It has been some years now already that the chinuch world has been addressing the question of how to deal with the problem of the Internet and Smartphone addiction. Teachers, professional therapists and the best minds in high-tech have offered various solutions. * We used to have to deal with text messages on the old cell phones, while today, any hand-held device can be a danger and a slippery slope to the depths of destructive worlds. * Beis Moshiach spoke with Rabbi Zev Crombie who has degrees in psychology and criminology, who presents the proper approach to addressing the problem of the Internet. * The answer to virtual addiction. It’s not what you thought.
Interview by Shmuel Tzur
Photos by Noam DahanThe phenomenon of addiction has taken on a more immediate significance in our world. Social media, WhatsApp groups, and the easy entry into the world wide net, has raised the issue for many people as to how to differentiate between an addiction and a need. Among youth and those coming of age the problem is even more serious. With the press of a button they can connect to a virtual world and travel through worlds filled with dangerous content.
Along with an array of technical solutions that provide services to protect us from the dangerous virtual world, a professional approach has developed which considers addiction as the tip of the iceberg of the problem. Addiction to the net is not the problem but the symptom; the problem is what led to looking for meaning in places that cannot provide it. R’ Zev Crombie, who has served as the director of organizations involved in rehabilitation and chesed, has in recent years developed a response to addiction of any sort. In an open conversation, he shared with us how to fight the Internet and not just with a filter.
How did you come to work in this field?
For many years I worked for Kollel Chabad and for over twenty-five years I was involved in Chesed organizations. In my most recent position, I started and ran a hospice for eleven years, the Gravski Rehabilitation Center, which deals with severe cases in need of physical rehabilitation. At a certain point, I became aware of the problem in the frum world that had almost nobody dealing with, that of various addictions. I left my job and studied the field for two years and got my second degree in criminology at Haifa University. A few months ago, I was asked by the director of the Kehillat HaDerech Center, Dr. Amnon Michoel, to develop a therapeutic framework for the frum community for out of control behavior.
What is meant by addiction?
When someone cannot control his urge to surf the Internet, in an obsessive fashion, and sometimes what is on the screen spills over into his life outside the Internet. Unfortunately, the frum world is also suffering from this problem. I’m talking about people who outwardly seem typical, people with families and children who daven in shul, learn Torah, some of whom even teach Torah, but are actually leading double lives. Outwardly, to all their friends, they are thought of as G-d fearing Chassidim, but inside, there is real problematic behavior. These people suffer a great deal and to a certain extent, sometimes their families suffer too, mainly when their families discover there is another side to them that they never dreamed existed.
What spiritual answers are there to the problem of the virtual world?
It’s a problem that people tend to hide. The reason this tendency is stronger in the frum world is because one of the strongest fuels for this problem is guilt feelings. Usually, someone with an Internet obsession has an inner emptiness, an inner lack that cannot be filled, an insatiable void. People who you would think are fine and who have everything in life, feel as though they have nothing. They feel completely empty inside. They feel tremendously guilty and more than anything, they feel a lack of self-worth.
When a person feels a lack of self-worth, he wants to feel good at all costs, even when this good feeling costs him dearly, because of course, for a frum person to surf the Internet and look at unacceptable things, is something that only intensifies his guilt feelings.
We can use, as an example, something far simpler, emotional eating. A person comes home after a hard day at work and he feels bad and he doesn’t know how to deal with the unpleasant feelings he has. He doesn’t know what else to do and so he goes to the refrigerator and eats cake because it makes him feel good. In the short term, the cake does the job. In the long run, it will make him feel guilty because he will feel bad about himself, so to console himself, he eats more cake, and then there is an endless cycle. That is what is happening here.
It is very hard to extricate oneself from this without outside, professional help.
What help do you offer?
A tax investigator once told me that when he catches tax evaders, they almost always feel relieved even though they will have to pay for what they did. Because the person lived so many years feeling bad about himself, living a false life that he knows is false, he is happy that he finally can start truly dealing with his issue.
These things exact a heavy price. There are people I meet and even young yeshiva bachurim, thirteen years old in chareidi and dati-leumi yeshivos, who spend a large part of their lives in the other world, in the virtual world, in a world of tuma. And they are there because they feel an intolerable emptiness.
One of the most significant things in treating people who suffer from this problem is to teach them how to relate to other people. There are people who do not know how to connect. Connections between people can cause unpleasant feelings because when we connect with others, we are inevitably, occasionally, offended. There is no escaping that when relating to other people. Some people, having been offended in the past, close themselves off from any authentic human relationship. They might speak with other people but only on a superficial level.
You are describing here a specific personality type. If I understood you correctly, the addicted person is a shy or anti-social person. The bachur who is always on the sidelines. What about an outgoing type?
There are those who are gregarious only superficially, but when you uncover their true selves you see that their external facade is completely empty. It is known that there are people with dominant personalities who are completely immersed in these addictions. There was a story recently about a famous community person who fell into severe addiction and it destroyed his career, because although externally he seemed successful, nothing was real for him. He did not believe that he was truly successful. Today I spoke with someone who is a gambler, who said that he worked and was in the army and he started a company and had many other successes, but his success does not seem real to him.
