You once posted that you were going to try out Urge Surfing. Did you find that Urge Surfing or other meditation exercises on GYE resolve or heal your anxiety?

I found that Urge Surfing, SOBER and other mindfulness exercises calm me down very much. I used Urge Surfing for anxiety even without a sexual urge and I labeled my Urge as anxiety. I used to have panic attacks and ever since I have been doing these exercises I have been successful in lowering my anxiety level to 2-3 out of 10. For about a year my anxiety level is almost always 0-2 and I almost never have to do mindfulness exercises anymore. Medicine also helped but it was primarily the exercises on GYE that got me to where I am today. My diagnosis is bipolar disorder and anxiety is only a secondary illness.

Day 24: ok so I experimented today and I think the outcome was pretty interesting I sat down to eat some candy and after one bite I decided, "why not practice some urge surfing?" so I set a timer for 20 min and told myself "I cant have another bite till the time is up." not gonna lie it felt the same way urges feel regarding porn & masturbating. I was pacing, telling my self "this is stupid," I couldn't concentrate ETC. there were 2 things holding me back
One: the 20 min timer.
Two: the bragging rights of being able to post this on forums AKA Guyvah (lol.) 

so yeah, interesting experiment, and so how dose this apply to PMO? good question! when it comes to "the battle" there's very little you can do. Its a whole lot better to just avoid the "candy" in the first place. but there's a catch; what about our natural urges how can we avoid that? the truth is we can't. so i'm stuck. I don't know what to say, I guess I need to chew on it for a while (pun intended) 

also, I've yet to find a good enough reason to stop PMO long term other than the 90 day count, because the truth is PMO dose feel really good the only negative; is my reaction afterwards. as messed up as that seems its the truth.
Let's say hypothetically PMO becomes mutar tomorrow would you hold out? I don't know if I would.
what if my (future) wife said shes ok with it? would I still be scared of falling? probably not.
Unless I can find such an absolute reason to stop IE cigarettes = cancer. I don't know if I would.
feel free to share your thoughts 

    We as men will notice. What we can't do is lingering or glance back. If I notice a women then that's just me noticing a person, if I linger or look again then that's me treating her not as a person but as a sexual object. The main mindset which has to change is de-objectifying women.

    We have to treat people with respect and dignity. If all we can think about when having a basic conversation is a fantasy about her, then that needs to change. It's very difficult as you know but it is doable. Treating women as people is the main goal, fantasiesing them instantaneously is objectifying them. 

    When we get a fantasy pop into our brain the way to deal with it is not to force it out. By forcing it out it gives it more substance. We need to acknowledge its there and just make sure we dont play out the fantasy. I think its similar to urge surfing where we are riding it out till it dissipates. Over time fantasies get more infrequent and easier to deal with. Easier, but never easy.

Keep on Trucking, One Day At A Time!!

chosemyshem wrote on 09 Dec 2024 21:10:

the initial urge is often not "me" at all.  hashem gave us a natural reaction to certain stimuli which does not at all represent what we want.  
with regards to the feelings of desire that we associate with our physical or emotional drive, see chapter 16 of The Battle of the Generation.  being able to identify and separate the feelings that are not coming from our intellect can be a very powerful tool. 

When i first started my recovery i truly believed that these feelings were a part of me and that people who told me "that's not really you" just didn't know me.  With time i came to realize that they were absolutely correct and that all of those desires were just the yetzer hara talking to me as if it was me.  Once i clarified for myself what it was that "I" really wanted, it was much easier to reject anything that didn't fit in to my real (logical) desires. 

simchastorah wrote on 09 Dec 2024 17:16:

Fantastic post and discussion.

Two points.

1) If it was just talking to schmooze about the urge, then you would have an extremely valid point. But the point is that calling someone to share that your having an urge is an extremely powerful method of killing that urge. I think this is HHM's advice. Just calling someone and sharing is a powerful tool. And a part of the power of that tool I think is the sense of shame. Simply saying it out loud helps you realize how bad of an idea it is. So if you can, recognize that even though it's embarrassing it's also very helpful for you to do it and put on your (unsoiled) big boy pants and do it.

