Panel discussion

and also why should you guys have to here well he's getting another mic he's getting another mic he's getting another mic all right you want to start go ahead okay perfect time all right all right okay yeah all right yeah all righty okay does anybody oh is that better no all right there is an echo and i can't stand the sound of my own voice but every summers we raised two million dollars for tour anytime on something i kind of get a kind of kind of working mic okay all right now everybody knows why i wasn't hired as a singer here we go our topic today which i know i'm just testing the other panelists and they don't know so i'm going to tell them is there is there such a thing as enabling the answer is yes now okay so enabling is a term uh generally used in the world of addiction hi my name is yasie benshushan i am currently making of yeshiva high school of cleveland bar hashem that is not where i get my experience in addiction um we are a non-mainstream high school that is just uh for specifically awesome kids that's it that's our one requirement if if you don't laugh at my joke you don't get in that's the one that's the one part of the interview we fly them all the way to cleveland i say a joke they get it they're in they don't get it it's over um however uh the rest of my day is spent working with families and teenagers specifically but also spouses of um people suffering from substance abuse usually enabling uh 15 years in rehabs okay we got the point usually enabling is a term specifically used for addictions within the addiction field it does not though stay specific to that at all it is not exclusive it is not a term exclusively for that it could be for any sort of negative behavior that we enable the enabler is not the person i don't know if this is obvious or not but the enabler is not the person who is acting out the enabler is the person that is part of either family friends job support group of some kind that is enabling this behavior to continue that's enabling this behavior to continue now it's a very great area when you want to speak about it in general terms because what can sound like being sympathetic and being apathetic showing empathy to a person can very much sound like enabling them if we don't have the specific case in front of us but let's get what enabling is not enabling is not listening to a person and nodding that's not enabling enabling is not showing sympathy towards what they're going through enabling is definitely not being supportive through a conflict no matter what that conflict is no matter how twisted or bad that conflict is showing support and listening to that person and being supportive of that person is not enabling we the way i like to explain to parents of of addicts or any parent really even if it's their spouse that's going through it is that we refuse to enable our children usually little children we call kids out right away on something now a lot of times we go too far and we're not showing support i'm sure we're gonna have a speech about that later but for right now enabling enabling is supporting a person through the direct means of them acting out now again it's a very gray area and the therapists are going to speak more to the uh the specifics i'm sure i'll bring up specific cases i have no idea for taking questions or not but yeah okay great and however the main term that we need to understand over here is that there are certain require requirements before we even get to is there such a thing there are certain requirements that a person has to have or that a situation or a case has to have in order for us to even consider whether or not this is considered enabling or not number one there has to be a negative acting out this can't just be someone who's upset someone who's angry someone who's there has to be a direct negative acting out which is why it so commonly happens within the addictions field the classic example is when uh just by way of example uh a teenage boy comes over to his father his father gives him a hundred dollars a week he comes over two days into the week and he says i need another hundred dollars and the father knows his boy has had substance abuse issues before and so on and so forth and he says what for and he gives him some excuse two days later he shows up back and the father says i don't want to start up with him i don't want to get him angry i don't i'm i'm too scared sorry i give them the money what else am i supposed to do that would be the classical case of enabling obviously it could get more specific and and and worse again it is a broad broad subject but enabling the one common concept that i have personally found in enabling is fear any time now we always have to ask i ask everyone has to ask we have to ask either the professionals or our robunum or whoever it is before we make these types of moves but any time fear is running our response specifically if that response is us caving in anytime fear is running our response i'm not telling you not to be afraid we're all afraid but when fear is the engine behind what we're doing you could almost be guaranteed that the other end side of that is enabling i'm going to end with this the one downside or at least this part with this the major downside what is so bad about enabling the major down is there oh yeah uh soon unless it's a clarifying thing am i not being clear about something okay so um the one the major downside to enabling is that specifically if we're gonna uh refer to addictions or anything along those lines the person who is suffering and who is acting out will not be able to come to terms with what they're doing they won't be able to hit the proverbial rock bottom because everybody keeps cushioning the blow because everybody keeps allowing the behavior without any sort of natural consequence i'm not asking you to make the consequence i'm allowing you to allow nature to have the natural consequence so a boy who gets in trouble with the law i i have a very close friend i'm not going to say his name right now or on camera but i have a very close friend who runs a very big a i'm advising your parents to do the same now obviously when we say getting in trouble with the police he's referring to you know larger things and the kid can get a speeding ticket but spit his gum out in public i'm saying it's not they still ticket for those things but we're not allowing we keep bailing them out we're not allowing this child we're not allowing this person we're not allowing this adult to be able to have the natural consequence of their actions and therefore learn from their actions learn from their mistakes and grow we're not allowing that to happen so in reality we are killing this person and if you've ever been to any sort of anonymous meaning you will constantly hear when they're saying their stories constant stories constant stories of how my dad my mom my rabbi my this my that thought they were helping thought they were helping by paying this one off getting me out of this getting me out of this getting me out of that and then all of a sudden the end of their story usually is so sitting in this person's cell waiting i was uh i heard the story a few days ago sitting in this prison cell just waiting for my dad to come by my way out you know he was tight with all the police and the prosecutor and this and that all of a sudden sun sets and i'm sitting in holding with a bunch of drunks and not the best of people there was a there wasn't a minion in there and he wasn't coming i started to realize oh no this might have been it and that was a tremendous turning point in his life now again every specific situation has a specific answer and a specific idea and a specific major to follow as a general idea and that's my general thing on a opinion on it is enabling real sure it's real is it as common as people make it sound i don't know is it as detrimental as people make it sound is it as damaging sure okay can you hear me all right so my name is nate negoblot i'm a licensed clinical social worker private practice and i'm also the clinical outreach manager for recovery at the crossroads so i work with a lot of families before they come into treatment i work