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What would you do if your daughter kvetches that she has to load the dishwasher every night after supper? Or if your son complains that he doesn't want to do the Erev Shabbos errands anymore? How would you respond to yet another child who balks at visiting his grandfather motzai Shabbos, or yet another who refuses to babysit when you need to leave to a wedding or levaya?
What would your reaction be to the mother who cries that she is sick of doing laundry or cooking supper? To the father who refuses to learn with his son each night? To the friend who says she is not giving out her notes to be photocopied by her best friend? To the married daughter who stops visiting her mother in the nursing home? To the brother who does not take part in family weddings?
Selfish! Selfish! Selfish! would be the normal reaction. No?
Absolutely.
If my daughter would kvetch about the dishes, I would explain how everyone has a job to do in the house, and this is hers. I would say the same to the kid throwing a fit about babysitting or running errands.
I would be properly horrified about the mother who abdicates responsibility for supper and fresh laundry, about the father who washes his hands of learning with his sons, about the married daughter who neglects her kibud em so flagrantly.
But yet, sometimes these individuals enter therapy, and soon, these may be the behaviors they are displaying.
It sounds like therapy contradicts everything we are taught about being a giving, selfless person, one reader writes to me in an email.
And I totally get what she means.
It most certainly does look like that. It looks downright awful, if you get right down to it. Absolutely horrible that the changes that therapy brings is to allow a teenager to shirk his or her responsibilities in their home, for a parent to deny their children normalcy, for an ill mother to be left to languish alone in a nursing home without her daughter's care, for a sibling to opt out of family simchos.
But many readers are already so therapy-savvy, that they can absolutely understand that in some cases, these behaviors can make sense in another context, in the context of dysfunction that therapy seeks to alleviate. So there can be a therapeutically sound reason for a mother to stop making dinners for her family.
(You can't imagine what that can be? What if the mother is a single mother working to support her family, and she lives with her three adult daughters who each have only part-time jobs? What if the mother is the one who does all the laundry and cooking and cleaning and the daughters refuse to take responsibility for the home despite the mother's constant entreaties? Hmmm. Makes more sense now, right? “Oh,” you can now say knowingly, “the mother is enabling these selfish behaviors and needs to stop making dinner in order to restore functioning to the home.” Good, you get it.)
And if you look at the examples at the start of this article, it is not hard to stretch your imagination to see where each of these behaviors can make sense. Like, a ten year should not be babysitting four younger children of varying ages when her parents need to go to a wedding. Or a child should not be forced to visit a grandparent who speaks abusively or is violent in some way and is unprotected in the grandparent's home. A friend needs to set boundaries if photocopying her notes inevitably means she doesn't get her notes back in time for her final. And a brother will not attend a wedding that his rav has paskened is halachically contraindicated.
So we are clear, here, that tough times may call for tough measures, right?
But, there is one person who cannot reconcile the concept of a Jew as a selfless, giving person and the person who needs to exercise her rights to be selfish. This is the person who is inherently selfless, trapped in someone's else's selfishness, and cannot differentiate between normal and abnormal expectations and rules of behavior.
While she knows logically that it is patently unfair to have to load the dishwasher every night, bathe all the children, do homework with her siblings, and clean the kitchen after supper perfectly while her mother is out doing nightly chessed, she is so good, that she feels guilty for even thinking of holding her mother back from her chessed activities, feels selfish for her angry and frustrated thoughts.
Therapy definitely does not contradict the Torah way of selflessness and giving.
When a person enters therapy and struggles with various issues, sometimes a therapist can see how boundary violations have occurred, continue to occur, and where the client may need to delineate those boundaries in a healthy way.
Sometimes, I need to help a client say no to a parent, say no to their child, say no to their friend, sibling, or spouse. And often, when clients who are inherently good and caring people are faced with having to engage in behaviors that appear to directly oppose all that have learned from their teachers and rebbeim, I encourage them to speak to their rav. Sometimes, I will speak to their rav with them, for them. Inevitably, the rav will hear and agree with my assessment and plan of intervention.
Because you know the story of the mother who had had one apple and many starving children? She took the apple and ate it herself. Because she said, “You need a mother and I cannot be one if I am starving or dead of hunger.”
And sometimes, that is what therapy needs to do. Give the client permission to eat the entire apple by himself so he can be the person that can become the ultimate giver from a secure place of health, and not starvation.
NOTE: This article was originally published in Binah Magazine's bi-weekly column Therapy: A Sneak Peek Inside
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