Binyamin Greenspoon

so this session it's it's titled understanding parents ptsd signs symptoms protective measures and self-care it's sunday morning i know everybody's brains are full i know my brain is full i had a whole shabbos thursday friday hearing about kids in pain understanding where what's going on with these children how to be able to relate to their struggles how to be able to see the kami maul in them and we heard wonderful wonderful amazing speeches uplifting speeches from some really unbelievable people i don't feel i'm on such a level i'm a little bit more human and i think most of us go through very human times when a person has a child who's doing all sorts of things that are let's say their worst nightmare they're not always in a perfect place i was speaking to somebody last night friday night is when i get i finally get a chance to learn a little bit so it's late at night and i'm enjoying the peace and quiet not two nights ago that's two nights ago already it's okay and i don't know it was like three o'clock in the morning and i met somebody i'd met years ago and he he what he does with his child is unbelievable unbelievable he's taken her to the far ends of the world to show how much he cares about her to be there for her to do whatever he can and i reminded him that when i met him i don't know it was six years ago he was hoping that a truck would run over his daughter i remember years ago i was at an event where there were different osconomy got together people were working with people working with struggling kids off their kids and i was horrified i was horrified because these people they were working with the kids they weren't working with the parents and when they saw they were able to see that these are struggling kids they were able to see that these are good kids that just have a lot of challenges in life and they're lost and they're struggling and they're acting out and they're dysregulated and they were connecting with these kids and helping them out and they were doing a good job but they obviously weren't parents to these kids and we were sitting around the boardroom a boardroom there was probably 20 25 people there and each one one after the next they were sharing horror stories about the horrible parents that they were working with and i was horrified because i got to know a lot of these parents and they're really not horrible people most of them are very very special people we would think we would think working in the kids that are falling out of the system we would think that most of them the troubled kids they're coming from very troubled families that's what one might think until you're in this and you meet these parents and you meet some of the most special people you'll ever meet in your life i don't have another way of saying another way of seeing how this is a maka for the generation that we this peace doesn't make sense the really horrible parents are not the ones that are having the really horrible kids and shalom i don't want to call them really horrible kids they're not really horrible kids they're special in the shamas what i found is the people that are really really really minimalistically functioning their kids mostly struggle with emotional issues this is different it actually takes a lot of to be very brave to go against to go against the whole system you have to be very brave takes a lot to say i'm just gonna drop out of school it takes a lot to stand up to fight the system to fight your parents to say life is not working for me and i'm going to insist on doing something different they don't know what to do different because they're mature and they got all sorts of issues and there's nobody really there to help them explain to them how to do it and they're rejecting people's advice and help so it comes out looking in a in a lot of stuff that we that cause us a lot of pain but they have to have a certain amount of resilience to be able to do this the kids that are come from from families that are low functioning they're usually just low functioning they're low functioning kids so i'm sitting around this board room and one asking who works with kids he's saying how one parent said that he wishes his child was he could see him inside inside a box and he wants to put the lid on it and another oscar was saying i wish my child died that he that he heard that from her parents and they went around and shared and shared horrible stories the point i want to bring out is is that as a parent it takes superhuman superhuman effort to be able to see what's going on with your child i don't know you have to have a seat ishmael that's it's beyond you have to be at sadiq you have to be at sadhaka or sadekis somebody that's so iced garbage you learned every every one of the suffrage muslim you spent years and years and years working on yourself if you're going to figure out the right thing to say every time at the right time and not make any mistakes as parents going through this there's no doubt in my mind that every single parent who goes through this has not just a rough time but to develop real post-traumatic stress from this when a person i want to talk a little bit about the diagnosis of ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder so unfortunately if you pick up a dsm a lot of your kids don't fit that definition a lot of parents don't fit that definition it's kind of a narrow window it's defined as somebody has an overwhelming life-threatening experience and now they have all sorts of symptoms afterwards they have flashbacks they have triggers they have symptoms of anxiety and depression they walk around fearful they lose their sense of safety in the world in the