Empower Your Future to Protect their Future - Dr. Shloimie Zimmerman

the title of the talk is empower your future to protect their future it's a bit vague so I decided to talk about what I forward some of the underlying issues that lead to these things instead of just the usual abuse prevention stuff that I've done here number of times but you heard a little bit about what I'm udham does and why a mood them is here and in a very similar way sadly I want to tell you a little bit about what led me to become a mental health profession I was in my early 20s basem a Jewish guy anish Eva that had an affiliated high school for at-risk youth and informally the base mesh guys were sort of set up with as hallucis or mentors for these high school kids I was set up with one fell in particular he was high 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year he woke up in the morning the first thing he did was get high before he went to bed he made sure to get huh that was the presenting issue underneath it was more complex in one of the few lucid conversations I ever had with him he shared with me that despite being an exceptional Talmud in his yeshiva having memorized vast amounts of toshiba pebble and Kamat all of Tyre shoebox chibok south bow pet he still felt like a failure a disappointment particularly to his father was a very critical man and his mother stood by and that conversation he said some haunting words to me said sometimes you push a child and eventually push too far they go over the edge for a while what did I know I'd no training no background no nothing I would go try to be a positive influence in his life sometimes sit on his dorm near his dorm bed just listen to music with him shown that somebody cared somebody have had some concern as to his well-being occasional conversation there was some signs of improvement some motivation at one point he attempted to keep shabbos he would smoke so much air shabbos so that he would be able to sleep 25 hours straight so as not to have to wake up and smoke on shabbos but ultimately it was way too little too late and on one fateful day the call came into the achieva that he had died of a drug overdose and everybody was up in arms what a tragedy everyone had brilliant ideas what to do what should be happening what could we do quite frankly I was furious now everybody's up in arms now there is in fact the huge tragedy and it is a tragic tragic thing when somebody dies at such an early age but this tragedy didn't take place on that day this tragedy was years and years and years in the making and was playing for everybody to see this addiction was not hidden and even the pain that he was using the addiction to cover was not very well hidden too little too late it was one of the things amongst many factors that led me to realize that there was a desperate need for highly trained mental health professionals in the front community and it's very similar to cancer the underlying reasons for this guy's death on the death certificate it says drug overdose but this guy didn't really die of a drug overdose he died of what in the modern research is called shame what is shame it's feeling unworthy unlovable feeling that if people really knew who I really am they would disconnect themselves for me they would not approve of me like cancer sometimes in order to treat the cancer you have to wipe out the immune system and then you can be very susceptible to a virus in pneumonia that actually kills you shame was his cancer drugs his treatment but sometimes the treatment kills Shane is very different than guilt as described by brené Brown and if you haven't watched any of her TED Talks one called the power of vulnerability to listening to shame they're incredibly worthwhile she distinguishes between guilt which is action focused I made a mistake I did something wrong from shame which is person focused I'm not good enough I'm a mistake shame highly correlated with addiction depression aggression violence eating disorders and suicide guilt the ability to hold oneself up to a standard I could have done better I made a mistake inversely correlated with those things highly adaptive what's really important to know even quote unquote successful people can be plagued by toxic shame as evidenced by two of my patients and shame is really at the core of perfectionism two of these patients one a real estate mogul incredibly wealthy incredibly talented at being able to assess a property and how you going to develop it and extract value and then manage it but also a very critical father and a mother who felt it was her duty to stand by her husband no matter what he did as they watched the decimation of a family so while on the outside he's incredibly tough to negotiate deals like you can't believe internally is plagued by shame always afraid people are out to get him they don't really care about him they're always trying to mess him over so he erect enormous bunker around him which is highly efficient at keeping him from feeling the pain of that rejection there's just one problem with that bunker he's the only one in it so it's incredibly lonely his wife from a incredibly wealthy family highly put together he's shipped very good-looking but also filled with shame so she cannot be vulnerable to her husband and request the love and affection she needs so she pokes him she prods him she nags at him seeking his attention and affection without being able to be vulnerable enough to ask for it so he feels hurt the barrier gets bigger he built a five-million-dollar home thousands and thousands of square feet yet he asks her do I have to build one behind it so we'll have enough space for you to leave me alone to my other patient a Russia Shiva one of the best Tommy them in his yeshiva now gives you room to both base mesh guys and Bala bottom alike beloved by all grew up in a very aloof house parents not