with families from all over the united states really globally and these families are struggling they're the ones you're reaching out it's usually not the addict who calls me up it's usually a parent it's usually a grandparent sometimes family members sheba system and i can work with families for up to six months before the addict will ever get into a treatment facility and sometimes they don't get into a treatment facility but the families are getting the support that they need and just as an aside and i know this isn't the topic but i am incredibly grateful for all of you being here and for what kesha now has done it the reason why i'm saying it is because you know i'm a therapist because he didn't i'm not going to throw this but we work with the individual it literally takes a village and this is that village when parents get the support that they need whether it's peer support professional support guidance just someone to listen to um it can be the world of a difference in a child's life i tell every parent that i work with and i'm going to throw it out as a theory you can agree disagree i'm curious to see what you guys think but the most impactful relationship a person will have in their lives is the relationship with a parent right i think every single person here in this room is a child of a parent think about that relationship think about how impactful that's been in your life when parents get the support that they need parents get the guidance that they deserve it's solid gold for their children it's worth a thousand therapy sessions so just by way of introduction incredibly grateful for everyone being here and for the for the platform um i must have gotten like 10 people come over to me before the event um so what do you think about enabling is it real is not real am i enabler and i feel like there's so much anxiety around this topic like am i enabling am i doing the right thing am i not i also feel like the word is is a pejorative there are a lot of there are a lot of pejoratives in the field of addiction where there's like words that have a condescending meaning i feel like enabling is one of those um i have never worked with a parent who wanted to harm their child i'll take it and i think it's really important to put that out there right a parent who might be enabling is not doing it because they want their son or child or daughter to overdose right or to remain an addict for in perpetuity that's not why they're doing it and i think this is sort of indicative of a lot of aspects of drug addiction can we see past the tip of the iceberg right it's usually not about the drugs i i don't know if again curious if you guys would agree with that or disagree in my experience it's usually not about the drugs the drugs are symptomatic of a much larger issue right i have clients who are not active users and the families are complete disarray they're not actually using but all of those underlying issues are there whether it's anxiety depression trauma um the way that i like to to sort of conceptualize addiction it's just a coping mechanism right we're all trying to cope we're all trying to find ways to get through life and these people have found an unhealthy one right one that happens to be incredibly addictive chemically and behaviorally addictive but i think the same thing is true for enabling right where is it coming from what's beneath the enabling yes you mentioned the fear right there's this cliche word called codependency right we're not going to use labels but what does it mean to you to comfort your child right where is it coming from can we better understand it because i think if we put a label on it you're an enabler we shut down the conversation we can't move past sort of that tip of the iceberg so i think the word enabling if we can sort of get get it out of our jargon and i think the better sort of way of framing it is where is this going two three four steps ahead right i always tell parents can we play chess while they're playing checkers what's our objective right we want to be able to create a genuine positive relationship with children we want to be able to give them unconditional love how do we give them unconditional love without feeding into an incredibly without feeding into an insidious disease and i'm going to mention it now because it doesn't always get talked about but addiction is fatal not everybody survives addiction and it's something that we just need to be aware of i don't know if we talk about it enough i don't know if there's enough awareness but this is russian roulette so i think the question really is how can we build those relationships with our children have that positive regard the unconditional love without falling into the trap of supporting the addiction enabling or allowing the the addiction to sort of flourish and one last thing that i'm just going to mention on the topic of enabling when i work with families sometimes i'll have one parent who wants to support or enable the addiction they buy the drugs they get the klonopin the xanax the alcohol and another parent who is incensed over the fact that you know my spouse is allowing this to happen and very quickly it breaks up the family right we talk about this triangle in therapy where we want the parents to be the base of the triangle and the child to be the point and when we have that united front we can make an impact on the child and very quickly that triangle gets distorted and we end up having parent and child as the foundation and the other parent as the tip on the outside and we end up dealing with a family system that's really broken so again it's not about the enabling it's about the impact that it has on the family the family systems approach and what is our objective how can we develop these positive relationships with children without feeding the addiction but also what is the fear what is the reason what is it about for me what is my need to enable my child's addiction and i think those are really really important questions to ask instead of labeling and you know this condescending you are enabling you're not ask what does it mean for you how important is it i had a family that i'm working with um and it turned out that this parent was a people pleaser they struggled with a sense of self from a very young age they themselves were went through an abuse abuse of abusive childhood and they needed people to love them especially their own family so when they were going out and getting their kids annexed it wasn't about the xanax it was about i can't have my kid be mad at me i don't know how to live in that world and it was so much more about the parents own journey than it was about oh you're enabling you need to stop and the challenge was you know in this specific case the spouse didn't see that right the spouse just saw my spouse doesn't care about our child and he they're just poisoning our child so i think it's really important to sort of ask those questions where is it coming from what does it mean for me instead of just labeling it and shutting it down but yeah okay so hello it's on no no so okay um so apparently yes he hadn't checked the schedule to see who was speaking nasano apparently did i did also and i think the first thing i have to say is i am not sani perlman so i'm also not an addictions expert i don't work with addictions but just to give you an idea of who i am and what i do and why they asked me to sit up here you know that kid that you're struggling with i i was that kid i taught that kid i was the principal for that kid i counsel that kid i counsel the appearance of that kid and i have that kid so my name is mayor zuckerman i'm an lcsw i have a private practice in lakewood i also had this just to be the english principal under of david trang satsal for nine years and a lot of a lot of who i am is a result of what rebbe did for me as an adolescent i'm gonna leave now that's it okay i have nothing else just do it that's it a lot of who i am today is the result of what rebbe did for me as an adolescent so if you're wondering can someone go through it and come out the other side i i think that i could testify you can and i'm not saying i'm you know develop or anything but