Life as a Series of Changes or Crises

In the five days between talking with my bestie Ruth, my life managed to catapult into entire upheaval, mostly in a good way, though. Our weekly phone dates, which have been going on for near a decade go far beyond the bare bones updating that happens with longer distance/time friends, and so I felt almost no qualms in stating in one breath:

So, I’m starting a private practice. And some (paraphrasing for privacy) pretty interesting personal things happened in our sex life, and I feel mixed emotions that I want to process with you.  And I interviewed a nanny, and liked her, but worried she’ll be flakey. And did I mention I’m teaching an additional class next quarter? And why do I always feel like when we talk it sometimes feel like I’m giving you a pinball list of my next crazy adventure.

She laughed, and said, ‘you know, I’ve come to realize, that most of my friends leave rather boring day to day lives. And when things are good with me and Barnes we’re good, and I don’t need to report on it at all, and we talk about things like deep religion and stuff, and then when things are up in the air or hard I need to process. And so in talking with friends, it can seem like our lives are a series of changes or crises.”

Boy did she hit the nail on the head, per usual.

Brought on my some frustration at work, I went out to coffee with a former classmate who has managed to start a counseling agency. An agency with a contract with a local school district so counselors can provide therapy to students. A counseling agency with a billing specialist, scheduler, 8 treatment rooms and a group room, an ARNP in-house for medications, and access to insurance panels. She said she’d love to have me on board, and it’s when I finally let myself remember that I love doing therapy, and am excited to see where this goes, and the possibility for 6 clients a week could almost equal $20,000 extra a year (on the high end), and that while I’m nervous about adding an extra day to my plate, it’s not forever, possibly time limited for a year or so depending on whether I get pregnant, but it could be an opportunity for me to get this other part of my soul fulfilled.

And so, the nanny interviewing begins. We met a woman who seems like a great fit, though I’m worried about her being flaky, and so I hope that added stress doesn’t happen because I am already feeling super nervous about my transition from 4 to 5 days, and I really want Potamus to have a good time with a fun person, and that’s what it seems to be. Ugh I hate being an adult sometimes and having to deal with all the stress, added on top of that the whole mommy guilt which I mostly avoid, but it rears its ugly head in situations like this where I feel like I’m tipping the balance of family to career focus.

But then I think, how great it’ll be in the summers, when I work one day a week, and he’s only in care 2-3 days, and the rest with me. That there are plenty of moms who work 5 days a week, and that dads never worry about this type of commitment. And that if I’m able to even make an extra $15,000 that would pay for childcare for a second kid if the time came to it. And I’d be able to flex my therapy muscles.

So there you go, a series of crises and changes in my world.

How to Pass the Time when You’re Waiting To Hear That Your Student Is Not Dead…

“I want to die! I want to die!” is not the first thing you want to read in your Monday morning email. Especially when the email was sent at 2:24 am on Saturday, a day you don’t work nor check email. Boundaries are super important in this job, and I make sure to live up to the boundaries that I set with my students. This isn’t the 24/7 crisis work that I used to do, and technically I am not even acting in the counseling capacity for my students, but when I read an email like that my heart skips a beat (or 12).

Because I care a great deal about students, and I also take suicidal ideation seriously.

I know, as a mental health counselor, that there is a difference between wanting to die and wanting to kill myself but without the ability to do a face-to-face assessment I cannot determine the level of threat in this email. And with a student not responding to my response email(s) or phone call, I am left in the emotional lurch.

Tomorrow, at noon, I will put a welfare check out on this student, per the college’s recommendation. But, in the meantime, my heart feels bound up and my normally boundaries-of-steel are crumbling into an almost state of panic.

I’ve never lost a student to suicide. I am frank in my lectures and in my last assessment with the student I am confident they were in a depressed state but had no suicide ideation, let alone any means or plan. I am confident in that. And yet…and yet…that email…and how quickly things can spiral.

In the meantime, while I wait for that return email, or that police knock on their door, I am drinking beer and folding underwear. Because nothing puts the world at ease like sorting panties into sexy and period piles on my coffee table. I have to live this way, one foot in front of the other…focus on the mundane, the real, the things I can control right now.

And wait.

Waiting is the hardest part.

And for those of you that vibe or shake or pray or drum or send good thoughts…you wanna send them my student’s way?

Thanks.

