Does My Child Really Need Therapy? Secrets from the Therapist's Room | Shneur Avtzon #014

00:00 Speaker 1 Welcome to this episode. I sat down for a conversation with Schneur Avtzon, a psychodrama therapist. We talked a little about the world of therapy: what its role is, who needs it, and what role parents play. In short, a really fascinating conversation. I’m Meir Wishnefsky, and you’re listening to On Chabad Education. Schneur Avtzon, welcome.

00:17 Speaker 2 Glad to be here, Meir.

00:19 Speaker 1 You know what? I prepared a lot of questions, but before we start, I think we should hear a little about you. Who are you? How did you get into the whole field of therapy? And within education, where do you fit in? What are you doing today?

00:31 Speaker 2 Right after my year in kevutzah, I went on shlichus to a yeshiva. After a year, I was offered a shlichus with the Chassidic Technological Institute, and I went. It was an amazing year of shlichus, full of activity. At the end of it, they offered me a class to teach. I thought about it a lot and decided to go for it. From then on, I spent twelve years in teaching. I started at the institute. After that I was a supervisor in yeshivas, a teacher in cheder, and taught classes preparing students for yeshiva. I moved down a little, and over time—

01:12 Speaker 1 Down in age, not in...

01:14 Speaker 2 Down in age, and I got to sixth grade. Over time, I really wanted to become more professionally skilled. It came from needs I was seeing on the ground—students with certain difficulties, stories you suddenly hear about families. You feel that, with all the tools you’ve learned and what little you know, even with a bachelor’s degree, you need more. So I started pursuing further training. At first it was through Yanar[?]. I studied personal coaching. After that I studied social education and a bit of social coaching.

01:51 Speaker 1 All while you were teaching a class.

01:52 Speaker 2 While I was teaching. Course after course, all the time, until three years ago I decided to take it a step further and began studying for a master’s degree in psychodrama therapy. At first I wanted to combine it with teaching—to make both work. For the first two years, I managed it. I taught in the mornings, then went out in the afternoons to see clients. For the past year I’ve worked only in psychodrama therapy: at the mental health center in Ashdod, at the Mesilot Institute, and at the Center for Education and Family in Lod. I’ve also stayed somewhat involved in education. Maybe another time we’ll talk about the world of education in the Ministry of Education, specifically social education.

02:40 Speaker 1 Where you’re also...

02:41 Speaker 2 Yes, there. At the national level.

02:42 Speaker 1 Good, we’ll talk about that. I think this is the first time on this program that I’m sitting with someone who’s a therapist. A lot of our guests work in education—that’s our focus. But when we talk about therapy, I have a question, or a few questions: Does everyone in our generation need therapy?

03:03 Speaker 2 Okay.

03:04 Speaker 1 I mean, when you walk into a classroom, does every teenager there need therapy? Is that what will help him and set things right for him?

03:09 Speaker 2 First of all, the answer is no—with an exclamation mark. Both as an educator and as someone who now stands on the other side, I often hear, “This child needs therapy.” Maybe we should unpack what therapy is, and even what we mean by “needs.” There are many people whose quality of life could be improved by therapy. We could be talking about a child, a teenager, or an adult. Those are different worlds.

03:41 Speaker 1 Mm-hmm.

03:42 Speaker 2 Saying “maybe he needs therapy” can be a way of shedding some responsibility—sending him to a therapist as though the therapist were a magician. You see it a lot. Parents come in with a child, and whatever the reason for the referral, we always meet with the parents first. Sometimes it’s one meeting, called an intake. Sometimes it’s two meetings, sometimes three, and you try to understand this child’s story, and the family’s story too. Very often it doesn’t end with one child. They may have brought in one child, but he’s giving voice to something in the family. Sometimes, when we manage to work with that child, after a month or so you hear, “He’s doing fine now. Come on, treat the next one.” That, too, is a way of shedding responsibility. People also want magic solutions: Great, therapy sounds cool. He’ll go once a week, talk to someone, and... It’s not like that. It doesn’t work that way. Therapy has a lot of value—I don’t want to sound dismissive. It has a lot of value, and there are situations where therapy is needed. By the way, I have clients whose cases leave me so preoccupied with the question “Why is this child coming to me?” that I bring it up a lot in supervision. And my supervisor keeps telling me...

05:04 Speaker 3 I want to explain “supervisor” a little. While you’re treating teenagers and children, you yourself receive some kind of guidance.

05:12 Speaker 2 Right. Beyond the personal therapy every therapist needs, so as not to carry everything they hear from clients on their own, there’s professional supervision. You sit down with someone once a week.

05:22 Speaker 3 And you describe the case without names or details, and he...

05:25 Speaker 2 You describe the case. If you work at a clinic or center, the supervisor knows the cases. Sometimes there are several clients from the same family. There’s a whole team of professionals supporting the work. In supervision, I try to understand why this child is in therapy, and my supervisor keeps telling me, “He’s in therapy; there’s a reason.”

05:45 Speaker 3 Yes.

05:45 Speaker 2 So sometimes it’s a puzzle. Sometimes the stated reason for the referral doesn’t match what’s really going on. There’s a whole world to it, and it takes a long time to build that understanding. A therapeutic alliance, by the way, takes a long time to build. Some even say that...

05:58 Speaker 3 Sorry, what’s that?

05:59 Speaker 2 A therapeutic alliance. A relationship of trust, a level of openness. Often, after a month or two, the parents come in. When we see a child, or a teenager, we meet with the parents about once a month—to hear what’s happening and to offer some guidance for them. Not from a place of superiority, as though we know better than they do, but because we may see something that someone on the inside can’t see. And you hear their frustration. Sometimes it’s, “The therapy isn’t helping.” But therapy isn’t magic. It’s not a matter of dropping your child off at the garage: “There’s a problem with the brakes. Fix him, and let’s move on.” Not at all. It’s work, and it can take time. There’s also the idea that a person could be in therapy his whole life, so part of therapy is knowing when to let someone move forward—recognizing that they’re in therapy for this period of time.