i made it through but in my day as a child drugs were not really a thing the only drug that we had access to and that we used was alcohol and alcohol today it's a drug alcohol is a drug we tend not to think of it so much as a drug but it is a drug and it is used today by the children as well but unfortunately today and i could say you know i have a child in this sparsha as well and we know that our children often times are turning to much more serious substances than merely alcohol and it's unfortunate my expertise what i work with a lot in my practice is working with the parents of struggling at adolescents and young adults i say struggling some are what is called either kids that pain or kids at risk but that's not the whole story there are also people who are mainstream who are quote unquote making it and yet there's that struggle and the family piece is an extremely important piece in the whole dynamic but i want to also address it from the point of view of having such a child because we were we were hearing about parenting from fear the fear response and i i totally yes he is absolutely what he's saying is absolutely true if we're parenting from fair we're going to do the wrong thing but rabbina shalom the fear we feel and i i thought i was empathetic as a therapist as i worked with people i've been working with this a very long time maybe even when my daughter was just a little kid she's 18 now and there is no comparison when she's out late at night and i have no idea what she's doing when she says she's going to the park and i know that's where transactions take place and i don't know what she's buying and what she's using and what she's doing the fear is overwhelming no we should not parent from fear but it is so difficult it is so difficult to be there in that moment and that's no different for me than it is for you and if i speak over shabbos i'll probably tell you about the times i did the right thing and i was successful because i don't like telling you about the times i did the wrong thing and i said the wrong thing and i blew it really badly i probably should tell you more about that it's easy when someone walks into my office to maintain that posture and be empathetic and stay out of it and then if you come to me about your child i feel confident that i could guide you but when it's me and my wife and it's three in the morning someone said it yesterday i think maybe with shimon russell i want to call someone and say what should i do next and i'm on someone else's phone they want to call me but when it's my kid rubina we are terrified and we have no idea what to do more often than we would like to i would say more often than not and and for sure more often than we would want it to be it is so hard but we must keep in mind that the parenting and family peace is key to the whole situation and when we talk about enabling let's be real we cannot control what our children do or don't do have you figured that out yet do you realize that we have no control zero it's so important to realize that and another thing what they're doing or not doing it's not because of us it even if we manage i do also i managed to beat myself up and kick myself if only if i would have maybe if i at that point should i have shouldn't i have i made the wrong choice some of the time hashem with seattle i also happen to have made the right choice some of the time but it was all seated when i made the right choice and if she's using it's not because of me and i can't control whether she's going to use or not and then i have to decide and each case says yes he said and it's so important to keep that in mind i borrow hashem yesterday i got so much just from being here yesterday i told them last night i already got my money's worth yesterday by last night i'm full everything else hakoreva everything that we're getting it's amazing so one of the things that we we have to take from this we have to know it's not about us they're doing it because they're doing it they're doing it because that's where they are and oftentimes more often than not they're self-medicating they are in such deep pain and they're going to use because they're in pain and i i started saying i interrupted myself yes he said about individual cases and we hear things from the stage we talk to other people we hear things from other people you know i had an interesting uh thing once i had heard this from shimon russell before i was in the field i once heard him speak and he said something and then it happened to me i was seeing two bachran and in the course of conversation i realized these two guys will have ruses and they learn together at night and i was wondering like when they ever learned together one guy was coming to me monday night one guy was coming to me wednesday and i'd say the night say that sunday to thursday they were both dating i don't know if they ever saw each other they probably saw me more often than they saw each other but eventually they figured out they probably showed up the same night and they started schmoozing and they figured out that they're both seeing zuckerman and they started comparing notes and they were both coming for the same problem but i was telling them totally different things and it was very devastating to their treatment that they started shooting with each other because they they needed different things so when we hear things this is a supermarket idea when you're in the supermarket and you come to the cereal aisle and that 10 15 hashem can i know how many even kosher cereals there are and you just take the one you like you pull the one off the shelf the one that's for you but there's another cereal there somebody else likes it or somebody else needs it and that thing just leave on the shelf and as you hear things and want to absorb them and want to use them check back with whoever's working with you or helping you or helping your child does this does this work in our situation not everything works with everybody but very commonly our children are self-medicating they're hurting and they're using and we can't make them use and we can't make them not use and then we have to step back and let it be them and their problem i i could say it so easily i can't do it so easily but i could say it so easily because it's the truth and it's what we need to do and it's so difficult and so painful to step back and then this was said in different words and you've heard this before we have to accept them and accept them in their pain and in the things they're doing and acceptance does not mean approval if i accept my child a hundred percent it does not mean i approve of what she's doing and it's the same for you and that goes a very long way it's not enabling but it's accepting it's listening it's being there for them it's being there with them and it's allowing them to have their journey and to stay off that roller coaster when we get too emotionally involved in their journey and of course we're emotionally involved with parents how could we not be emotionally involved but when we put ourselves we hook ourselves our car to their car and they go up and we feel so good and then they crash if your child is using and then they're clean chances are i hate to say it but the statistics chances are they're going to be using again and if your happiness is totally connected to whether or not they're using how are you going to survive and presumably you have a life most of us probably have other children that we're responsible for and other things in our life that we're responsible for right so how are we going to function if everything is dependent on what's going on with that child it's impossible and we have to be able to work on this idea on stepping back as painful as it is as difficult as it is to step back to remove ourselves a little bit that doesn't mean that i'm not empathetic doesn't mean i don't feel along with my child i must and then allow it to be my child's journey it's not my journey and sometimes they're up and i'm very excited and sometimes it goes the other way i'm devastated but i'm not it cannot impact it cannot destroy everything else that's going on in my life we have to be able to separate from them and