Amudim Event 5 15 2016 Part 3 Dr Shloimie Zimmerman Psy D

thank you very much Robert wallerstein good evening everybody it's uh really remarkable that rabie wallstein was not supposed to introduce me this is not going to work okay but it's uh as if he read my mind and we'll see how that connects in a few moments the title of the talk is uh Empower your future to protect their future was a bit vague uh so I decided to talk about what I thought were some of the underlying issues that lead to these things instead of just the usual Abuse Prevention stuff that I've done here a number of times but you heard a little bit about what amudam does and why amudim 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 professional I was in my early 20s Bas medish guy in yiva that had an Affiliated high school for atrisk Youth and informally the Bas medish guys were sort of set up with as kusas 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 high 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 the despite being an exceptional talmid in his Yeshiva having memorized vast amounts of to by and all of he still felt like a failure a disappointment excuse me particularly to his father was a very critical man and his mother stood by in that convers ation he said some haunting words to me said sometimes you push a child and eventually you push too far and they go over the edge for a while what did I know I had 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 to show him 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 shabas he would smoke so much ER of shabus so that he would be able to sleep 25 hours straight so as not to have to wake up and smoke on chabas But ultimately it was way too little too late and on one fateful day the call came into the Yeshiva that he had died of a drug overd 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 a 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 it was plain 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 Firm 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 from 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 a pneumonia that actually kills you shame was his cancer drugs his treatment but sometimes the treatment kills shame is very different than guilt as described by B Brown and if you haven't watched any of her TED Talks one called the power power of vulnerability to listening to shame they're incredibly worthwhile she disting 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 eting 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're 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 watch watch the decimation of a family so while on the outside he's incredibly tough can negotiate deals like you can't believe internally he's 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 erects an 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 gik very good-look 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 ition and affection without being able to be vulnerable enough to ask for it so he feels hurt the barrier gets bigger he built a $5 million 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 ariva one of the best t m in his Yeshiva now gives shim to both B medish guys and balab 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 he is and how much they love is urim and how inspiring he is he feels like a fraud I don't really have enough yay 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 by a bigger 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're incredibly able to pick up who are the vulnerable kids then they abuse those children and and if you thought you had shame beforehand now it grows exponentially and where do you turn it just exacerbates everything similar to the addiction you're incredibly shame bound you try to escape that so you take drugs when you sober up you say oh I'm a drugie 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 fortun 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 Eric Fram 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 on 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 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 oh 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 it's all 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 Shalom bias and parenting like rellia 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 shus 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 are they going to be great andos they're highly attached to my ego and so everything becomes very personal and very sensitive often times 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 shabas table or not even to which quite frankly is often developmentally inappropriate especially when they're having emotional difficulties often times we're very shortsighted 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 and we exchange 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 processor our we just have an emotional re action and then we make up to Rum afterwards as to why we did it very infrequently they're actually thinking is this thing going to be in the best interest of the long-term of this child so we gain compliance and we rationalize it that we're teaching moral Behavior how often are we actually teaching moral Behavior so if my child loses his or your toy because of an act or they get a timeout have they learned anything more even worse if they will feel bad about themselves have they learned anything moral did they actually learn a respect for a 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 shamer and we learn to be ashamed of ourselves from those we're 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 harshed 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 they're sort of second class citizens at best often times we actually attempt to shame them to get them to comply Big Boys Don't Cry how often do we hear a bad boy or good girl even about babies is it a good baby or bad baby how many times in my office will 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 it's many situations considered acceptable and it's not restricted to the abuse of families in fact it occurs in the quote unquote the nicest and firest of families a study out of Canada found that only 4% of schoolage children had not been the targets of their parents shaming rejecting demeaning 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 in many other respects in terms of their functioning and in terms of their overall mental health in 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 cuddle children and praise them excessively so there's no more winner or loser everybody gets a trophy you look at their picture you say wow you're a Picasso but that doesn't really ground them in the reality because eventually they 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 much better than you there's somebody in your class who's smarter than you who's prettier than you and then what do they have and they collapse under the face of that so excessive parades 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's an incident in history that's largely overlooked because after it came the battle of iima the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki eventually the Germans giving up but at the time Okinawa was an island 350 mil off Mainland Japan and both the Americans and the Japanese knew that if they C the Americans captured Okinawa it would just be a little hop skip and jump through air attacks and sea 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 550,000 troops were in the Pacific on the island of Okinawa 250,000 people died one out of every three people on that island died so just imagine you have three to six people on your bench if this was the battle of Okinawa one or two of those people would have been dead and of the remaining survivors a third to a half were wounded so when the Americans finally went on to Okinawa they sent in a bunch bunch of Mental Health Specialists expecting that the mental health Carnage would be as bad as the physical Devastation where almost all the crops were obliterated every family was crushed they found something incredible the okinawans were largely intact