06:54 Speaker 3 And that they have tools to take with them, right?

06:55 Speaker 2 Exactly. During that time, they’ve acquired tools and skills, overcome a particular difficulty connected to some traumatic event. You see that they’ve come through the crisis, and they move forward. If they need more help later, we’re here. There are other professionals too. But that’s part of it.

07:15 Speaker 3 So you’re saying that, in many cases, therapy can be a way of passing off responsibility: “It’s not on me anymore. The child needs therapy; let him go to therapy.” You’re saying parents still have a role. So my question is: What is a parent’s role? Or if it’s a member of the educational staff who prompted the student to start therapy, is it a matter of referring him and forgetting about it, or are there things that person needs to do along the way? If I’m a parent and my child is in therapy, apart from driving him there, what place do I have in the process?

07:44 Speaker 2 So let’s divide that up.

07:45 Speaker 3 As an educator and as a parent.

07:46 Speaker 2 Exactly. Let’s divide this between a staff member and a parent. As a rule, a staff member isn’t supposed to know why a child is in therapy, why the child is going, or what happens there. Sometimes a therapist will ask for the parents’ consent, have them sign a confidentiality waiver, and contact a staff member to learn what the child experiences at school. Again, it comes from wanting to understand the child’s world and experiences. Because sometimes—and this happens a lot—you speak to the parents and hear that the house is in chaos, for example, while at school everything seems perfectly calm. Sometimes that’s because the staff aren’t saying anything, and sometimes it’s because the child really is doing fine there. And sometimes it’s the reverse. At home he’s a sweetheart, his mother’s little prince. There’s no one sweeter. At school, listen, he turns the place upside down. He won’t follow any instructions, and he just won’t... So what a staff member can do is refer the parents. Every school has a counselor for that. The counselor’s job is to observe, to take a look. Maybe have a conversation or two to understand what’s going on, and if the counselor thinks more is needed, then it’s therapy. That’s as far as the staff member is concerned. With parents, it depends on the child’s age. At a young age—I mean five or six through twelve or thirteen—the parent has several roles. First, there’s the role of bringing the child and the role of being there to support him. A lot of people give up on that because they say, “Fine, he’s independent already.”

09:22 Speaker 4 You mean on a really practical level.

09:23 Speaker 2 On a practical level, but it isn’t merely practical at all.

09:25 Speaker 4 Right.

09:25 Speaker 2 I mean, the parent brings the child. At the end of the day, the child goes into the therapy room and the door closes. He’s in a space with someone who, at first, may be a complete stranger, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. Often, when it’s a child, I ask the parents, “Come in with him the first time. Tell him why he’s here.”

09:49 Speaker 4 Wow.

09:49 Speaker 2 What’s the reason? It’s very hard for a parent to say that to a child’s face. So we sit together at the intake meeting and think about how the parent can put it to the child in a way that won’t crush him, in a way that lets him bear the reason he was referred. Why are you here in the first place? Now, when the child arrives and leaves, there’s this concept of holding. I once heard a beautiful analogy: it’s as though the therapist opens the door with outstretched arms and the parent hands the child over. Then the child can enter the room. And when the child comes out—

10:25 Speaker 4 He needs someone there again.

10:25 Speaker 2 He needs someone to receive him again. It’s happened to me many times with a young child. Say I have a seven-year-old patient: he opens the door and neither his father nor his mother is there. He’s just spent fifty minutes sitting and talking, revealing his inner world. With children, that happens through play and all sorts of other things, and I make therapeutic interventions and get involved. Then he opens the door, and his parents aren’t there. Now imagine it’s dark. Five in the afternoon, winter, rain outside, and a child walks out. You understand that this can be a very powerful experience of abandonment. And I also understand the parent who says, “Okay, he’s in the room; everything’s fine.” If a child is really acting out in the room, we can ask the father or mother to come in. Then it becomes dyadic therapy: three people—the therapist, the parent, and the child—working on the parent-child relationship. Some therapists stay to the side; others actively intervene. We won’t get into that.

11:24 Speaker 4 Because every symptom and every conversation could open up a whole world.

11:26 Speaker 2 Exactly. So that’s the first thing for parents: being there throughout the waiting period. By the way, some children open the door to check whether their mother or father is outside. Or they’ve made a drawing and suddenly want to show it to them. Gradually, we establish that what happens in the room stays in the room and doesn’t go outside, but there’s a whole framework around it. The second thing is coming for parent guidance. In parent guidance, we’ll usually take a particular incident that happened during that period. I don’t want to give actual examples, because so many examples from current patients come to mind. But take the simplest examples: a child who gets up late, a child who talks back, a child who hits. We want to see two things: that the intensity of the outbursts has gone down and that their frequency has gone down. To us, that’s a success. Therapy isn’t... I know that today people promise ten sessions and the child comes out perfect. I also started out studying methods that promise hocus-pocus results in seconds: “Why dig into the past? Let’s move on to the future,” and so on and so on. And there are people it helps tremendously. I’m not dismissing that. But dynamic therapy—psychodrama, psychological therapy—is much deeper. CBT is behavior modification. Yes, it’s very well suited to people who need it for a specific issue. But when we need to go down another level, it’s very, very slow. Sometimes the steps are minor, even very, very small. The idea of parent guidance is to keep track of that cooling-down process. The third thing—

13:14 Speaker 5 Meaning, sitting with the parents to discuss particular behavioral problems the child is having.

13:19 Speaker 2 The reason for the referral. You came with a reason for the referral; let’s hear what’s happened since. There’s been a lot of [unclear] outbursts? Give me one example. A Shabbos meal. The morning rush. It could be all sorts of things. You know that stubborn child who always needs everything to revolve around him? What is he experiencing there? What is he bringing into it? You start unpacking it with the parents. Get to know where he’s coming from; get to know his experience. How can you help him come down instead of escalating things? In other words, learn to spot the moment before it happens. You work with those things, and then...