then just one more thing that i want to throw out there it was mentioned about the parental relationship there's a sibling relationship and in actuality a sibling relationship is the single longest relationship that we will ever have in our lives our parents are the previous generation our children are the next generation we meet our parents and we travel with them a portion of our life our children come into our lives as we're adults our siblings we join them in the family at birth and they remain our siblings all the way all the way through it's the longest relationship we will have in our lives so sometimes i know i'm just throwing this out there it's not really on our topic but unfortunately i hear this so often siblings not being supportive of our our journey with our children sometimes and it's so painful because they are our siblings and it's so important but the sibling of the child who's struggling the journey of the sibling of the child who's struggling i've heard it said that they want to make organization they want to create programs they want a lot of those children are not going to attend those programs and that's why they they have not in lakewood they try to do it those siblings are so embarrassed they feel so terrible about that other child they don't want to be identified with it but it's something serious a serious concern we're talking about enabling however there's always that concern what is what is this child teaching the other children what behaviors are the other children seeing how is it impacting what else is going on in the house and how does it impact the relationship i want my children to be close but if he'll be close with him or he'll be close with her what is it going to do to that other child very very important topic and i'm going to invite you guys to also respond to that please but so important that we consider that in our look at enabling and the system the family system around the child who is using a very very important point that we have to address as well so i'm i'm sitting back now these guys are the experts and i'm waiting to hear them and learn from them [Applause] okay so however vast of a topic um asano did an amazing job the better looking sonic perlman did an unbelievable job and of of what of what it is that we're we're really looking forward to clarify i just want to say so a little while back i'm sitting there and two parents come into my office i see mrs lanker he is here she's the only one who's gonna really understand this story from me um two people come into my office and it was the reverse of my parents my father is moroccan that's why i called out mrs lange i'm sorry mrs lincoln calling you out um my uh my father's moroccan um my mother is very much not moroccan she's uh she's white she is white power white she is uh from brighton beach brooklyn before the russians she used to fight italians all day i don't know it depends what stories you believe the point is is that um um this couple comes in and a little bit reminiscent of my parents but it was the other way around the father was a uh very uh american man he was a doctor is a doctor um the wife was an israeli sephardic woman i honestly have no idea the answer to all your questions right now i don't know i don't know sitting in that room i had no idea after they left i was questioning my own reality of how in the world that works but it was it was entertaining to say the least however they come in and they have a son who's struggling uh addictions and so on and so forth and the father says to me he was getting very very uh he was getting very overwhelmed and very upset and i'm trying to explain to him the idea that the addiction is just a symptom if we try to treat the symptom there's no such thing you can't treat a symptom you can only treat the disease you can treat symptoms all day long the disease will still remain you can try to minimize a symptom you could try to but to treat it is impossible because it's being born out of somewhere else and it's going to keep being born until until you treat the disease he said he looked me right in the eyes with a straight face and there's no judgment here really because i don't think and i'm talking about myself here i don't think he's the only person i know that has thought something like this before he looked me right in the eyes and he goes why can't he just have leukemia it was leukemia i get if someone has leukemia he can't go to yeshiva no one's asking him why he's not going to nightsader he has leukemia no one's asking him why he's hanging out in that hospital room all day laying in bed till 12 o'clock he has leukemia the one mistake this guy made was that he forgot that there was a sephardic woman sitting next to him and you do not say something like that in front of me and i don't know if i had if i have that i'm not a therapist so i understand i didn't but the the responsibility to report this she took her bag and whacked him [Laughter] and she started rattling off curses in arabic like you would not believe to which he responded he goes why are you giving everyone breakfast now and i'm like that's how this marriage has been making it this long i need you to understand something there is so much beauty to what your husband just said she was the one that was being very supportive and loving and and empathetic to her son and her husband was very much struggling with it and i said to her he's trying so hard to relate [Music] to understand this kid that he would say something so insane and mean it just so that he can feel like i can do something for him now i'm a doctor i could be there for this kid now i can actually affect the change for him i can support him and i turned him and i said if khalilah that would be the case and i saw her give me a look i'm like hallelujah that would be the case would you feel confident that you can cure him he said no i said would you feel confident to say that you're going to get him back on track like that and it's just going to be a couple of medicines he's good to go he said no i said what would you do he said i would understand what's happening and i wouldn't leave that bedside table for a second if we're reaching the point of fear which is natural and understandable as i said and is good because then sonos said i don't know a single parent it has ever okay that's not true [Laughter] oh it's really not true it's just this is regular not you i don't know a single parent that is out there trying to actively hurt their kids even those that are by the way they still think they're doing something to to save the kid to help the kid the fear is natural and it's good for many reasons they're not going to get into now but it's good however when we start enabling the reason we're enabling is because we feel lacking in some other area the arche the hierarchy of the family has shifted and now the kid's in control and i just keep using that example it could be whoever the focus over here of the one acting out is now in control to say the only way you can prove that you care for me is to do this and this and this we have to be confident enough to know we have to be solid enough to know that that's not true how a shabbat like this is the perfect place to start with something like that if we want our children to stay in the rut that they're in we hide them we make believe like it's not happening and like a cancer it grows if we want to truly affect change it starts with us and it starts with us as a group negating extreme abuse and other things like that the boys that i know that are on a lower level of going off the direct that have went off i don't know a single one of them that went off because of shabbos they say shabbos is annoying because they want to use their phone but that's coming from somewhere else it's not shabbos i don't know any of them that went off because of dancing on samha's torah i don't know a kid who went off because of his mother's talent i don't know a single kid who went off for that i know a kid who went off because of yeshiva system that we invented 50 years ago didn't accept or diminish or didn't that i know a kid who went off because a black hat that wasn't in his family's heritage