Rabbi Dr Bentzion Twerski

and uh my minion started at eight o'clock so you do brushes at eight and review at uh 8 10 and i would always you know make sure that i i start on time but when they tell me you have to get to preserve some shots by this in this moment i would always make it like a minute or two later because i discovered that the meaning of the basement was if they say chakra starts at nine on shabbos it means it doesn't start before 9. [Music] when it starts you don't know so whenever the rabbit walks in all right so today we're talking about communication and this may very well be for some of us the equivalent of a college course called communications 101. i'm going to talk about just some very very simple basics about communication that that we tend to overlook we tend to minimize them and here's what communications 101 is obviously if i'm talking to you i need to make myself understood that you should be able to hear what i got to say you also have to be the one listening because if you're not paying attention you're not listening you're not hearing me the message isn't getting to where it has to go so much as we would talk about travel you know you get in the car over here you have to come over there there's a path that you have to go in order to get there if you're going to use the wrong route and follow the wrong map you can end up at the wrong destination so obviously what communication requires i'm not telling you something that that that is not that is not obvious is if i'm trying to communicate a message to you i have to give it to you in a way that you're going to understand it to whatever degree i'm less than clear you have to be able to figure out what i really mean i'm going to explain more about that momentarily remember when we were in younger grades in ghetto in school we had a hamish with big letters with the posik on the top and small letters with rashi on the bottom right rashi is trying to tell you the intended message of the posik is this right sometimes he he brings letters he brings a lot from that but whatever it is this is the intended message of the possibility that's what teresa is the reality is that we need to recognize that when we're communicating the person on the other end is hearing the words we say but then they have to decipher and break the code what is the message that is really met and we there are so many ways of doing this wrong and it is so easy to do it to do it wrong let me give you some examples of just how bizarre things can get so for instance there was a couple that i was speaking with a week or two ago and one of them described the scene that actually happened where the husband asked the wife can you please pass me the salt and her response was oh you mean i didn't spice the food well she she got she she picked up completely the wrong message was an unintended message and at the same time there are messages that we are trying to convey that don't get through i want to relate to events in my own experience there was a summer shabbos that i had everything ready i have a list of like last minute chores i don't know if most men get this but it's mine i got to make sure that the hot water is put up i may have to make sure that the black is done a whole bunch of last minute things and one of the last minute things is that the kishka that was taken out of the freezer was left on the counter and wait i wait for it to thaw superman so i can tear off all the wrappers with with letters before shabbos and then we put it into the chunk then we're good to go well what happens is that the kishko was on the counter all day and one of my chores is you know before i set the challenge onto the blast that's what i do i i had another five ten minutes before lift mentioned and i went into the living room i sat down on the couch and i have arms length to the stronger my finger let me see something on the posture so i'm sitting there and i'm keeping myself busy with looking into a cypher and my wife comes downstairs and she makes turn the other direction to go into the kitchen and i hear her calling to me from the kitchen where's the kishka i put it in the chunk okay that was one time about 10 seconds later where is the kishki i put it in the chunk so this is two okay and the score kept on going up so about eight times she kept on saying where's the kishka and she's she's giving me the same question i'm giving you the same answer like what part is not being understood there's a reality that she's around this way so the sound has to travel completely around the corner but then i'm over 40 and in our family we get nerve deafness by somewhere by the age 40. so i'm past that already and so you can attribute it both to you know my my age and the layout of the house she comes running into the living room she says i'm about to bench look where's the pish guy i want to put something in okay so that that's that's a that's a very elementary simple version of communication now here's here's a here's a far better story the story was that my youngest married son is married to a young grace so my hypnos the one who is the shuldin woodburn this the famous rabbits in june grace is the second cousin to him but after the war the families kept very close they were very tight so they go to each other's synchros and here in the middle of the dancing the the servants and young guys wants to say to me so she they they opened up a few inches of the pizza at the far end of the hall and they called us over that she should say mazel tovtos now in the meantime the kitten is a very very loved man and a lot of the singers and performers are coming to the hassana and one of them