13:56 Speaker 5 So what could you tell parents? You encounter so many cases. We’ll get into it, yes, but you see so, so many cases on the ground. What could you tell parents, based on what you see, that might make things a little easier and, as they say, keep many situations from ending up in the therapy room or something like that?

14:16 Speaker 2 Look, I’ll tell you something.

14:17 Speaker 5 And if therapy is needed, that’s not terrible either. It sounds intimidating, like going to a hospital, doesn’t it?

14:21 Speaker 2 First of all, it isn’t terrible at all. I know there’s an element of shame. I can understand that. By the way, as a Chabad therapist, there are people who very much want a Chabad therapist. And there are people who wouldn’t dare go near one.

14:36 Speaker 5 They’ll want someone from outside the community.

14:37 Speaker 2 Exactly.

14:38 Speaker 5 Wow!

14:38 Speaker 2 Now, we could talk about that, and about why, in my humble opinion, it is important to have a Chabad therapist. There’s the whole question of values, too.

14:44 Speaker 5 Why is that, really?

14:46 Speaker 2 Because, ultimately, he understands the language and the nuances. And again, if he’s a professional, he knows how to make the distinction. He knows to say, “All right, even if the child describes utter chaos to me, I know that’s the child’s experience. That’s the child’s inner world. It doesn’t necessarily say anything about the parents.”

15:04 Speaker 5 Because the concern is very much about family, about bringing shame on the family.

15:07 Speaker 2 Shame, absolutely. A great deal of shame. That’s why the ability to hold all of that is so important, in my view.

15:16 Speaker 5 And the importance of a Chabad therapist is that understanding of the nuances.

15:20 Speaker 2 Yes. I can give you an example. I work at a mental health center. Recently, another therapist came up to me and said, in a hallway conversation, “I need a little time with you.” I said, “Gladly.” She said, “I need to understand what Tishrei is.”

15:35 Speaker 5 What Tishrei is?

15:36 Speaker 2 “What is Tishrei? How can people send children away like that? And how much money does it cost, and [unclear]? Isn’t that the parents’ responsibility?” She’s trying to enter that world. She told me, “I’m trying to discourage a girl I’m treating from flying away for Tishrei.” Now, she was coming from a good place. I’m not, G-d forbid, saying otherwise. But it would have taken her time to understand. Because she works at the center, she came to me fairly quickly. She said, “You have to understand, if I hadn’t run into you, I would have carried on as I was.” What would have happened to that girl in another two months? Her therapist would have told her no. Either she would have talked herself out of going, or she would have gone anyway. And then the therapy would have—

16:17 Speaker 5 Because there’s no understanding of what these things mean to a person’s inner life.

16:20 Speaker 2 Right. And wait—what about yeshivah? “All right, so he should go to yeshivah. Why does it have to be that kind? Let him go to a high-school yeshivah.” There are so, so many nuances. “All right, he doesn’t have to wear a suit...” They don’t understand that saying that to a bochur is like cutting him off from something much higher—from his sense of belonging, from all those things.

16:38 Speaker 5 Really, in how these things connect. So you studied in yeshiva, and you were involved in education. When you came into the world of therapy, did you see things that connected? After all, Chassidus deals with the soul. Did you see connections between Tanya and things we learned in Chassidus—things that speak a lot about the work we do within ourselves—and what you learned about therapy and therapeutic methods?

17:04 Speaker 2 I’ll tell you, there’s an amazing book, “Yatz’ah B’nafshi” [?].

17:06 Speaker 5 “Yatz’ah B’nafshi” [?]. Yes.

17:07 Speaker 2 Yes. It brings together a great many references and responses on the subject of therapy.

17:12 Speaker 5 Who—who published it? I’ve forgotten.

17:14 Speaker 2 I don’t remember either.

17:16 Speaker 5 Right.

17:16 Speaker 2 I want to give him the credit.

17:17 Speaker 5 Right.

17:18 Speaker 2 Whoever deserves the credit.

17:20 Speaker 5 Yes, the credit is entirely his.

17:22 Speaker 2 There’s Rabbi Yitzchak Hertz [?], who put out a course in JCBT—CBT in Judaism, so to speak, based on Chassidus and Judaism. I’ll tell you the truth: I’m a little careful not to mix the two.

17:36 Speaker 5 Really.

17:37 Speaker 2 I mean, I’ve studied Chassidus, and I study Chassidus all the time. We never finish learning Chassidus. But to me, constantly trying to make one thing fit the other—

17:49 Speaker 5 Mm.

17:50 Speaker 2 I mean, the Alter Rebbe understood the human soul better than anyone. Okay? It’s not as though some therapist—Freud, Winnicott, Bion, whoever you choose—understood it better than the Alter Rebbe. Absolutely not. At the same time, I don’t want to look at every single thing and say, “Wait, is this good or not? Is this what the Alter Rebbe meant? Oh, this completely contradicts the Alter Rebbe, so let’s try to reconcile it, or else not study it.” Listen, we had a lot of arguments. I also studied with people from all sorts of backgrounds, and we had lecturers who weren’t [unclear]. There were many arguments and all sorts of discussions. Someone who really wanted to impress us would say, “Look, this is what the verse means.” You know, don’t interpret verses in the Torah for me, and don’t give me concepts and— But you learn many more approaches. You try much harder to live with the point. And by the way, there are therapists who think that—and that’s also why I said that the parents’ role is to come for parent guidance. Some therapists are sure they’re above the parents. In other words, “I’ll tell the parents what to do; I’ll educate the parents.” As a chossid, I know that parents have the greatest and most fitting ability in the world to help their child. And by the way, we’ll soon touch on how to prevent this, but if you feel your child needs therapy, trust your intuition. Trust your intuition; go and get help. There are methods, by the way, where the therapist won’t even meet the child. They’ll meet only with the parents to understand what’s going on with their child.

19:30 Speaker 5 So the child won’t be in the room at all.

19:33 Speaker 2 The child isn’t in the room at all. The whole treatment is done through what’s called the Hika method [?]. All the work with the child is done through the parents.

19:40 Speaker 5 Really.