at all was all of a sudden forced onto his head and and and he was and he was an ice fire if he didn't do it we need to get ourselves straight our love for our children is intrinsic and it's real and it has nothing to do with how and what they do our children do not reflect us but they are superbly affected by us i was in training once and with this i was in training once i was a very big doctor someone mentioned something about a hug or something he had a physical touch within a thing in a hug it was specifically referring to a parent to a child or a siblings also and he uh he backhandedly said he's like yeah you know two thousand dollars yeah and i was like i'm sorry what it's like two thousand dollars it's two thousand dollars like what are you talking about he's like developmentally i've figured out that i charge two hundred dollars per session one hug is worth ten sessions i call them the two thousand dollar hugs [Applause] a hug and i cannot be more specific about this everybody knows the famous uh martial famous story we tell hassanam because this is what they need to hear i was said very sarcastically um about the this woman shows up to a rabbi and she says to him my husband doesn't love me she says why do you think that she's like we're married a year two years three years the guy does not say i love you ever ever ever never he says let me let me let me see what's going on over here calls on the husband he says to the husband your wife came and she said you don't say i love you he's like i don't know what her issue is the night we got married i told her i love you if anything changes i'll let you know your child is not our children my child does not have to do anything to deserve a hug the term deserving a hug is wrong and there is never an inopportune or wrong time to give it i don't care if your father hugged you or didn't you don't care how the affection worked over there then break the cycle be the one to break the cycle there is never a wrong time for that we enable because we're trying to make up for what we didn't do if we resolve ourselves to do what we already know we should do we will never need to cross the path of enabling i know everyone's thinking the same exact thing so am i i told her of kadalia last year we should start catching offshit on a thursday everyone go home on a friday to hug their kids give them kisses and just hold them and then we'll come back for shabbos because everybody wants to go home right now but the fact of the matter is is that we will never need to cross that road if we build up the tank on the other side then when they say if you don't give me that money if you don't give me if you don't want to go if you don't let me go out right now if you don't let me you don't love me we'll never believe them and instead we're going to give them a hug [Applause] all right so i think we're probably opening up to questions jessie what do you think we'll open it up i think i think that was a sort of a great way to end um but if anybody has any questions anybody wanna so so the question is what it what it what happens if the kid refuses a hug i'm gonna let jesse answered because he was the he brought up the hugging um but um i i'm i'm wondering if there are other ways of showing love and affection to people um i i'm just curious i i don't know i don't know in specific cases but yes i don't believe it um the child might be sensitive child might be there's a gentleman what sensory i'm sensory [Music] i'll speak about my kid uh my childhood sensory and um yeah there might there might be a case there are situations where they don't you know with extreme circumstances in the background trauma and the like uh there is a hug though so it's not a hug but there is a hug and i very rarely when putting a parent because i've been asked that question when putting a parent up against a wall i very really didn't get an answer what the hug is what's the hug and by the way it's annoying i'm gonna tell you right now it's annoying the hug might be driving him to school instead of him taking the bus guys it's okay not going to your yoga class that day that might be the hug the hug might be letting them sneak that candy even though you've decided that there's no more sugar in the house i don't know i don't know what the hug is but i can almost guarantee you if it's your kid you know what the hug is if i may and to continue um culturally culturally especially in a sidisha home and and even in a litvisher home oftentimes a boy hits a certain age and mommy is not hugging him anymore um and the same thing with a father and a daughter so it is very true it's not always a sign of a problem when when a child is not accepting a hug it could be very appropriate to the culture of the home it is true that if you started hugging your children for when they're very young there's a greater chance that they'll allow you to continue when they're older but if we come home from kashanashi and decide to hug all our children we may find you know there's a rebellion because right then then of course you could send them over you know but uh what i'm saying is that that it's not it's not always it it's not always so so true but it's the i love you it's the i love you that's that's i think when yasi is saying the hug it's the i love you and you know my father is a mechanical excellent of ravaran he went into when i was born and and he's still in china today baruch hashem hara and my father never in my life i don't recall my father ever saying i love you and yet i've never had a doubt a day in my life that my father loves me and my parents moved around the corner from me about a decade ago and baruch hashem i get to be mashamish a lot and i'm in the house a lot and i talk over cases with my father my father sometimes talks over some of the things that come to him with me and so terehi volumera needs i need to know and i said ta why is it that you never said i love you to us because i tell my kids i love you 100 times a day you know every time i see them i'm saying i love you and my father said my parents never said i love you to me his parents got married during the depression they didn't have anything and it wasn't a thing and they never said i love you and so he didn't say i love you to me so does that mean i shouldn't say i love you to my children they addressed that yesterday it's not mini gov is saying that we don't say i love you we're living in 20 20 almost 20 22 and we say i love you because that's what we have to do but we must make sure whether it's a physical hug or not that our children know know that we love them i'm going to get some more questions just one quick point on the hugging i was going to bring it up but just to comment very quickly just very quickly is it ever hard to hug our children i think it's important to ask that question i think we all know how important it is to hug them but why is it hard i think we can't be oblivious to what parents are going through you know it's really hard to be superman to our children when we're running on empty when parents have resentment and disappointment and guilt and shame and public humiliation these are real things that parents live with and i work with it with parents not just with addiction parents of of teenagers in general we all have wishes and dreams and goals of what we want for our children when it doesn't work out we live with that we're human beings we're not robots i think it's just i'm really putting it out there because i had a client recently [Applause] i just just very very quickly and i want to get to the questions i just had a client very very recently who um it was a consult who was a family member of a family that i'm working on and i don't use this word lightly but it is a highly abusive relationship family setting and i really don't use that word callously and i asked the person have you ever been to therapy and they said no i don't believe in therapy i don't need it everybody deserves support especially the heroes in this room you guys are the lifeline for your children you deserve every support you can get it it is our job as professionals to try and provide it but you guys deserve it and i think it's just again going