On Sunday evening, December 17, Let’s Get Real With Coach Menachem featured a lecture by psychotherapist Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld, LCSW, on the subject of trauma. Rabbi Rosenfeld is a specialist in addiction, anxiety, and depression.
Rabbi Rosenfeld shared that when we focus on trauma, we gain insight in the pathway to get out of trauma. The pathways are in the Torah, and we must understand that the problem itself holds the path out of it. When Moshe threw the tree into the water to make it sweet, the tree itself was bitter. It was thus a miracle within a miracle. To find our way out of the forest, we need the handle of an ax to remove the forest and the handle is formed from a tree in the forest.
Our first trauma was after Adam and Chavah ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They felt great shame and immediately covered themselves with leaves from that tree. Rabbi Rosenfeld taught that it is a great idea to delve into the mechanism at the heart of a trauma, and then you can think of how to put yourself into a position of hope and not into a position of predicting and focusing on the bad that will happen. “Trauma disrupts life. It breaks open the way my life has been going.”
People need habits. We trust things will go a certain way and they will work a certain way because they have always worked that way. Life is chaotic and we look for stability. Development of functioning is based on the assumptions that certain things will happen. It means developing basic truths about yourself and others. This happens early in childhood. From birth onwards, we try to develop order out of chaos. We search for things that are permanent in our lives. In healthy development, the child realizes that he won’t always get what he wants immediately. A child develops a healthy perception of what can be expected. He learns the natural results of certain behaviors and how the world works.
He explained that human beings are naturally terrified of the unknown. We struggle with what will happen in the future. We try to place controls. Comfort comes when we find places of knowns in our life. He then shared that the definition of trauma is that there is suddenly a disruption to what I know about life. We have to work through trauma and acknowledge the gap and find ways to bridge the gap over the difficulty.
Any event that disrupts me emotionally, psychologically, physically, that reveals to me that what I know about life is not true, is trauma. “The suddenness of trauma makes trauma trauma.”
When I understand this framework of trauma, then this can be applied to trauma in my life. I come to realize that I don’t know and that assumptions I had, don’t appear true. He reiterated that trauma is the sudden appearance of the unexpected that forces me to reorient myself.
He then spoke of the trauma of redemption. Everyone has his own challenge or struggle. I learn to adapt and to make form for changes. I realize what I thought I knew, I don’t know. The goal is to reframe the situation. As Jews, we live with knowing that we don’t know. “The healthy way of dealing with trauma is being willing to live with emunah even though I don’t know.” Emunah alleviates the unknown part of trauma.
By Susie Garber