My Speech Before the Movie Remember the Titans

I sat cross legged on the desk in front of the room. It was a minute passed the start of class and I was silent. Some students had just come in and were getting settled. I waited. My silence had an effect on the room. Conversations in the back of the class slowly stopped. The students in the front of the class looked at me wide-eyed. When I had 99% of their attention I said:

Before this job I was a crisis counselor. And one day, when I was on-call, I went to a house and the student they expected me to counsel was 350lbs. And she was stark naked. I stood in the doorway of her apartment building, and she was naked, developmentally delayed and didn’t speak English because she wasn’t from this country originally. And I thought to myself, “what the fuck do I do?” Because nothing in my schooling prepared me for this. (class erupted into giggles).

And I’m sitting here in a similar situation. Because this is the first class I’ve taught where, on an individual level, I really like everyone. I came to be a mental health counselor because of a belief in unconditional positive regard, and that means that no matter how many times you fail your English class, or keep having anxiety, I will not judge because I see the essence of each one of you and it is amazingly awesome. And yet, I work for an insititution that systematically oppresses young people, and expects conformity over individuality. And so I’m torn. Because on an individual basis I think that most of you will be ready to progress, but for some reason the classroom dynamic isn’t there, and so I really don’t know what to do. But I’m sitting here wanting you to know this, because I have a tendency to hide behind anger and annoyance and if you were all just dicks to me I could write you off and not be upset if you failed. But that’s not the case, and so I don’t know what to do. But I do know that yeserday a teacher called one of our students (not in this class) pathetic, and worthless, and I am extremely protective of you because I want you to achieve your goals…and be successful…no matter how you define that for yourself. But my job is to make an assessment on whether you are ready to advance to the next classes, and we aren’t there yet as a class. And I needed to be vulnerable and share rather than blindside you at midterm evaluations. Because I have enjoyed getting to know each of you, and I enjoy joking and our discussions, and your writings…and yet it still seems like there’s something missing. And so we can discuss it as a class, or we can just take some time to think about it, but I’ve never been in this place before, and I feel stuck and don’t know how to move forward.

I could have heard a pin drop the room was so quiet.

And then when I was done, a student spoke, and he said:

“yeah, it seems we still sorta have a highschool vibe in here.”

And another asked if it meant they needed to just be quiet and listen more, and I said that wasn’t it entirely. And another said that she felt I was a different type of teacher, that I cared, and that the other professors won’t care and could just fail them. And another said she really liked how comfortable people were sharing and that it felt good to her.

I told them they weren’t getting in trouble, and that this wasn’t a bad or shaming lecture, but that it was something I was feeling and wanted to share. And the body language was at least 85% engaged and seemed to be in agreement, even though some of their honest verbal feedback had a slight edge of defensiveness (which is understandable).

And so, not to beat a dead horse, I left them sitting in that place of vulnerable sharing and without a resolution to get started on our lesson for the day (as I’m still subbing for my co-teacher) and we watched Remember the Titans, which was supposed to go along with our lessons on diversity, but also, in a strangely coincidental way, went along with this idea of rising to a challenge, and changing, and becoming a team and people that we can be.

Results are pending on whether this worked. Or if they even heard me. Or if the students I wanted to hear me heard me. But I did something different today, leading from a place of honest vulnerability, rather than my typical sarcastic bravado and flippance. I hope they noticed. I hope they heard the message at the heart of it…that they are worthy.

Face Forward to Go Forward

I had used the line before, but it was different this time. I’m not sure why this client clung to me (metaphorically, of course), but sometimes that’s the nature of crisis-work. There becomes a trauma-bond that they feel when you come and see them in the most vulnerable state, and then six weeks later they are crushed when you tell them that they have changed, are stronger, and need to keep moving forward without you. It’s the nature of crisis work, nothing personal, I tell them up-front, but there were those clients who had lots of feelings when it came to that final goodbye.

And so, my Family-Advocate and I, sat in the moldy smelling family room, with her mom and dad and sister and long-time therapist, and we had a final family meeting. And the dad, overwhelming nervous about the prospect of this crisis happening again, asked “what do we do if it happens again. We don’t want to go back,” and I replied:

When you’re driving you look through the windshield. You need to glance in the rear-view mirror to see where you’ve come from, and what might be behind you, but if you stare in the rearview mirror you’ll crash. You have to keep your eyes focused on what’s ahead. The forward journey. Glance back, but keep moving forward.

There was a moment of hush in the room. It wasn’t anything magical, I’d said it a hundred times, and it’s something I believe in, but in that moment it hit the family in a spot that they needed. Even the therapist, who had been working with this young lady for years, and was a long-time therapy supervisor, was stunned. I might have blushed because half the time I think I’m fucking everything up and about 1 step away from being found a fraud.

