Doesn’t seem like I’ve mentioned my experience with stalking on the unit. Our newest psych, Ms. Eamon had a new patient that came in from his month at what I call Decontamination. This is a process where all new prisoners are taken upon incarceration, screened for appropriate security levels, and most important to us, investigated for current or incipient mental health issues. We get the Security 1 (lowest) mental health patients.
Mr. Newsome was a ratty looking, decrepit, probably younger than he looked, nondescript guy. Immediately he started sidling up to us on the yard about half the time we walked it. he apparently discovered who I was and started approaching me independent of Ms. Eamon, asking me about his parole options, even though parole was at least two years off for him. This quickly devolved into him stopping in my office on his way to hers.
When walking on the yard and being approached, you can keep moving apace, and the guys fall off pretty quickly. In my office, I have nowhere to go. I generally pleasantly redirect unknown visitors away from my door to who they actually need to talk to. I was not pleasant, but dismissive and curt with Mr. Newsome for his first visit. The fact that I even knew his name and he was not on my caseload and had been at the facility for less than two weeks was not a good sign. The second time he was lurking outside my door, I walked at him until he had to stumble backward away from me and sent him on his way. The third time, I believe I roared somewhat incoherently, followed him into Ms. Eamon’s office and made it bloody clear he was not to approach me or talk to me ever again.
Later that afternoon, as I we were talking about his earlier visit to the offices in the morning I hadn’t even known about, he strolled back into the interior offices, allegedly looking for something he had left in Ms. Eamon’s office. I backed him down the hallway, called custody and had him escorted back to his unit and left to talk to the Captain about dealing with this person. Our boss was out of the office and I was too irritated and freaked out to let it wait. I checked, and he has two charges of Assault to Commit Sexual Penetration, Indecent Exposure, and a couple of less exciting charges.
Unfortunately, his unit officer had given him verbal permission to come back looking for his possession. So, no Major Out of Place ticket could be written. He had not actually entered my office, so that was out also. Instead, the Inspector called him down, read him the riot act, told him he could catch a new bit for stalking if he addressed me or came without a pass to our offices again. Ms. Eamon transferred him to the male boss, and all was quiet for a while.
As the previous blogs suggest, I had a run of spending quite a bit of time in Seg. Seg has only a few cells, and the Custody person who usually works there is garrulous and talk and chat back and forth, knowing most of the guys are carefully listening to everything that is going on. It’s not like there is much else to do while you are sitting in a tiny cell, and it is usually better than listening to your own thoughts.
While visiting Mr. Biggs, I had to stroll the long way out of the office to get out. A movement caught the corner of my eye where no movement should have been. I glance over and perfectly centered in the frame of the meal slot is a penis and a hand. He wasn’t overtly masturbating, the best interpretation might have been scratching his testicles. I was a bit startled, but kept walking so as not to reinforce the behavior, if that is what it was, nor embarrass some guy who was caught unawares. Later that afternoon I happened to glance at the Seg board, and as you have already guessed, discovered it was Mr. Newsome.
I bounced it off of the Inspector, and he felt it was important that I write the ticket, although it would be hard to prove intent if we did not make eye contact and he did not speak to me. Four rewrites later, we have the best we can do with the sketchy events.
His initial interview with the Hearings Investigator struck gold, so to speak. He explained that the direction not to speak to me was so clear, that the only way he could think to get my attention was to wave his genitals at me. Which I guess worked, but not even remotely in the way he had hoped. He also mentioned he would be highly honored if I might wave mine back at him. Really, that hadn’t occurred to me as social possibility. He is now at a Level 4 (Level 5 being the highest), and I wonder who is receiving his attentions now?
As I was walking out today, my boss mentioned the fact that in the first 17 years he had been working in the prison, there had been no penis waving. And for some reason, I had my second in the first year. He quietly wondered to himself what this might portend…
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
In the Hole Yet Again
Yesterday, one of my guys I’m fond of, but has a lesser place in the pantheon was caught smuggling illegal substances into the facility. Mr. Biggs was on a program that takes guys out of the prison and rents out their work to local governments. They mow grass, clean up cemeteries, roadsides, etc.
