We meet, you and I.
We shmooze, you and I.
We meet at weddings, at bar-mitzvahs, at the exercise class, and at Chinese auctions. We meet around the pool and at lectures; at the Tehillim group and at our shidduch meetings. We meet socially or we meet at professional conferences. We meet when we are involved in our children's PTA and we meet when we are involved in chessed projects together. And whenever—or wherever we meet, we shmooze.
When we meet and shmooze, you and I, each time we are faced with the greatest temptations to tell our stories. And we have such interesting stories to tell; about our children and our spouses, about clients at work and clients through our chessed endeavors; about students and about neighbors. So many people to talk about and so little time. Funny, how despite our limited time, we manage to do so much shmoozing, we manage to do so much harm.
Sometimes we do harm because of our need to talk, about anyone, about anything, to fill the silences inside of us. Sometimes, we talk because we actually think we are helping others. Whether the selfish motivation of the former or the altruistic motivations of the latter, we tread in dangerous waters with our lack of insight and understanding about the underpinnings and necessity of confidentiality.
It is tricky to write an article about confidentiality because then, because of confidentiality, I cannot give any true to life examples. I will stick with stories that happened to me, not involving confidentiality restrictions. Some stories will be so bizarre, you will believe I invented them. Or I will create scenarios, totally made up, but so true you will think that they have happened. And here's the paradox. They are invented stories but they are all true. And so I can begin.
When I was in the seventh grade, one of my teachers was part of a popular group of friends who all accepted jobs that year at my elementary school, straight out seminary. They were young and fun and lacked boundaries, so somehow they became part of our school life even though they didn't teach us particularly. One of these teachers, Miss Ungar, taught eighth grade limudei kodesh mornings in another school.
To put it mildly, I was not very well behaved. I believe I was what was termed a problem child in those days. I admit. It was an apt description. And I was rather proud of this unique distinction.
The following year, for eighth grade, I changed schools a week into the school year, and attended the very school Miss Ungar taught in. I came into school a minor celebrity for changing schools so late in the game, with my grand reputation preceding me.
When girls from the other eight grade classes came to check out the new girl in Room 312, one girl said, “Oh, so you were the one Miss Ungar was talking about.”
I remember my amused reply. “Miss Ungar? What did she say about me?”
“She was giving us mussar and told us about a very bad kid that had to change schools for eighth grade,” came the casual response. There was actually more to her response but my memory of it is erased.
It is thirty years later, and the betrayal of this teacher, to bandy my story around, to break the confidentiality inherent in her position at my former school, although I had basked in my notoriety then, still continues to surprise me today.
I wish I could say things have changed but if anything, with the explosion of chessed in our community, with the increase of frum, heimishe professionals doing the work once relegated only to those “in the outside world,” it has gotten worse.
I hear people breaking confidentiality wherever I go. Kallah teachers relating stories about their kallahs, and teachers about their students; the mortgage broker and the life insurance guy; the speech therapist and the nutritionist; the occupational therapist and the rebbetzin. They are all talking—without names of course!—about their clients and community members.
In my past life, I taught in a variety of schools. In many of them, there was the annual teachers’ meeting in which each girl was discussed. I was inexperienced, young, and felt powerless and out of my league when the chashuveh principal established this meeting as a given and I was expected to participate. But I often wondered why no one thought it terrible that if one teacher had an issue with a student (and sometimes that someone was me) everyone had to know about it; especially when no one else was aware she was a problem. I never understood the purpose of this meeting except when we shared positive things about a student, but that was not usually the purpose of the discussion. (I appreciated when I knew when a student’s family was in crisis because then I could give her the care she needed; but unfortunately, that information was rarely shared until it was (almost) too late to help.)
