Think Good & it Will Be Good - Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch

[Music] okay great welcome to everybody good evening my name is rabbi Daniel Samba I'm a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist based in Brooklyn and around the world via Skype I'm also contributor to he de bruit comm and many of my videos have been circulating on the internet the last few months of ether Brut but for many years I've been broadcasting many different videos tour cafe.com and other places around the world so many of you may have seen my work or maybe most recently found out about my lecture series some of it's based upon my new book called think good and it will be good spiritually based therapy inspired by Viktor Frankl and Jewish wisdom what's going to be special about this first night of hopefully many nights here evenings in this community is not just a sheer on psychology and Torah but also a chance to answer your questions or ask your questions that I could answer on anything relating to psychology family therapy relationships for those of you don't know me I specialized I began to specialize many years ago in marriage therapy so I work with many many couples through marriage therapy I also work with individuals dealing with anxiety depression OCD and so on I also specialize in treating trauma with something called EMDR and many other things so we've got any questions what I'd like to do is the majority of this class will be in the discussion as well to answer questions but also has to offer opportunities for you to ask questions I can answer as many questions as we can to the evening any question relating to marriage relationships dating emotional difficulties in distress hope to kind of combine Torah with psychology for here so we'll get lots of time for that tonight as well but I'd like to begin tonight I like to be in tonight discussing a concept which was noted by the time ascetic a long time ago over 20 years ago where he said chocolate ones I don't think good and it will be good very famous term in psychology I decided to write a book on this topics because I was very influenced by the positive psychology movement and I found its roots to be in the Torah so I decided to write a book to help people the thing more positive thoughts in their lives and so I wrote this book and you know sometimes when you write a book cutter Sparkle of course will help you if it's the right type of book and so along the way I started putting together a lot of ideas and writing about them and the ideas are also based upon things that I've experienced in therapy with people over the years this is not just coming as an idea but real life therapy with hundreds and maybe thousands of people over the years how I've helped them and how these ideas I try to bring the Thar ideas into the therapeutic environment to help people in a very profound way so I want to just start with two stories which summarize what the book is all about two very powerful stories and the first story the most inspirational idea on thinking positively comes from a Holocaust survivor named dr. Viktor Frankl many of you have probably heard of his name before dr. Viktor Frankl wrote a book called man's search for meeting he wrote this just after the Holocaust Frankel is a survivor of several concentration camps in the camps he lost his wife he lost his parents and he barely survived but he lived through these camps to describe his experiences in a book called man's search for meaning where he gives the history of what happened in Auschwitz perhaps for the first time for many readers around the world he actually wrote this book and didn't put his name on it he was such an enough he was so modest that he said this is not for me this my people that were murdered in the camps but his friends that you have to put your name on it no one will continue to read it and spread it and listen you have a person behind it they have to have a doctor behind him so he eventually put his name on it so Frankel experienced tremendous suffering in the camps and despite his suffering he talked about how he overcame his suffering it's a misnomer to believe if anybody studied Victor Frankel's works that his ideas came from the concentration camps it's not true his ideas came before the concentration camps in fact is another very famous book not as well read as man search for meaning it's a little bit harder about the beginners it's called the doctor and the soul he wrote way before the concentration camps and it turns out that when he got to Auschwitz he had it in his pocket he took his manuscript with him to outfit so it's all he had left and the first things and the first thing the Nazis did was they took away his manuscript poem and they burnt it but this actually turned out to save his life why you'll see his essential idea merging from the actual story that happened to him to him and why man searcher meeting is so important he was dying one night of his disease called typhus type is a disease which is spread by lights in the camps and one of the things which happens when you get typhus as many people develop a very high fever one hundred three hundred four hundred and five and he developed typhus in the camps in Auschwitz and he knew at the time as a physician that if he would fall asleep that night with a high fever he would experience cardiovascular collapse never heart attack a guy so he forced himself awake until his fever would break and he survived but how did he force himself awake what he did was he got little scraps of paper and you know you weren't allowed to paper in the cancer you could barter for it and give a piece of bread for a piece of paper um he got some scraps of paper together and what he did is he recreated his book that night on those scraps of paper and they kept him awake it saved his life though what did he teach us in the camps and what was his message from that story his message was that those in