+++++++++

I thought of this experience this morning, as I buckled Potamus into the car. We’re a month early, but we turned his car seat around to face forward. His legs had been scrunched for awhile now, and we thought it best. And he was Mr. Nonchalant about the whole thing, clearly based on the picture above. And as I drove I kept catching glimpses of him in the backseat and had to remind myself to keep my eyes on the road. I could state at his wild blonde hair and intense eyes forever. I could get stuck in the nostalgia of the first car trip with him, all 7lbs, bundled up so snugly as we drove home from the hospital. I know that nostalgia, sentiment, memories are good…really good…but I can’t live there, in the past. We move forward, driving off into the sunrise, and work, and daycare, and a new Holiday-Week, and it’s okay.

 

Bearing Witness to Student’s Lived Experience

In the past few weeks I have realized something: my job as an instructor/adviser is just as hard as it was as a crisis counselor. Though the schedule is much easier, the fact that I am simply in a position to bear witness to lives, rather than be the person to actively help seek the resources and see immediate change, is where the exhaustion is coming in. I know that I was built for this work, but lately there are several students who have been heavy on my heart. So heavy that I downloaded Anne Lamott’s new book Stitches and am flipping through it, because she talks about the utter fuckedupness of the world and how we stand and face all the cruelty in situations that often don’t have any ‘meaning’ (she cites the Newton shooting, for example.) Her words give me comfort.

So I’m nestled in my pajamas, at 4:30 pm on a Wednesday, drinking red wine and watching Jake & The Neverland Pirates with Potamus and musing about the fate of my students. And I’m sad, and angry (at parents and schools that have failed my students) and excited and proud, but also this feeling that is deeper than all of that, something about awe and heartache mixed with immense fear and hope. It’s hard to express adequately, ya know?

This week I had a student tell me that in their photography class they were instructed to take “street shots” and so they were in a piss-filled alley taking photos of graffiti. And they struck up a conversation with a homeless man, who spilled his life story, and after an hour the photographer moved on to a different location…getting two blocks away before they heard screams. And when they turned back into the alley, the homeless man had been stabbed to death by someone on drugs. A man who had previously lost his wife and daughter in a car accident and had chosen the homeless lifestyle, donating all of his posessions to charity, in order to “start over.” If heaven exists then maybe he’s met by his daughter and wife, but only minutes before my 17 year old student had been chatting with him, taking his photo. And then he was dead, just like that. And my student witnessed it.

How do you make sense of that? How do I hold the space for that story, for the emotions that go with it, without trying to solve it or make it all magically better?

What about the student who told me they missed class last week because they were arrested and with 1 week until their 18th birthday are most likely going to be charged as an adult and sent to prison? This student who I found on the news was selling close to 300 “molly” and crystal meth pills at a local rave. My student fessed up to their actions, but still? And school is the best option for them right now, but my heart is heavy because prison is the real deal and all the hard work to get on the right track were blown in a night.

How do I hold that?

And the students who have been writing about their drug addictions and the process of getting clean. Or their experience being in lockdown psych wards for psychotic breaks. Or the 11 concussions and expulsion from high school because they didn’t pass their class but no teacher gave any accommodations for the sports related injuries. My students are struggling with SO MANY things. And they come every day, and write about SMART goals, and learn study habits, and sometimes they do it when they haven’t eaten for a day or two, or don’t know where they’re going to live.

I admire their tenacity. Their ability to rise above the challenges that no kid should have to face…homelessness, drug addictions, abuse, mental illness, physical illness, natural disasters, etc. I bear witness and have to sit with their stories and know that maybe that is enough. When I can’t do anything but smile at them, and tell them hello, and hear their lives in a way that many educators haven’t done in the past. Is it enough? I have no idea. But I hope that it makes some small difference…

Compassion Fatigue

Compassion fatigue, also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS), is a condition characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time. It is common among individuals that work directly with trauma victims such as nurses, psychologists, and first responders. It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s. Sufferers can exhibit several symptoms including hopelessness, a decrease in experiences of pleasure, constant stress and anxiety, sleeplessness or nightmares, and a pervasive negative attitude. This can have detrimental effects on individuals, both professionally and personally, including a decrease in productivity, the inability to focus, and the development of new feelings of incompetency and self-doubt.^{[1][dead link]}

Journalism analysts argue that the media has caused widespread compassion fatigue in society by saturating newspapers and news shows with often decontextualized images and stories of tragedy and suffering. This has caused the public to become cynical, or become resistant to helping people who are suffering.^[2]

When I worked as a crisis counselor, I had this amazing ability to be really present with families and clients, while somehow maintaining a strong boundary emotinally. I was compassionate in the moment, and when the students were no longer on my caseload (betwen 3-6 weeks) I was done with them, emotionally. I saw my position as a part of the greater whole, a watering hole for the thirsty, but didn’t consider myself necessary to their overall lifetime of happiness. I was an in-the-moment bandaid and often saw immediate results, though I couldn’t take away years of chronic stress or drug use or neglect. I provided concrete skills in the immediate, much like a life preserver. I didn’t stick around to see if they became Olympic swimmers.