2) Without getting into whether or not you should feel embarrassment about this, the fact is that you do. But calling someone to share doesn't mean getting into every gory detail. It means the general picture. To continue with the incontinence mashal - you're not calling and sharing how you lost control and feces got everywhere and there were little flecks of corn leftover in there from the bbq last night and now your couch has a stain on it shaped like Australia that smells like rotten corn. That would indeed be embarrassing. You're sharing more the trigger that is making you want to act out, not the details of how you want to act out. 
E.g., I'm feeling frustrated so I want to pretend like I'm going on Youtube to check the news and end up spending an hour on inappropriate content. Not getting into detail about the exact shape and flavor of the inappropriate content.

This is, I think, less embarrassing. 

3) A bonus point. To echo CO's point about the Bastille of shame. It's totally normal to be ashamed and not want to reach out. This is something that keeps us trapped in acting out. We are effectively telling ourselves something like: "Oh, I'm so disgusting, so ashamed of my terrible life. I can't possible talk about this. The only thing I can do is to keep on acting out (since the ways to get out of acting out are so embarrassing.)" This is a very harmful thing. 

That being said, you can ease into reaching out. Posting is a good start. Then perhaps find one person whose posts resonate with you and reach out to them. One of the big guys maybe, who speak to dozens of people and if their contact list gets out half the Jewish world is going down with you. Then maybe make a friend or two. No rush, and no mitzva to speak to everyone. But opening up takes a hammer to the gates of shame, and it feels pretty darn good to be on the other side of that gate. This paragraph is literally just a summary of my personal experience. 

Hatzlacha!

Side point: I disagree with looking at the urge as a thought from someone who is "not me". It's helpful as a short term technique to avoid a given urge, e.g. urge surfing or find the fox techniques. But in the long term, you'll probably find that it is indeed you who wants these things, and that's why you do them. Not "society," not "the internet," not "the yetzer hara," but you.

And when you start realizing that you do want this, you can deal with resolving that want in a better way. But if you always disassociate yourself from the urge then you will never resolve those inner drives and they may pop up again in the most unexpected and unhelpful places.

dreamyunicorn28 wrote on 11 Nov 2024 17:08:

I'm sorry Brother,
It's hard when things pile up and the deck starts to feel stacked against you.

If you don't have the capacity to handle it the way you want in bed, maybe you need to jump out of bed. If your brain is foggy, then keep it simple. No hands below the waist. Clench your fists. Commit to taking a drink of cold water. Any basic thing that you CAN manage that is enough to jostle your mind.

Hatzlacha

This morning I fell again  I woke up from a lustful dream fully erect and with feeling bad about waking up late... and being triggered last night by my wife's friends that carpooled with us to a Simcha, and a lot of work-related stress, I regretfully succumbed to the urge.

I'm also realizing that urges I have when I wake up is many time more difficult to overcome because of my foggy brain... Methods like urge surfing, is harder to apply when I'm sleepy. So instead of overcoming the urge I build it up till it becomes irresistible.

I'm sure many of you have some advise to give... Listening 

PaulONeill21 wrote on 05 Nov 2024 15:19:

I apologize.

Let me explain why I think I responded harshly. A particularly tough time for me, a time when I will nonstop binge no matter what, is when my wife goes out of town. No matter the preparation, I have always, always, masturbated my brains out the second she left town. 

Why? I'm not sure why. Part is habit, part is conditioning, part is a feeling like I "need" to make use of this "opportunity", part is the break from normal life structure. But I think the fundamental issue that is revealed by this situation is that porn is the bedrock of my life. When the normal external barriers and restrictions (a.k.a. my wife) go away, the incessant drive to act out is revealed. Which is deeply disconcerting.

So I'm working on it. I work on it in the short term with good filters, strong accountability, connecting to friends who help me in the struggle, tefilla, setting up better routines, learning alternatives to acting out, planning out distractions, using Flight to Freedom tools like urge surfing etc. etc. And I work on it in the long term by trying to develop a life that can be sustained without relying on external barriers to keep it going.  A life where I genuinely live the life G-d wants me to live, and not a life that I trudge through painfully and that needs to be escaped from with porn at every opportunity.

So your question resonated with me too strongly. Realizing that when I'm really alone what I really want to do is just dive into porn until the sun rises on the next day was a very painful realization. And your question brought that realization back up to the surface. 

Anyway, I don't know if this resonates with you at all. Most likely you just have a bad habit and need to work on filters and planning out other activities to fill your time. But I was unacceptably rude and think an explanation and apology is required.

Hatzlacha!