was lipa okay lipa comes he's wearing his collared necklace and he's he kisses everybody downstairs and he goes upstairs to the balcony to the music and he takes over the microphone we knew this was going to happen so he takes and he finishes the next song and then the music takes a 10-minute break my favorite time at hasanes is when the music takes a break because you know all of all the blasting and the zetzing with the and the noise you can at least talk to somebody and hear them so the music takes a break and the robinson uses this opportunity to say muslim now for those of us or from the new york area there are hassanis we can refer to as hit and run you show up you find the martinez and you're out of there your spouse is waiting in the car so you don't get a a a ticket and uh nor did you have to look for parking and you go home or you go to the next center so um how long does it take you to say muscle tough 30 seconds 45 seconds you know you know you know the family a little bit closer maybe takes you before a full minute represent young guys was a speaker and when she spoke she would go for sometimes an hour or two probably without breathing in the middle as far as we could tell she had so much to to share she is not saying mazel tov for 45 seconds she filled 10 minutes easily and she's going on and on and meanwhile the music the opposite side of the hall on the balcony is starting to play now she's still talking how do you quiet down music so that she can finish what she has to say it's only it's only proper so there's a bunch of people standing in back of us and a few of them turn to the face the music and they go like this their hands up high like shut up and what was lipa singing and if you ever watch the consonants when he would sing with whoever the singer is singing everyone's walking around like this the same message that's intended be quiet is actually turning is turning them on and it's actually stimulating that much that th the the noise and the singing to keep on going so what we have is the fact that there are there's when you look at a dynamic of communication you have one individual who is performing what we call expressive communication they're conveying a message they're saying something on the other end there's a receiver now in a dynamic let's let's let's take the typical you know or we always say communication is part of the problem is in marriage and that is you've got the husband or the wife is the expressive communicator saying something to their spouse right the spouse is receiving the message now if they're tuned into the same frequency show them how you throw it's great this is exactly what we're looking for but what if they're not and the husband is communicating this and the wife hears that so to whatever degree his express of communication is for lack of a better uh description description idiot proof you can't misunderstand it that's terrific but what about if he is not a perfect expressive communicator and he doesn't say exactly what he means so she has to somehow figure out from what he said what is it that he really means to say so we have to have we we have to have good skills for expression and good skills for reception we have this all the time if we're talking to somebody and we're on our cell phone or today even our home phones are our cordless phones remember corded phones anybody um if if somebody's signal from their from their cell plan is weak the conversation's not happening these are things that we all understand because we do with them on a daily basis um anything that's going to prevent somebody from expressing themselves clearly is going to impede communication anything that's going to prevent somebody from receiving and deciphering the message clearly is going to is going to is going to is going to interrupt that so you really need to have two people that are on the same wavelength i'm going to repeat briefly what vivianka solomon shared last night in his presentation it was speaking about the love languages and when i work with couples we we have to talk about the love languages and i i always recommend the book for people who aren't aware um the five love languages is a book that has been modified for different populations so there's the five of all languages for truck drivers five love languages for people over 40 five love languages for you know like chicken soup for the soul for you know for airline pilots and chicken soup and it's all for teenagers any identifiable there is a book the five love languages for orthodox jews um and it's available you can you can you can look for it on whatever your your online websites are there are some judaica stores that actually carry the book um so it it leaves out things that would otherwise be um offensive or not well tolerated in the firm community and there's some things that i written to be to be more um compatible for us and the author together with the from the professional uh had collaborated for that the side of the five love languages besides knowing what they are it's a very very important basic basic theme and the active mentioned it last night if i'm trying to convey an affectionate message to you i have to use your language not my language so that if you're in a foreign country and you want to ask directions because you don't know where you are you better know the language of the land if you're going to try to ask them in english they're not going to understand it because they speak whatever other language that is is used over there so you're in france you better figure out how do i ask in french where am i going to my father described when they were he was a vocal learning