My job, now, though, is much harder than I expected. I see students for 1 quarter as a teacher and then they get funneled to me for advising in the rest of their time in our program. A student spent an hour crying in my office last week and I noticed that I cared quite deeply about their life story and realized that I was still holding a presence in their life since last year. And that’s when I realized that I’m pretty exhausted by my work. Because short term caring is easy for me. Long term caring is hard. And it gets harder every day, though I think my awareness of my caring is the first step. Because as a crisis counselor I didn’t think I was saving people, I was merely giving them a drink on a hot summer day. But with these students, sometimes I feel like I’m plunging into the murky waters to try and rescue them, repeatedly, and it’s both rewarding and exhausting. It’s hard staring into the face of a hungry teenager and tell them abou the wonders of study skills when I know that they aren’t getting fed, and most likely are sleeping on their friend’s couch and bumming cigarettes to take away the gnawing pains in their stomachs. I want to DO, because just being with the pain of their life is hard.

I don’t have compassion fatigue, but I see how I very well could develop it. I’m tired, certainly, but aren’t we all? Just this afternoon I see that yet another school gunman killed a teacher, and if I let it, my mind will go a thousand directions with that type of news. I am an educator working with students with records and access to guns and histories of mental illness. And I am a mom, with a son, who could be bullied or be a bully, who could have mental illness (like his mom) or a host of issues, or could be in class with a kid who brings a gun. If I start thinking I start panicking and in turn I just shut everything off. Because feeling the fear of losing my baby, because feeling the fear of leaving my baby motherless in this cruel world, is too much for my poor heart to begin to comprehend.

I’m trying to focus on self-care…therapy and yoga and talking with friends. But sometimes I feel like I need self-care from my self-care, does that make sense? Like the burden of weekly therapy and yoga and phone dates come stacking up and it’s one more thing I have to be present and aware and compassionate in, and I just don’t know if I have the resources. Because it’s exhausting being for others, my students and my child, what I can’t often be for myself (though I’m trying). Giving to others what I don’t feel like I have received, or am receiving, is taking a toll on my mind and my heart.

Have you experienced burnout or compassion fatigue? What did you do to get through that?

Roles & Boundaries in Higher Education

As an educator, I have to remember that I am not a counselor, even though much of my class is built around soft-skills and information that I would explore and work on in a counseling relationship. But, I am an instructor, and it is imporant for me to know the difference, as well as to create and stick with an educational boundary that isn’t quite like the boundary I’d set with a group therapy session.

Of course I knew that my counseling informed my instruction, but it wasn’t until I was processing a student-student conflict that happened last week in class (of which I had felt I handled it badly and was in triage mode the rest of the class period, as well as ruminating all weekend) that as an educator I actually handled myself very well. But, as a counselor, I was holding myself to this supremely high expectation that is not reasonable given my circumstances.

And, in my role of adviser, I am noticing my boundaries loosening quite substantially in the year that I’ve been there. I’m beginning to feel ‘invested’ in these student’s lives, so when one is crying in my office because of crippling anxiety, or proudly sharing their name change to their biological family heritage, I’m finding myself caring, which isn’t to say that I didn’t care before, but I had built a strong mental boundary to eliminate lying in bed at 3am wondering how they are doing or what might help them be more successful. I know the student relationships are what feeds me, but there is the phrase ‘death by chocolate’ for a reason. And the crippling sadness and despair found in many of my student’s is having an effect.

So how do I find the balance? Less counseling in the classroom, in terms of what I expect of myself emotionally, and more counseling in the advising office, in terms of how I deal with boundary issues. But I’m not entirely sure how to do that…

Thoughts? How do you navigate boundaries and self-care and the various roles you have in your life?

Is Love Enough?

A few years ago I was taking a counseling Ethics class and had to do a paper and presentation on an ethical dilemma. I chose International Adoption, posing some questions like:

• Adoption…or baby buying?
• Is it ethical to adopt a child from a different culture than your own?
• Is Love Enough?

