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While this article addresses specific situations, it does not necessarily follow that the description will apply in every case. The use of these examples are illustrations of how to place the entire process in perspective.
You walk in your community with your head held high. You nonchalantly smile at your neighbors while pursuing a normal conversation with your friend. You appear content, yet, no one sees your inner turmoil and pain as you cry yourself to sleep at night. Your outward appearance depicts a rewarding life, yet your inward emotions cry bitter tears. Time passes. You begin to back off from friends, you attend fewer family simchas and community events. You are now feeling isolated and forlorn. You have difficulty facing your acquaintances and fellow shul members. Some of them keep a distance and have difficulty speaking to you, while others appear to be uncomfortable around you. You perceive that nobody understands your pain. The shame is so intense. What are these people going to think about you and your family? You feel alone. There is no one to comfort you, to demonstrate care or concern. Tension rises at home. You begin to blame your spouse. The children sense the static. They begin to exhibit fear due to the insecure air that permeates the home. Home is no longer a warm and loving environment; it has become a pervasive battleground.
Welcome to this new realm. As you enter this new parsha (segment) and embark on this journey of parenting a struggling adolescent, I greet you with bittersweet emotions. This is not a sphere where one generally stations oneself to receive guests. Nevertheless, I do present myself to you as hostess to this new world. I invite you with opened arms as you begin to experience some strange phenomena. At this juncture, I extend to you feelings from the bottom of my heart and from the deepest recesses of my neshamah. Empathy, compassion, care and love are what I offer you as a means to help you understand the complexity of this confusing world.
You are now standing at the threshold of your child�s new domain. Where do you go from here? As responsible parents, you may contemplate seeking the aid of a professional. You would probably expect to get a quick fix. No doubt you would like to hear a clinician utter words such as, �This is what you should do so that your child can revert to her/his previous ways.� This sounds much like the motherly myth of kissing a baby�s booboo and saying, �mommy will make it all better.� Instead, the competent therapist is honest with you and puts all the cards on the table. You are informed that the various signs of rebellion may remain status quo for a while or could be the beginning of an altered lifestyle that may take a few years to resolve. Then comes the shocker. It is suggested that your child may have to hit rock bottom before climbing upward and turning around. This is not at all what you wanted to hear. You now have two choices. You may wish to remain in denial of your child�s current status or you may attack this problem head on and see it to its fruition.
The first choice may be the easier one. You may not wish to face the reality of your child shifting from your family�s traditional lifestyle. Why should you accept your child�s preference of living in an emotionally and religiously unhealthy manner? You are also probably reflecting on your child rearing skills and cannot calculate what went awry. You know that you gave your child the best education possible along with a home environment that depicts a Torah true home. That being the case, where did you go wrong? When and how did you lose control over your child? Who is to blame? With no substantial and sensible answers, you begin to blame everyone around you, your spouse and yourself included. Guilt then goes hand in hand with blame and you now internalize the problem as your own. What perplexes you, though, is how your child can have her/his own agenda when you, the parent, have controlled your child�s home environment and upbringing for so many years. None of this makes sense.
What of the rebellious teen�s agenda? You notice your child�s style of clothing and head covering change
and so does the interest in her/his religious observance. Your child is now keeping company with different friends, not necessarily to your liking. Her/his choice of leisure and entertainment does not coincide with your family ways. By now, you have probably switched your child�s school at least once or twice, if not more. As to your child�s performance, s/he is showing little or no interest with school responsibilities and in general, seems to have difficulty with functioning properly at school. Patience is wearing thin. As each new change takes place, your anxiety level is rising. You are now faced with the shame of your child�s visual changes. What will your family members say? What will the neighbors think? You now begin to limit your conversation with your friends for fear that someone will make a judgmental statement. How can you keep your head up anymore?