in in yeshiva and bob of this and then when they first opened in 1947 there was a talmud there who was a a holocaust refugee did not know a word of english and he wanted to go from bubble was then on the upper west side he wanted to go to brooklyn to logansburg whatever and he asked one of the other gohan there who was one of the few that was able to speak english and he said if i need to ask directions on the on the subway what do i say and this book has said to him you ask somebody where is my destination right he came home like he he made it back in time to put on film the next morning so the there's the the the critical piece is that the that the most effective communication requires that that the expresser expresses clearly the receiver receives clearly and that that that we're able to manage is now we've spoken very very fundamental basics of normal communication okay normal communicators what happens now when you have a situation where the two people are una one of the two or both are unable to communicate properly and there's many different situations that can lay that that lay the the groundwork for this and if we have an idea of what they are we know where are the potential trouble spots so that what if somebody is handicapped and cannot speak clearly can we understand what they're saying there's a yin man who the last several months has been davening in their basement with us um and he's a friendly guy and he makes he makes conversation with people i've had conversations with him and most of the time of my shaking my head i have no idea what he's talking about he mumbles in a way that it's just just not clear to me so i'm nice to him and i behave but if he's trying to tell me something i have no idea what he's talking about um [Music] that's a one version of somebody with difficult communication there are people who are are unable to communicate properly because of clear handicaps right this is a speech handicap they're people with with neurological problems the people who are are are less able to communicate because of of of aging one of the and obviously there's mental illness which can make a very big difference one of the things that is clear is that when we're dealing with our kids that are going through major difficulties which is true way too big of a percentage of the time where they're victims of trauma we're dealing with somebody who can not communicate accurately now let me go away from the from our kips for a moment let's talk about a normal kid not a kid four-year-old kid and the kid says something to the parent which is really what's my dick nasty right i was i once got a phone call from the parents a seven-year-old kid mild-mannered kid kid comes home from school one day and says mother seven-year-old mother if i had a knife i'd cut you in pieces he's like what now the mother was sat back and said there's something going on here i don't know what it is they called me and i'm not a child therapist who were able to actually figure out what was what was what was happening it was one of these cases of me having a lot of scout to dismay and guessing right but there was there was a reason why the kid was communicating that way and it turned out that there was it was a particular medical issue that was having a psychiatric side effect whatever it did that it was a it was something was broken able to be resolved relatively easily and happy ending they lived happily ever after the kid that comes and speaks to a parent with foots i get the question probably at least once a week my kid talks to me with hooks how do i react to that and the the knee-jerk reaction of a parent or a rebbe or a teacher is to react disciplinary you shouldn't talk like that it's not nice to talk like that and that's true it's not nice to talk like that but if we understand the perishabashi of what the child is really saying it changes the entire the entire dynamic what's wrong with but it's a disgusting way to talk it's a distancing thing it's more of an attack it's a verbal attack is that what we want to accept from our children the answer is no we don't want to but that's not what's really happening and if we pay attention to what is really taking place it's a totally different dynamic and what i'm the the suggestion that i'm going to give you which is true so much of the time is the kid that's talking to you that way and again not even kips the kid is saying something is bothering me and with the kids they're saying i'm hurt i'm in pain i'm suffering and if we realize that what the kid is telling us is not mother i hate you tatty get off my back you're making my life miserable what they're doing is they're they're reaching out and they're connecting and saying tate or mommy i'm in pain they're not called kips kids in pain just because it's a cute word the kids are suffering the husband is it's not a nice way for them to say it now the response to the parent who says my kid talks to me with football how do you respond to that instead of approaching it in the disciplinary way my typical response to them unless there's other individual factors going on but my typical responses you tell your kid i know you're trying to tell me something and i very much want to hear you i don't understand that language please say it differently and this is the same for the kid as saying kid is speaking with vulgarity right very common these days does anybody realize what vulgarity is well guarantee is a way of saying things in a way in a manner which is rash irritating but making sure that you're going to hear it and when a kid is deteriorating to the point where they're talking in that language they're saying i