back to the question can we understand what's going on beneath the surface for us process that and then maybe we can get to a place where we can do the hugging we can give that unconditional love all right question like watching all of this happen and the the fine line between that and protection so you want to protect yourself and let's say what's the way that we go about it when let's say let's go back to your money right and you don't want to enable them but then where's the trust come in how you spending your money what are you spending your money on and you know you want to show your kids that you believe in them and that you trust them but yet you don't want to enable them to spend money on things and you're not always with them to know where they're going with their money and you love them and you don't want to parent what are they going to do are they going to steal for it are they going to get it from some other terrible place like we don't want to all right so i'm going to let jesse answer the question but i i do just want to point out and again correct me if i'm wrong but i'm sensing an underlying anxiety what will be and this is one of the major issues that i work with when i'm working with families the anxiety of living with the unknown because we don't know unlike mr zuckerman said we can't control it we can't anybody here ever try and control an addiction any success we don't know what's going to happen i had a parent this is hard for me to hear i had a parent tell me that their heart their their child lives in their house and they will periodically call them on the phone or text them and when they don't get a response they'll check on their room because they're worried that they died and they're living every day with the anxiety that my child might overdose and i can't control that and i think it's just important to notice that like the anxiety is real i so i want now jessie's going to answer that question but i just wanted to note that the anxiety is real yes he is passing me to mike but i i'm not gonna i i'm going to tell you the question the question was you know here the question was so do we give them the money or not and then that fear the trust we we often come to a place with our child where we realize that we cannot trust them and we do not know what they're going to do and we're stuck with that question and honestly i i i say this as a froome person they didn't teach me this at rutgers but when you hit that point that's the time to open it to helen and i have to tell you we were sitting one matsuri shabbas my wife and myself and one of our married couples who was very much helping us with the situation that had happened and it was mate chavez thursday friday we had been frantically working on a very very very difficult and painful situation and i'm gonna tell you shabbos as we were sitting to just what are we gonna do now and the question came up between us and it just came into my head and i said the following adam the three partners in a person the mother the father and akadesh baruch between thursday and friday we had called everyone we knew that we could possibly call we asked them to give us the names of anyone else that could help that situation we tried every single thing that we were able to try and then by the time shabbos entered this is where we ended up and i said if i have done everything i know how to do and enlisted the help of every person that i know of or that i could find that may be able to help me and then this is where i ended up then hashem now it's your turn [Applause] i i what i say is i'm not saying you could throw your hands up and do nothing you must do everything you can that's ishtardless means that i did everything that was within my power and i consulted with every i called professionals i am a professional i called other professionals i called us conan i was involved we we were immersed in atsara and we did we did not just throw up our hands and say okay who do that you know the stories that about shem tov and he just let the horse go wherever it would go it got him exactly with abrasive wanted him i'm not confident that if i tried something like that at all you know i don't i don't have an anything i don't have the right i don't have this muslim i'm not that person but when i have done everything when you have done everything when you have poured your heart and soul into your child when you have gone to every person who could help and i'm looking at the men because when we have gatherings and they do things it's easy for me to find women to come to my office to look for help and it's much harder for us as men to be vulnerable and come in it hurts us it is so hard for us there is so much shame we feel like such failures and then we just we can't but if we have if we've done it all everything we could think of and that anyone that we could find to help us has advice and we tried everything that's what i'm talking about at that moment you have to realize hashem put you here it's not easy i'm not i'm not the the type who does this i'm not i'm not i don't do the spiritual talking usually it's not it's not naturally me but that's the moment we have to realize i am here exactly where hashem intended me to end because i've done everything that i could think of and that people advised me to do and then at that point so i'm i turn to hashem and i say okay so now i'll wait to see what happens next please [Applause] and thank you thank you for and thank you for sharing that um i'm i'm i'm going to get to i'm going to get oh oh yeah she was saying that the importance of being present and being educated in how to and train and how to use narcan if you have an addict that lives in your house if you have a substance if you have someone who's living in your house that suffers from substance abuse you must know how to use narcan you must it's it's like teaching your kids the number tatsala it's it's just as important it might actually be even more important um you need to have you need to have you need to have it around to get back to the question so there's a few things over here first of all where questions like this get evie is that i have so many more questions for you than you have for me narcan is because we just fast because this isn't a uh setting for it but um well there's a setting for it i guess uh it's uh it's something that's administered like uh like asthma medication without nose and or it could be mr different ways and it uh it will stop someone from overdosing basically someone who is overdosing will stop overdosing it follow it'll keep them from passing right well yeah yeah exactly yeah so mr jug and we're not gonna yeah uh don't stand too close to the guy who gets narcan now um okay so uh back to the question so i have so many more questions uh to ask about that uh specific topic whether it's the money whether it's how do we build trust so i i think we couple things together uh right that's my problem i think we couple things together too often trust follows after love we need to do things in order and if we missed a step we need to go back and do it again if if you missed the third floor of a building you sort of got to put in the third floor of the building or rename all the floors we need to see where this trussel is lost and why also nothing exists in a vacuum if a child lied about one specific thing and lies about one specific thing and again i always bring up a child it's just the example my brain goes to you could use it for whatever it doesn't mean that they're not trustworthy on everything now in the addiction world it's very difficult to pull this off so that's why i have so many more questions however however we need to move in in an order over here broken trust is not an end it's an opportunity now you know now you know what was being hidden from beforehand you have an opportunity right now to remove the shame of that so that the child can actually trust you when trust is broken it's broken both ways and again i'm just gonna use the example of a child but the child didn't trust to tell you as much as they felt to lie to you that's a relationship issue that's something that needs to be built and it needs to be built