Boca Raton News - Sunday, February 26, 2006

Boca Raton's Sherrie Raz stresses stress reduction

Longtime therapist has practiced locally and helped around the world

by Dale King, Julia Hebert

Dr. Sherrie Raz discovered her career calling early. And it has been a steadying guide through a life that has taken her to places around the world.

Raz, a Boca Raton therapist, has always used her skills for stress reduction. She has taken her psychology talents to places they'd never been before. She has dealt with a variety of troubles and traumas - at her office in Boca Raton, on the streets of New York in the days following the 9-11 attacks and along the coast of Indonesia following last year's horrific tsunami.

She is often called upon to share her expertise in the field. She has also appeared on County Channel 20 offering stress-reducing procedures to worried residents during hurricanes.

"Life is hard," she said. "If you take a rigid role, you will not have mental health. If you take a flexible role, you will have mental health."

She said her father provided a major incentive for her to enter the field. He returned from war with post-traumatic stress disorder.

After some 30 years in her profession, Raz is preparing to take it to the next level - by entering "the high-tech area of stress reduction."

She is educated in biofeedback - "a training device to learn how to reduce blood pressure - with or without drugs," she said. And she is heading to California soon to learn a new procedure - HeartMath.

Raz and her husband, Yuda, live in West Boca Raton. Their son, Yaneev, a budding film producer, lives in Los Angeles, where he is writing and raising money for a movie he hopes to create in Boca Raton. They also have a daughter, Orly, who is involved with her father's business, Sir Speedy, in West Palm Beach.

A Philadelphia native, the former Sherrie Belack and her family moved to Cherry Hill, N.J. when she was eight. She later attended the Lear School in Miami, where she developed an early love for theater. The acting bug would come back to bite her again later.

Perhaps this avocation was in the genes. Raz said her father wanted to be a writer. His first cousin was famed author Clifford Odets.

"He talked to Clifford about writing," she said. "Clifford told him, 'Don't get rid of your day job.'" Her father also attended television school with Ed McMahon.

She studied for a time at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. But when Raz was 17, her father died. The family then mustered at her uncle's farm in Virginia.

By the late 1960s, Raz was back in school - this time at the University of Maryland, where she studied comparative literature. It was the Vietnam War era, she recalled. "I was a peace activist." She said she attended classes taught by Eugene McCarthy, the Democratic presidential hopeful in 1968. "He was an inspiration," she said. And she wrote a book of poetry called, "In a Strange Land."

Her life took a major turn when she moved to Israel, to live on a kibbutz. "They put me in charge of a course called psychosocial work. There was no such thing as psychology."

Living with her mother in Kibbutz Ulpan, Israel, Raz got the opportunity to work with men injured in the battlefield. "That was 30 years ago - and I've been doing it ever since."

She soon met her future husband, Yuda, who had been the commander of a tank corps and served in three different wars in Israel. In fact, she said, he was born in an Israeli Army barracks in 1948 - the same year the new country earned the status of a nation.

They married in 1974 - and a couple of years later came to the United States.

While raising her children, Raz worked on the side. She drafted the first drug abuse policy for Palm Beach County schools. "It was never implemented," she said. She also did part time work as a therapist, then went on to get her doctorate in clinical psychology from the Miami Institute.

As she picked up momentum in the field, Raz started the Trauma Society and the Green Cross. She worked to create a mobile stress reduction unit.

As a member of a Homeland Security Team, Raz was assigned to trauma therapy duty in New York after 9-11. She worked in hurricane-ravaged Pensacola last year, living in the operating room of a smashed hospital. She also worked with tsunami survivors.

Founder of the International Association for Psychology in the Performing Arts, Raz is a member of the Board of Advisors of the American Hebrew University. And she has taught drama therapy at New York University and psychology at the Miami Institute. She also taught at the University of Plymouth, England, and Fort Lauderdale Community College, now Broward Community College.

Raz is now setting her sights on HeartMath, a new stress reduction system that's just coming on line. She said she's excited about bringing what she considers to be a new and innovative therapeutic technique to the area when she finishes training in late March.