Welcome back to the All About Audiology podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Lilach Saperstein and on this show we talk about how audiology interacts with your life, how it matters to you, and why you should care about any of the anatomy and all these technical things. But really, when we talk about audiology, we are saying, how does hearing and communication impact your relationships (and how does it) impact how you survive in the world. Especially for kids, we have tons of wonderful listeners who are parents. You want to give your kids everything you can, you want to advocate for them.

So, welcome to the show!

I’m so, so excited today to introduce you to Margo Helman who is a clinical social worker and therapist. She has a very interesting story to share. We have a little bit of a theme going on in the last couple of episodes where people have reached out to me and want to share their personal stories with hearing loss, audiology or communication and there’s a surprise. So, I’m excited to introduce Margo.

Dr. Lilach Saperstein: “Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself.”

Margo Helman: “Hi, thanks for having me. First of all, it’s so cool what you do. It’s great and so important. So, I’m really happy to be here.”

LS: “Thank you. It’s truly a labor of love and a mission from my heart. It’s fun.”

MH: “Yeah, I want to hear more actually about how you got into it. Maybe I’ll talk to you later. Your listeners probably know all that already. Hahaha.

So, I’m Margo, as you said, Margo Helman. I’m a clinical social worker and therapist. I work with people here in Jerusalem or online, coping with all of the things, normal difficult things about life. So, anxiety, difficult relationships, illness and loss. That’s my thing. I’m also passionate about mindful listening. Maybe I’ll tell you a little bit about that.

A lot of us have practices where we self-soothe and we can get ourselves really calm. Maybe some of us meditate or do yoga, little inner things too. Let’s say we’re meditating or doing yoga, we get off the cushion, we get off the mat, we walk into the kitchen or the living room where all the action is and then we can lose it at the people who are most important to us. It’s normal obviously, but sometimes, especially we know we are good at soothing ourselves in other situations, it can feel horrible and ruin our day and get us off track.”

LS: “Do you mean that people yell at their loved ones? Hahaha. That’s something that happens a lot? Hahaha.”

MH: “It does, Lilach. I can see you are very innocent about this. Hahaha. Yeah, we usually yell or get terribly upset and it throws us off so much. It’s both fascinating to me and really I want to create a movement, if you want the truth. I want to create a movement of bringing our inner practice to those moments with the people we love the most. Because that’s where we need it. I’ve come up with little tools and ways of doing that.”

LS: “Oh, wow. I really resonate with that. I want to hear lots more about that. One of the things we talk a lot about is advocating. My method, called the F-I-G Method, people have heard about it, and I’ll link it in the show notes but it’s basically about how do you take all that advocating energy and take it also to random people in the parking lot who ...