BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

JUDAISM & ABUSE: EXPECTING BETTER This was written a few years back. Despite strides in educating leading rabbinic authorities it seems that nothing much has changed… not yet. Some are truly working on the problem and I beg them to keep working on it. Sometimes preserving a marriage AT ALL COSTS or allowing a manipulative man to make a woman an AGUNAH and then looking the other way - is NOT the way to go. Allowing the verbal & emotional abuse of children in the name of Torah and keeping it hush-hush for appearances is enabling the abuse! Loshen Hara can be a mitzvah if it stops an abuser from taking advantage of his family, his friends and the world at large. If You Beat Him He Will Not Die by Richard Silverstein A personal and theological meditation on child abuse As spiritual communities, it is enormously important that we provide grief work as part of the process of healing [from the effects of abuse]. At the same time, we have to take that lesson of choosing to...

AND WE CAN PROVE IT! SORT OF..." It is a source of endless amazement to me how alike abusive types are. How they follow similar patterns and once you see them as they truly are... its so obvious you wonder how politicians and diplomats, let alone trained therapists miss it SO MANY TIMES. I talk a lot about malignant narcissism because I was exposed to it for so many years. For many years I thought that was NORMAL behavior too. My childhood was colored and skewed by a narcissistic parent . Because of narcissists I will never, ever have another intimate relationship in my life. It's not that I don't want to - it's that I literally can't. And therefore, won't. Spotted this piece on Hamas and thought, "there they go again. abusive & self-absorbed. that's familiar." You see, narcissistically-skewed groups like Hamas fall into these same patterns. Called on for proof, evidence or truth... they can't really produce it. When they can...