19:41 Speaker 2 And there are many therapists who use those methods, and they also have—

19:44 Speaker 5 They have a track record.

19:45 Speaker 2 Yes, they have a track record. And again, to me this also comes from a Jewish perspective. A father and mother have strength. A father and mother have that intuition. Parents ask me, “What do you say? What do you think?” I ask, “What do you think? What do you think?” Parents are often frightened, too: “What? I’m going to say that to my child?” I wrote a post about this last week for my group, based on a case I’d seen that very day. One father told me, “I want my son to go to yeshiva and start the year. It’s hard for him, but I don’t want him to be spoiled.” The mother said, “He’s not doing well. He hasn’t been doing well for years. We can’t keep sending him. I can see he’s starting to get depressed. I see him shutting himself away in his room a lot.” Wow. So I said to the parents, “Okay.” The father said to me, “Convince her.” I told him, “You convince him. I’m not getting between you. I want the two of you together…” Right? We’ve just had Parshas Ki Seitzei. With the wayward and rebellious son, there’s the voice of his father and the voice of his mother—two voices, a father’s and a mother’s. We don’t want those two separate voices. The child needs to understand both: on the one hand, “We understand your situation,” and on the other, “We also want to see you make progress.” Mm. And within that space, parents have a lot of strength. Parent guidance isn’t about the therapist being above them. And by the way, parents often come to workshops, consultations, and lectures saying, “Give me a tip about education. Give me a parenting tip. Give me a tip about…” The truth is, life isn’t made of tips. You can’t build a life on tips. Nobody runs their livelihood on tips, and nobody is going to raise their children on tips. What you need is some—

21:22 Speaker 2 A slightly deeper understanding. Hayom Yom, right? These very days. Yes. It deals with education: a soul descends into this world. And yesterday’s entry was about the need to spend half an hour thinking about our children’s education. Educating children doesn’t happen in an instant. Now, I think that’s a statement—and that’s why I started my group. Let’s talk about that a little, because I want to draw a question from it. You have a WhatsApp group with hundreds of people in it. You post every day—well, every few days. I try to post every day. Yes. I don’t have the headspace to write every day. Well, I have to tell you, it’s amazing. Each time you take up a topic, a point that’s very relevant to the moment, and write a whole column about it—a long post, really. Very impressive. Thank you. Yasher koach. Really, I’ll put a link to it in the description, with Hashem’s help, for everyone. A link below. Yes. The truth is, it started after Pesach last year. I thought: at the end of the day, I encounter so many cases every day, and I want to share them. I mean, I have a shlichus. I encounter things, and there are things I can tell parents. Why not do it? That really was how it began. I never advertised it or marketed it. Nothing. I have a commute to and from the clinic, and sometimes I spend ten or twelve hours there. Wow. I hear so many stories, and each time I try—after all, you also have to write things down and summarize them to bring to supervision, to record what happened, and to track progress and so on, right? Each time I come away with some point and say, “Wait a second, is there something I can give parents?” So I try, one time—

23:07 Speaker 2 Something about early childhood education, another time about older children, another time about something in family life. It also often connects to the weekly parsha or a sicha of the Rebbe, as it usually does on Thursday. Yes. Lately, a student of mine, Yossi Solomon, has been posting it on Chabad Info—yasher koach to him, too—and the pieces are getting published. So the goal is to offer something each day. The idea is that a person will read it and try to think, “What can I learn from this about my child? What can I learn from this about my family?” I really believe in this. I called the group “Parenting in Shape,” because I believe it’s one long process. It isn’t, “Okay, we went to an education evening, heard someone give a lecture, it was nice, and tomorrow our home is going to change.” So many times we’ve come away promising that from tomorrow things will be different. That’s not how we work. How did I put it in the latest one? No, it’s a post that’s going to be published today. I wrote it this morning—see, I’ve already forgotten! It’s about the start of the year. The start of the school year? The start of the school year. A child comes in with a desire to do well. Every child wants to succeed that year, and then something happens. Maybe he sat next to a friend who wasn’t good for him—not “not good” as a person, but not good for him, someone who doesn’t help him move forward. Maybe he got up a little late and needs time to adjust. Maybe the teacher came across as a bit too strict. Maybe the teacher came across as a bit too soft. Whatever it may be. And the child also has his past experiences. A child knows that the beginning of the year is always awful for him. That’s it. He’s braced for it; he’s ready for it. He knows it takes him time—yes, we use those kinds of phrases a lot: “It takes him time…”

24:54 Speaker 2 To adjust, right? Yes. You bring a little child to an event, and all he wants is to be with his father—when does he open up? In the last five minutes. So people say the same thing about a child at the beginning of the school year. We know it takes him a month, takes him time. There’s something in the psyche that takes time. The same is true for us as parents. We have so many things we experienced ourselves: things we heard at home, assumptions about the world we heard at home, ideas we heard at home. They have consequences. If we want to change them, it doesn’t happen through one lecture, or by saying, “Starting tomorrow, I’m going to be different.” Our defense mechanisms are—there’s a book, Atomic Habits, that says you operate on autopilot most of the day without even noticing. You have to start noticing what happens to you, how it happens, how you respond to things. Right, how you—before you get to how you respond, what do you even feel? Mm-hmm. There’s the Efrat model: event, interpretation, emotion, response. How do you even interpret the event? You practice that again and again and again and again and again and again, and then, slowly, things change. There was a very moving response to the posts. One teacher wrote to me that, after a year in the group, she’d gotten more out of them than from her bachelor’s and master’s studies. She sees it day—she sees it every day. At the beginning of last year, I posted about a very difficult child in class. He might be going through something very hard at home, and the teacher should think—the teacher, yes, the Hebrew isn’t vowelized—about what they can give this child that he isn’t getting anywhere else. She wrote to me, “And what if there’s a child

