I love teachers.
I was a teacher for loads of years before I became a therapist. Sometimes I was a great teacher, sometimes lousy. I loved my students to pieces. I found them funny and interesting and lively and smart. I also found them a handful. They exhausted me, challenged me, irritated me. I miss the classroom. I miss the passion and excitement and butterflies in my stomach from sheer nervousness of walking int o a classroom loaded with teenage hormones.
I think that the teaching profession is the hardest one out there. It comes either first place or second place to being a parent. Not quite sure which one is more time consuming. If you are a teacher, you know what I mean. And the pay for both is awful. For the amount of time I would put in preparing, teaching, talking to girls, talking to parents, to girls and their parents, I earned about 75 cents an hour. And that was putting in a 20 hour work day.
Okay, so I am exaggerating but you know what I mean. And that was in the days before therapy. So you gotta figure that today's teachers are also liasioning with their students' speech therapist, physical therapist, SEIT, para, TITLE I, shadow, and social worker. That would probably means hours put in increase to 24/7 and salary decreased to fifty cents an hour. Okay, so I am exaggerating again, but you still know what I mean.
And this includes the menahelim. The rebbeim. The rav and rebbetzin of your shul, or your community. This includes the neighbor, the counselor, the kallah teacher, the friend's aunt who has an open heart and allows girls, and young women, to spend hours talking to her after school, asking nothing in return, only wanting to alleviate the pain.
Which is why, when I finish listing the ways in which these people are so selfless and giving, taking nothing monetarily for their devotion and dedication beyond their call of duty, it makes it really, really, really uncomfortable to write the rest of the column. Which is to explain the deep and enduring damage perpetuated by these very wonderful people on the very people they are attempting to help.
Boundaries, boundaries, boundaries.
Because this is the story I hear over and over again. And I am not the only one. My colleagues (the only ones I trust enough with their boundaries to send them referrals) hear the same terrible stories over and over again. And this is the story.
“Once upon a time there was a wonderful teacher. She was so caring. So wonderful. She let me call her when I was down. She gave me advice about my mother, my brother, my friend, my religion, my seminary, my dates, my shoe size. It was incredible. I even called her in middle of the night because I knew she cooked late Thursday nights and she would talk to me until 3am. I babysat for her. I cleaned up her kitchen before yom tov. I organized the fundraiser she was involved in. I volunteered to do the dance for the fundraiser and spent hours of my time before and after the fundraiser. I loved doing it because then I got to talk to her the whole time. Sometimes she even hugged me. I really felt like she understood me. If not for her, I would have not survived high school/camp/seminary/dating/shana rishonah/you-get-the-picture.”
Sounds wonderful, you are thinking as you are reading this, right?
But here's the second part.
“But...
“But then she suddenly started backing off. She said she can't help me anymore. That she really thinks I need more help than she can give me. She stopped answering my calls. She didn't seem interested in me anymore. She brushed me off, avoided me, seemed uncomfortable around me. I don't know what I did wrong! I kept asking her if she is okay with me calling her, visiting her, emailing her and she always said yes. Or she didn't answer. And I am so hurt. I miss her so much. I don't want to go to a therapist! She was helping me the whole time!”
Nobody lived happily ever after. Not after that betrayal.
As a therapist, it it painful to watch my client grapple with this betrayal. Especially when the person involved is a respected teacher, mentor, speaker, whatever.
Because what happened is simple.
Beloved teacher wants to help. And tries. And loses boundaries along the way. Thinks her hugs and allowing the student to clean her kitchen is helpful. Unaware of how transference works (which is when prior relationships play themselves out in the present—mostly the mother/daughter dyad). Unaware of her impact on her student or mentoree. That when a girl totally loses herself in a relationship, it is unhealthy and indicative of an impaired mother-daughter relationship that must be addressed to allow for healthy functioning. Mainly through therapy.
The relationship becomes a noose around the teacher's neck. Slowly strangling her. But she is determined to help this student. But when the noose is too tight, she suddenly cuts it off in order to breathe. With great damage to the student who is not at fault for the adult in her life who did not maintain appropriate boundaries.
Teacher, mechaneches, rebbetzin. It is your responsibility, when you work in a field that helps others, to learn about these types of relationships and how to keep them healthy, when to refer the student further, and how to keep boundaries despite the lure of clean dishes erev Shabbos. The lure of the delicious satisfaction of simply helping another person that is the cornerstone of a Jewish woman, of a Jewish person. But that goes terribly wrong in the absence of appropriate boundaries. To say, “I didn't know,” is not an excuse. The one time a mentoree accuses you of failing her, her pain screaming out to you in her perceived abandonment by you, should be reason enough to go find out.
It happens to the best of us. I am sure I have similarly failed a student somewhere in my teaching career who is currently with some other therapist. I am not taking the high road here. But if you take a close, hard look at your own patterns and realize that this has not happened only once in your career, but often enough that as a respected person in the community you find yourself consistently failing a certain type of individual who reaches out to you for help, then it is time to take a step back and ask the fundamental question, “Why?”
And for any of you who is shocked at reading about yourself in this column, doubting yourself and blaming yourself for losing the love of a respected and beloved teacher or mentor, know that although it is not your fault, you can break this pattern if you choose.
Did I mention that of all the hazardous jobs out there, like construction workers working on a foot long beam a hundred feet up the air, writing is the most dangerous of all? (I wouldn't mind some fan mail to counteract the angry mail that will soon clog up my inbox....oh well.)
NOTE: THIS WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN BINAH MAGAZINE
Look me up on LINKEDIN https://www.linkedin.com/in/mindy-blumenfeld-a8067583
Check out my book THERAPY SHMERAPY, available in bookstores and through Amazon
Browse through my previously published articles on my former blog Therapy Thinks and Thoughts at frumtherapist.com/profile/MindyBlumenfeldLCSW
Read current articles in my bi-weekly column THERAPY: A SNEAK PEEK INSIDE in Binah Magazine, available on newsstands every Monday.