One of the most meticulous guards, who knows I am connected with this guy, made it his business to track me down at lunch and tell me, “your friend,” got busted bringing in drugs. Apparently he is in Seg, now, awaiting investigation.
I check his ticket out and it is grim. He was hoping for Parole. He explains to me his thinking and what he owed on the unit and that this maneuver would set him free from his debts. He accrued a debt. His brother did not put enough money in his account to meet it. Now the debt has trebled, and the gang holding the debt suggests he bring in $2000 worth of drugs in to meet it. How he imagined he could smuggle it in his underwear during a strip search evades me, and in fact evaded him.
Instead, he is in the hole. He has no other tickets; odds are he won’t be ridden out elsewhere, but he has this smuggling/substance abuse ticket that makes him look rather bad to the Parole Board. He wants out for his children. His five year old daughter believes he is someplace else on the planet “working” which is why she is not with him, but can talk to him.
He is forlorn. It is possible he will catch another felony for smuggling. No point in telling him this, learning it from the Hearings Officer will be soon enough. He tries to put a brighter face on it by recounting his bunkmate who was paroled after a series of fairly serious tickets, and I suddenly suspect Mr. Biggs was bunking with Mr. Stark. I ask a few questions to ascertain it is Mr. Stark. We toss this idea around for a moment through the meal slot, and I end the conversation and retreat to the Seg office to write my note in the Log.
Halfway through the note it occurs to me why Mr. Biggs didn’t just tell me his bunkies’ name. I checked with him, “Mr. Biggs, you didn’t tell me who you bunked with because you only know his nickname (Highboy), and didn’t want to let me in on that bit of information, hmm?” He blushes and nods. So careful of my sensibilities and potential naiveté.
One of the most meticulous guards, who knows I am connected with this guy, made it his business to track me down at lunch and tell me, “your friend,” got busted bringing in drugs. Apparently he is in Seg, now, awaiting investigation.
I check his ticket out and it is grim. He was hoping for Parole. He explains to me his thinking and what he owed on the unit and that this maneuver would set him free from his debts. He accrued a debt. His brother did not put enough money in his account to meet it. Now the debt has trebled, and the gang holding the debt suggests he bring in $2000 worth of drugs in to meet it. How he imagined he could smuggle it in his underwear during a strip search evades me, and in fact evaded him.
Instead, he is in the hole. He has no other tickets; odds are he won’t be ridden out elsewhere, but he has this smuggling/substance abuse ticket that makes him look rather bad to the Parole Board. He wants out for his children. His five year old daughter believes he is someplace else on the planet “working” which is why she is not with him, but can talk to him.
He is forlorn. It is possible he will catch another felony for smuggling. No point in telling him this, learning it from the Hearings Officer will be soon enough. He tries to put a brighter face on it by recounting his bunkmate who was paroled after a series of fairly serious tickets, and I suddenly suspect Mr. Biggs was bunking with Mr. Stark. I ask a few questions to ascertain it is Mr. Stark. We toss this idea around for a moment through the meal slot, and I end the conversation and retreat to the Seg office to write my note in the Log.
Halfway through the note it occurs to me why Mr. Biggs didn’t just tell me his bunkies’ name. I checked with him, “Mr. Biggs, you didn’t tell me who you bunked with because you only know his nickname (Highboy), and didn’t want to let me in on that bit of information, hmm?” He blushes and nods. So careful of my sensibilities and potential naiveté.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
My Mother Doesn't Write..
Mr. Borsch is back. He is not leaving the prison system, the stuff I got through the mail was wrong. So here is his story.
He is 19, and on his second bit in the prison system. His family was vaguely functional for years. His father stayed at home, for some medical reason I am still unclear about, and his mother worked. He was the youngest of five. His father didn’t really take care of the home as much as he required the children to clean and mow and cook to support the mother that worked. Then when Mr. Borsch was 11, he died. Gone. Not much in some ways when he was around, but he created order out of chaos.