26:34 Speaker 2 whose home is falling apart?” She messaged me privately. “His mother is very ill, his father isn’t functioning, he comes without food, and he turns the classroom upside down.” I asked her, “What does he need from you?” I mean, that was the point of the post. She wrote to me at the end of the year—sadly, his mother had passed away. Wow. She wrote, “My relationship with this child is completely different.” You missed the post. By the way, I also think—and this is just a tip for parents—that the challenging children end up being the ones you have the best relationship with. Yes. You know that. Yes, yes. They wrung us out, and in the end they’re the ones who put up the fight. To this day. Yes, yes, yes. To this day, the students I have the best relationships with are the ones who challenged me. The ones who challenged you. Yes. It’s the parents’ job to remember to trust their intuition and do some work. And to learn that this is a long-term process. Right. Parenting is definitely something— So, to sum up what we’re saying to parents: it’s also about being physically present, and it’s also about remembering that parent guidance is available. Parent guidance doesn’t mean someone comes to teach you; it means someone comes alongside you. I often tell parents, including when we finish, “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come into your lives for a while, to help you, to join you as a third partner.” I’m not replacing anyone here. I’m not changing the whole system. I’m here to help. And it’s a pleasure to leave and see that you helped, something loosened up, something got through a difficult period—whatever it was—and we moved forward. From there, parents can also go through a personal process. For parents of young children, that personal process is the most important thing. Yes. Often in the group, you bring up things in response to events we experience, things that happen in our communities,

28:20 Speaker 2 things that happen in Israel. We’ve been through several major events—I think since COVID, we’ve been in one unfolding event after another. Right. So there are many things—an attack, Hashem protect us, something traumatic that happens, or someone getting killed. I’ve often seen things you wrote about them. Could you sum up: when there’s some traumatic event and things are unclear, kind of hazy, and we’re not sure of the details, what first aid—and perhaps what help beyond first aid—can we immediately give the people around us, our children, the teenagers we work with? In other words, when something significant and negative happens, how can I respond? Look, there’s the Ma’aseh model, used by resilience units. It’s a model for the initial response to a traumatic event. It starts with commitment: I’m with you. Ma’aseh [unclear] [?]. Yes. I’m with you, and I’m committed. I’m here with you the whole time. Then there’s putting things in order. What happened? What was the sequence of events? There are questions. What does that mean? Starting to say what happened? What did you see? What did you hear? What did you experience? And giving it a frame—because today, it isn’t something that has to remain [unclear]. The event is over. Mm-hmm. If we’re talking about, say, a siren, and a child has an anxiety attack: we were in bed, we had to wake you, we went down to the shelter, the siren ended, ten minutes passed, and we can go back to bed. We’re giving the event a frame. We’re bringing it to a close and giving the child a sense of security: the event is over. But above all, it really comes down to the relationship and the commitment: I’m with you. Look, a lot of times people come in—we talked about therapy, and here we are coming back to it. People come at the last minute. You sit down with someone for an intake, you hear why they came, whatever the reason is, and then you ask, “When did this start?”

30:30 Speaker 2 Oh—suddenly they remember. Five years ago, three years ago, two years ago. What happened now? Very often, someone was crying out quietly, and nobody heard them. Things had to escalate and reach some kind of breaking point before everything stopped and people suddenly said, “Okay, something’s happening here.” Mm-hmm. And our relationship with our children is what can protect them more than anything else in the world. Whether we’re talking about keeping them safe or anything else you want to name, in the end, the relationship is what matters. There’s attachment theory: when I’m bonded with someone, when I’m connected to them and give them what they need, when I’m attuned to them, they won’t go looking for it somewhere else. When someone lacks that connection with a parent, with family, and so on, something is missing. Then all kinds of behaviors can follow: trying to be more accepted socially, doing dangerous things, showing off, seeking attention, and so on, just to have some kind of connection. The most important thing for a parent is to be connected with their child. Listen, we’re people who go to work for who knows how many hours a day. Take the whole subject of finances today—wow, people can talk to you about it for hours in shul. The S&P 500. Yes. Buying, renting, I mean... The real estate market—what’s going on with it? The real estate market. You wouldn’t believe it. What’s happening in your home? People won’t talk about that. Is that connected to shame, like we discussed earlier? It’s connected to shame, and it’s also connected to people not giving it enough importance. Look, as a therapist, sometimes I see things and tell myself, “Don’t look; it isn’t nice.” But you can see it every morning when children are dropped off, and every afternoon when they’re picked up. You can see who’s focused on greeting their child and who’s still preoccupied with financial matters. Uh,

32:37 Speaker 2 You tell a parent, “Make quality time for your child,” and he tells you, “I don’t have time.” So one person might sit with his child for an hour a week, and someone else for five minutes. No phone. Sit with him and chop a salad together. If you’re going shopping, take him along. If you’re going to the farm, take him along. It doesn’t matter so much what you do. Give the child that time, that connection: just you and Dad. There’s something about it that’s more powerful than anything else. It can also help tremendously when a child is going through a crisis, because he knows there’s someone he can turn to, that his father will accept him. After all, we want our children to come and tell us when something happens to them—whether it’s a safeguarding issue or anything else. Safeguarding. You mean matters of tznius, right? Matters of tznius, but also social issues, bullying. Violence. Social aggression. It could be many things. Children don’t come forward because they say, “They won’t believe me.” There’s a case I’ve been dealing with recently: a boy who finished yeshiva ketanah, and... he’s been suffering for three years. His friends abandoned him, as he sees it. The reasons don’t matter to me; that’s his experience. Now he’s supposed to move on to yeshiva gedolah, to start there. He refuses to go. He simply won’t. I tried asking him, “Did you approach the staff?” He said, “Yes, I did.” “And what did they say?” “They didn’t know what I was talking about.” He feels socially invisible, and even when he finally gathers the courage to tell someone, he feels that his words are invisible too. It’s a frightening story. I really admire him for seeking help today, for somehow managing to try again. I can see that it’s