this was astounding to them and they began to study what was going on in Okinawa and what they found was that okina and children were well mothered they were given the breast at will until Age Two the parents were deeply focused on not allowing early frustrations in the 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 could access it they also had a profound respect for and 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 Ki was asked by a bunch of what should they tell parents in terms of educating children not usually a man of many words he said tell the parents very simple things things that should not have to be spelled out but today overwhelmingly need to be also when it comes to children all the apply there's no forgiveness on this 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 to with a child they asked him if so how could anyone be a parent it's terrifying we'll be o he said if you are very respectful and if you do your best then there's under those situations Hashem 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 art scroll book that we all struggle that we're not malim that Hashem 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'm look fat what are the children he 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 perfect we don't have to pretend to be perfect in general we 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 vehicle 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 fact so we need a lot more empathy all around and what is empathy in contrast to sympathy sympathy is I take my experience and cut and paste it so you say oh I have a sick child I have child as well I cut and paste 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 revish so the reash would sit with people for hours on end and he would respire profusely to the point that during certain visits he would have to excuse himself to change his clothing so when he was asked what is shot that you're sweating so much they have to change your clothes he said the follow when people come to me they're wearing their garments when they express their problem to me in order for me to understand it I have to get out of mine and da theirs then once I understand their issue from their pers perspective I have to think about whether it's the or the advice through my own 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 in the we're 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 seeing that is crucial and really empathy is the antidote to shame shame really needs 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's usually the biggest critic ourselves and when we share with others in a real way it starts to dowe 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 L and hard despite the enumerating 37 describing that the is not being rebuilt because of I 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 and col speech before they knew so they're getting it somewhere not usually the healthiest of places and today we used to look it up in the dictionary if you look it up on Google you're going to get an education that is going to scar you and even if your friend has that education and 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 shame 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 L up doing increase their curiosity increase their acting out their 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 you're trying to hide it and you'll try to perfect your children and that M 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'll Stand By and Watch that decimation unfold and it can be very difficult period 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 rellia talked about if your children are symptomatic get them help early the research shows that most issues take between 8 and 23 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 can be so much easier if they de with sooner one of the greatest paradoxes in our society is the Paradox of sh so in 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 we view it almost as if the is the Finish Line I hate to break it to you it's nowhere near the Finish Line cuz I get the calls afterwards and then if they're not healthy before and and now they're married the issues are just twice as great and if you put children in the mix they're exponentially greater so we need to do this beforehand and our research only from The Firm Community by shter and the Ark Institute has found that abused victims are six times more likely to divorce than nonabused victims so we need to address this and it's the greatest Paradox I don't know a place that there's more talk of a and there's actually less if I do the right thing if I'm vulner if I share my experience if I get help they're going to mess up the no if you do the right thing will get child the right somewhere on my talk there's supposed to be something about advocacy so I'll just say the following sometimes it's very difficult there was a philosophy that parents have to have united front but if you have one very unhealthy parents 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 were tormented by one parent and have such ESS on the other because where 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 and between peer and peer kids can get bullied kids can 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 Shas here we've worked with them we've collaborated them on very difficult areas they are ready to collaborate you got to advocate for your child there's nobody who's going to be the advocate for your child not even myself for UA you got to be the [Music] 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 though we're hearing about it much more and there's much more awareness what we find is that there is a steady 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 leave happy healthy and productive lives and I'd like to end with another story from my practice I'll call this young boy Yank 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 F world called me he was visibly shaken he said to me scham I have one that I need you to take he said the details of this are so severe I handled 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 prolong period of time Yan was 4 years old at the time he intersected with a number of par professionals who believe that you don't go to therapists right away they 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 as child that every single symptom of trauma one can imagine night terrors flashbacks fear of going to school angry Outburst wetting himself from school to the point that his overwhelming fear he defecated himself from school when the parents finally came to me they were in tattered 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 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 act would change the parents came from a very different world very cish world where patching was something that the father took pride in where the mother's sisters ran homes that looked like military bases so the ideas of of creating a very sensitive empathic understanding environment at home to look away from the child's outburst and hisa and is 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 than on his behavior was a radical departure for them and it was literally a slugfest I was accused of being a mish Mish was good I accused being a go um I was accused used of liberal ideas and going connected to Tyra it was long and a brutal battle but I was doing it for one reason and one reason only for the sake of his 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 heic slowly 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 one of the most amazing feelings you could ever have is when you see the lights go back on inside a person the lights 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 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 mush that some children are like weeds 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 they're very Hardy they're very resilient but some flowers like the orchid need Greenhouse parent 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 actually 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 I'm in tears the