clinical field in this field when you're working with these kids you know that you could have full-blown ptsd without going necessarily through a life-threatening experience if somebody went through years of of abuse and they were never never threatened with their life sometimes they are most of the time they're not most of the time it's actually by somebody who's close to them it's a sibling it's a cousin somebody they trust they never felt like their life was threatened they can have ptsd if somebody has an overwhelming amount of negative life experiences to the point that it catches up with them they can have ptsd all the symptoms a more correct definition of what real trauma is what is trauma the world gets the word gets thrown around we throw the word around there's trauma i don't know everybody's traumatized yeah everybody has certain traumas in their life what is trauma when we when we go through life we go through good times and go through negative times and these are experiences in life we have good days and we have bad days we have positive experiences and negative experiences but they they're within a window there's that within a window of what life brings and sometimes they're very very painful and difficult and they're not traumatizing when everybody out lives their parents it's a bracha to everybody that one day you're going to sit shiva for your parents and it's very sad and you'll cry and you'll be in mourning and if they live to 120 and they get old and you're prepared for it you're preparing for it it's sad and it's overwhelming and you cry and you're not traumatized because that's the way of the world and we know this since the time we're two years old people are born and eventually people move on but somebody dies at age 15 in a car accident that's a trauma it's not expected it's not within our window of what we expect to happen in our lives it we need to be able to walk around and feel like we can understand what's happening in the world around us we need to be able to feel safe enough that we don't think we're going to die at any second when somebody dies at 15 years old and they were in perfect health in a car accident or they had a brain aneurysm it's traumatizing it's outside the view of what's normal to happen inside the world when we got married and they handed us this wonderful manual about how to raise children i told you exact directions what to do when they cry what to do and they're upset what to do at what age you mahanak them what do you tell them the lessons in life perfect manual it said nothing no one told you anything about what you do when they go off the dirk what you do when you find out that being mahalo shabbos what you do when they don't when when they don't come home at night it's outside our view of what's a normal experience in life and something that's happened that happens outside of what we know how to process sticks inside our brain in such a way that it's just there it's there it's live it doesn't go into a long-term memory experience we can't calmly say oh this is what happened let me sit and think about what do i need to do in order to be able to respond in such a way that's going to really really be effective somebody's child doesn't go home at night they go into panic and fear into desperation if somebody child child comes into the house and they didn't like the supper and they toss it across the room and they throw an f-bomb at their parent and tell them that they wish that their parent was dead our parenting manual didn't tell us how to be able to sit calmly and say oh i love you shayflah you must be really hungry i'm sorry that you didn't like the supper tonight we'll find a way that you can get some food and you can feel good about yourself it's normal for when that happens you want to kill your kid and maybe you yelled at that child maybe you said something that's not your proudest moment in life but we're human beings we're human beings and we make mistakes and it's okay to make mistakes and you can go to your child afterwards and you can apologize i'm sorry i wasn't prepared i wasn't in the best place i didn't respond in a way that i'm proud of i really love you i'm sorry you didn't get the the supper that you were expecting you must have had a really rough day let me go ahead and do something that you can that can make it easier for you if we go through enough experiences the dread a parent's worst fear if their child falls out of school it's the worst it's a tragedy it's their worst fear i don't know how parents sleep at night i don't know how they sleep in it you don't yeah you don't if you don't know if your child's safe if you don't know what they're doing if you don't know the outcomes the repercussions of some of the things that they're going to who knows you're looking at what looks well it looks like you're slowly burying your child that's what that's the way it looks and feels anyone who goes through this has experienced serious trauma in their lives what are some of the symptoms of trauma well you can be depressed you can be anxious you can have sleepless nights you can feel like your world is falling falling apart around you you can have a sense of worthlessness these are all symptoms of ptsd you're going to have a a sense of worthlessness you feel like god doesn't like you you lose your sense of trust in people i heard a lot kind of listening to some of the vibe i heard a lot over shabbos about how many people had negative experiences in the school systems you have negative experiences in the school systems you can feel like all systems all systems are bad we can't believe in any system any symptoms and any systems can trust people what happens