The mom continued to work, but she couldn’t make chaos order. Things began to fall apart. Mr. Borsch stepped up to the plate and began to cook and clean as a pre-adolescent. He explains to me his older brothers were already leaving, and his sisters were, “being girls.” He kept the house running and then at 14 began to bring money into the household. He told his mother he was working construction. Actually, he was selling drugs. She was so desperate she decided to pretend to believe him.
School started to get out of control. His older brothers had set the tone through their violence and misbehavior. He described himself as being peripheral, and then beginning to be a force of fear in his small town school. He labels himself as a, “bully.” But as I push into this, he was, in part, protecting the geeks and freaks of which he was one. Preppy and Jocks were his targets.
So, at 12, he gets slapped into an alternative school. If he doesn’t get his homework done, he does three days in juvie. When he got pissed at somebody and flung a pencil at him, he was in juvie for three weeks over Christmas. He had just made enough money to bond his older brother out of jail for the holidays.
This last bit was Uttering and Publishing. He found signed, unwritten checks. He wrote them out enough to have the pseudo-father he was living with, his fiancé, and his mother and sisters had a mind bobbling Christmas, and then he came back to prison.
When they brought him into prison, his mother and fiancé were frustrated and angry. In the past months, his fiancé has taken up with another man. His mother made up with him in the jail, but now it has been four months since he has heard from her.
He explains when he lived with his girl, or lived with his mother, he made different decisions. To have somebody who cares and expects something from him helps him not to make stupid decisions. I can see this is a role I might be able to take on. In some ways it soothes me.
After vomiting this entire story to me over most of an hour he shares with me his current custody status. Some group, which he won’t give me details about, has betrayed him; they have, “stabbed me in the back.” He wants to know why people he cares about do this to him. We talk a bit, but I know that he is asking me if I will do the same. Promises are useless. Time is the issue.
He should go now, count is coming, and I excuse him. He doesn’t stand up. He has three pending tickets which is news to me. If they are all found true, he hits the point level where he rides up to a higher level of incarceration: he leaves.
Crap. Again. How do I keep getting involved with this story? He is so young. He has started to be less skeptical of where I come from, and now he announces his imminent doom. It is too early in the relationship for me to tell him that he needs to stay with me. I think we go there, but he is fragile and easily spooked. But I have no option. I stop to think how to phrase it. He watches me and tells me to just spit it out. So I do.
“if you come into therapy with me, I’ve learned over the year I’ve been here, the only way I can help you is to care about you.” I check him and he is following. “So if I do this, and you do something to get yourself ridden out, it causes me a huge amount of sadness. I can’t keep doing that. If you want to work with me, you need to stop collecting tickets.”
I watch him cross over from wary to becoming one of my guys. Can he stay with me? The moment of electricity sits. It is close to count and he has to go across most of the yard in the next ten minutes. I start to shoo him out and ask if there are more questions.
“If your son was in prison, and you were angry, but talked with him about it in jail and said you would write… what would keep you from ever writing him?”
He is 19, and on his second bit in the prison system. His family was vaguely functional for years. His father stayed at home, for some medical reason I am still unclear about, and his mother worked. He was the youngest of five. His father didn’t really take care of the home as much as he required the children to clean and mow and cook to support the mother that worked. Then when Mr. Borsch was 11, he died. Gone. Not much in some ways when he was around, but he created order out of chaos.
The mom continued to work, but she couldn’t make chaos order. Things began to fall apart. Mr. Borsch stepped up to the plate and began to cook and clean as a pre-adolescent. He explains to me his older brothers were already leaving, and his sisters were, “being girls.” He kept the house running and then at 14 began to bring money into the household. He told his mother he was working construction. Actually, he was selling drugs. She was so desperate she decided to pretend to believe him.
