Many young men have come to me complaining that they don’t want to learn. When I work with their parents/ mechanchim, I always tell them how important it is to accept the child for who he is, not for what he does. Sometimes this is met with confusion, other times with downright hostility. “How can I accept this? We are supposed to learn day and night!” Or, “Some feelings are simply assur!” Some come straight out and say that they don’t accept the child for who they are, only for what they do. They insist this is the Torah derech.

First let me explain what it means to “accept.” When I say “accepting,” I am referring to acceptance of reality, not agreement. Let’s say that you are sitting next to a person and they smell rancid. For whatever reason you decide to not get up. As soon as you decide to stay, the stench becomes more tolerable. It’s not pleasant, but it’s better than it was before. Why? Because the struggle of accepting the reality that you got stuck next to someone that stinks caused more pain than the actual smell itself.

Something I say often is that the emotional world is the opposite of the physical world. In the physical world, the more you run away from danger, the farther you are from it. But the more we ignore a threatening emotion, the bigger it gets. If we run away from sadness it usually becomes anger, if we run from anger it becomes depression, and depression can become psychosis. A common rule I’ve seen with young men is that the more they act angry, the more they feel sad about not being accepted. We must learn—and teach—to accept all feelings, but not all actions.

A child in distress will always show his parents the first signs of his frustration. Boys being boys, who are not as verbal as girls, usually act out their frustration. This is their method of communication. Sorry folks, that’s just how it is! When they are given what they need, they naturally start being more productive.

Sometimes to give them that feeling of acceptance, we have to think a little outside the box. For example, a family wanted to send their fourteen year old son to me. After assessing the boy I realized that therapy would be a waste of time. I told the parents that at this point giving the boy therapy would be counterproductive. He would see the “necessary” therapy appointments as more signs of how unacceptable he was, how desperately he needed to be changed and fixed. I tried to persuade the parents to let me counsel them on how to give their son what he needed. Let’s be honest here—the kid wants his parents over a therapist any day of the week.

The parents were not having it. They insisted that something was wrong with their son and he needed therapy. We live in the “diagnoses generation,” so this something I often have to deal with. People think that whenever something is “off,” the person must have an official, diagnosable problem. But not every issue has to be labeled in order to be treated, and sometimes the problem lies more with how others relate to the person than with person himself.

In any case, I agreed to work with the boy. Three days a week he came to my house and did physical labor. After about six months of this—with him getting the feeling that I truly enjoyed him—he actually did make it to my office. That was about nine years ago. At his point he is a very loving husband and father learning in kollel.

After working in the mental health field for over twenty years, I realized that the hardest thing to convey to people is the importance of being with their children. In general Jews are extremely intelligent and intellectual. This is great, but it can be detrimental when working with our young men. Some parents and educators think that if they just present the boys with the right information—shalom al yisrael—mission accomplished. But the boys need much more than this. They need people to sit with them through their fears and loneliness. Only after a long period where all of the young man’s feelings are accepted can the young man himself accept them and realize that he’s normal. This type of education is experiential, not intellectual.

Some naysayers claim that validating someone’s feelings gives them the excuse to not learn. “I don’t have to push myself to learn, even so-and-so agrees that I’m having such a hard time!” But my experience has shown me the opposite. If you can look someone in the eye and say, “I hear what you’re saying, and I’m with you” (and mean it!), you can almost immediately say, “Ok, now go learn geshmak.” Since they got what they needed, they’ll do it. The problem is that we don’t have many people who are able to do that.