mother's in tears the kid is smiling from ear to ear he's living a happy healthy life 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 points in our work but he said sometime and 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 Orchid home and I was going to give it the most amazing greenhouse ever I bring this home and I'm watering it my wife's watering it and the thing starts to smell smelling really weird blossoms are okay I'm getting into an argument with 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 over coming out of this Orchid and 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 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 H 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 comes that I get from it whenever I look at it one is sometimes our best effort what we do with our whole hearts of m nees they can really be negative if we misread 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 [Music] 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 movement s and I would find something else to do and lastly but maybe most importantly and I don't know how wall so must be something from shmay sometimes when all looks ble this kid had enough trauma that he shocked the person from relief who hles trauma caus 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 it's underground but what's there [Music] 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 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 upon Shu and in this neighborhood we have an orchid C that maybe you'll remember these three lessons from the Orchid story because if we dig deep we're self-compassionate we're empathic and we provide that Greenhouse Hashem is going to look upon us and say you the Eagles and I will be your Eagles and it take us to our final destination thank [Music] you thank you very very much Dr Zimmerman I'm going to make this very brief I started off the evening giving you a number that's a factual number and it's probably larger than the number that I mentioned because that's just what I know about which is 66 the shamas will never have a chance to grow families since this rashash sh and people always ask me if that's true and that's what I see at work what's the drive to go the next day why are we still fighting this battle if we are looking at something on the negative side of it and the truth is I ask myself that question many times as well and then I look at the positive and I look at how the world has changed it was about 15 years ago that I was asked to speak the first time in a public setting about the Mya of sexual abuse in our from community and I look now at the last 15 years and I look at how our community as a whole has changed it was closer to 20 years ago that I started dealing with issues pertaining to addiction and I use the following example from myself and this is the message that I want to give over and hopefully we can take from here 35 years ago if a family had somebody that was born with a developmental disability the family tried to hide it it would hurt the magic word sh for other case and then amazing organizations came out and started helping with that and it became an issue that was embraced and now we have shabbaton and and all the amazing work that gets done and to make people that are born with special needs part of our society and part of our cultur part of our families and then it was the God forbid anyone can say the word cancer it was the M we did talk about it and it took us years to come over that step as well and between organizations such as K Lifeline rccs kids of courage and so many other wonderful organizations tackled that issue then it was the kids at risk nobody could talk about and that took time to develop whether it's our place my dragos priority one and so many other wonderful institutions that have developed to work for that field and we decided to take the Bold step when it came to child sexual abuse within the community and we're seeing a tremendous change for the positive yes we're nowhere near where I think we should be but we are light years ahead of where we were when I first got involved and when Dr zimman first got involved and so many others here the main thing is people have to realize there are resources available there is help available there are people out there that want to help to make sure that people that are suffering don't have to suffer my wife likes to say the following mush she's actually works for Rabbi wall in the high school in BCA and we just had a shabat to this week for the school as well separate from his and my wife likes to say the following musall I'll make it short where she talks about someone who gets stuck in a ditch and different people come by and they ask for help and there's the clergy member that comes by and says oh I'll pray for you and God will make a miracle and you'll come out and the architect comes by and says oh I'll come up with some plan to build something it'll take some time we'll get you out of the ditch and then the person's friend comes by and without thinking jumps into the ditch and the person looks and goes sh what are you doing now we're both stuck says you're right but two is better than one and together we'll overcome this obstacle at the end of the day Claus as a nation we love to help each other in whatever way we can and the main thing is people have to know there is help available there are plenty of amazing organizations out there there are asan and raon and therapists people just need to feel comfortable to say we need the help we we want to get to the next step we don't want to live as Dr Zimmerman said alone in shame we need to be able to address that and get to the next level and help the person next to us and not walk past them and look down at somebody because they're suffering but look at that person and say how can I help make your life better and I say this all the time and I'm going to say it again now people walk down the street and they see that kid that's the one out who's no longer wearing the yam and people are talking about him instead of walking by that child and looking at him what about walking by and saying hey how about a slice of pizza can I get you a cup of coffee how is your day showing someone that you care this is not rocket science it's really being able to take from ourselves and give it to somebody else this is the message that I like to leave off with we are all in this together we are all part of this great nation and we all have the same father that cares for us and loves us and has protected us and we have our trials and tribulations in every generation I mean as I was just looking up I saw the memorial for the 6 million kadash I can't imagine what that was like I don't even want to try with my visits to concentration camps and grandparents telling me stories every generation we have is that we don't know how to overcome and we don't always know if we have the answers but somehow we Prevail but that's because people try and fight for it and we have right now an epidemic between drug addiction sexual abuse and mental illness that has not been seen before in our communities or at least not documented to the level that we see now what's going to separate us is how we respond to that and I say this wholeheartedly I I D for the day that myself and SCH can go look for other work I would love nothing more than to not be busy with this young but unfortunately as long as there's problems we're going to do our best and we have to just D that the Abisha will help us get through this as we have with all the other trials and tribulations and in this we should all see from our own families and only be to Pure real Sil and to be able to welcome Mia amen I would love like to take one moment and really just thank those that really made this event happen from start to finish Rabbi AI Feldman who really put his pus into this I'd like to give him a round of applause please and mik gerer I don't know where you're hiding someplace but around well to all the other amazing staff atud and all of our partners in kazak and our wonderful speakers and the isas and schools here thank you very very much for coming come