Dear Doctor Shulamit Blank!
I would like to thank you and the entire Bnei Arazim staff, and I hope my vocabulary will suffice because I am practically at a loss for words to show you all the joy and serenity that I finally feel in my heart.
Sometimes I even think that everything was only a dream. A bad dream. A very bad dream.
Only the scars on my daughter’s arms bring me back to reality.
It did indeed happen, and it was real, and it involved my young and beloved daughter, and everything happened in our highly normative family (if such a definition exists).
I am glad that it is possible to use the past tense: there was… there was fear, there was trauma, there was shock, there was crying, lots of crying, there were meetings with psychiatrists and psychologists, there were meetings in groups of parents whose children hurt themselves… there was fear of the phone ringing… what would they say, what happened to my child this time…
The whole Shalvata Hospital saga is like a horror story.
Pain, tears, shouting, injections, pills, ties, padded cells… I don’t believe everything is over. And it ended in the best way that we could desire.
Eight horrible months in a psychiatric hospital only made the situation worse.
Despite the staff being so good and the really special treatment they gave my child, the place was not suitable at all.
And how did it all change in the two months since entering Bnei Arazim? No injuries, no pills, no injections, and no need for a padded cell…
How afraid I was… and how many bad, even terrible, things I heard about this place.
Fortunately for us, they all turned out not to be true, because after two months I got my girl back.
Like a small light in the darkness—I saw a smile on the girl’s face, and little by little life came back, week by week the situation kept improving for the better.
And very importantly, in Bnei Arazim they don’t work any less with the parents.
Almost every day there are chats with a social worker, once a week a conversation with a psychologist, once a week a meeting with parents, talks with the teacher…
I got answers to every question, and I had a lot of questions.
I would like to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to social worker, Inbar. Such a young woman, and so professional.
She helped me so much with patience and lots of empathy to smile again and to think with hope.
I have no words to explain the special attitude toward a frightened, crying, and pestering mother like myself. Such patience and understanding! An infinite number of talks, and every talk ended with a laugh.
Looking back now, I understand that working with parents is more difficult because we parents also need serious care; we, not less than the children, have gone through rough times and sometimes almost lost hope.
Dr. Blank’s methods are a technique that saves souls!
Within two years, my daughter came fully back to life, and more than that—she received lots of life lessons that I am not sure I could have given her at home.
She learned to communicate with people, she learned that every behavior has results, and she understood that she chooses how to behave in different situations.
She believed in herself and her powers, she went back to school and became a straight-A student!
She learned to cook, bake, wash clothes…
Two years in Bnei Arazim went by and she came out into the world stronger and wrapped in an embrace. Full of good energies and dreams, dreams…
The reality was not simple. The friends she once had were no longer friends, and it turned out that none of the schools we contacted was willing to accept my daughter, only because of her having been hospitalized and in a post-hospitalization boarding school.
We went from ulpana [high school for observant Jewish girls] to ulpana and from school to school, and it was awful. The stigma… a new disappointment every time. Pain again and tears again.
In this difficult situation, I saw how strong my daughter was. After a few months I almost gave up, but she kept on searching, and in the end, a real miracle happened. She was accepted! She started school! She finished the year with a certificate of distinction!
Little by little friends began coming back. She has taken up sports, started to work during vacations, and simply lives the good life of a 16-year-old girl.
I would like to add that my husband and I went through a very rough time and did not make it. We are getting divorced. Largely thanks to Doctor Blank, I plucked up the courage and strength to decide what was best and right to do.
Doctor Blank and the Bnei Arazim staff became a big and significant part of our lives. I am very glad that my daughter went through a huge process with good, professional, and warm people.
“Mom, I have really destroyed my life and yours also. What will happen, Mom?” asked my girl when she was in the hospital.
“Mommy, what a good life I have”, she says now.
There is nothing left to say.