School started to get out of control. His older brothers had set the tone through their violence and misbehavior. He described himself as being peripheral, and then beginning to be a force of fear in his small town school. He labels himself as a, “bully.” But as I push into this, he was, in part, protecting the geeks and freaks of which he was one. Preppy and Jocks were his targets.
So, at 12, he gets slapped into an alternative school. If he doesn’t get his homework done, he does three days in juvie. When he got pissed at somebody and flung a pencil at him, he was in juvie for three weeks over Christmas. He had just made enough money to bond his older brother out of jail for the holidays.
This last bit was Uttering and Publishing. He found signed, unwritten checks. He wrote them out enough to have the pseudo-father he was living with, his fiancé, and his mother and sisters had a mind bobbling Christmas, and then he came back to prison.
When they brought him into prison, his mother and fiancé were frustrated and angry. In the past months, his fiancé has taken up with another man. His mother made up with him in the jail, but now it has been four months since he has heard from her.
He explains when he lived with his girl, or lived with his mother, he made different decisions. To have somebody who cares and expects something from him helps him not to make stupid decisions. I can see this is a role I might be able to take on. In some ways it soothes me.
After vomiting this entire story to me over most of an hour he shares with me his current custody status. Some group, which he won’t give me details about, has betrayed him; they have, “stabbed me in the back.” He wants to know why people he cares about do this to him. We talk a bit, but I know that he is asking me if I will do the same. Promises are useless. Time is the issue.
He should go now, count is coming, and I excuse him. He doesn’t stand up. He has three pending tickets which is news to me. If they are all found true, he hits the point level where he rides up to a higher level of incarceration: he leaves.
Crap. Again. How do I keep getting involved with this story? He is so young. He has started to be less skeptical of where I come from, and now he announces his imminent doom. It is too early in the relationship for me to tell him that he needs to stay with me. I think we go there, but he is fragile and easily spooked. But I have no option. I stop to think how to phrase it. He watches me and tells me to just spit it out. So I do.
“if you come into therapy with me, I’ve learned over the year I’ve been here, the only way I can help you is to care about you.” I check him and he is following. “So if I do this, and you do something to get yourself ridden out, it causes me a huge amount of sadness. I can’t keep doing that. If you want to work with me, you need to stop collecting tickets.”
I watch him cross over from wary to becoming one of my guys. Can he stay with me? The moment of electricity sits. It is close to count and he has to go across most of the yard in the next ten minutes. I start to shoo him out and ask if there are more questions.
“If your son was in prison, and you were angry, but talked with him about it in jail and said you would write… what would keep you from ever writing him?”
Monday, May 11, 2009
Monday Blues, Part 1
It’s one of those days I’m just not sure I can tolerate the grief anymore. In the “Real World,” people leave treatment in a number of ways. The most common is they fade away when the acuity has passed, or they never return after the second or third session. Once in a great while somebody just disappears in the middle of something intense, but this is rare. I also don’t usually suffer from the feeling they are wandering off into the wild with no support or expectation of it.
I haven’t written about Mr. Stark in the past few weeks as I’ve just been too sad. He was granted parole, and we had a few days before he transferred out to prepare for this transition. This was in the middle of a huge art extravaganza at our studio, involving 20-50 people daily for two weeks. It was also in the middle of my father being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and a limited number of months left to live (we are still waiting for confirmation of this opinion). I received the paperwork on a Monday morning, first thing, and my heart sank.
He has been working hard, making difficult progress and was at the brink of what felt like a turning point: a change in how he was thinking and dealing with his emotions and fears. We both assumed, due to his flurry of tickets earlier in the year, that he would be flopped. He wasn’t. I should have given myself a day to process, but I didn’t. I called him out to tell him the news. It was possible he would be gone in two days, we needed to do some preparation and I had paperwork to complete. It didn’t feel like I could wait. Besides, he would be so excited. I was greedy for the opportunity to tell him myself. Although I was disappointed and worried and the timing could not have been worse, I knew it would balance out with his amazement and anticipation.