really much to do with him no real interest in his emotional well-being making him incredibly vulnerable and eventually somebody took advantage of that vulnerability and abused him at a young age and he didn't feel he had anywhere to turn so he harbored that inside for decades till he finally couldn't hold out anymore and came to therapy but despite all the accolades and everyone telling him how amazing is and how much they love this your him and how inspiring he is he feels like a fraud I don't really have enough you're a sham I am I'm not as big a London as they think I don't really love learning as much as they think I do they could do much better buy a bigger Thomas awesome constantly beating himself up never good enough so what happens we create children that are vulnerable then abusers love to take advantage of that vulnerability they're probably the best assessment tool we have they are incredibly able to pick up who are the vulnerable kids then they abuse those children and if you thought you had shame beforehand now it grows exponentially and where do you turn it's just exacerbates everything similarly to the addiction you're incredibly shame bound you try to escape that so you take drugs when you sober up you say oh my i'm a druggie you feel even worse so you need even more and you can enter the death spiral we've been talking about so many people turn to the age old ways of getting out of those feelings of inadequacy fame fortune and power if I could hold on to something look I own those buildings look at my net worth I matter everyone will listen to me maybe those feelings will go away as Erich Fromm describes it trying to focus on having rather than being but there's a new age way to deal with such pain and that is the internet on social media I can get the illusion that thousands of people are my friends that they're interested in the minutia of my life and even more directly with pornography any negative feeling I have as long as I can enter the illusionary world that the pornographers depict so I'm feeling unloved they have a solution for that someone who's incredibly loving on the other end if I feel nobody's really happy with me I can't please anybody somebody will be incredibly pleased on the other end and even if I feel out of control and desperately need control I can find the depiction of that as well but if I'll feel guilty i'm hurting somebody all they enjoyed it too so now I'm in full control and they're happy about it so I don't have any more guilt or shame but the moment the illusion is up so I'll back again and you need more and more and more of it and it's becoming ubiquitous at this point so what contributes to shame and what I'm about to say does not come along with any judgment in fact I'm keenly aware of how difficult having good Sheldon bias and parenting lycra velia talked about is and the worst thing that you could leave with here tonight is to feel ashamed of your own parenting because probably the lead contributor is actually parental shame not feeling good enough and that gets transmitted in a very bad shall shell Assad layers and as it is our children are often representations of us and very attached to our ego but certainly if I filled with shame then I really am affected by how my child looks what they say are they hook Switek are they going to be great Tommy them and tell me those they're highly attached to my ego and so everything becomes very personal and very sensitive oftentimes we just simply make many developmentally inappropriate expectations so we expect three-year-olds to be able to control themselves and not have angry outbursts or to clean up after themselves or for kids to sit at the shabbos table or not even to be Macoutes often which quite frankly is often developmentally inappropriate especially when they're having emotional difficulties oftentimes we're very short-sighted so if you ask almost any parent what are their long-term goals for their children they'll say they want them to be well rounded assertive self-motivated happy healthy and well balanced but yet so often we just want their compliance in the moment just finish your homework so i can give you supper and you can go to bed and i can have a few minutes of minus kissena fish and we exchanged that short-term for the long term and does that compliance many times afterwards we think to ourselves what the rationale is the truth be told I found this personally it was a little shocking to me so much of the time I say we don't even enter the hint of processor are safe oh we just have an emotional reaction and then we make up to root some afterwards as to why we did it very infrequently they were actually thinking is this thing going to be in the best interest of the long-term Kenneth of this child so we gain compliance and we rationalize it that were teaching moral behavior how often are we actually teaching moral behavior so if my child loses his or her toy because of an act or they get a timeout have they learned that he think more even worse if they will feel bad about themselves have they learned anything more did they actually learn a respect for human being themselves and then an interpersonal respect for another or did they learn this causes me pain so it's not worth doing under these conditions unfortunately the kind of shame we're talking about wherever that is found wherever there is shame like that there is a shame and we learn to be ashamed of ourselves from those who are most closest to and most dependent on parents educators authority figures the more significance in our lives the more deeply entrenched it gets most children can't distinguish between their impulses their actions and themselves so when we're very harsh on their impulses and their actions they take it as negativity about themselves and in general though we've come a long way in the last few decades there's still a tremendous