gotta make awfully sure that you hear me and this way i know i'm gonna use some words that are gonna get under your skin i'm gonna irritate you i know that you've heard that i'm that that i'm talking to you and the kid is it's more it's an attention-getting thing because vulgarity is usually not part of the subject matter that they're talking about it's how they dress it up so that the if we can get past the offensiveness of the kids saying words that are vocabulary that shouldn't be in our homes or our classrooms and we can say you know what i know you're trying to tell me something i'd love to hear you but it's got to be a language that i can understand because this because this isn't it right and to whatever whatever you have to do to to give message to give that message to the child is critical the kids that are in trauma and um [Music] i know that i i said this yesterday afternoon but the the definition of trauma is a very very broad definition and as we go through shabbos you're going to hear different versions of the same message many many times there are there's a there's a wide variety of situations that create trauma um yeah you have the drama ones you have the ones that have you know flashing lights and hot solo calls and and police and and and and and all the and all the action and you have traumas that you know that some people here are calling it mini traumas or micro traumas there are there are situations which are traumatic rather than a a traumatic event and those things have a profound impact on the mind of a child who wants to communicate so that if somebody was kashalum in some sort of a serious accident and they walked out barcelona they're going to bench guymo right they're going to be telling people they're going to tell somebody something you know there's an old there's there's an old story of a reformed rabbi who wakes up you keep in mourning and he's got a job right yeah i know it's him kipper and i have a job and then a rabbi and a temple and you know what i'm not in the mood of any of that i'm going out to to to the to the to the golf course and i'm going to shoot myself a couple of a couple of holes of golf and he gets in his car with his uh his his apparatus his golf clubs and he goes out there and he tees off you know tee off is when you set up the ball on a little thing you stick in the ground you give us that's the ball and it flies somewhere and it has to go in the direction of wherever the hole is right and it's usually quite a distance from there and there's like norms or an average of how many times you have to hit the ball to actually get it to go into the little hole there's such a thing as a hole in one now if you just think what the statistical odds are of getting all in one they're extremely tiny so this guy sets up and he tees off and the ball goes really really high and far and hits the top of the tree and it ricochets bouncing down from one branch to the next and it finally gets down to the ground and there's a pebble there and it ricochets off that and then it bounces something else in the root of a tree and finally finally finally nothing on some iso hole in one so the angels in heaven are going into god almighty god this guy's blasphemous he belongs in temple he's supposed to be fasting it's young kipper he's got a job he's supposed to be giving sermons he's supposed to be demonstrating to other people to bring them close to god and and and you get you let him get a miracle like this and god says to the angels calm down folks who's he gonna tell the when we experience something dramatic we're accomplishing to tell somebody it's pushing out of me i remember when my my youngest son was bronze big kiddish you know i was over 40 and my wife was i think she just hit 40 or something like that and i i we were thrilled beyond right i couldn't get a car service to get home from the hospital whatever there was there were no car services and i have to wait an hour i walked home it was a nice distance and i stopped at this medicine i i wanted and i got milk there and i stopped in the store to buy something and all i can tell you is i was going crazy i walked i walked into a store to buy something okay i didn't do it but i really felt like telling the shiksa behind the counter my wife just had a boy now she doesn't know who i am she doesn't care who i am she doesn't care if i had a baby she just needs to do her job i was itching to to share it's a piece of it it's a piece of news the same way that these major events in our lives that are positive are things we like to share and the damage is off we should always be able to share things like this somebody who is experiencing a negative event is polishing by nature to share it with somebody because to suffer alone is is a is a magnified form of suffering so that it's perfectly common and rational to expect a kid that is suffering internally from whatever their trauma is it's a accumulation of micro traumas it's a traumatic event it's a series of traumatic events and and and and all the things that follow that the loneliness the anxiety the self-blame the the rage that they have towards towards towards towards others the um self-esteem that goes that that goes down the the that goes down to drain for them all of these things are things that they don't want to contain inside because we all want somebody to share it with and when they can't do that it's suffering for them and they they're they're trying desperately desperately to do it and what they need to be able to do is to share the experience and we need to be there to share it with them so that they're going to be saying things they're haunting to