Choose Your Battles

“There are certain battles that you pick. When they're not worth picking, they're laughable stories.”

-David Beckham

Recently one of my children needed 30mg of a certain medication that was only available via prescription.

Problem was that this medicine was only available in 10mg, 15mg and 20mg pills.

So the doctor writes two prescriptions, one for the 20mg pill and a second for the 10mg pill.

I get to the pharmacy and after waiting for my turn, I finally get to hand the prescriptions to the pharmacist. Good news is that they have the 20mg in stock, but they are out of the 10mg.

Annoyed that I won’t be able to get all that I need in one place, I ask the pharmacist if I can get my 30mg by getting two 15mg pills, instead of the 20mg+10mg, since they are out of the 10mg.

He told me that despite the fact that it makes no difference for my child whether they get their 30mg by way of two 15mg pills, or via a 20mg pill with a 10mg pill, he is unable to accommodate my request. I will need to go to a different pharmacy to get the 10mg pill that he doesn’t have.

I have nothing against this pharmacist. I understand he is doing his job and his hands were tied by the laws governing the distribution of medicine. But this event led me to ponder how rigid people can be. How people tend to strictly want things done their way, even when they know that there are alternative ways that will yield the exact same result.

Too many times parents fall into this trap with their children. For many parents, it isn’t enough that their kids reach the parent’s desired destination for them, but they must also take the route the parents desire.

This is most prevalent during holidays, especially Pesach.

Let me illustrate this with a conversation I recently had with a person who is a grandfather.

He told me that during his pesach seder he insisted that his grandson eat the boiled potato given to him for karpas. 

The child politely asked the grandfather if he could have celery instead.

The grandfather insisted that the custom in the home was to have the boiled potato.

The child begged the grandfather to let him have celery.

The grandfather acknowledged that while there is no difference vis-a-vis the mitzva as to whether celery or a boiled potato are eaten, nevertheless, the family custom is the potato, so he needed to eat the potato.

As I was listening to the grandfather tell me this story, I was heartbroken. There are so many families who’d love it if their child would even attend a seder. They’d be ecstatic if their child would even eat matza. Yet here the grandfather was arguing not that a mitzva needs to be done, but it needs to be done his way.

Parenting contains lots of battles. Children keep pushing limits to see what they can get away with. It is a constant juggle between carrot (gifts) and stick (punishment). Yet before one even gets to that stage, they need to be able to recognize which fights are worth fighting and which battles one should just walk away from.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here

Identical Background ≠ Identical Responses

Different people need different kinds of communication for it to have the same effect. That was something I had to learn.

-Tobias Lutke

  

Sometimes life lessons come to us from interesting places. A very important life lesson came to me when I went to see “The Lion King” in camp when I was 13 years old.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, one specific scene in the movie would end up having a lifelong impact on me. Not due to the movie itself, but to the reaction that it caused two people.

But first, some background:

Camp used to take us to the movies every Friday. While we were watching movies that the camp approved for kids, the theater would also be showing the more graphic, non-camp approved movies on their other screens. We were under strict orders not to go to the other movies, or we’d be thrown out of camp.

The bus drivers who took us to the movies would also be given movie tickets (what else were they to do for the 2 hours we were watching the film?). Needless to say, given the choices of movies to watch, they always chose to watch the more graphic films.

Then it happened. One camper disobeyed the rules and ran out of “The Lion King” and went into a theater showing a rated R movie. The bus drivers happened to be there, caught him and reported him to the camp staff.

Certainly we knew what was going to happen to this kid, We were warned and we had been told there would not be any second chances.

To our surprise, the camper was not expelled.

In “The Lion King”, there is a scene when the young lion Simba witnesses his father’s death. The camper who left this movie to go see the rated R film had lost his father. His father was a member of the NYPD who was shot and killed in the line of duty. Given the backstory, the camp let the infraction slide.

This left me quite confused. Not just because the camp wasn’t following through with their warning, but because I didn’t understand the justification for leaving “The Lion King”. The reason why I could not understand was because during the film I was sitting next to a friend of mine, and he had no issues with the movie. This friend of mine lost his father to a mugging gone bad. His father was fatally shot and my friend later had to give a victim’s impact statement to the court.

So why was it understandable for the child of the police officer to leave, when my friend was able to stay with no problem? Certainly this proves that the child of the officer could have stayed, thought 13 year old me.

But that thought process is flawed.

It is flawed because people react differently.

Even if two people seem to be identical, don’t believe that they will have similar reactions to the same stimuli. As the movie shows, two children who lost their father due to a fatal gunshot each reacted differently when seeing a story about a child witnessing his father’s death.

Unfortunately, I constantly see people falling into this trap, most notably when it comes to judging victims of sexual abuse. People mistakenly think that a victim is lying because, in their eyes, the victim’s subsequent behavior isn’t how they believe a victim would (or should) act. Different victims will react differently to their victimization.

For example, some survivors will seek assistance from a friend, support group or mental health professional, while others will prefer not to share their traumatic experience with anyone else. Some will self-medicate while others will become workaholics. There are a plethora of ways that survivors attempt to cope with their trauma. Some have very different ways than others.

There are also many different mental health issues that may arise from the trauma of the abuse (e.g. attachment issues, anxiety, anger issues, just to name a few). Different people cope differently and different victims will have different issues that they’ll be struggling with post the abuse.

Sometimes the reactions aren’t just different, they are actually polar opposites.

Victims who have yet to build coping skills can easily be triggered by even the slightest touch. While others with unhealthy coping skills might utilize promiscuous behaviors as a means to minimize their trauma.

To the untrained eye (i.e. one who doesn’t understand coping skills) this appears to be two totally opposite responses to identical traumas. Different responses, even to opposite extremes, are normal as different people (even different children in the same family) will react differently to things in different way.

We need to recognize that people are different. Intervention that is successful with one person might not be successful with another. Stimuli that triggers one person might be nothing to someone else.

That’s ok. What isn’t ok is questioning whether someone is really a victim because you don’t understand their behavior.

It would have been the height of chutzpa to go over to my friend who didn't leave the movie and question whether his father was really murdered. The fact that the movie didn’t trigger him and didn’t cause him to leave doesn’t mean that his father’s death was not traumatic for him.

It is also the height of chutzpa when people do the exact same thing to abuse victims.

Don’t ever question someone’s trauma solely based on your narrow/personal/subjective view as to how someone in their position should react.

Yisroel Picker is a Social Worker who lives in Jerusalem. He has a private practice which specializes in working with people of all ages helping them understand their own thought processes, enabling them to improve their level of functioning, awareness, social skills and more. He also lectures on the topics of communication and child safety.  

You can email Yisroel at yisroel@ympicker.com

Follow Yisroel on LinkedIn here