34:41 Speaker 2 very hard for him. Even when I say, “Wow, that’s hard for me to hear,” and then fall silent, he looks at me as if to say, “Are you serious? Someone actually said it’s hard for him to hear? You’re only saying that because you have to, because it’s your job.” I often don’t respond; I try to understand. Think about what this child is experiencing. He wants me to convince him: “Convince me that this is really you, that you really mean it and you’re not saying it because you’re a psychologist.” Right, a thera—therapist. A therapist. “And you’re supposed to say it.” It’s such a difficult experience. Now you ask, where were the parents? They weren’t... They’re good parents. Excellent parents. They saw their son come home and asked how things were at yeshiva, and he said, “Fine.” But why? Why does he say “fine”? Why can’t he come and tell them what he’s able to tell you? Because their relationship didn’t give him room to talk about everything without being judged—to have someone accept what he says without feeling a need to fix it. Some parents might say, “Oh, is that really how you feel? Talk to the rabbi. I’m coming to the yeshiva tomorrow, and I’ll set things straight. What do you mean? How can my son be feeling like this?” That’s the other extreme. Often, the child doesn’t know. Resilience isn’t built in the middle of trauma or a crisis. You don’t train in the middle of a war. We heard this about the last war: there were soldiers who were killed because they weren’t sufficiently skilled. They hadn’t had the training beforehand and were thrown straight onto the battlefield. Training, the connection between parent and child, resilience—these are built day

36:28 Speaker 2 by day, in the routine of life. In the routine of life. Then, when something happens, how do you respond? What do you say to your child? The first thing to remember is to tell him, “I’m with you,” and to ask him, too. And he has to believe it. Yes, of course. Not just saying it under pressure. Ask him, “What do you want me to do? What would you like me to do?” A young child won’t necessarily know. An older child may have solutions. He may have ideas that make you think, “Whoa, how could he even consider that?” He wants to leave yeshiva? He wants to go to work? I don’t deal with—I say this in quotation marks—“I don’t deal with education.” Whether the child stays in yeshiva or not isn’t my concern. What concerns me is his mental health. There was a case of a boy who refused to sleep at yeshiva. The parents and the yeshiva kept saying, “He needs to sleep at yeshiva, he needs to sleep at yeshiva.” Listen, you can’t dictate to me that this is the... That’s not my therapeutic goal. It isn’t the goal. They were trying, with the best intentions, to steer you toward the idea that this was the boy’s problem, and once he slept at yeshiva, the whole issue would be solved. Wow. No, there’s much more going on with this child. I didn’t force him. Now, therapy is once a week, right? Fifty minutes. One week he suddenly comes in and says, “Shneur, I slept at yeshiva three nights this week.” I said, “What? Really?” I was stunned. He said, “What, aren’t you happy?” I mean, hold on—we wanted this, but we hadn’t even talked about it because we hadn’t gotten there at all. He felt he had the strength, and he went ahead and... So

38:10 Speaker 2 I told him, “After six years, I think maybe you should spend a night at home, so it doesn’t swing to the other extreme.” In other words, let it happen gradually. But yes, something happens there. We’re not just trying to educate a child so he falls into line and becomes like everyone else. Right? We spoke earlier about the garage approach: “Here, take my child and fix him for me.” No. It’s about connection. Again, when there’s an extreme case, professionals can help. Right, it doesn’t happen in an instant. It’s not ten sessions and we’re done. Some people stand there with a stopwatch, checking: progress, no progress. When you set a therapeutic goal, it often takes time to clarify it, get to know it, and explore it in depth. By the way, every therapist begins with a therapeutic goal. Maybe he sees it in the first moment, maybe after four sessions. But what is my therapeutic goal? Very often, the goal is simply to be with the child in his experience. That’s it. That’s it. And it’s so powerful. Parents are convinced you worked magic: thanks to you, he sleeps at night, he no longer wets the bed, he no longer... I have no idea. I never spoke to him about it. These are things I’ve experienced in my clinic. Parents come in with a very, very difficult case. Three months later they come for parent guidance and say that, after hospitalizations and everything else, it’s all gone as if it had never happened. I tell you, they had no idea I hadn’t said a word to their child about it. Wow, wow. Nothing. That’s the power of simply being there. Being present. If you understand the power of that presence in therapy, imagine what a parent can give. Wow. Now, often a child has already had negative experiences in so many areas, which brings us back to your opening question. Does everyone—does

39:56 Speaker 2 everyone need therapy? When someone has reached a point where it’s hard for him to connect with other people, every incident pushes him to the edge, and you see a decline in how he’s doing—in eating, sleeping, socially, or in his studies—take note. Keep an eye on him. Try to strengthen your connection with him. If you can, take a day off work and spend it with your child. Listen to him. Don’t ask, “Why aren’t you getting up in the morning?” Say, “It’s hard to get up in the morning, isn’t it?” He’ll tell you a lot. Don’t say, “How was school today?” Ask, “What was the best part of your day? Was there anything that annoyed you?” Don’t—you know that game of yes or no, black or white?

40:43 Speaker 6 Yes.

40:44 Speaker 2 Don’t settle for yes-or-no, black-or-white answers, for “fine,” for—

40:46 Speaker 6 Open-ended questions, yes.

40:48 Speaker 2 Yes, open-ended questions. Get him talking. Talk with him. And if you see something happening repeatedly, get help from professionals. My recommendation is to find someone from Anash. There’s no shortage, boruch Hashem.

40:58 Speaker 6 Yes.

40:58 Speaker 2 Um, but yes, do get help.

41:00 Speaker 6 Yes, boruch Hashem, there are many people now within Anash, our own community, even people who are relatively young by Chabad standards, who have entered the field of therapy...

41:08 Speaker 2 Yes, that’s right. There are approaches like CBT. If someone needs help changing a behavior because of something that’s happening, that can help.

41:15 Speaker 6 I wanted to ask you: you specialize in psychodrama.

41:19 Speaker 2 I practice psychodrama therapy.

41:20 Speaker 6 Psychodrama.

41:20 Speaker 2 “Specialize” is...

41:23 Speaker 6 And what exactly is it? Tell us a little about it... There are lots of names with English acronyms that I don’t really know.

