Course 001:Former espionage agents teach the tricks of their trade: people skills
It’s a truism that emotional healthiness finds and begets more healthiness. But in order to learn this, Batel Vaknin needed to experience the reverse.
Life hadn’t been easy for Batel. Her parents’ divorce when she was young hit her hard, and later, she struggled when her mother remarried. While her mother and stepfather raised a large blended family, she felt unmoored. Her teen years were tumultuous, and she struggled to fit into her family, to make sense of her tremendous emotional pain, to find her place.
“But even amid the deepest moments of pain,” Batel recalls, “I felt something — a presence, a calmness. Hashem? ‘There’s a purpose to all this,’ I’d tell myself. Even then I knew my pain had a purpose, that one day I would channel it.”
Batel married young. She soon realized that her marriage wasn’t healthy, but it was a catch-22, as remembering her parent’s divorce, Batel resolved that she’d never go down that path. Eventually, though, it became clear to her that she needed to end her marriage.
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