say it and they don't they're unable to express it properly or at least in the way that we want to hear it because they can't do it and in order for them to do it they have to get into vulgarity they have to get into huts but they have to speak in ways that we don't like sometimes they're not saying it in words they're saying it in actions the kids that change the way they dress they're not doing it because those things are more comfortable now i can't tell you what short skirts feel like i've never tried it okay but why would somebody want to walk around less covered up i i just don't understand it right why does somebody want to have more hair in the front it's a pain in the neck right the kids are making statements we recognize that the kid that changes their lavoosh and their manner of dress is making the statement they are conveying a message to us and we need to hear that message so that and yeah pretty much almost everybody there is dress you know the vacuum suits whatever it is whatever the regular the regular the wishes and every so often somebody comes in and they're not dressed like that and they used to they used to come dressed like that and today they're wearing something else and i make it my business to go over and whatever way is socially acceptable and proper i embrace them they're making a statement and my message to them is i'm not interested in the statement that you're making unless you want to tell me more about it but i am going to reach out to you and tell you that you are to be embraced because very often what they're trying to say is i feel separate from you i feel disconnected and i'm not and and i'm not going to let them get away with that because that's that's a message of pain and if i can help a swag and minimize their pain in any way whatsoever i want to try to do that the so the kids are making statements and the statements are not being made verbally verbal schools are not going to help you for that when they're making a statement behaviorally you need to respond to them behaviorally and and connect there are many things that control the way that a person conveys messages we've mentioned trauma we've mentioned languages there are factors that are very different in different in different languages different dialects different locations different times when i was in my early days working in the field and encountering people using drugs they referred to marijuana as grass and pot in the new york area when they said dope they were referring to marijuana when i was working in new jersey dope meant heroin and these are the street names for drugs and those street names have changed so that in bar park in the populated neighborhoods around brooklyn um marijuana was called grass because grass could not mean anything else um [Music] in pennsylvania you know grass gave me something else so they called it other stuff today the common common expression for it is wheat and there's many other nicknames for these things and if anybody wants to deal with the drug scene they better be up to date on on on what the names are that are being used for things and recognize that over the period of time those things are going to change because because um the vernacular does modify over time um the the uh we're beset in our generation with certain challenges of communication that are the things we have to cope with they're they're here to stay um do we text the same way that we speak would we would we submit a a letter to somebody that spells people ppl or before the letter be in the number four you know you will you you wouldn't do that but that's okay in texting language and how many of our kids have a huge amount of their how many of us of our communications are being done that way so what we've done is we've modified the way that we communicate to be able to to uh to to follow certain trends and it can be unnerving to people i i i find it really irritating when i get a text message that's like that i have to like decipher it before i can before i can actually read it um it's it becomes now a critical piece of how people can interact maintain a way the medium of interacting is communication can we express ourselves well can you receive the message as well is there a disability or a handicap on one or both sides of that two that make it difficult for us to be able to communicate for for a while i was unable to communicate with my father well by phone there was a problem between the receiver of the telephone and his hearing aid you know it became problematic for him and we communicated better by email no we did speak on the phone but it was half the time i was saying things and i did not know whether or not he even heard me and these are these are are common common challenges that we have think about the people that we're talking to and i'm not even talking about our kids i'm talking about us here how many of us here are coming in with our trauma maybe it's primary trauma maybe it's secondary trauma that we're here and we're parents in pain we're pips and when we're talking to somebody else are we communicating in a way that we're saying what we really want to say and is the person hearing us hearing the message that we're actually saying um in the in bianca solomon's presentation last night he made reference to a colleague of ours uh dirhavan named dr mayor wickler dr may wickler one of the books that he's written the last time i spoke to mayor it was it was in its 17th printing it's probably far beyond that now and even though the book was originally published quite a number of years ago it's still found on the shelves of judaica stores and it should be the name of the book