with trauma when it creates a sense and there's no safety that safety spreads out to not just the area where the trauma happened it spreads out all over the place if somebody was attacked at night because they were mugged walking down a street in a safe neighborhood they now feel like it's not safe to walk outside in a safe neighborhood people aren't safe the world becomes an unsafe place it's very easy to go into into a negative state we see dark around us very hard to see light see pain wherever you go see the problems get stuck in the problems it's hard to see the solutions these are all symptoms of trauma know most of the speakers are focused on the kids all these kids are traumatized there's absolutely no question about that explains a lot of their behaviors but as parents working with the with these kids it's not possible to go through this without experiencing your own level of trauma and if you don't take care of it you're at risk of really struggling it affects a person's functioning if a person feels constantly that they have no energy low energy levels if they feel like they're carrying so much of a load that they feel weighed down all the time they lost this their spring in their step they have a hard time smiling it's not the way we want to raise our other kids not just these kids when you have kids that are struggling it takes super human effort now we're expected to be malachi who expect them to be angels so i i don't actually don't really like speaking so if anybody has any questions you're welcome to ask my only issues that were showed up were short on time if anybody has something that they want to jump in with i'll be happy to kind of talk about it a little bit go ahead just talk loud so people could hear so the question was how does one say feel safe in an unsafe world and how does one feel safe with hashem when we're running to hashem and from are we talking we're talking talking about trying to understand the kids that understand the parents oh it's a real question because the question is too it's true for both of them yeah it's a it's a it's a wonderful question yes it's a wonderful question how does one feel safe in an unsafe world yeah go ahead oh very excellent question okay so i don't want to ignore the first question i don't ignore the first question but i'm going to talk a little bit about the second the second question how do you treat ptsd when you're in constant trauma so when we say in we don't want to do trauma work for a person if they're in an abusive relationship we don't want to do trauma work to get them past their trauma if they're still getting abused at the same time it doesn't make any sense how are you supposed to do trauma work while the situation is still going on how are you supposed to feel calm when you don't know if your child is coming home that night it goes back into the first question a little bit if you're not living in safety how can you feel safe these are wonderful questions i don't have easy answers i don't have easy solutions i want to just give perspective and maybe people can go ahead and if they can understand it a little bit and if they can feel understood they can they can see the value they could see the value in being able to do the work of what they need to do of finding the right supports and getting the right help for themselves because we can help others if we need help ourselves you can't make your child feel safe if you don't feel safe it's impossible you can't deal with your child's anger when you're angry i do my as a a couple hours a day i do private clinical counseling only a few hours a day the rest of my day i'm involved in working with struggling kids and their parents in my clinical practice a very high percentage of the people that i work with where these kids when they're on their way back they're they're young adults young adults in their in their 20s low 30s a lot of them have anger at hashem and i know i'm being recorded so i have to be careful about how i say this why did hashem do this to me what did i do that i got molested why did hashem give me this pain and the parents are angry too thank you i know you're a father but you're not a mother these kids lived in us for nine months yeah [Music] yeah thank you yeah that pain i can't imagine that pain we don't have a way to understand about why hashem gave us those these kids we don't have a way to understand it and if people are are honest enough they might see that they do have anger we don't what do we do to deserve this all we try to do is be good people as parents i think saying this to what i found to be some of the most special people that i've met i think most people most people that are here most people that i know that have struggling kids all they wanted to do was to do the right thing was to serve hashem was to get married and have good kids show them how to love torah mitzvahs show them how to be good yiddin what do they do to deserve this i don't have an answer i don't have an answer about why kids get cancer maybe one day we'll understand but we can recognize that this causes a tremendous amount of tremendous amount of pain a tremendous amount of mixed and confusing feelings so the world doesn't feel safe we have all sorts of very very very intense feelings and then people on the outside expect us to be perfect when your child came in and didn't like to suffer threw it in your face and cursed at you and you lost it for a second because you hadn't slept for a week and you're gonna get this because the people that are working with these kids not all of them have so much experience not all of them have been inside your house and and known you and seen that you're special