As a therapist who also teaches kallahs occasionally, I sometimes get calls to teach a kallah who specifically have issues necessitating a combination kallah teacher/therapist. It often amazes me how a woman can call me and after confirming that I am indeed who I am, she immediately tells me the name of the kallah in question and begins rattling off very private and personal information about the potential kallah and her family situation. This woman is usually a very special person, involved on many levels of chessed with this kallah and with many others in the community. She is usually a woman who dedicates her life to others, as well as opening her doors to many unfortunates in our community with purely altruistic reasons (except for the satisfaction she receives for knowing she is doing avodas hakodesh, as if that detracts from her altruism!). And yet this wonderful woman absolutely does not consider confidentiality in her role, and the importance of taking careful thought before sharing any information.
When this happens, I always stop the woman immediately and say very firmly, “Please don't share any of this information until we can first see if I have time to see this kallah. Then we need to discuss if the kallah is aware you are giving me this information. If she is not, you need to discuss with her what she wants you to divulge, and what she will tell me herself.”
The woman usually expresses stupefaction and says, “But you need to know!”
And I will say, “No, I don't. And if I do, it needs to be done with the kallah's permission and her knowledge. If not, then the breach of confidentiality will create a rupture in our relationship, undoing any good I may have accomplish as I teach her.”
As a therapist, I often face the greatest difficulty treating teenagers and young adults in my practice. Usually it is the parents who are paying for therapy. And it most certainly the parents who love their child most dearly, who are most invested in their child's treatment and improved functioning. And it is the parents who expect—no, demand—that I share with them the confidences their child has revealed in therapy.
When the child is over eighteen, legally, without a signed consent, regardless of who is paying for treatment in therapy, the therapist is not allowed to speak to anyone without express permission. If a child is under eighteen, but an older teenager, this issue becomes thornier as it is legal for a therapist to speak to the minor's parents, but not always ethical. This would be in a case where the child has clearly requested the therapist not share any information with the parents and expects therapy to uphold that level of confidentiality. I have also experienced this problem when parents pay for a couple's therapy and expect that I will share their progress or lack thereof. Of course they are concerned, of course they mean well, of course they only have the best interests of their married child in mind. But of course a therapist, a rebbetzin, a rav, a kallah teacher is expected to uphold the moral, ethical, and legal considerations of confidentiality, regardless.
Although part of my work is to help repair familial relationships, sometimes it is not in the child's best interests to have the parents involved in the therapy. Either it is because the parent-child relationship has been badly damaged, or it is simply unhealthy at this time for the child. Often, what seems clear cut to others in respect to familial relationships, becomes muddied when a therapist hears the real story in the safe confines of the therapy room. But whether there is a legal, clinical, or ethical obligation upon me to protect a client's confidentiality when dealing with parents, I often struggle with parents whose mindset thinks it is perfectly okay to break confidentiality if the child will never find out in any case.
It is to these parents that I want to explain. “When a relationship is based on dishonesty, the foundation if corrupted whether or not the child is aware of it consciously. And that corruption impacts the therapy negatively.”
It is to these parents that I wish to say, “Your inability to understand the importance of confidentiality, of the underpinnings of a trusting and trustworthy relationship reveals to me a large piece of your family dynamics in which a child does not feel s/he can trust his/her parents. This lack of trust is often the trigger or reinforcer of the pain your child is experiencing.”
I have lost clients with these types of parents, who yank them out of therapy, angry when I cannot speak to them behind their child's back (when I offer instead to tell the child when they call, or to work together to build a relationship that will allow conversation between them and their child), while they frantically search for another therapist who can achieve the herculean task to both break confidentiality and gain their child's trust adequately to do the work of therapy. Sometimes I see women who describe their disillusionment with therapy ten or twenty years prior to their seeking treatment with me, for precisely these reasons. The breaches of trust and betrayals when they first began therapy as adolescents or young adults held them back from getting the help they needed all those intervening years.
When I first entered the shidduch scene with my oldest child, what I found most difficult was collecting information about a potential shidduch and the disgust I felt being exposed to hearing negative things about others.
I remember calling a perfect stranger to ask information about a shidduch. She was a friend of a friend of a cousin of a sister-in-law of a neighbor. You get the picture. Truly a stranger to me.