the camps that had an orientation towards the future that believed then they didn't know if it would be true or not but at least believed that they would fulfill a future meaning in their life a purpose in their lives had a greater chance of surviving the concentration camps this in fact was a very controversial statement if you believe you have a meaning you would survive of course you had no control whether the Nazis would kill you or not but he said you had one area of control and here is his main point the last of all human freedoms is your ability to choose your attitude when facing inescapable suffering this is a remarkable concept the Nazis could take away your body if you could take away your food they could take away everything you had but one thing they could not take away from you that one human freedom was your attitude towards them and towards your suffering so his first message and this is the first message of thinking it will be good is to live towards a higher meaning in your life in fact Viktor Frankl also said that those who get up in the morning and say I want to be happy will never be happy you cannot pursue happiness according to Viktor Frankl you need to pursue meaning when you pursue something meaningful what does he mean by meaning when you love somebody else that's an active meaning when you study something higher than yourself something greater like the Torah that's an act of meaning when you experience the cutter sparkle in the world then he talks about this in his books when you go out you look at mountains and look at the Sun we look gaze up at the stars like the Rambam says you look up in the stars you and he'll close day o see you are in awe of what you see in the universe and you jump back and you see yourselves as a brief cephalic a ton a small little speck of dust in the universe and you're in all the colors bar who Viktor Frankl talked about the same thing that is also an act of meaning so he says when you pursue meaning in your life happiness ensues it follows you so the goal is not to say I want to be happy the goal is to say what can i what meaning can i fulfill and the present is going to be happiness Story number one the second story is a true story from a mother who I interviewed from my book this is so sunken Nell lives and Eric's as well but she's from New York and 1994 a group of young buckram stewart and sheba students were crossing across the Brooklyn Bridge and an Arab Lebanese terrorists got up and started shooting the van very famous story and one young man was killed ari Halberstam no idea why do you know that name because when you drive from the FDR and you're going to the Brooklyn Bridge it's called the alley Ari Harbor stone bridge a rent that was named I think by the government the mayor of the time named it so but he was the young man who was murdered in that terrorist incident but another young man knock'em two sunken was shot also but he was shot in the head and he was rushed to the hospital and he was still conscious but when he got there he was suffering such internal bleeding in his brain that he went into a coma and they rushed him into surgery immediate surgery surgery and they had to remove a piece of Rangers to keep him alive move the brain the pressure on his brain and he went into a coma at that point the doctor was asked what is the chance of him living or surviving the surgery and having a meaningful life and the answer is I believe he said one in twenty maybe five percent chances men would actually living he'd never seen anybody actually lived such a such an injury and survived so what happened at this point at that moment his mother thought about it and she got up on television and to the bewilderment of everyone on TV and all the doctors listening to this interview she invited everyone to her son's wedding because I want everyone here to come and celebrate at my son's wedding Oboro senchan the story goes the true story is that Malcolm saw something this and he wanted to have a beautiful family and his beautiful children as well and I asked his mother what gave you the power what gave you the power to overcome such a potential tragedy in your life to invite everybody to your son's wedding despite his brain injury and she said the concept of think good and will be good think owner will be good means that our minds have the power to affect reality our minds have the ability to affect affect realities but I want to be very careful here this statement of chocolate of enjoyment comes from the Tanakh setting and I want to be careful because I don't want to be misused by people just about positive thinking it's not just about the positive thinking movement he was talking about but I want to share with you one of the time ascetic talk what did he mean think good and it will be good he described this on two levels the first level it says in a talk he takes in bloom Ohama when you go out to war for ISA and you see an arm bravia climb you see a nation greater than you Siuslaw recive you see a horse and a chariot in this great nation and you're a tremendous fear and you want to run back you said low torah journey hashem elokenu amalaka marital time I am the Lord your God that took you out of the land of Egypt so the term ascetic ask the question how is it possible that you can't be scared when more and more who goes out to war who's not scared and sure you that your family members or cousins that arts as well over here that had been the war been in the army who's not scared in the army a fool everybody feels fear during the war in an army so how could the tour be commanding assets I'm ecstatic how could the tour be commanding you to not do something but you're just going to do instinctively she says the Torah cannot mean that rather he says it's not that you can not feel fear rather despite your fear you distract yourself from your fearful class and therefore he says and this was concept of treating anxiety long before the