people and they talk and they'll you'll experience some of that pain they'll hear people say negative things about you and people will doubt your parenting even when you're doing everything right the world becomes an unsafe place so the first thing that you could do and this helps with any trauma as you could find people in a similar situation people who understand you people that are in a better place or people that struggling in a way that can be supportive to you and you get together as a community and that's probably the most the single most powerful most protective factor is that you can connect with other people who understand you who are supportive to you who can be there for you you're not alone when you experience a problem that's overwhelming and you're completely alone that's so much more that it's going to shut you down it's going to take you over it'll sabotage your brain so you come to kashanakshi shabato come every year come twice a week a year come as many times as they make it find more friends that are in this situation go to support groups stay away from the people don't understand it that's probably the single most the single most effective thing that you can do that will really be a protective factor anyone who wants to take medication for anxiety or depression don't hold yourself back you don't have to be a martyr it's fine you know i wish we were given so they gave out tylenol here at the front desk you should be giving out anti-anxiety medication should we give it out what do you call that helps you sleep at night uh melatonin melatonin should be given out everywhere unfortunately like if you go to like typical therapy they're going to teach you skills you're going to say let's do deep breathing exercises now this is going to really help you out when your child is cursing at you and your child has run away and you don't know if you have to pick them up at the police station i'm just going to do deep breathing let me count to 10. now it happens just as much there's different reactions to trauma there's different reactions to trauma and men respond to things differently than than women the typical responses that we have to trauma are fight fight flight and freeze and shut down so the fight will look like something like when you get upset you get angry and you lose it the flight is when you run the opposite direction and the freeze is when you just don't know what to do and you don't do anything shutdown is not spoken about as much shutdown is just your system starts shutting down you don't feel anything most people most people alternate through different things and i'm going to say that working with these kids because it's an evolving situation and there's constantly different there's constantly different situations that present themselves at some situations you might respond well and in other situations you might find that you're entering a shutdown response in other situations you might find that your response can is going to be freeze in other situations you just want to want to run away i don't think that men are any different from experiencing trauma their response might be minutes and i'm different everybody is crying or there's glass on the floor the ladies are we're dealing with everybody and everything don't forget there's no baths there's still supper shabbos is still coming we still have one of the one of the things that men and i'm over generalizing you know i really don't like doing this because there's a lot of men that are very emotional and a lot of women that kind of have certain ways of functioning that we would assume that aren't actually like like men but like you know if we kind of use like the cliche what the men experiences and and the women experiences one of the things that men do a little bit better than women a lot of times are partitioning their brain so a first responders first responders hot solo men policemen firemen it's very interesting that they're all called men we don't have hot solo women now they do a little bit we don't have police women not it's not so often you know they're kindly when you have a policewoman people look at them they're kind of manly you know you don't want to mess with a policewoman that's for sure we have don't have so many fire women and the reason for that is there's a training that they need to go through and it's something that men kind of take more naturally to when a fireman has to go into a fire they need to be able to think where is the right place what's that what's the right thing that i that i should be doing should i be going into the fire should i be waiting for backup should i be going through the roof should i be going through the i'm not a fireman so i can't tell you the details of it but you need to be able to think in a time of crisis about what the smartest thing to do is what the right thing to do is and how you do this efficiently if there's a child on the third floor in a burning building and you hear them screaming if you listen to that child then you don't do what your training is not only are you not going to be able to save the child but you're going to put yourself in sakura also now you can have two people in sakona so they train people we're not going to hear the sound of that child screaming if you're first are there any first responders here any other men right so right you go through a training you're going to kind of shut off your emotions you're going to show you're going to shut it off and you think what's the right thing to do i can't listen to the emotional pain of somebody that's hurting right now or somebody that's like something terrible that might happen need to think about what the right thing