slowly with small stake things so yeah if if if someone who is addicted is asking for a thousand dollars that's not small stakes that can end them up dead but we there are there are many counselors and many uh uh social workers that that will give you that will sit down with you and work out that system of how to rebuild that something that both parties are comfortable with but it's not trust or no trust it's where are we holding within trust and how to build that now as far as one second now as far as the the fear and the i'm really gonna speak to more the idea of of the humanity of the parents and all this tomorrow night it's not my personal thing right now so i'm not going to go for that but i was in uh costco the other day with my son yetzek and i turn around and he's gone i go running up the aisle down the aisle looking all around he's gone now panic set in i wasn't that afraid to be honest with you whoever took you suck was returning him immediately there is trust me they wouldn't have made it to the parking lot either they're going to return him or they were going to end up hurt but it's like sexy yeah scariest dude i know but he's saying that so um but there was that panic that set in and some people might say well i mean you know an 18 year old that's out at three in the morning no no no i don't care if it's an 18 year old i don't care if it's a spouse that's a child that's out there they have about as much impulse control when it comes to most things that fear that anxiety is real but we need to separate before we do anything else we need to separate what the child or what the person is doing and their responsibility within that to my responsibility of how and what i am feeling now we don't choose to feel that way that's not what i'm saying at all but that's my thing to work on now that's not my child's thing to change so that i don't feel anxiety so that i don't feel panic because i'm going to tell you what road you lead down over there because people do this to kids at a very young age no you can't go to your friend's house because you i'm just going to say again trouble i don't care first speech let's do it you can't go to your friend's house because i was abused as a kid so now you can't go to your friend's house anymore because i'm gonna be freaking out the entire time you're there that's not your kid's problem you need to get 100 on that test because i wasn't a very good student and i know how much trouble i went through trying to catch up so you need to do well that's not his problem that's for me to work on and i'm telling you right now the amount of people and we all know this you don't need me to tell this to you the child we breathe then is one that just learns to lie better they just lie better they will find that one friend that one family that you trust and that's the one they're always going to always can i go to florida you're eight sarah's going oh sarah's going then fine all we're asking them to do is learn to lie better not to open up to us mommy can't handle this i'm i'm i'm i'm too this is too much you are asking abbas when we say that's it do we have anything here we can't with god in this house all we're saying is every word you say to me is a danger for you say as little as possible we know everyone here looks the same exact age we all grew up at the same time you know we used to say to our parents all the time it's a different generation we can always say our parents all the time to get out of these things say as little as moment the principal used to call you in i'm telling you first through eighth grade they definitely thought i was a mute my parents my family makes fun anytime someone says uh you know oh we're worried there's a five-year-old this five-year-old and he he uh he's not speaking yet every one of my siblings will say the same exact joke like don't worry about it you'll see them speak till he was 14. it was getting him to stop after that that was the trick but but to speak to one point robert zuckerman said and i'm going to disagree with her when i apologize is this where zickerman said that at a certain point it's time to open up the tehillim i very much disagree because that's a helm should never have been closed to begin with [Applause] every single day i'm going to tell you probably one of the most personal things i have i own one of the most this isn't the most it's one of the most every single day every single day i walk up to yeshiva and then i started i started working there when it was still warm outside i did not know what cleveland winters were like and i immediately regretted it once the winter came but i stand outside yeshiva and i say a bunch of walk in here with me because i'm telling you one thing if he doesn't i'm done i don't do any of this every single right what am i telling them right now or running the camera he can he can he can attest to this he had my brother and myself as uh ezra bam every single speech class anything we ever give my father drilled it into my brain drilled it in i don't care how confident you think you are i don't care how good of a speech you think it is i don't care how smart you think you are you are either a partner with the rabbinician or you're not and if you're not the only reason you're going to get to the top of that ladder so that you can fall really bad because we're all going to fall the only question is is he going to catch us every single one you say sherlock allison i beforehand and you look up it's not just words i'm looking up to the mountains my wife was going through a very very difficult time and she went she went on she went on a hike to clear her head she sent me a picture of the view she's gonna kill me she sent me a picture of the view so cam we're ready i don't think this is gonna make the cut she sent me a picture of the view and she said it's all good now i said why and she said the amount of care that they're abundantly put into this view is the amount they care that he puts into my life just because it's easy for me to see the beauty and the view doesn't mean the beauty of my life isn't there we look up at that mountains and we say oh he's so much bigger he's so much bigger than a drug dealer he's so much bigger than an abuser he's so much bigger i don't know his plan i have no idea i don't know why bad things happen i have no clue but i know that if we go in hand in hand with him we are calmer and there is only two i'm sorry i'm going over here but there's only two themes that i have found that was macabre from irabam two themes that i have found that every single family without fail needs and if they don't have one of these two things you can expect problems they can have so much else going on sickness and this and this and this and this but if they have these two things i promise you they're gonna pull through if you're a therapist you're gonna add a third the third is communication but i think if you have these two things you'll automatically have the third number one i'll tell you guys later no i'm talking number one and both of these things take it takes fight but you have to give it precedence it's the most important thing you don't have to pay your bills you don't you don't you'll live in something smaller you'll live out of a van number one joy i don't care how tired you are joy you need to be happy in your home you need a smile when you don't want to you need to dance when you don't want to and it's not for your kids it's for you alone in your house the first ingredient is joy in the second ingredient is calm calm if you need to leave for a second to breathe to walk back in that's fine but calm and if it's a fake calm front that's fine but calm these two things are infused into our lives when we allow their abundant little men hand in hand and if we negate these things it's like the famous line says i might have made it up i don't know you're not happy with the cup of coffee you're not going to be happy with the yacht if one single cup of coffee cannot bring you that joy i swear to you nothing else will mostly because i love coffee but questions yeah sure don't want to answer questions we're supposed to have some more someone's going to run and go yeah so we'll wait