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JUNE 4, 2020 | The Jewish Home OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
Navigating a Restricted Life By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
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here have, actually, been some amazingly good outcomes from this corona thing. Someone threw away his cigarettes so he would be better able to make use of a ventilator should he need one. That’s cool. My neighbors don’t fail to ask if I need anything or to just chat. There’s a lot of love that has been shown
throughout this ordeal. But the best story came out of the news. Since Jews, especially in Crown Heights, were the hardest hit by this, according to “public health data,” there was a literal flood of volunteer blood plasma donations from the Jewish American world to help hospitalized individuals who simply couldn’t pull through without that assist. Accord-
ing to CBS News, tens of thousands of Orthodox and Hasidic Jews came forward to donate blood. This is the largest use of plasma transfusions to date in the world. What an incredible kiddush Hashem. There’ve also been positive changes in the way we do things that, perhaps, are for the good. For example, I’ve been seeing people around the country and overseas for 20 years, although back in the “old” days it was just by old-fashioned phone. The thing is that the fields of therapy didn’t know what to do with this concept. Over the last decade, many people would write articles in the professional magazines about how useful such a practice is, for example, to people in rural places, or they would make other positive points about tele-health, but the field seems to be kind of clunky and wasn’t able to wrap its collective head around such things. Well, those days are past. Even my recent issue of the AAMFT (American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy) magazine noted that we’re now taking this telehealth thing for granted – and it’s a good thing. The same thing happened with the even more entrenched medical field. Thank G-d for that. I have been able to do doctor visits by computer, and it saves hours of travel time and parking when you don’t have to go into the City. I imagine many businesses will be far more relaxed about working from home going forward, too. Zoom certainly made out well. I used to use it myself, but no one knew what app I was talking about. Now it’s a household word. Using this great method of communicating has been a most pleasant part of the whole pic-
ture. In spite of all that, we wish this problem weren’t here. It has completely put a stop to so many pleasurable activities, and it has come between family members, dividing and separating them. I’m an example of that, unfortunately. So I wanted to explore with you how to navigate that piece. Just to lay the groundwork, I heard an interesting lecture recently. The guy was and is a public speaker and he was talking about mindset having a much bigger impact on how we feel than other things that we think weigh heavier on us than they actually do. He gave the following example: he said that he used to be very annoyed and insulted when he was publicly speaking and someone would interrupt him. It’s rude, it’s a distraction, it’s whatever terrible things. Then he decided that having that mindset wasn’t helpful. You hear this? He decided what his mindset should be based on how useful to him it was. So, he asked himself, what if I told myself that being interrupted was a good thing? A great thing? Why? Well, because if I am just up on stage doing a monologue, then I’m talking to myself, pretty much. I can get disconnected from my audience. But if you interrupt me with a question or a comment, then it forces me to be present, to hear you. He decided that interruptions would, from that moment on, be amazing experiences and opportunities to connect in a real way with the people he was talking to. That’s sort of like the decision to throw away your cigarettes, isn’t it?