to do is partition our brains so they they train first responders this way we're going to not respond from an emotional place we have to respond from a cognitive or an instructional place to think what the right thing to do is and that's what we're going to do we're going to do it well so i was speaking once without hatzala and lakewood and specifically about like some of these sensitive situations where they have to respond to these crises that are happening with kids that have you know all sorts of emotional issues and when you have you know a big kind of shirley outsole man who shows up and it's a really sensitive situation especially if it's a a female and that they've especially if they've been hurt by a man it's that doesn't feel the safest and i was talking to atsalo about maybe i wasn't talking to you about free i was talking with that solemn member about maybe having some women on the team which both hashem they do now and the response that i got is that we can't have it the response that we that i got that i got is they're too emotional they don't know how to separate from it barkusham they do have this now but this is a skill i just want to talk about this for a minute and i you know i can really talk about ptsd and dealing with stuff for hours and hours and hours and you probably don't have the brains for it and we don't have the time but this is one skill that we can practice and if you're in this long enough you don't have a choice you can end up learning it by default so the question is if you're going to learn it by yourself or if you can be aware of it and you can try to put it in a little bit you need to be able to to dissociate a little bit from what's going on with your children you need to be able to separate from it a little bit sometimes it sounds like you know we don't care it's not because you don't care it's because you care too much you need to be able to say my child is going through whatever that my child is going through i can't think about it every single second of the day if i think about it every single single second of the day i am not going to function i will not be able to be there for them i won't be able to be there for my spouse i won't be able to be there for my kids part of what drove me into working with families of kids is that when i would see that when one child struggles a lot of time there are many many children that struggle afterwards and the reason for this what i see is is not because there's something wrong with the family it's not because it's not a stable family these kids have destab their situation with their kids has destabilized their whole family if the family goes into a system there are that they're operating out of panic and fear desperation you know they feel like that they're after sitting at the edge of their seat all day long they're not getting any sleep they're walking around feeling like who knows what life is going to bring to me the next second it's impossible to run a functioning family like that when there's the kids bring in chaos it's chaotic so we don't have time to practice this today about how to be able to partition your brain but this is something it's just another thing that you could try and you're going to end up learning it by default anyway you need to be able to separate a little bit you're not separating because you don't care and you're not separating that you're not doing anything about it you're separating from some of those extreme situations that are going on around you that i'm not living i'm choosing that i'm not going to live with them at every single second of the day somebody needs to go for therapy to help them learn these skills go ahead and sign yourself up for the therapy you're entitled there's nothing wrong with you if you're trying to figure out how to be a normal person when you have chaos going on around you there's absolutely nothing wrong with you there's no shame in it there's nothing wrong with you if your child is acting really crazy and dysregulated and you're trying to figure out how to function absolutely nothing wrong with you there's another piece that i feel that aside from skills aside from a lot of skills that a person can work on working with their friends they're working with a therapist they work on with their spouse they come and hear the requisite from all sorts of all sorts of people there's one thing that i feel that is necessary in order for a person to really be able to if a person wants to be able to function if they want to be able to wake up and have a smile on their face when they have what they've always considered corbin around them when what they've always considered their worst nightmare corbin destruction if a person is walking around then their life is ruined or they see their child is ruined their family is ruined i don't think that there's a way that they're going to be able to to really be happy people healthy people functioning people in order for a person to be able to deal with a situation like this and be okay with it and be able to be who they want to be as parents to be able to become some of those really really special parents who have spoken over over the weekend and even those special parents they've all had weak moments it's not like they've always said the perfe the perfect thing they need to be able to come to a place of deep acceptance how so i'm going to tell you a story and i feel it's not really i don't i don't think that i'm really the person to say how i really don't think so this is not something that comes from research it would be this is something i don't have enough guy though that i said that i could say how i don't have enough haughtiness that i could