university system invented therapy for anxiety or depression there's something called cognitive behavioral therapies I'll talk about in a minute long before the cognitive behavioral therapy movement was started 1960s by Aaron Beck plugging 150 years before this the Tanakh said it said one has to distract one's thoughts from their own fears what has to not pay attention to them that means that one cannot eliminate ones fears easily rather they should distract and focus on positive thoughts and gives many a totes many directives how to experience happiness tell a joke have a discussion with somebody you enjoy speaking to he said of course learning Torah is the greatest way to experience some common life do things which aroused joy in yourself in order to avoid your states of anxiety he also gives many a toast for example he quotes for moshe cordovero the remark and the remark who lives is may know in the 1500s the conscious before the re he gave a meditation on colors now this meditation on colors that i actually write in the book was translated by Ravi Rea Kaplan and rarely seen but the time aesthetic mentioned iPhotos importance it putted into his book it's a meditation on colors that you could look into the book when sorry Kaplan's book learn how to meditate eventually want you to think about the color white going through a beautiful garden eventually experience the color white he says one should wear white with some upside mentions this what to think about the color white and this would arouse the state of sense huh it's interesting you know he also mentions it's an aesthetic that one should also think about water and one wants to calm down meditate on water especially when you want to fall asleep you know they have these modern apps today we listen to water flowing he was already talking about this two hundred years ago that was the first point of time aesthetic to distract yourself from negative thoughts to fill your mind with positive thoughts that's why I call the book think that it will be good but this is deeper insight I want to share with you the deeper insight comes from helical um at Alice tonight's the York side of menachem mendel schneerson Ababa surrounding he says he asked a question on the time esthetics writings because there's another story which is more like the NACA mr. sunken story which is commonly told that a young man Susan a father came to the thumb aesthetic and his son was dying a terrible terrible illness and he didn't know what to do anatomists etic answered him he said chalk Woodman's I'm good think good it will be good and the story says that we started thinking positively son got better but he asked the question what does it really mean what is trunk Goodman so how could it be that you think something good and something good will come out of it how is it possible he believes that from the direction of the hobo Tova vote hobo salafi duties of the heart did his little heart describes as follows and says that a person needs to believe in a color Sparkle as if they're in ever taste lays in a ditch in the dungeon locked up and only his master can take him out of that ditch the whole lot of Avadh talks about and there's a something called the Sharpie Tejon the gate of trust he believes that a person needs to work deeply on implicating himself or herself with the concept of tremendous peace at home tremendous trust what's the difference a Munna he says is a belief in God state is one God is one cutters bark-beep Tejon is something much deeper much more internalized not that I just believe in God I believe that God has personally involved my life at every moment and he explains just like the slaves know that the only way out of this pit is to call out to his master he does when we believe in a cottage bar when we turn to him and say there's no one except you a note Nevada there's nothing else is fine so I've tried everything else because Barco it's up to you I'm here for you no one else can remove me from this difficulty or changes he says a college bar who also gives of himself caveat oh he also gives him himself and will actually change reality for the person this is of course a remarkable idea in addition I would say controversial as well but it's important to note that a rabbis mentioned the importance of this idea of turning to Co Sparkle giving him everything in time here only for you I've actually tested this out on a cycle these two ideas on a psychological level many times with people i first of all try to treat people saying here are some techniques to kind of distract yourself from anxiety let me give you some distraction techniques anybody experiences anxiety and wants to help themselves from it and of course most of us experience anxiety at some common our lives right it's part of human nature to experience anxiety but some people experience anxiety as I've seen therapeutically for a long time plus just they're a little bit scared of something they're always scared called generalized anxiety disorder so let me just give you a distraction technique that I find very effective it turns out that there's two parts of your brain there's the right side of the brain and there's the left side of the brain the right side of the brain is the seat of imagination and creativity that tends to be going to science on the right side of your brain the left side of your brain tends to be the side of logic remember that easily left for logic of your brain so anxiety primarily exists in the right side and the side of imagination what is anxiety except imagination you understand that point what is it besides you're imagining things turning out as a disaster how many people have experienced I can't say I mean almost everybody has unfortunately believed that things would not turn out the way they wanted them to they were going to turn out disastrously it turns out in cognitive behavioral therapy we call this a thinking trap there's several thinking traps one of