41:29 Speaker 2 No, no, psychodrama isn’t an English acronym.

41:31 Speaker 6 Right.

41:32 Speaker 2 That’s the “psycho” part, right? Psychology, the psyche—understanding the mind through drama, through acting. The power of psychodrama is in the group. You put together a group.

41:42 Speaker 6 Like training sessions, where people sit—

41:44 Speaker 2 No. Group therapy. Basically, you have ten people, eight different people. They don’t know one another, and each week someone else does the work. You do some kind of warm-up exercise to get them warmed up, then see what it brought to the surface. Whoever wants to work that day volunteers. The group members choose—

42:07 Speaker 6 So is that how you do therapy today?

42:09 Speaker 2 That’s—hold on. I’ll get to how psychodrama works one-on-one in a moment.

42:13 Speaker 6 Yes.

42:13 Speaker 2 First, what psychodrama is. Then that person does the work, and really, they’re doing it for all the group members. Everyone takes part. You set up a stage, so to speak, and simply act out the scene. What happened?

42:27 Speaker 6 One more time. I’m... How does that work on the...? Let’s say we’re in a group now—what do you call it?

42:35 Speaker 2 A therapy session.

42:36 Speaker 6 A therapy session.

42:36 Speaker 2 A group. You sit together and do some kind of warm-up exercise. It could be that everyone shares what happened to them today and how they’re arriving at the session.

42:44 Speaker 6 Mm-hmm.

42:45 Speaker 2 You might start with some walking, some breathing, or a scale: where are you from one to ten on some issue? It could be the elections, it could be the war, whatever. Then, after going around the room, you ask everyone how that was for them and whether anyone wants to bring up something they’d like to work on. So one person says, “Yes, there’s been a lot of stress around the war in my home.” Another says, “I’m under tremendous financial strain; I’m taking a course.” Let’s say there are two. The other group members have to choose whether they want to talk about the stress of the war or the financial stress. They choose one person and make it clear to the other that it’s okay, that they’re going to work with the first person. We won’t get into what happens if he says no—that’s another subject. Or if nobody wants to work, that’s another subject too. Then they work with him, and he describes what happened. For the sake of the example, they chose the war. What happened? Where were the children? Where was he when the siren sounded? What was he doing? What feelings came up for him? Then he says, “I lashed out at my child.” What did you shout at him? He acts it out. The group member—

43:51 Speaker 6 Someone else comes in to play the child?

43:53 Speaker 2 Right. Someone comes in to be the child with him, and then we ask him, “What’s your name?”

43:58 Speaker 6 Um...

43:59 Speaker 2 “How old are you? What’s it like for you that your father is bringing up this incident now? What happened there?” We start to see things. Suddenly, he’s voicing thoughts he has in his head through his children. Okay?

44:10 Speaker 6 Oh, the father becomes the child.

44:12 Speaker 2 The father becomes the child, and then the other person learns the role. He learns the role, and then we bring it to life and act out the scene itself. Through that, we go deeper. What does this remind you of from your childhood? What other event? What does it bring up for you?

44:31 Speaker 6 Fascinating.

44:31 Speaker 2 It’s fascinating, it’s frightening, it’s powerful, it’s unsettling. Yes, it’s—

44:36 Speaker 6 Putting yourself on the table. The operating table.

44:38 Speaker 2 Right. And we believe that the person doing the work is called the protagonist. Everyone else serves as an auxiliary ego; they all help him in the action. Now, that’s in a group. Jacob Moreno, who was Jewish, developed psychodrama. That’s essentially how he created it. Why did he do it? There was a war. There were many traumatized soldiers. He said, “I can’t treat all of them, so I’ll make groups.” There were so many cases and issues. Okay.

45:03 Speaker 6 That’s how it started?

45:04 Speaker 2 Yes.

45:05 Speaker 6 Wow!

45:05 Speaker 2 Yes. And it works. Now, when we talk about one-on-one psychodrama with an adult, whatever scene you bring in, there’s a concept of a third chair. You and I are talking. There’ll be another empty chair here, and you’ll bring in the character of a friend you argued with today, or someone you had a phone call with. Then you become him, and I interview him. “Hello, Itzik.” “Hello, Moshe. Meir brought you here.” You now become him.

45:33 Speaker 6 So you have three chairs in your room?

45:34 Speaker 2 Yes. “Meir brought you here. Now you’ve become Moshe. Itzik, why did he bring you here?”

45:40 Speaker 6 So I have to speak as my friend.

45:42 Speaker 2 “What? What do you like about him?” Through that, we discover things through the drama, through...

45:47 Speaker 6 I imagine it’s much easier with children, too.

45:49 Speaker 2 Exactly. With children, it’s through Playmobil figures, through art projects, through play. You draw something together with a child, and little by little you expand on it. Sometimes there’s talking; sometimes there isn’t. You get a glimpse into the child’s inner world. It’s also much easier to intervene, because you don’t tell him, “I think it would be good if we did this.” Instead, you suddenly bring in a Playmobil character: “Hey, I want to help you. I want to save you.” And a child responds to that happily.

46:16 Speaker 6 Yes.

46:16 Speaker 2 Yes. And through that, you teach him flexibility, creativity and spontaneity—things that give a child so much.

46:25 Speaker 6 Wow.

46:26 Speaker 2 The experience people imagine with a psychologist is “Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, yes, I hear you.” People say, “I’m the one doing all the talking. Why do I need someone just to listen to me?” In psychodrama, the therapist is responding all the time, present all the time. Everything is alive the whole time. Of course, as a therapist, what are you feeling throughout? Our aim is to be aware of ourselves: “Wow, he’s saying something now.”

46:48 Speaker 6 Are you able to put up a curtain? I mean, you can hear terrible stories. You’ve mentioned that a few times, and then you go home at the end of the day. I can’t imagine it doesn’t affect you if you’ve had a day with, I don’t know, some really intense cases. Are you able to—how do you manage? Just to get through the day, to contain all of that?