These provocative questions got the class thinking, and discussing, adoption from a different point of view than is traditionally upheld. Each point could be its own entry, but I want to focus on this question about love being enough.

In my time as a crisis counselor, I worked with MANY families who had adopted: domestic infant, international, or from foster-care. And all of the families I met were dealing with some major issue (duh, it was a crisis counseling service), that stemmed back to adoption and adoption trauma…yes…even the families with the children who were healthy white children adopted as infants. While certainly other families had issues, there was something unique about these adoptive families, where they would mention things like, “but I love her, I didn’t realize that this could happen, I took her in, I showed her love.”

I keep thinking about the stories we hear, about Russian adoptees being sent back by their parents after being a handful, or even here, in Washington, so many stories of Ethiopian adoptees being starved and whipped for “bad behavior,” and ending up dead or in foster-care because of the abuse/neglect from their adoptive parents. Certainly those are extreme cases, but even the loving families that I saw, were struggling to make sense of why their child was so fucked up (to use a very non-clinical way of describing it). There was this overwhelming sense of naivete, that because these children were loved, and saved from a life of living with a crack-whore birthmom or in a foreign country (a dominate narrative told in adoption-land), that they would grow up to be okay.

But IS love enough?

For children who were raised in orphanages, who might be struggling with Post-Institutionalization Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or any type of physical/cognitive delays, is simply loving them going to fix it? Standing from this perspective, the answer is clearly NO! But for some reason, families who desperately want children, who go to such great lengths to obtain these children, still operate under the belief that love is enough. Their love is going to fix everything.

But, who would tell a soldier’s wife that her love is enough to fix her husband’s PTSD from serving 5 tours in Iraq? Nobody I know would. And even, on a less-extreme case, when Potamus is sick, or if he broke a bone, or seemed to be suffering from depression, I cannot imagine simply trying to ‘love’ the pain away…ya know?

These questions were meant to get my fellow counselors thinking about working with families from a new perspective. Because, for so many, the myth of adoption being a miracle, has clouded over the fact that an adopted child is wired differently because of their experience, and simply loving them is not going to fix things…it will help, but there are many other things that need to happen to help the child be successful.

In my crisis work, I was fortunate to be paired with a 67 year old adoptive mother, who “got it” and had lived it, and was able to connect to many of these adoptive parents in a way that I was not. And I was able to connect to these children/teens in a way that other therapists were not. And adoption was discussed (because most often others hadn’t even recognized where the pain/dysfunction was stemming from).

Reflections on 16 months of crisis counseling

I have witnessed a lot in the past 16 months of crisis counseling, and as I sit on my last day, having discharged my last client last night, I feel so much hope in my move forward. But there is also this lingering sense of  heaviness from all that I have witnessed…

I accepted the job, as a Crisis Intervention Specialist, working with youth 3-18 and their families in King County, 24 hours after I learned I was pregnant. So my first 9 months on the job I was pregnant and the 2nd half of the job I was a new mom. While I have been employed there for 16 months, if you take out the maternity leave in the middle, I’ve solidly worked there for 1 year. But 1 year feels like an eternity. There are things I have seen, and witnessed, and felt that are hard to put into words, hard to describe to people who haven’t been there.

Like, how do you explain the feeling of arriving at an apartment, to find a 250 lb naked teenage developmentally delayed (can’t speak or understand language)  girl from a foreign country sitting on the stairs and realizing that she is the client. Naked. And what goes through my mind is, “my schooling did not prepare me for this.” To be body slammed and try to explain to the family through an interpreter how the mental health system works here in America.

How do I explain the smell of a pre-adolescent who hasn’t showered or changed clothes for the past 3 months because she sees a bloody axe wielding woman in the bathtub. How do I explain the condemend house infested with fleas with the family living in the basement? Or the 13 year old who was pregnant and kicked out of her house by her aunt, who said it’d be fine if she just went to live in a shelter. Or the 5 year old who put his mom in a choke-hold while she drives down the freeway. Or the meth-coke-crack-oxy-marijuana-alcohol abusing 15 year old trying to stay sober in a family of addicts.

Or what about the 12 year old prostiting herself because she heard her birthmother did drugs and was on the street and she hoped that maybe she would meet her out there, somewhere, sometime.

I have seen so much, and yet, what I have seen doesn’t compare to how much my family’s have seen. And I am leaving this position changed, in a way that is hard to put into words. Not much scared me before, but now there is very little that I am really afraid of in reaction or relation to teens or their families.