lack of respect for children there's sort of second-class citizens at best oftentimes we actually attempt to shame them to get them to comply big boys don't cry how often do we hear bad boy or good girl even about babies is a good baby or bad baby how many times in my office while I hear this child is so lazy or lies or is manipulative now even if we don't say those words directly to the children but we're walking around with those beliefs they will pick up on them and unfortunately shaming is very common and its many situations considered acceptable and it's not restricted to the abusive families in fact it occurs in the quote unquote the nicest and firmest the families a study out of Canada found that only four percent of school-age children had not been the targets of their parents shaming rejecting the meaning criticizing in a destructive way or insulting statements about 30 years ago there began a self-esteem movement and that was very helpful in the sense that children today are a bit happier and a bit more motivated but many other respects in terms of their functioning and in terms of their overall mental health and other areas it's been sorely lacking and what I believe has occurred based on a lot of the research is that people went the other extreme and they said we have to coddle children and praise them excessively so there's no more winner or loser everybody gets a trophy you look at their picture you say while you're a Picasso but that doesn't really ground them in the reality because eventually they're going to figure out no there's a kid on that ball field who can crush the ball much better than you there's somebody who can draw a much better than you there's somebody your class is smarter than you who's prettier than you and then what do they have they collapse under the face of that so excessive praise from the outside doesn't help them deal with the reality of themselves that raises the question so what does work to raise secure wholehearted and resilient children so I want to go back to an incident in history something that's not so well known in 1945 there was a battle of okinawa it said incident history it's largely overlooked because after it came the Battle of Iwo Jima the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki eventually the Germans giving up but at the time Okinawa was an island 350 miles off mainland Japan and both the Americans in the Japanese knew that if they kept the Americans captured Okinawa it would just be a little hop skip and jump through air attacks and see attacks to capture mainland Japan and the Japanese had a different philosophy in battle you did not come home you left it all on the battlefield so it was an incredibly gruesome battle at that point five hundred and fifty thousand troops were in the Pacific on the island of Okinawa 250,000 people died one out of every three people on that island done so just imagine you have three to six people on your bench if this was the Battle of Okinawa one or two people would have been dead and are the remaining survivors a third to a half were wounded so when the Americans finally went on to Okinawa they sent in a bunch of mental health specialists expecting that the mental health carnage would be as bad as the physical devastation were almost all the crops were obliterated every family was crushed they found something incredible the Okinawans were largely intact this was an astounding to them and they began to study what was going on in Okinawa and what they found was that Okinawan children were well mothered they were given the breast at will until age to the parents were deeply focused on not allowing early frustrations and a child and would breastfeed the child whenever they experienced the frustration they attempted to minimize that as much as possible and the mother spent a great deal of time with the children until age five also they had a tremendous understanding of child development so if a child in Okinawa broke something his mother would scold herself for leaving it in a way where the child can access it they also had a profound respect for an autonomy for the children so that a Navy photographer asked an Okinawan father and his very young child can I take a picture of you the father said I can only give you permission for myself you have to ask my very young child for permission prior to taking a photo of him and this was very similar to what today is called attachment parenting being incredibly sensitive to the developmental needs and emotional needs of the children in very simplistic terms the Torah perspective on this when her client Connie ask you was asked by a bunch of my concen what should they tell pair in terms of educating children not usually a man of many words he said target lahore in davorin shooter tell the parents very simple things things that should not have to be spelled out but today overwhelmingly need to be shegaon biyaha 3 you love him yay shipping other Mahavira also when it comes to children all the Holocaust have been other mohave reapply the Shane Mahela er there's no forgiveness on us and he said with an adult relationship before you go and criticize somebody a colleague a worker how many times do you think about how to say it what you'll say it when the best time is he said so too with the child they asked him if so how can anyone be a parent it's terrifying will be over he said if you were very respectful and if you do your best then there's high bay rasim in menasha mine under those situations as gem will take care of you maybe what's most crucial in terms of parenting is our own ability to have self-acceptance and compassion it's the non edited artscroll book that we all struggle that were not my locum that a Shem put us here as humans with enormous failings enormous things to work on nothing we have to be ashamed of it's part and parcel of the human condition struggle is