Peer Counseling – Helping Others Grow

By Shoshana Siegelman

Before I discovered the world of Torah, personal growth was my religion. The self-help and peer counseling movements provided me with daily practices, support communities, a body of literature to study, and ways of thinking that I found at least partially satisfying.

When, through HaShem’s incredible kindness, I became exposed to Torah thought and living, my thoughtful guides and mentors helped me bridge the gap by ”translating” Torah into the language I understood: personal growth. (For example, I maintained that “Moshiach” was a gentile concept, and one that I couldn’t get comfortable with. My mentor asked, Don’t you dream of a time when people will be whole, and good, and not give in to their distresses? I replied, Yes, that’s my dream, my life-work! To which he replied, That’s Moshiach. And suddenly a tenet of faith became mine.) I spent a year reading, listening to tapes, taking classes, experiencing Shabbos and Yom Tov, and re-creating my life from scratch. I had to re-think everything I had once believed. So much non-Jewish thought had been part of my worldview. I needed to sort through what was true and useful and appropriate, and what was not. Having heard that one of the reasons some Jews are raised far from Torah is so that they can go out in the world and gather in what is useful to bring back, I decided I wanted to take what I had that was useful, to clean it up hashkofically, and to make it available in the frum community.

One reason I wanted to do this came from a giving place. I saw that, despite having Torah and mitzvos, there is a lot of pain in our communities and among our fellow Jews. Between our natural modesty, our desire to only “think good” and be strong in our faith, the prohibition against loshon hara, and the awareness of future shidduchim for one’s children always in our minds, a lot of pathways for emotional healing and support seemed closed to Orthodox Jews.

Another reason I wanted to do it came from, if not a selfish place, then from a place of taking care of the self. Because my new utopian community wasn’t perfect and I still wasn’t perfect. And there was something that I knew I needed, that just didn’t seem to be out there. So I set out to create it.

What has emerged is called Kesher Counseling. We called it “Kesher” (Connection) because the intention of this peer-counseling method is to make strong connections between two people exchanging counseling time; and, between the person and HaShem. Between HaShem, who is always loving us, and all the other Jews around us, whose mitzvah it is to love one another, a Jew should never feel alone!

I can teach the basics of Kesher Counseling while standing on one foot. (And I’ve done it, just to prove I could!) And I’m about to give them over to you in a few words. Take them, apply them, and grow your own support community. But if you want help internalizing them, seeing them in action, and getting assistance in getting started with them, please come to a Kesher Counseling training workshop (TBA in Passaic, Monsey, Brooklyn, Baltimore, the Catskills, and Toronto.)

To learn to think and act as a Kesher Counselor, please remember three steps:

1. Regard the person as B’Tzelem Elokim: a divine creation, with the potential to imitate HaShem in every way, totally worthy of love. Treat them this way, in a way they can receive. (For much of the day, and for many of the people who pass through our lives, the first step is all we need.)

2. Notice where the person is having challenges living up to his or her divine potential. Any rigidity, any habitual or inflexible way of thinking, acting, and feeling, any place in which their thinking is cloudy and their behavior less than exemplary, is an example of this. Some terms for this block or lack in functioning are: “meitzar” (constriction), “mishegas”, and distress. (It is also the proverbial “ruach shtus”, or spirit of craziness, without which no one would ever sin.) For the most part, these inflexibilities are the product of hurtful experiences, layered on top of what may be pre-existing temperamental tendencies, from which the person has not yet had the opportunity to heal.

3. Create an intervention that can serve as anti-matter to the matter of the distress, to shake it up and melt it down! Supply or remind them of a piece of truth where the person seems to be believing a lie; closeness where they feel isolated; movement where they feel powerless or paralyzed. Say or do something, or get them to say or do something, that is a “v’nahapechu”, a flip or reversal, to some part of their mishegas. When done right, catharsis occurs. And catharsis – examples of which are eager, “live” talking, laughing, crying, trembling, and yawning – seems to be an indication that emotional healing is taking place. Catharsis is hypothesized to be a built-in method for healing from hurts that all children are born with, and which, in this world of sheker and galus, we systematically learn how to eliminate from our lives, much to our detriment. Catharsis seems to accompany getting un-hurt, unblocked. We tend to try to quiet it and stop it, as if by doing so we are stopping the hurt, whereas in actuality we are only stopping part of the healing process. In Kesher Counseling, we make space for, give permission for, and actively pull for, catharsis. Like many things, it is much easier to learn this by seeing it in action. It feels counter-intuitive to what we’ve learned in “polite society” – but it seems to work. People think better – and sometimes experience emotional and physical relief – after a good session of catharsis, or even a short burst of it.

To make this work even better, put it into practice by exchanging counseling time, doing “chesed b’chevrusa.” For half of the designated amount of time, both you and your partner pay attention to, and apply these steps to, one of you. For the second half, switch roles and give the attention to the other person. Set up in this way, counseling can be free, flexible, non-stigmatizing, and designed to fit mutual convenience and need. (A few examples: in my Kesher group, we’ve found it incredibly useful to be able to call one another on Friday afternoons – to spot-counsel for a few minutes to eliminate our yetzer hara to get tense, yell at family members, etc. In times of crisis, one member may request a lot of time from her partners, and repay them later. For late-night concerns, it’s useful to have a counseling partner on the West Coast or in Eretz Yisrael. And for ongoing middos work, and to have a place where we feel we can truly be ourselves and work on the Kesher Counseling skills togther, we try to meet once a month as a group.)

Peer counseling is a life skill that I would like to see every teenager learn, before they reach the stage of shidduchim and parenting. Firstly, because teenagers often share things with one another, without always knowing how to handle the confidences they receive. Secondly, because it can improve communication between parent and teen. And most importantly, because, counseling skills are indispensable in marriage and child-raising; and once we’re in the thick of those parshayos, it’s hard to scrape together the time to learn this new skill!

If any of this intrigues you, and you think it might be of use in your life, please contact me at bechira@verizon.net. If you can, treat yourself to the workshop. A 15-hour intensive small-group training costs $200 – about the cost of two hours of therapy., and much less than graduate work! (And a lot more fun, too. Yes, we can be frum and still have fun. But that’s a story for another day!) Shoshana Siegelman, MSW, LSW.