the thinking traps people do when they have anxiety is definitely called abuse something called fortune-telling fortune-telling means I predict the future negatively I predict it negatively but to predict it negatively takes a tremendous amount of imagination this will happen that won't turn out well this person will say that this person won't like me it's a tremendously imaginative process real anxiety just like the time ascetic says this concept is now interested in psychology one has just shift one's brain from the right side to the left side so I'm going to give you a technique you can share with everyone that really works you know they say don't try this at home you can try this one another very easy all you need to do when you're feeling anxious is to do some math now how many of your loves doing math in one person well that's good because I don't want you to love doing that if you love doing math is to be too easy if you tell me you love math I'll give you some harder math with calculus but for most people don't like math right why don't you like math you know why it's hard yeah you have to see okay it's not very creative math unless you're doing letting theoretical mathematics and math is very hard for certain people however if it's hard few great so I want you to do this simple take a cue for feeling anxious and you're following the director that's an off setting I want you to start from 100 I want you to count backwards by 7 out loud in 193 I want you to count back seven seven seven maybe six seventy nine nine if done as many times of you so it's easy 72 if I was nervous I wouldn't do this 65 I want you to count backwards and I can do this experiment with you I want you to get extremely anxious right now get really worried terribly worried right now about something as you get worried I want you to count backwards from 100 by seven and if that's too easy let me make this easier let me make a little harder actually hi yo so easy that's too easy I want to make it hard seven focusing on the math how do you well if you do it by route there you go you know 5 10 15 20 25 30 or 95 80 and even go backwards it's gonna be - I I wanted to be hard so your mind has to sink itself focus on really hard - really I want you to experience concentration okay what kind of or so I give people a number I say pick a number a random number pick a number like you know 2426 and then count back by seven that's a little harder but you can actually do it just go really slowly so what happens is I almost guarantee you scientifically even if you're very anxious if you're really concentrating on math it will reduce your anxiety this is what it's about cellular safe if you distract your mind from your imagination and go to pure logic and reason you will see a reduction of your anxiety states so it's an extreme no I I've changed this over the years and because I'm both a rabbit a psychologist I can play with it so one of the exercises I give people is I tell him to use gamma trio's and for those that don't know I'm sure most of you know but those who don't a good mantra means every TV letters as a number salat as one bait is two puffs is twenty-one the certain time so here's a great technique and you can it could be Couture experience while you're reducing your anxiety look at any object if you're nervous and add up its numbers so you can add up coast if you like 26 and 60 add them enough to come to you you could take it book you could say safer right Adam the word safer and so on it's on and if you really want to challenge you could add up together safer and coast and if your other objects but if you look at objects and turn them into mathematics you'll see your mind just move towards the logical side and is able to reduce its anxiety so here's the answer you should take a math book one level behind beyond what you studied in school if it's challenging and I think that will help you honestly and I told a lot of my patients to start studying math they're very anxious but here you see the psychology Latura manifest revealed many years later and I can tell you one of the most important strategies that we learn in psycho psychologists help people reduce anxiety is this concept of distraction so this is extremely important it's a simple lesson today and how to reduce some of your anxiety to know about distraction we know about this concept of thinking positively there are people that despite this technique is despite using logic they suffer from extreme anxiety we call general anxiety disorder G a day or worse they suffer from something called OCD obsessive-compulsive disorder which I actually specialize in 3 and for somebody that has severe OCD their life is really overwhelming about 2 percent of the population is OCD so every 2 how do you stay with 100 people two people probably have some form of it but there's minor OCD and there's mate Rose would be some people what would be a little OCD you know you check your door a few times at night before you go to sleep once isn't enough minor ozium says that we all all of us I founded little OCD s so don't be worried if you do that a little bit but some people check the door 100 times before they go to sleep that's more severe right the more common OCD is people washing their hands alive right that's the class if you watch the movie that to me the OCD they're washing their hands a little bit so that's a common notion but oh so you could be slight they could be very powerful to be it can be so debilitating that people start hoarding or you can't leave their homes and they can't function properly so I treat these people as well and we do distraction techniques we do something called exposure therapy which I'm not very popular now tonight but sometimes therapy doesn't fully work sometimes therapy doesn't and we have to go to the next step you have to go a little bit further and that's actually why I wrote this book because I believe that therapy has its limitations