integral to normal life parents need to model that self compassion instead of say oh I'm so stupid or I look fat what are the children here in terms of your own ability to have self compassion and maybe integral words from a book called the power of empathy instead of I'm okay you're okay which is often how we try to present ourselves a different philosophy I'm not okay and you're not okay and that's okay we don't have to be / we don't have to pretend to be perfect and generally need a lot more vulnerability to be more open about our struggles with our friends with our spouses and with our children they're experiencing our imperfections anyway we might as well use it as an educational vehicles to teach them how to embrace our humanness and what we find in the research is those who live wholeheartedly who see themselves as worthy of love and connection and have wonderful relationships they view vulnerability as integral to that they have the sense that even with your struggle you're still worthy of that love and connection and it's fascinating there's only one factor that really distinguishes that group from the group of people who struggle all the time am I good enough when will I be good enough will they like me and that is do they feel worthy of love and connection that's the only factor so we need a lot more empathy all around and what is empathy in contrast to sympathy sympathy as I take my experience and cut and paste it so you say oh I have a sick child I have a sick child as well I could have pasted my experience onto yours which is somewhat helpful at least you're not alone but you lose the uniqueness of your own experience no matter what even if you're going through the exact same event every person has a different experience and I lose that and maybe the best example of empathy I've ever seen is actually a rebus on my soul so the rebel my rash would sit with people for hours on end and he would perspire profusely to the point that there is certain visits he would have to excuse himself to change his clothing so when he was asked what is chat that you're sweating so much they have to change your clothes he said the foul when people come to me they're wearing their garments when they expressed their problem to me in order for me to understand it I have to get out of mind and don there's then once I understand their issue from their perspective I have to think about whether it's the debate hissic or the advice through my own sake or my own perspective so I have to get out of their clothes and put mine back on now that I've come to that place I have to give it to them in a way that they could understand through their experience so I have to get back out of my clothes and put on theirs he says now do you wonder why I sweat such is the art of listening such is empathy and we lack so much empathy the world were so quick to judge I'm better you're worse I'm right you're wrong the ability to share and to really hear another person's perspective especially seeing the world through the children's eyes putting aside our expectations and our thoughts and trying to see what is it that they're seen that is crucial and really empathy is the antidote to shame shame really need silence and secrecy to grow and thrive but when you're really ready to be vulnerable and courageous enough to put your true self out there with all your failings and let another person see you often that's very healing because truly who is usually the biggest critic ourselves and when we share with others in a real way it starts to douse the shame and truly this is the best way to prevent shame in the beginning because if you grow up in an empathic environment you realize your thoughts and feelings are valid are meaningful can be understood and respected so you don't even get shame to begin with we need to know that sexuality is one of the most shame prone places I have yet to have anybody come to my office with neurotic symptoms because they speak lashon hara despite the toughest time enumerate in 37 lavaman describing that the base I'm English is not being rebuilt because of la Jinora I've yet to have one but I can open up a practice dedicated just to issues around sexual fantasy and masturbation and the shame associated with it let alone abuse situations so we need to talk to kids about sexuality we need to normalize the drives and the struggles and to prepare them for the exposure and what they'll encounter I don't know too many people who made it to the fussing and kylo speech before they know so they're getting it somewhere not usually the healthiest of places and today if we used to look it up in the dictionary if you look it up in google you're going to get an education that is going to scar you and even if your friend has that education that shares it with you it'll be very problematic we need to be proactive about this I know it's uncomfortable but trust me if you stood on my phone line for one day you'd be cured of that discomfort I assure you and it's crucial to know even if you have a great relationship with your kids they pick up this is an area of no go we don't talk about this this is Shane so we need to take the steps and initiate it and what the research shows is not what most parents think oh my gosh if I open this up who knows what they'll end up doing increase their curiosity increase their acting out the research demonstrates the exact opposite that children who have gotten this education are less likely to go pursuing this information elsewhere and less likely to act out inappropriately it does not give them permission to do anything it's actually an opportunity for us to teach the Torah values around it another difficult issue like I said before parental shame is often the primary source of shame in the children and it's crucial that parents get their own therapy if needed many times is trying to hide it and you'll try