If so, then it is not just addiction to the Internet, it seems to be a broader problem.
All addictions are symptoms of a situation in which a person lacks inner peace. The addicted person is disconnected from three things: 1) From himself – addicts don’t know how to identify and talk about emotions, and so part of the healing process is to teach them to identify emotions and talk about them. In the frum world in general, and the Litvishe world in particular, the chinuch is very intellectual. It does not place much of an emphasis on the emotions. In the Chassidic world it’s a bit better because Chassidim are more exposed to displays of emotion in t’filla, for example, but this is lacking in the Litvishe world. People feel a great emptiness.
2) From other people – he is not connected; he does not know how to relate to other people. He has relationships but they are only technical.
3) From Hashem.
A person reading this article who realizes he is addicted – what process does he need to undergo beyond getting in touch with his emotions. How long does treatment typically take?
That depends on the severity of his addiction. There are relatively minor addictions that require seeing a professional once a week. Today support groups for addicts are commonplace in Eretz Yisroel.
But sometimes the situation is worse. There are people who have gone for therapy or to support groups and did not solve their problem. The solution for them is to do more intensive therapy, under professional auspices, like the program I am in which has been treating substance abuse for twenty years, and they have now opened a program for the religious sector for Internet and other addictions.
What needs to be done is to get the person to relate to himself. He must step out of all his existing social structures, disconnect from his phone and computer, and learn how to live in a community. Addiction results from the inability to properly relate to other people. The patient comes to live in our residential facility. The short program is four months and the long program is nine months. The community functions as a completely independent community under the supervision of professionals, social workers and criminologists.
So at the facility the person is constantly exposed to other people with the same problem. He is not alone with the therapist.
Correct. The first and most important thing in therapy, and the most painful, is for a person to admit to himself and others that he has a problem. “I am addicted and I cannot take care of the problem myself.” Only when a person reaches a point where he says he cannot treat himself, he needs help, can recovery begin. Because until then, what he does, what everyone does, is play the victim, blame the whole world for his problem. The moment he begins to realize that only he can solve his problem, that it is his responsibility, the process can begin. And part of the process is to be able to tell other people, I have a problem, I am addicted to the Internet.
What’s amazing is that he then hears about many other people who are also addicted, who have the same problem. When he hears he is not alone with this problem and that other people recovered from it, it gives him enormous strength to successfully recover too.
If a person wants to know whether he is addicted to the Internet or other things, how can he tell?
When is eating food called an addiction? The definition of addiction is when the activity overshadows all other activities he does. When the activity occupies a disproportionate amount of time, and when it causes him to do things that contradict his values. When a person knows stealing is prohibited, but he steals, he knows it is forbidden to lie but he lies regularly, when he feels that his behavior is something he wants to change but he cannot, this is defined as an addiction.
What can we do with our youth?
The first and most important thing is to talk face to face. Social media causes people not to talk. At least we have Shabbos which puts a stop to the media. It’s very important to talk to children face to face, to make the human connection.
The second thing is that it is very important to learn about and talk about emotions, to express emotions, what I feel. There are so many people, adults and children, who do not know how to express their emotions. When a person cannot express his emotions, a void is created that cannot be filled.
The third thing – when a parent, for example, sees his child sitting all day on the Internet, his instinct is to attack and blame him. This is counterproductive because the guiltier a person feels, the more lacking in value he feels, and this just spurs him on to get external satisfaction and good feelings. The child’s problem is that he does not feel good inside and therefore he looks for it outside because when you feel good inside, you don’t need to look for it outside. When we blame the boy or girl, it just makes the problem bigger. We need to understand that this is the worst way to deal with it. The best way is to deal with it lovingly, compassionately.
Do you have a tip or something that can help people who are on their phones all day, because someone who works all day on the phone – and there are many like that – cannot take a break from it.
As I said, I think the most powerful medicine for addiction is human contact. Addiction is a misguided substitute for connection. A person innately has a desire to connect. The proper connection is with other people, but when there isn’t the proper connection, then a substitute is found, like people who have a dog because they don’t know how to fill their need for connection with human beings. Lower than that is connecting with a phone or the media or the Internet or food. They are all substitutes for human interaction.
In the approach I studied, addiction is more the result of a problem in forming connections than anything else. Connecting to yourself, to others, and the third relationship, with a Higher Power, Hashem. A real connection to Hashem is the most significant part of recovery.
In conclusion…
When it comes to treating addiction, we can learn how to deal with inner urges and how to handle unpleasant thoughts. The addict lives in his head and he is taught how to get out of his head and into real life, with its advantages and challenges. The main thing we teach addicts is – get out of your self-absorption. The addict lives a life in which all he thinks about is how to get more and more, and in order to get away from this, he needs to start doing for others.