When people ask Mindy Blumenfeld how she became a social worker, she has a simple response. “I feel like I didn’t become one,” laughed Blumenfeld, a 2009 graduate of Touro’s Graduate School of Social Work (GSSW). “I was born one. It just took me 38 years to realize it. For many of us in social work, we have the feeling that it was something we were born into.”
Blumenfeld, who maintains an office in Brooklyn, is a well-known and popular figure in her Orthodox Jewish community. She is many things to many people: a magazine columnist, a sought-after speaker, an author, and a trauma therapist certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) with a strong success record in the community.
“Since I’m a part of the Orthodox community, my patients don’t need to spend a lot of our sessions explaining concepts from the Orthodox world, like shidduchim, or yeshiva, or how the Chasidic world works,” Blumenfeld explained.
“I love working in my community,” she continued. “Whatever I put into my individual clients they’re going to further put into our community.”
Blumenfeld attributes her success to the education she received at GSSW, which honed her natural gifts of empathy and compassion. “I took away a very strong feeling of family and community from Touro,” she said. “The most valuable lessons I took were from the sincerity and authenticity of our professors. They cared about what they taught, and they represented what they taught.”
The greatest moment in the therapeutic relationship with her clients is the final one.
“When someone finishes their run of therapy and I watch them blossom and flower into something new and move on with their life, there’s such a feeling of gratitude that I was able to be a part of that,” Blumenfeld concluded. “It’s beautiful.”
To learn more please visit gssw.touro.edu