to perfect your children and that masseur will just go on and on and on so often they'll drop the kids off by me but I can only take the kids so far unless the parents are really willing to do the hard work and the same thing sometimes it's a spouse and you think I can't really say it I can't do it and you stand by and watch that decimation unfold and it can be very difficult period which if it's that case you need to help the spouse get into therapy and if it's a marital issue don't think oh we fight only in private the kids always pick it up there's a marital issue you need to get the marital therapy and obviously like revalue talked about if your children are symptomatic get them help early the research shows that most issues take between eight and twenty three years from symptom onset till somebody sees a mental health professional by the time I get them the issues are so deeply entrenched they're incredibly hard to deal with things could be so much easier if they've dealt with sooner one of the greatest paradoxes in our society is the paradox of shidduchim so when trying to do well for our kids and we put pressure on them we make them look good on the outside while suffering on the inside and then when they're really struggling we don't get them help out of fear that it's going to mess up their lookin we view it almost as if the of is the finish line I hate to break it to you it's nowhere near the finish line because I get the calls afterwards and then if they're not healthy before and now they're married the issues are just twice as great and if you put children and that makes their exponentially greater so we need to do this beforehand and our research only from the firm community by yitzy Schefter and the arc institute has found that abuse victims are six times more likely to divorce than non abuse victims so we need to address this and it's the greatest paradox I don't know of a place that was more talk of a Munna Bhai shared by shared by shared cautiously ludacris youngsters Bosco and there's actually less than Munna if I do the right thing if I'm vulnerable if I share my if I get help they're going to mess up the oakham know if you do the right thing I xem will get you child the right sugar somewhere on my talk there's supposed to be something about advocacy so I'll just say the following that sometimes it's very difficult there was a philosophy that parents have to have a united front but if you have one very unhealthy parent why should children lose both at least they should have one and sometimes that means not standing by so many of the people in my office we're tormented by one parent and have such kindness on the other because we're were you how did you just sit there and watch it can be very challenging it needs a lot of sophistication as to how to work that through but we need to really advocate for our children similarly regarding school settings in between pier and peer kids can get bullied kids could be ashamed in many different settings and i'm not encouraging people to go in there every time the teacher said something to go in there and bust it up we have to collaborate with our schools and the shivas here we've worked with that we've collaborated them on very difficult areas they are ready to collaborate we got to advocate for your child there's nobody who's going to be the advocate for your child not even myself or three glove you got to be the primary but I want to end with something very encouraging and that is that through all our efforts focusing on self-esteem how many different educational workshops for parents for teachers the tide has changed enormously over the last 30 years and yes our children are doing better in many respects and even in the area of sexual abuse but we're hearing about it much more there's much more awareness what we find is that there is a study and significant decline over the last 30 years in the actual incidents of abuse so while we're making noise and we need to make noise about it because otherwise it doesn't go away it is actually slowly but surely getting better and it's crucial to note that the overwhelming majority of abuse survivors with the right help go on to lead happy healthy and productive lives and I'd like to end with another story for my practice i'll call this young boy Yankee a couple of years ago the person who handles most of the abuse cases for a relief that does a tremendous amount of mental health referrals in the firm world called me he was visibly shaken he said to me shlani I have one that I need you to take he said the details of this are so severe I handle this all day I'm having a hard time believing the story it's too horrific I will spare you the details both for your own upset as well as the confidentiality of the patient but he was abused by multiple people in various settings over a prolonged period of time yanke was four years old at the time he intersected with a number of paraprofessionals who believed that you don't go to therapists right away they make a big deal about these things they get carried away so they tried various avenues to help this child make it all go away those failed miserably by the time I got that call his child that every single symptom of trauma one can imagine night terrors flashbacks fear of going to school angry outbursts wetting himself in school to the point that is overwhelming theory defecated himself in school when the parents finally came to me they're in tatters believing that they had lost their child forever it took a great deal of effort to even establish basic safety for this child in my office for him to even be able to play some sort of safe space but I saw that with time I can slowly access this child but I realized if I really wanted this child to get better a lot of things in the home at that change the parents came from a very different world very classy dish world where patching