If my description depicts some, much or most of your current lifestyle, then that is because....�been there, done that.� It is for this reason that I would like to take you further into this journey, to my sector of this world where loneliness no longer exists. Terror, hostility and conflict are familiar to me, yet they are words of the past. Our family environment shifted during these past three years because my husband and I took the second choice. We decided that we were going to help our son in any and every which way possible; whatever it took on our part. As a result, those descriptive words of negativity slowly diminished as our household took on a more peaceful status. How was this accomplished? As my husband and I traveled through that hostile territory, a definitive growth process initiated more positive feelings. Support replaced loneliness, serenity substituted for turmoil, while the negative energies of anxiety and frustration were exchanged for a more productive outlook. This achievement was reached as we developed a new inner strength., the result of which was a life rich with emotional and spiritual growth. This sojourn took place with the direction of a compassionate and competent therapist as our guide, using our seichel (basic intelligence) as our compass and utilizing skills and tools that we had amassed throughout our sessions as our vehicle. Equally important, were the support and friendship of many other people who had already been there, done that.
I would like to humbly share some key points that my husband and I have learned. This knowledge enabled us to contend with the daily struggles that sometimes reached crisis levels. The basis of this concept helped alleviate the anger, resentment, shame and guilt. The underlying factor was about our growth. Once we understood that we had to be the ones to grow and to make the necessary changes, we no longer expected to see immediate changes in our son. We recognized that our son would be going through his own search and discovery which was going to be his sojourn during this period of his life; his nisoyon (challenge). After all, his neshamah was taken from the same otzar (treasury) as ours, and had its own mission to accomplish on this world. We were going to have our own separate nisoyon which entailed being on the receiving end of our son�s decisions and choices. Our tafkid (goal) was to be his guide, not his master. Our own nisoyon was definitely linked to our son�s but had its own integrity. Hearing this new understanding gave us the strength to let go of the guilt. We knew that such nisyonos were being experienced by many fine and good families throughout the world. We realized that this struggle was about HIM and not us. We now had more peace of mind so that we could forge forward in helping our son heal as we would be healing first.
It was at this point that we acknowledged that we could not control what our son would be doing during the next few years, nor could we attempt to stop anything from happening by him or to him. All we could do was to establish rules in our home, to be implemented in a compassionate, loving, yet consistent manner. We knew that we could not stop this struggling process from happening; we could only be there with love to help him through the difficult times. Being there with love means unconditionally. It means that we would love him as our son and accept him no matter what he would be doing. This was no easy task, but who says life is easy? As we worked on ourselves, we embraced new traits such as compassion, understanding and patience. This does not mean that we lacked those traits to begin with. Embracing such traits means incorporating those characteristics within our being. We were now able to tolerate his different lifestyle and just focus on the pain of his neshamah.
I would imagine that at this point you would be questioning, � Am I missing something, what pain of his neshamah?� After all, who is the one who is suffering with a high degree of pain and shame at the abominable choices that this teenager made? Who is the one who must contend with daily fighting, non-compliance and chutzpah? Who is the one who must pick up all the pieces and make constant changes in the family structure? Who is the one who is being treated like a shmatte (rag)?
My friend, if you answered �I� to the above questions, then you are correct. Yes, you are the one suffering greatly at the hands of this struggling adolescent. However, I have a few more pertinent questions to ask that require much honesty and soul searching. Who is the one with the very sensitive neshamah? Who is the one who may have been ill-treated by authority figures? Who is the one who may have learning disabilities and cannot handle the structure and rigors of a �normal� school curriculum? Who is the one who may have been embarrassed due to being kicked out of class so many times (whether it was or was not the child�s fault)? Who is the one who may have been physically, emotionally or verbally abused by someone, whether it be peer or adult figure?.... When you take a sensitive neshamah and add one or more of these criteria to that pure and innocent soul, the total adds up to a very pained neshamah.
Cry for yourself, yes. Feel sorry for your difficulties, yes. Empathize with you for your pain and your shame, yes. However, DO NOT FOCUS ON YOU! Your focus should be on your child and what you must do to help your child heal. Your child�s actions and choice of lifestyle are expressions of a very deep pain that emanates from her/his neshamah. S/he is crying out, �I have difficulty with my current lifestyle and I do not want to live my life as you do.� Do not discard your child�s call for help by being contentious. Be there. Love your child unconditionally and do what you can to maintain a loving, warm and caring relationship. It is the unconditional love that will help bring this child back to where you would like to see her/him be in the future. TIME and PATIENCE are the key to this process, and with it comes the opportunity of much growth. Seek the help you require to help make a difference in your struggling child�s life, in your family�s life, and mostly, in your own life. A challenge was presented to you as a gift from Hashem. This gift is your struggling child. Utilize this gift well and grow with it.
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