say hell i can i'm going to tell you a story i'm going to tell you a story of what a very very special a very special parent a mother shared the story with me and i got permission to say it over over here so this was a lady who she was a good she was a good student when she was younger she was one of those kids who gave her parents nachos she went to school and she absorbed all the information they gave in school constantly working on her meetus constantly developing knowledge learning soaking up all the messages that her teachers had told her all she wanted to do was to serve hashem and she did a good job and she dove in that she's going to be able to grow into she graduated high school and went to seminary he went to the typical system and got married to a wonderful person who wanted to sit and learn and go into and then she had a whole bunch of kids beautiful kids and she gave everything she had to her kids her whole life this is what she was taught in school you live for your kids your kids are your nachos if you can get married and raise the next generation that our shame retire omits us you're surely going to get a place in the world to come and she gave everything that she learned over to her kids she showed them good me this and she baked them amazing food and she was involved in doing homework with her kids every project that they were that they were doing she was heavily involved in she was waiting for them after school to give them physic and to be involved in one piece to pta and everything was what she felt like she was doing wrestling hashem she was doing amazing and that went on for quite a number of years when they're young they look pretty innocent and then one kid went up there and then another one did then a third child went off the door and her life started to crumble what do i have to live for what could make me feel good today my whole life all i wanted to do was to serve hashem was to raise the next generation in klaus israel was to be able to be a good year to shaman i'm going to give i'm going to teach tara mitsus and love for hashem and they're not religious and she started falling apart and when her when her daughter was going off the dark and came home with like i don't know purple hair and a new uh a new piercing it was like an all-time low for her and she was finding it hard to function rosh hashanah time comes by yum kippur sarsimechumo and what is everybody dominating for she doesn't know what's the dalvin for she's already seen that no matter what she does she doesn't have control over the outcome her kids are adults now and they're going to choose what they're going to choose and there's nothing that she can do about it what can make her feel safe and she secretly wished inside rosh hashanah time she's secretly wishing inside i can't deal with this it's too much i shouldn't take my life as seriously machu become goes by and seem kipper and she's fasting she doesn't know what to dub him for she's at an all-time low so if she's in her house her husband's at shul i don't know where our kids are and she goes into her study and she noticed the safer there was that was lying there on on the shelf and it wasn't like put in she says let me pick it up and put it in its place and she sees it so hummish so she picks it up and she just opens the page and she opens up to this week's to the partial precious by egash yaakov has to go to mitzrayim and he's very nervous jacob knows what's in it's rhyme at a certain age you have to push it away a little bit it happens all of a sudden by the way he's very nervous he knows what he's going into thomas mitzray jakov knew it says when they klaus came out of him inside him they were memphis yakov knew what mitzrayim was this is his biggest fear yaakov avinu he's bringing his kids into the earth's hotmail who knows what's going to happen to them you know they definitely weren't going to be like his uh right now pure you know not hashemits of soul in them he's going into mitzrayim a place of tumult far away from far away from hashem's presence so it says and she reads when it says the double ocean states saying my dear son yakov he says here i am it says raymond don't be afraid of going down to matriarchy you don't understand it they're going to make you a great nation over there and she says she says to herself i don't know why i picked up this hamish but hashem sending me a message i'm living in a world of tama i'm living in a world it's not the nachos that i expected i'm not having these beautiful angelic kids who are nachos machines i'm immature don't be afraid don't be afraid of going down to mitsrayam i'm going to make you great over there it's a wonderful message wonderful message and it was a light a light went off inside her head i'm living inside mitzrayim i'm living inside an eretz atmel my house is not this house where there's the kids are coming home and talking to retire at the shabbos table i hear diver navalo maybe i hear about like all sorts of things that i didn't want to bring into my house i'm in mitsuram but don't be afraid the i'm going to make you golden over there and it gave her and she was able to go ahead and said hashem sent me a message it's okay and that kind of percolated inside her brain for a while and then she's thinking about the next words in the passage it says i'm going to go down with you to mitzrayim i'm not here alone hashem says i'm going with you you're in mithraim you're dealing with all of this garbage you're dealing with all these things that this is not something you wanted to do but i'm going to be there with you hashem says i'm going to be there with him going down with you timothy i'm going to bring you out from