was something that the father took pride in where the mothers sisters ran homes that look like military bases so the ideas of creating a very sensitive empathic understanding environment at home to look away from the child's outbursts then his foot spa and I'm not his making a mess and is even hitting his siblings and to focus on why he does the things and to focus much more on his feelings that I his behavior was a radical departure for them and it was literally a slugfest I was accused of being on my Danish my damage was good I was accused of being a guy I was accused of liberal ideas and goenka negate the Torah it was long and a brutal battle but I was doing it for one reason and one reason only for the sake of this family and eventually slowly the mother really started to get it and she started being more sensitive to this child more empathic towards him trying to look away from his behavior and look into his guts the father backed off he wasn't ready to take on her approach yet but he stopped doing such direct heza Chloe things started to change the parents had tremendous amount of their own vicarious trauma I had to refer the mother to a colleague of mine and eventually they went in for marriage therapy slowly but surely the entire system started to change the kid was really coming back to himself when the most amazing feelings you could ever have is when you see the lights go back on inside a person the likes went back on and even more so the parents started to get on board but the mother really struggled with why should I give this kid so much more than the other kids my sister's kids look at them and is this really the right thing to do and one of my attempts at helping them continue with this approach I called upon a paper i had read years before that talked about greenhouse parenting and it gave a muscle that some children are like leads weeds more water less water more sunlight less sunlight they pop up they even pop up where you don't want them to pop up they're able to go there very Hardy they're very resilient but some flowers like the orchid need greenhouse parenting they need a highly sensitive environment temperature sunlight water nutrients but with that greenhouse parenting those children will thrive so things went on the father eventually went to his own therapy finally acknowledging his perfectionism things really changed the mother says that really she should call me every single day because through the most traumatic incident imaginable she now has a better relationship with her children and her husband that ever thought possible for this occurred and had she not been exposed to any of these ideas she would have been stagnant in so many other areas and now she's incredibly close with her sons and her daughters and the husband and wife relationship is completely different so the final day of me seeing this boy he comes in with an orchid I'm in tears the mothers and tears the kid is smiling from ear to ear he's living a happy healthy why he doesn't know anything about the orchid story but it's his parting gift to me and the mother says to me there were a lot of turning point in our work but he said sometime when I was really struggling and I was almost there but I couldn't go over that step the fact that my son can turn out to be one of those orchids help me push through and so I wanted you to have this so i took this orc at home and i was going to give it the most amazing green house ever i bring this home and I'm watering it my wife's water yet and the thing starts to smell smelling really weird the blossoms are ok I'm getting into an argument of my wife I say this thing is dying she says she actually think it's growing we're having a crisis this is going on for a couple weeks and there's a really foul odor coming out of this orchid when I can't get rid of it finally my sister comes for a visit she goes up to the orchid she's sniffing the orchid she's staring at the way she's examining the orchid and finally she turns to me and she says you know it's fake right my wife and I are incredulous the rubber or whatever it was held and did not take well to the water so we got rid of the water and this orchid sits in my dining room and when I look at this orchid there are three crucial take homes that I get from it whenever I look at one is sometimes our best efforts what we do with our whole hearts and mysterious nephesh they can really be negative if we miss Reed what's going on by the child we're putting in our own stuff to push them to develop them but it's coming from us it's not what they actually need number two if we gave a lot more of our kids greenhouse parenting there would be no need for child psychologists there would be no need for our modem three and I would find something else to do and lastly but maybe most importantly and I don't know however wallerstein so must be something from sure Mayan sometimes what all looks bleak this kid had enough trauma that he shocked the person from relief who handles trauma calls all day one of the most egregious acts of abuse that I've ever been a part of treating so it looks bleak it's in the earth underground but what's their seeds and no matter what they've been through if we refuse to give up on them if we have the people who will stand by them if we're act as those Eagles they'll grow into beautiful orchids and I hope for me it's much more poignant but for you when you walk out and you'll see some flowers blossoming in the spring and we're coming up on shoeless and in this neighborhood we have an orchid sale then maybe you'll remember these three lessons from the orchid story because if we dig deep we're self compassionate we're in pathak and we provide that greenhouse a chef is going to look upon us and say you the Eagles and I will be your Eagles and will take us to our final destination she acted Kane of impervium a no amane thank you