I said, “Do you know the XXX family? Can you tell me about them?”
This perfect stranger then revealed an ugly, highly private piece of information about the mental health of a member of this family. A piece of information that would send any potential mechuten running in the opposite direction.
You would think that I would feel grateful to her for revealing this information, for saving me from putting my son into such a situation. But all I felt at that time was fury. “How dare she reveal this piece of information? I didn't even ask her a specific question! Did she consult a rav to know if she is allowed to reveal this information at all?” It shocked me to my core that someone could break an acquaintance's confidences so casually when so much was at stake.
As a side note, I consulted with a giant in the mental health field concerning this matter, and our conversation was enlightening. First, he went into a whole spiel how I need to know the exact diagnosis of the family member's mental illness, and then I can call such-and-such geneticist who can give me accurate information about the extent of its heredity. When he finished this part, he said something to the effect of: “This is what I am telling you as a mental health professional, but as a rav and member of our community, I will tell you that everybody has some type of defect and illness in their families whether or not anyone knows about it. I would suggest that it matters more not what the illness is but how the family has dealt with it.”
As a therapist, I am privy to many secrets within our community. Of course I expect the day I will be redt shidduchim with people about who I know things about that would prevent me from wanting to put my child into their home. But I needn't tell anyone why I am rejecting the shidduch, not even my husband. I can simply tell him, “I asked some information and she's not for him.” In the worst case scenario, if my husband is very interested and I can give no adequate response why I do not want the shidduch, I can pretend to go along with it and then figure I can always check her out at the wedding she is attending, come home, and then say, “No, she's not for him.”
In our community, we break confidences in a million different ways. And what makes it so terrible that oftentimes we don't even realize. Often we speak without names. “I know a chassidishe/sefardic/litvish/rebbish girl from Town X who just got divorced this past month.” Or, “A neighbor of mine is going to jail for fraud.” Or, “A client of mine was abused as a child and her father is a doctor.”
Our community is so small, it's so easy for many of us to figure out who is the girl from Town X, who is the neighbor, who is the client.
Years ago, I sat in a college class and teaching us was my Jewish professor who is from a completely different community than mine. He was teaching us some concept in clinical social work and gave an example from his private practice (he actually had the client's permission to share her case with his students). He told us about her client and about her diagnosis. In his description, he used a combination of words that struck a memory, and suddenly I was dumbstruck. I knew the name of his client! I had been sitting at a wedding a year back, and someone commiserated about her friend, newly married, and the problems the couple was experiencing. And she had used a similar set of words to describe the trauma one of the couple had experienced that was affecting the marriage. My teacher's client and my table-mate's friend was the same.
And do you want to know how I knew her name? Because although my professor had not divulged his client’s name, and although the woman at my table had not used names, in a different conversation with this same woman some months before this latter one, she had shared her excitement about her friend, Mrs. So-and-So who was getting remarried...
Our community is remarkably small despite its boundaries that stretch across continents. I am amused when I meet an Israeli in an elevator in Yerushalayim when I am visiting my children there, and upon hearing that I am from America, she asks me if I know a Mrs. Schwartz from Monsey or from Lakewood, as if we are next door neighbors. But really, if you think about it, we all are next door neighbors—definitely in how a juicy incident or tragic accident that happens in a yeshiva in Eretz Yisroel reverberates in the shuls of Flatbush, Boro Park, Monsey, Five Towns, and New Square. And that is why we do not have the luxury of breaking confidentiality even when we withhold the names of the participants involved. Give someone enough time, they will figure out the characters of the story; whether that week or a year later.
It is inevitable given the global eiruv that encircles us.
Confidentiality is the responsibility I carry in the various roles I play such as community member, therapist, and parent, and it is the trail of destruction that follows broken confidentiality that drives home this lesson each and every day.
So tomorrow, when we meet, you and I; by all means, let us shmooze.
But not about others.

NOTE: Originally published in Binah Magazine

My book, Therapy, Shmerapy, can be found in bookstores or online