therapy is limited and if you ask people that have been to therapists some people broke loose and found the therapist some people with an average therapist find that we can always find the right therapist it's like finding each other it's hard sometimes but even people who found good therapists will still report to me and to others there's something missing even after they've gone through psychologists treatment this is something missing from that experience I write about three stories in my book of people that also experiences or they went for cognitive behavioral therapy who went for EMDR which is eye movement desensitization reprocessing that's a trauma they've gone for Freudian psychoanalysis they've done a lot of stuff they tried tapping all types of things you probably know that out there it's not at all but they're still feeling depressed usually taken medication and here's the news medication doesn't always work medication is a broad stroke and there's side effects opponents by the way because I'm not against medication when necessary somebody's by functioning well Zaun is really ill and even occasionally get better specifically with severe depression medications necessary and other things bipolar disorder schizophrenia but many people that are in between and just try medication many report that they're just not satisfied with the medicines it's not working so I believe we have to do something beyond therapy with people and it turns out that's exactly what Viktor Frankl released and this is a major point I talked about in the book and I'll be talking weekly about this concept as we continue to study psychology at our Intel is that therapy has its limitations now I'm not the only one that's notices a very famous psychologist a PhD psychologist Margaret Warren Berg growth is very point and she believes as I do that there's two types of presentations you'll see that people suffer with some people have what we call situational problems anxiety or depressing while other people have more chronic difficulties in their life what's the difference what's it what the situation versus a crime the situational thing is I fail a test and I feel depressed that's the situational thing we know what happened then the person has to get over their failure and to pick themselves up I'm asked to go fall hard that situational Lindos away there's other things that people experience what we call of chronic some people have a lot of fear their whole lives or suffer from depression or Hawass or a lot of over emotional ization borderline personality is people that suffer with many types of things out there and it turns out according to Martha Orenburg that therapy also doesn't fully work for certain people but what does she say they need and this is what I believe it's good psychologists are coming to this awareness as well she writes that people what they really need beyond therapy is in daily meditative experience with prayer and spirituality remarkable they finally they finally admitted it what she's saying is therapy is not enough it's not fair to tell our clients with narcan Gena carefully they need something greater and that's why I wrote this book I brought for our psychology I'm hoping to bring for a psychology of my book into the world of therapy by using the writings of Viktor Frankl and great tourist dollars worth of some aesthetic and many others to show that the Torah actually can augment and improve therapy infused properly if used wisely the Torah has many incredible insights into how we can improve ourselves and how we can be happier and how can we think more positive thoughts that was the main point I wrote my book core and I called it spiritually based therapy because while using the Torah we could develop a more comprehensive therapy that hasn't existed before and that's by the way exactly Viktor Frankl said I'm assuming many of you are not students of Viktor Frankl you might have read his work but Viktor Frankl fought a tremendous battle as a psychologist he probably just know his work man search for meaning but what you didn't know if you didn't study psychology is nobody in the world of psychology talked to my Viktor Frankl including the University as I went to the master's programs I did and the college's I went to Viktor Frankl was never mentioned in anything ever that I studied in psychology he was a footnote of a footnote somewhere in some book he wasn't one of the main therapies that we studied things so we're going to therapist today not really studying Viktor Frankl is so lucky most have studied well they used to study Sigmund Freud they would study cognitive behavioral therapy they would study he and VR would be a common therapy they would study Carl Rogers which is what we called Klein focused therapy a lot of reflection a lot of validation towards the climb very warm supportive therapy but few of ever studies Viktor Frankl do you know why cause Viktor Frankl went to war against most modern psychology disagreed with it he actually believed that if a person focuses too much on him or herself it causes more emotional distress he called this concept hyper reflection so he believed paradoxically if you do too much therapy you get worse what he said he said this in the 1920s and Sigmund Freud went crazy this is public knowledge well Dawson isn't Sigmund Freud threw him out of his Institute of the Society of Segway nose he then went to Adler now let me just mention why he also said that Sigmund Freud said that the essential drive of a human being is what he called the ED and many of you probably drove his work in the it according to Freud was he says man is like an animal who has these animalistic drives for pleasure that's what drives the human being Alfred Adler the second great psychiatrist in Germany was on Vienna in Austria as well said that that's not true the essential drive of the human being is power people want to be powerful and that's why a lot of parenting