Rescuing Psychotherapy - July 2010-White Woman Boots

The vessel has been built and has been pushed into the water. Sierra Agape Center was incorporated on May 13th but I only just got the notification. It is early July and I am trying to balance my work in this community with contract work that earns a steadier income. The contract work takes me into the homes of families who have little money and whose children often speak the language of despair. As the unwitting carriers of the trouble for the whole family, they behave accordingly and of course, are then identified as "the trouble." I travel in my little car around Reno and out into the desert into the towns where white people have left their usual mark upon the Native Americans. The shacks pushed into dried up corners called "reservations" where I feel a palpable emptiness for which I always feel partially responsible. Surprisingly,the families warm up to me after only an hour or so. Postures soften as I acknowledge my whiteness and ask permission to enter into the protected areas of the family's history. I suspend everything I am told about each family by social workers, child protective services and probation officers; it's always the same slant. They often speak of the children as if they are disease carriers who have no right to be obstinate, angry and defiant. They speak of twelve year old girls as if they are the creators of destruction in their families without considering the amounts of garbage they are forced to contend with as a result of their parents decisions to use drugs, to choose violent partners or who are not equipped to offer loving, supportive guidance to the children they produce often from multiple fathers and mothers. The children are taken into the grim reaches of county or state mental health and socials services offices and issued diagnoses, given psychotropic medications, and sentenced to therapy to improve their behavior. As one of the therapists assigned to cases like these, I walk tenderly, realizing that I will look into the eyes of children and adolescents who feel silenced, and whose hearts and stomachs hold unarticulated rage and hurt at being identified as "the trouble." And I will look into the eyes of parents whose shame or lack of insight prevents them from seeing how much sense it makes that their children are angry, depressed and teetering on the edge of implosion. My daily practice of meditation may be helping me sit steady as an old oak as I listen to a 31 year-old Mexican woman, pregnant for the third time speak to her barely 13 year-old daughter. Her daughter was removed from her home because of her meth and alcohol use which resulted in a DUI. Her son, then 4 and her daughter, then 10, were both removed and placed in foster homes. Her daughter has been back home for two weeks. The mother does not understand why her daughter, now physically developed beyond what 13 year old girls looked like before hormones were injected into our food sources, is angry and beligerent. She threatens to pick up the phone and call the CPS social worker and have her daughter dragged off to a holding facility for foster children. I watch the girls eyes fill with tears as she struggles to maintain the facade of anger and toughness behind which she feels at least some power over herself. "Go ahead, I don't care," she says chewing on a plastic bottle cap. The girl's eyes are heavily made up. She wears multiple pieces of decoration pierced through her ears, nose and bottom lip. Her mother blames the girl for having sexual intercourse with a man twice her age and for giving blow jobs to guys in movie theatres, calling her a 'ho. I take a breath and speak, trying to channel what this barely out of little girl-hood teenager must be feeling. I remind the mother that twelve year-old girls cannot make informed decisions and "choose" to have intercourse with older men even if they think they can. They are victims of sexual assault, coercion and rape. They do not know how to say "no" to offers of attention in any form is what they are so hungry for. I check in with the girl to see if she resonates. Am I echoing her or am I echoing myself? Or both? Do we, despite the abyss in age and ethnicity between us, share at some bone deep level the same pain and emptiness? She catches my eye and I see myself. She sees herself in me and she allows a slight smile.

On the other side of "planet therapy," in a town far away, I see a white, upper middle class family who has a facade of its own now crumbling into ruin. Once financially solvent, this family is now looking into the unfamiliar chambers of bankruptcy court. Although the SUV's and boats are still in the driveway of their luxurious home, the appearances defy the realities. Their 16 year-old son, the eldest of their four children, a star skier and the pride of the family made a u-turn when he was about 13 and began to deviate from his proscribed path. He kept it well hidden that he was molested by a coach as boys often do. Instead, he began to find ways to get away from the thoughts and memories. His favorite way was to smoke a lot of marijuana. His family, disappointed and dismayed that he seemed to be self-destructing and ruining his chances to become an Olympian, did what most parents do when they feel loss of control. They tightened up and cracked down in a frightened and frantic effort to keep him from klling himself. More structure, anything to stop the behavior. Predictably, the more they tightened, the more angry and defiant he became. The secret he kept began to bloat with its own toxicity and like a virulent, vicious tumor, it wound its way into the boy's mind, his stomach, his heart and his soul. His behavior became darker and infected the family to the degree that they just wanted him to go away somewhere and be healed of his addiction and behavior.

Several visits to juvenile detention centers, various camps, treatment facilities, begging, pleading and a succession of therapists only had the effect of intensifying his desire to avoid reality. In my visits with children and adolescents who have spent time in juvenile detention centers, none say their experiences taught them how to love themselves more or how to love others, envision a future free of violence and drugs or be a part of transforming a world that has silenced them and crushed their imaginations. While there are some adolescents whose lives have been so informed by insitutionalization that they may never habituate to anything else, I have only seen those whose toughness and anger belie hearts aching for some softness and a place to let their guard down. Each boy on my caseload, all of whom are on parole from places like China Springs or other juvenile detention facilities far out in the deserts of Nevada, tell me they want to be of help to younger boys headed down the same road. In the words of one who first saw the walls of a juvenile prison at the age of twelve and is now 18, "I feel real protective, you know. I wanna tell 'em, you know, it ain't cool to be locked up. It's not what you think. It's bad man...you don't learn nothin' in there except to be more angry...how to kill or be more like...violent...you know?"

Yes, I know.