there too and she says there's a light at the end of the tunnel hashem is here with me and hashem is going to take me out and then she said after a few weeks she was thinking about this pussac it's like she had an abua she was at her lowest point she wanted her life to be taken hashem says don't be afraid i'm going to make you great over there hashem says i'm with you on this journey and i'm going to take you out and then she says what's the gamaloi what is this double ocean i'm going to take you out gama and she says she realized that she has the opportunity of a lifetime this is her opportunity to grow we're not here only to raise our kids we're here to serve hashem and you can grow from serving hashem in mitzrayim and even though she had only heard her whole life those are the messages that she's that she had taken in being in high school growing up what she absorbed from her teachers is about her purpose in life is to raise the next generation of shaimar teremitsis she's there for a purpose even if they're not being shimmery to her missus and it's like she said a light bulb went off in her head she's like wait some of my classmates never got married it can't be that the only thing we're there for is to be able to raise the next generation they never got married some of them never had kids it can't be that they're only there for their kids so they have no avoidance hashem gamaloi that you can go up also going down into this eretz atmer there's an avedo over there hashem gave you a gift where you're really really going to be tested but it's going to bring the best thing it's going to bring the best parts out of you you're going to be able to grow from here like you've never been able to grow before you're going to be able to serve hashem in such a way that you never imagined in the past when a child does everything right it's not difficult to be a good parent how much for being a good parent does apparent to their child does everything right and only wants to do everything right there are some kids like that few of them they exist how much do we have to work as parents for those kids how much car do you get when your child does everything wrong and you're still being with hashem this is your greatest opportunity in life is to be able to say that i can be over hashem i could be with hashem israel this is when you become a sadiq so i feel like i'm sitting with sadikim and i'm not saying that to boost your confidence i don't believe in that i don't believe in fall in false compliments i do i would believe that i believe everybody that's here they're really tadikim and you're saddikam because you're in your yosef in mitzray hashem has given you real challenges in life real challenges your worst nightmares and he gives it to special people he says you can rise up you can become great i've always been very hesitant to tell this to parents because we don't want to tell people it doesn't feel good when you're going through something horrible and somebody says oh you're going to become a good person from it it doesn't feel good but it's not my message i could say it over in somebody else's name who's done this journey do i have a couple minutes when's that when does the next session star what are they are they waiting 11 o'clock what's that five minutes okay i want to do an exercise for five minutes if i'm stealing time from somebody else i really apologize is that you rather than chosen okay you'll sit and you'll participate for a minute i want to do an exercise for five minutes five minutes and you don't have to tell me if you want you can tell me afterwards how it works i'm going to ask everybody if they can close their eyes for five minutes i want you to see if you can identify where inside your body look inside your head inside your heart check your whole body and see if you can identify where you feel the tremendous tsar of your child see if you can see where you feel it and see if you can label an emotion or two or however many pop up what the motion is that you feel right now and as you're thinking of this place of pain of your child that's in pain and you notice what the emotion is see if you can how big does it feel if it had a size how big it would be and if it had a weight see if you can identify how many pounds it feels like and if you can give it a color what color would this tsar this place of pain be and now look at it and see if you can give a shape to it and see if you can identify what it feels like if you were to touch it what's the temperature how hot or freezing it is is it smooth is it is it rough see if it makes any sound or if it's quiet see if it has any movement or if it's still and just sit with that for five seconds now i'm going to read this plastic again and as i do i want you to envision how this place of change how this place of pain changes as i read the positive i want you to see how the weight changes how the temperature changes how the color changes how it feels different how the size shifts how it goes how the movement of it changes and how big it is hashem comes to you and he says and hashem says to you i'm going to go down with you to the time i'm going to go down with you to this place of disappointment of shame of pain i'm going to be with you i'm going to take you out too i'm going to bring you up it's going to be an opportunity for you to grow as you sit with it you're going to be able to grow and as you hear these words see how the temperature changes see how much the weight has shifted how many pounds does it weigh now it's not going to disappear but it will change notice its size notice its energy notice its movement and see what color it is now thank you very much [Applause]