47:10 Speaker 2 Exactly. That’s precisely why we have our own personal therapy, and why we have supervision, where you bring your cases and examine them. And a very big part of it—some therapists like the Chassidic story about the Rebbe who said he sweated because he had to take off his own garments and put on another person’s, with each person who came to him for yechidus. Some therapists like that story because, with every person who comes in, you enter deeply into their world. You really go inside. The goal is, on the one hand, to be very much inside and, on the other hand, to remember that you’re outside. To remember your place, take a step back and look at things. It takes work. That’s why you need supervision. You need some kind of... I also work in centers where there’s a team that helps support you.

48:06 Speaker 6 By a center, you mean a group of therapists working together?

48:08 Speaker 2 It could be thirty, forty, fifty therapists, with weekly supervision, team meetings, a bit of camaraderie. You sit alone in a room with people all day; then you get out and see some other people. Yes.

48:19 Speaker 6 Yes.

48:20 Speaker 2 That’s something important.

48:21 Speaker 6 Have there been cases where you yourself felt that it was...?

48:25 Speaker 2 Plenty.

48:26 Speaker 6 Wow.

48:26 Speaker 2 Look, you go into a therapy session and you don’t know what you’re going to encounter. You also have to be very careful about how you respond. Someone might come in and tell you they wanted to take their own life, that a close family member died, that they were in a car accident. Again, these are cases I’ve encountered recently. You try to understand what this means, what your reporting obligations are, how you hold this story, how you work with it, why they’re telling you this now. You ask them, “What do you need from me right now? What would help you?” You’re thinking all the time.

49:09 Speaker 6 Have you ever taken a Chassidic teaching or idea and brought it into the therapy room? Used it? Since we were talking about psychodrama and how you use things outside yourself.

49:22 Speaker 2 I’ll tell you that when I sit with parents especially, and we talk about a hierarchy of values and all sorts of things, people say to me, “You can tell you’re a Chabad chossid.”

49:32 Speaker 6 Oh, really?

49:34 Speaker 2 But it comes out naturally. In therapy, you talk less about your own inner world.

49:41 Speaker 6 Yes.

49:42 Speaker 2 But of course we have our framework of values, our set of values, and the knowledge that lives inside us. I study a maamar, and I think about it—[unclear], the King in the field, and [unclear]. You’re constantly living with these things; they’re part of you. You can’t separate yourself from them.

50:03 Speaker 6 Amazing. Well, to finish, I’d love it if you could—we ask our guests for a tip. We’ve said there are no tips, so perhaps some advice about serving Hashem, or in this area of education—educating ourselves, educating our children—something that works for you and that you could share with us.

50:21 Speaker 2 I’ll tell you, when I was an educator—and maybe this sounds a little harsh—I felt like I knew everything. I knew what to do about discipline problems, what to do with a child who came late, what to do with a child who was disrespectful. It was all very clear to me. Working in therapy showed me that I don’t know, and that I constantly have to examine myself and take stock, like a business owner. What does that mean? I’ll be sitting in a therapy session, and often I’ll say to myself, “Wow, I went through exactly the same thing with my daughter this morning. I went through exactly the same thing with my son this morning.” It’s not as though I’ve reached some summit where I know everything and can educate everyone. I remember that very recently, I brought something up in supervision. I said to my supervisor, “Listen, I’m sitting with these parents as they deal with this, and I’m going through exactly the same thing. I’m dealing with exactly the same thing with my daughter. What can I possibly tell them?” He said to me, “On the contrary, you do know, because you understand where they’re coming from. You understand that they’re doing things with good intentions, and that sometimes they need a little help. They need to consult someone a little.” You have to keep moving forward and not be embarrassed. Telling your supervisor that you can’t think of what to say to your clients because you’re going through the same thing at home—I thought that was, like, the most embarrassing thing.

51:50 Speaker 6 Yes.

51:50 Speaker 2 The shoemaker goes barefoot. Yes, yes. I remember when I went into education, someone told me, “You can’t teach the older grades. You don’t have children that age.” Now, if you sit there saying you know everything and you don’t have children that age, that really is a problem. But if you’re willing to sit down, learn, and develop your skills—and if we mention the institute, the program taught us to have a meeting every week, to sit and discuss each boy: what was going on with him, how he had progressed, what he had done. I think I carried that with me throughout all my years of teaching. Even in places where there were no meetings, I would sit and do that on my own. Sometimes I would send the principal a message: “You should know that this week I made progress with this boy and that boy and another boy. I did something; I made progress; I accomplished something.” I think that gave me a great deal. It still does.

52:34 Speaker 7 So what’s your advice?

52:35 Speaker 2 The advice is to keep learning.

52:36 Speaker 7 Mm-hmm.

52:36 Speaker 2 Keep thinking, keep consulting others. Don’t just label a child, “He needs therapy,” and move on, passing the responsibility to the next person. What does he need from me? Where can I improve? What can I work on? And with Hashem’s help.

52:49 Speaker 7 And keep moving.

52:50 Speaker 2 Keep moving and progressing. Go from strength to strength. Take stock like a business owner. Yes, not, G-d forbid, like someone just working the register, but like the business owner—because, in the end, the children are the most important investment there is.

53:03 Speaker 7 Right.

53:03 Speaker 2 Family is the most important investment there is, and it needs someone who will put all his capital into it. The S&P 500, and a thousand and two thousand, and...

53:12 Speaker 7 All that time people talk about...

53:15 Speaker 2 Make the time quality time, and then it won’t even have to be that much time.

53:19 Speaker 7 Yes. Okay, so again, the link to the amazing group—I’ve only recently had a chance to see it, and the work you do there is really amazing, as is how much of this you put out there. So the link will be below in the description.

53:33 Speaker 2 Keep Torah.

53:33 Speaker 7 Thank you very much. Have a good week. Thank you very much.

53:35 Speaker 2 Have a good week, and success with everything. A good finish, a good finish. Have a good week, Mosk[?].

53:38 Speaker 7 Amen. Thank you very much.

53:39 Speaker 2 Have a good week.