He walked into the office, I assumed, wondering why I had called him at such a weird time, or even called him at all. I put on happy face, glowed at him, waggled my eyebrows and reached out the paperwork declaring him free. He sank into the chair, looked balefully at the paper, and told me he already knew.
“I’m not ready, Ms. Mclain. It’s too soon.” His face was still, his body limp, and he wouldn’t look at me. This is a guy who is constantly moving in session. Shifting, hooking his leg over a chair arm, laughing, angry, pacing. No movement. Just an overwhelming despair that flooded then met with my own exhaustion and regret and inundated us both.
I got up and shut the door. He looked at me then, for the first time, “I guess I’m here for a bit?”
I nodded and told him I’d cancelled the remainder of my morning. We had to figure out how to seal off treatment in a way that could hold him safe. What had just happened is the one person he had come to trust and rely on was being precipitously removed from his life, another relationship ending in pain and ashes. We mostly sat for that hour and were sad, talking a bit about what needed to happen, but being quiet most of the time and just sitting with each other.
He does this thing with his arms and hands, where they become completely tense and energy filled. At some point during therapy I finally asked about it, and he told me this was a way he channeled his rage and fear and desperation out of his body: a sign of his emotions overflowing. It is something to do with his arms and hands that didn’t create violence except toward himself. I lost count of how many times this behavior manifested on this Monday.
He rose to leave just before count, and stopped at the doorway as I was looking at my hands trying to wait until he left to vent my own frustration and fear. He stopped in the doorway.
“Ms. Mclain, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m leaving.” Silence, I don’t even have the strength to wonder what comes next.
“I really care about you; you’ve become really important to me.”
What do I respond? Where is the boundary? What does he need? What is true and real?
“Me too, Mr. Stark. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be crying.”
“I know that, you didn’t need to tell me.”
And he is gone.
I haven’t written about Mr. Stark in the past few weeks as I’ve just been too sad. He was granted parole, and we had a few days before he transferred out to prepare for this transition. This was in the middle of a huge art extravaganza at our studio, involving 20-50 people daily for two weeks. It was also in the middle of my father being diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and a limited number of months left to live (we are still waiting for confirmation of this opinion). I received the paperwork on a Monday morning, first thing, and my heart sank.
He has been working hard, making difficult progress and was at the brink of what felt like a turning point: a change in how he was thinking and dealing with his emotions and fears. We both assumed, due to his flurry of tickets earlier in the year, that he would be flopped. He wasn’t. I should have given myself a day to process, but I didn’t. I called him out to tell him the news. It was possible he would be gone in two days, we needed to do some preparation and I had paperwork to complete. It didn’t feel like I could wait. Besides, he would be so excited. I was greedy for the opportunity to tell him myself. Although I was disappointed and worried and the timing could not have been worse, I knew it would balance out with his amazement and anticipation.
He walked into the office, I assumed, wondering why I had called him at such a weird time, or even called him at all. I put on happy face, glowed at him, waggled my eyebrows and reached out the paperwork declaring him free. He sank into the chair, looked balefully at the paper, and told me he already knew.
“I’m not ready, Ms. Mclain. It’s too soon.” His face was still, his body limp, and he wouldn’t look at me. This is a guy who is constantly moving in session. Shifting, hooking his leg over a chair arm, laughing, angry, pacing. No movement. Just an overwhelming despair that flooded then met with my own exhaustion and regret and inundated us both.
I got up and shut the door. He looked at me then, for the first time, “I guess I’m here for a bit?”
I nodded and told him I’d cancelled the remainder of my morning. We had to figure out how to seal off treatment in a way that could hold him safe. What had just happened is the one person he had come to trust and rely on was being precipitously removed from his life, another relationship ending in pain and ashes. We mostly sat for that hour and were sad, talking a bit about what needed to happen, but being quiet most of the time and just sitting with each other.