for them but yeah okay if i may you know i i'm sitting here next to yasi and i'm getting so much from it and i talked about the fear and i talked about the helplessness but as he was saying essaying haram and we know because i'll tell us it's the parents and we look to our parents that just sent me that is beautiful i'm sorry i heard that before yes however as i was sitting here and i was thinking that and i was thinking we are the parents that our children are looking to you know when i think of my parents you know that was the there they were they were here and i recognize i i'm nothing as compared to my parents and yet we are the parents that our children have to look to so i want to give one more point to go with the fear and the helplessness confidence our our children are getting a lot more from us than we realize when we're talking about the love and all these things and i sit there also and i feel guilty you know so am i loving am i giving the joy am i giving the calm and one second we do it right a lot of the time you don't have to do it right all the time you just you in the field we talk about good enough parenting you don't have to get it right all the time and you don't realize these children that we're so concerned about and that we love and that we feel so helpless and fearful at times they are getting that message they know even though when we talk about hugging them sometimes are you kidding you know do we want to hug our children well maybe the others maybe not this one all the time right but we love them and we don't have a choice about loving them you know it says that admiration other mauritian didn't have parents so the love from a child to a parent is not imborn from the beginning but admiration had children and the love of a parent to a child is inborn we love them and they're getting it they do they know it even when we want to strangle them they know it and we're better than we think we are and we should just feel the confidence together with the fear and the helplessness feel the confidence they they do know they do know the score they really know what they're supposed to be doing and they really feel it and they will absorb it and the ezra's hashem with time they'll manifest that understanding and belief even though right now they may not be uh there was a question yeah there was a question over here waiting for a while yeah is tremendous but there's no shame there's no blame and there's no vulnerability coming here you have to open yourself up and you have to look inside and i take much more from hearing that way in the sense to internalize the physic it's a very special uh last year last time i was here the yeah i'm sorry if anyone didn't hear he was saying that um in in in a partial response to the father who was saying about the leukemia there was the the that he would be able to do the same but if they could have leukemia he said yeah but leukemia doesn't come with shame and it doesn't come with the blame and it doesn't come with which by the way if the person is in shidduchim it breaks my heart to say it but yeah it might it might they try it yeah but let's just say and it doesn't come with the shame and it doesn't come with the blame game it doesn't come with the with the with the need for the vulnerability to open up to to speak about it to the people surround themselves around you and they support you you go to you mention the high lifeline you go to high life and there's people ending kicking down your door trying to have a clown down through your living room at three in the morning like doing whatever they can possibly do everyone wants to babysit your kids everyone wants to this everyone says that there's no one there's no neighbors sitting over there saying how are we going to watch that kid so they can go bail him out of jail so they're going to do like no one's sitting there doing that and and that's that is a beautiful beautiful point and last last uh kashanovsky that i was at um they asked me to do a closing note for sunday and i was never at a kashanovshi before that and i had a i'm gonna be honest with you it was a killer speech it was really good it was fantastic jokes let me say so myself and amazing stories and i'm telling you the entire crowd would have been blown away if i gave that speech but i didn't and the reason i didn't give that speech and i went off the cuff was that i got up there and i looked down at my notes and i i got choked up because i realized and then i had a this is a true story i had afterwards i had to go to lakewood not because i was supposed to because i had to go to lakewood after that chavez to go see my parents um so when i was looking at the speech i realized that because i had to go to liquid to apologize to my father because i i had a moment of very big ego and that's what i do when that happens so i thought i was coming to inspire people i thought i was coming to work with people i thought i was coming to give them solutions and help and and i'm sitting there looking at this speech and i honestly couldn't help but think to myself i'm like which idiot wrote this [Music] and i said to everyone i'm sorry i'm not giving the speech and i wanted to give because i didn't write it the osiman shushan of thursday wrote that and who i am today the day after something like kesha and off she's a completely different human being the amount of [Applause] the amount of what i saw happen you can sit in a corner in this place and just watch things and you'll change the strength the vulnerability the the the the humility the bravery the courage that it takes for every parent to be here right now every spouse to be here right now and be able to say what you say and speak to who you speak to unfortunately there's only one promise i can make you until 120 you are you're not going to get your standing ovation until until the only one that matters gives it to you [Applause] just just uh not to follow that at all but um i was talking to a a couple who are first-time attendees in kashanovsky and this is before they came and they they were really nervous about coming um like you'd shared i mean the the shame the vulnerability the embarrassment the unknown not knowing what to expect i hear that really from a lot of clients who go to an aaa meeting for the first time the courage that it takes to walk into a room and say i don't have this but i need help and i'm willing to hear and the response that you get not from people like me but the response you get from other people who are going through it peer support people who can sit down and say listen i'm struggling with the same thing you're not alone it's not just happening to you one of the reasons and statistically why group therapy is so effective is not because of the moderator it's because of the group response it's not just me and if anybody here knows a family who's a first time kesha now she attendee reach out do what you can to minimize that shame that vulnerability i i used to say before i i started coming here um that addicts are the most courageous people in the world because they publicly they make a public statement they go to a way to rehab they tell everybody their jobs their families their friends i'm not okay i need help i need support and i'm willing to ask for it it takes an immense amount of courage i think the same thing if not more is applicable here the courage that it takes for every single person to be here to attend and the growth uh gdalia is not here but i believe that in 10 20 years we'll look back and these are these are those those consequential moments where we start seeing a shift we start seeing a shift in certain communities and certain families and people are coming people are talking about it people are are courageously engaging in their vulnerability and for me i'm just sharing as a human being i said this last time and i'm going to say it again we as therapists we deal with a lot of pain we deal with a lot of hurt and it gets hard and this last week was incredibly hard um coming here and seeing all of you is why we do this so thank you for you guys thank you for being here um any other questions okay i think we're good okay i think there's lunch alright