is 10 minutes a day to a better marriage and what he describes there the very beginning of the book and i recommend it to couples because it is just that valuable for them to learn how to communicate properly where the tendency that the 10 minutes is a um basic exercise and we can all do it with whoever it is that we need to communicate with whether it's our our husbands our wives our children what it is is it's a a technique called reflective listening where i the practice session is i say something to you for a couple of minutes and you reflect back to me not your response to me but you reflect back to me what you heard when you do that i can now hear oh that's not exactly what i meant so let me let me let me try to say it differently and we may have a back and forth on this any number of times before we get it right when we do this exercise we learn to be better expressive communicators and we learn how to receive messages better in other words when you're not 100 clear because perfection is not for the members of the human race when you're not perfect all right you've communicated a message i think you mean such and such i can get better at figuring out what you really mean um [Music] simon pointed out a really really major major aspect of this and that is that communication involves other things besides the words there's the tone of voice there's the expression in which it's being it's being it's being said it's whether you're speaking softly you're speaking loudly it's the body language it's the facial expressions we get better with this we have to be aware of it so that when you know when you're talking to somebody you can't see them right there's a certain certain thing that you're missing okay so what's that fix that right we can facetime or whatever it is we've we've fixed a little bit of that but that but you still miss an awful lot the the uh uh so in reflective listening you basically practice how to be able to speak in a way that conveys the message you really need they give you a very very simple example of communication both verbal and non-verbal men you come home from work you're hungry and you go to the refrigerator and you open the door refrigerator and you're looking inside your wife happens to be in the kitchen what is she going to say to you what are you looking for are you hungry right obvious what if what if the real reason that he's looking at it because he's going to go to the grocery and he wants to know if you need milk or eggs there's there are other possibilities to what to what to what somebody means if we're conscious of that we can at least we can at least respond that way now there's no you know there's no no disaster of saying are you hungry when all he's doing is trying to check if there's no connects right but there's so many times that we can actually miss a situation so now how many of us have had stories where a kid comes home from yeshiva right and something happened in class that day and the kid wants to talk about it right now let's say it's something involving the kid that's disciplinary in nature right it's not a narcissist it's not an office of communication right so we're not going to be thrilled to hear it how's that communication going to go by you're going to show the you're going to show the child i don't hear stuff like this right you may say body language maybe not in in words what message messages the kid got you just communicated to them while they're talking you know that again so there's these these things become critical issues in every every home every day no matter what the situation is how do we communicate right we do it in action we do it in in words we do it in all the other parts of how we speak with the the body language the facial expressions the tone of voice how do we do all that when we become a lot more conscious of it it changes us do we practice the reflective listening is a fantastic exercise we each have a couple of minutes saying what we want whoever we're trying to communicate with says this is what i this is what i i'm i'm hearing and it it becomes it becomes a very very different somebody says something to you which is not true you know we can do we can be very much at the surface what you said is not true it wasn't this it was that right the person wasn't drying is driving a chevy they were trying driving a a honda you can get into that right is that productive maybe maybe it is but it probably isn't what you got a better chance of doing is recognize the person just said something that was not factual what is it that is going on that they're trying to that they're trying to avoid why are they giving me a different a different message why are they saying something is not accurate why would somebody lie maybe they're misperceiving it maybe they didn't understand it properly but if we recognize that the message being sent to us while it's untrue there are other possibilities of what the person's trying to convey to me we can focus on that instead of getting carried away into the into the mitsia's detail which as shimon said yesterday is a total waste of time because it does not it's not it's not communication that produces anything um remember that when we are talking to each other we're talking about our own experiences we're talking to our children we're talking to somebody that the communication has a good reason why to be less than a hundred percent we need to understand what the real messages that they're conveying because we can otherwise get completely lost please have a wonderful shabbos and enjoy it and be conscious of when people communicate thank you um i have time the program doesn't have time sure