He does this thing with his arms and hands, where they become completely tense and energy filled. At some point during therapy I finally asked about it, and he told me this was a way he channeled his rage and fear and desperation out of his body: a sign of his emotions overflowing. It is something to do with his arms and hands that didn’t create violence except toward himself. I lost count of how many times this behavior manifested on this Monday.
He rose to leave just before count, and stopped at the doorway as I was looking at my hands trying to wait until he left to vent my own frustration and fear. He stopped in the doorway.
“Ms. Mclain, I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m leaving.” Silence, I don’t even have the strength to wonder what comes next.
“I really care about you; you’ve become really important to me.”
What do I respond? Where is the boundary? What does he need? What is true and real?
“Me too, Mr. Stark. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be crying.”
“I know that, you didn’t need to tell me.”
And he is gone.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Good Friday 3
Third Friday experience was Mr. Stewart.
He was in group on Thursday, and became, for the first time enraged at me. He wanted a specific medication we could not give him. I told him again, it wasn’t going to happen. His face shifted from prison dead eye into a full Marquette, and he was actually raising his voice at me which has rarely happened at all in my past year. I do know the difference between somebody yelling in my vicinity and directing it toward me.
In the midst of his tantrum, and before it could be settled, the siren went off for Mobilization. They all retreated to their prospective housing units and we went through the irritating process of 90 minutes of interruption in our work day and sitting in the Muster Room twiddling our thumbs.
So I have this lovely Friday, and Mr. Sotheby has left and I have a bit of my afternoon left for catch up. The sun is shining and a breeze is blowing the papers around on my desk. And Mr. Stewart is suddenly standing in the doorway, clutching a pass and a book I had leant him.
“Uh, do you have a minute? I have a quick question.”
I nod and he pulls the door closed behind him and sits down.
“I was wondering if you changed my meds after we talked yesterday?” and there is no dead eye, let alone a Level 5 glare. He appears vaguely sheepish.
“No, Mr. Stewart, we hadn’t finished the conversation, so I hadn’t talked to the doctor.”
“Well, okay, thanks Ms. Mclain.” And he doesn’t move.
“Mr. Stewart, you didn’t come in here to ask about your meds.”
“Yeah, I was really angry yesterday…”
“Do you know why?” (This may seem to be a simple question, but it is the essence of both insight and cognitive therapy. The standard answer is to stay right on the suface, acuse us of malpractice and simply being stupid, stubborn State employees, lacking in compassion and common sense. This attitude allows him to fire his rage and excuses him from any responsibility. This has been Mr. Stewart’s standard approach for the balance of his life.)
“Yeah, I think so. What do you think?” He is looking at the pass in his hands, turning it over and around.
This is a bit of a cheat to ask me to answer the question, but he came on his own to straighten it out and I’m tired.
“Why I think or what you think.”
“What you think,” and he looks up.
“You felt we were withholding treatment, which in fact proved that we don’t care about you and everything up to this point was a farce.”
He nods and his face doesn’t even flicker, so he had figured it out on his own. It was probably important that I cared enough to have thought it through also.
“And I came to make sure you weren’t angry at me,” and he holds eye contact and watches carefully.
And this is one of those moments where it all comes together for me. He not only processed what had happened to him, but he was brave enough to try and resolve the potential rejection before the weekend so he didn’t have to stress about it. He knew it would bother him and potentially wind him up, but he took control and did something healthy.
“And you said you thought I might need a little anti-psychotic, like you’d decided I was fucking crazy or something. I’m afraid the more you get to know me, the crazier you’ll think I am. I worry about that a lot. I mean we have a pretty good relationship, you know a therapist fucking client relationship and I don’t want to fuck that up.”
He swears an amazing amount when he is feeling emotional.
It’s nice to know he also thinks we have a pretty good therapist fucking client relationship. I agree.
He was in group on Thursday, and became, for the first time enraged at me. He wanted a specific medication we could not give him. I told him again, it wasn’t going to happen. His face shifted from prison dead eye into a full Marquette, and he was actually raising his voice at me which has rarely happened at all in my past year. I do know the difference between somebody yelling in my vicinity and directing it toward me.