books that you read today many years later are all based on empowering children you know the concept of empowerment and giving them extra curricular activities and complimenting them even they're not doing well that comes from Alfred Alber that concept we also introduced to us this idea family place in psychology I often ask clients what number child are you right that's cuz of Alfred Adler he believed in the middle child syndrome you've heard of the middle everybody's heard of the middle right this is all Alfred out he didn't know some alpha not much he said this said well by the way it's interesting people ask because I counsel people from many different communities from iron Heights popplers to borrow parks Williamsburg and some of the families come to me and they ask 15 children the question is which is number two is number 17 September 13 also the number two child in the family system and and I don't believe is it a specific answer and you know why because all these studies were done in the non-religious world and everybody had two kids or three kids so they can only look at three kids so there were many studies done in 15 people in the family but I think middle children could exist later on as well but if it why did the middle child suffer as an aside the middle child suffers because when the first child was born he or she is the king of the Queen that's why why do I have an inside fort or inside in the second I'll give you in a minute but there's a king or the queen then the little number two comes along two little baby right but number one is not very happy because he or she is lost as her pedestal that knocked off her pedestal but let's just go for the boy so he he regains the pedestal afterwards he becomes king number two kind of fits and lying the fin falls in line to survive number one but then what happens number three comes along oh boy when three comes along it shapes the world of number one disease attention he gains it back but three is a cute little baby cute little baby but number two suffers because he's not that before and he's not the cute little baby so their loss so a lot of children who I've treated who are teams at risk many of them are second children I'm going to start thinking the true you may find a giving truth you may find that second children kids of teens at risk are not second children too so but I'm telling you it is a theory have that many of them have suffered because they are second so they're kind of the you know the lost the lost children but going back to Adler he said that human beings drive is for for power and if there is the if the search for power is frustrated then they turn towards negative behavior is enacting ad and so in depression anxiety Viktor Frankl came along says is Mestral well it may be true on a surface level but there's a deeper more fundamental drive that a human being has which is what search for me instead it's tremendous hop he said if a person search for meaning is frustrated they don't find purpose and lies then they fall down to power into pleasure but it's not the essential drive the human being it's a secondary join so what is it teaching us number one we have to give our children and ourselves if to find a sense of purpose a sense of meaning in our lives and that's why I had a problem with having too much focus on the self that mr. Franklin this is Albert Android was what he said stimulate what he called hyper reflection too much what we have to go beyond ourselves and it gives a beautiful muscle he says a person can't reach behind his back and pull himself up you can't pull yourself up higher you need something higher than yourself need something greater than yourself to aspire towards and then you can go up that was earth to Franklin song and therefore he challenged all psychology and therefore no one was interested in him because they were going in absolutely opposite direction they're talking about more about this off let me be careful there's a lot of Hoffman in psychology as well cognitive behavior therapy is a remark entirely talks about your thoughts so I've been feeling extremely helpful in fact in Kabbalistic and pathetic thought there's a lot of structures about first you have thoughts and your feelings actions customer and so on so he was right on in calling an animal therapy but Freud and cognitive behavioral therapy names ER is they don't focus which they don't put away on finding a higher sense of purpose in your life to pull you beyond yourself they're lacking there's something to something lacking so according to frankly we have to pre suppose that a person has deep inside it into her a deep search from meaning we have to help them discover that meaning therapeutically as well as to challenge them to find more meaning and therefore introducing psychology introducing into psychology Vitara introducing spiritual concepts will be extremely helpful for people in fact I believe it balances out the two different sides you need to work on the self and that's okay Lloyd algorithm clamps you also have to work on the other side the spiritual dimension of the human being Frank we'll call that spiritual dimension noooes which means meaning you have to go into the world of newest what we call the world of the Torah world over Camille the world with spirituality to complete the therapeutic process and therefore they go hand in hand both psychology and Torah complete the person can help them us and both are necessary to improve people's lives especially if they suffer from anxiety depression on a chronic level or for all of us for that matter whatever we struggle with we can look perfect ecology for health we have to find also meaning in a time and this is the first ride of hopefully many many lectures to proceed but I'm just introducing this constant we will be discussing psychological insights and Torah insights how this can all come together and how we could help people improve their lives more effective