In the midst of his tantrum, and before it could be settled, the siren went off for Mobilization. They all retreated to their prospective housing units and we went through the irritating process of 90 minutes of interruption in our work day and sitting in the Muster Room twiddling our thumbs.
So I have this lovely Friday, and Mr. Sotheby has left and I have a bit of my afternoon left for catch up. The sun is shining and a breeze is blowing the papers around on my desk. And Mr. Stewart is suddenly standing in the doorway, clutching a pass and a book I had leant him.
“Uh, do you have a minute? I have a quick question.”
I nod and he pulls the door closed behind him and sits down.
“I was wondering if you changed my meds after we talked yesterday?” and there is no dead eye, let alone a Level 5 glare. He appears vaguely sheepish.
“No, Mr. Stewart, we hadn’t finished the conversation, so I hadn’t talked to the doctor.”
“Well, okay, thanks Ms. Mclain.” And he doesn’t move.
“Mr. Stewart, you didn’t come in here to ask about your meds.”
“Yeah, I was really angry yesterday…”
“Do you know why?” (This may seem to be a simple question, but it is the essence of both insight and cognitive therapy. The standard answer is to stay right on the suface, acuse us of malpractice and simply being stupid, stubborn State employees, lacking in compassion and common sense. This attitude allows him to fire his rage and excuses him from any responsibility. This has been Mr. Stewart’s standard approach for the balance of his life.)
“Yeah, I think so. What do you think?” He is looking at the pass in his hands, turning it over and around.
This is a bit of a cheat to ask me to answer the question, but he came on his own to straighten it out and I’m tired.
“Why I think or what you think.”
“What you think,” and he looks up.
“You felt we were withholding treatment, which in fact proved that we don’t care about you and everything up to this point was a farce.”
He nods and his face doesn’t even flicker, so he had figured it out on his own. It was probably important that I cared enough to have thought it through also.
“And I came to make sure you weren’t angry at me,” and he holds eye contact and watches carefully.
And this is one of those moments where it all comes together for me. He not only processed what had happened to him, but he was brave enough to try and resolve the potential rejection before the weekend so he didn’t have to stress about it. He knew it would bother him and potentially wind him up, but he took control and did something healthy.
“And you said you thought I might need a little anti-psychotic, like you’d decided I was fucking crazy or something. I’m afraid the more you get to know me, the crazier you’ll think I am. I worry about that a lot. I mean we have a pretty good relationship, you know a therapist fucking client relationship and I don’t want to fuck that up.”
He swears an amazing amount when he is feeling emotional.
It’s nice to know he also thinks we have a pretty good therapist fucking client relationship. I agree.
Good Friday 2
Second afternoon appointment was, as usual with Mr. Sotheby. He walked down the hallway with me in front of his buddies getting store. I have this new little ritual. My office opens directly into the hallway now, instead of being part of a suite. When I leave it, of course it needs to be locked. I had a couple of days where three of my guys objected to the fact that I was opening the door for them. It wasn’t right, me holding the door for a man.
So now, I unlock it and take two steps back. Most of them get it right away, and most of them hold the door for me rather than going in first. Mr. Sotheby is familiar with this ritual, and he got to perform in in front of a myriad of people from the neighboring unit getting their store in the hallway. I hope it was a positive perception rather than one of me dominating him. I’m pretty sure it was the later.
As we were walking toward my office I caught him fiddling in his pants. As you might imagine, this can be a sign of something totally inappropriate. I was a bit surprised and gave him the horrid older sister raised eyebrows.
He opens the door for me, and rearranges his pants. He has a tape in them. A song he wants to play for me. It’s an underground rap group from Detroit, and the song is the one most close to how he feels about his mother. I should have written the title and artist down. I’ll try to remember to do it and add it into the blog.
Anyway, it is brutal and sad. His mother’s birthday has just passed. He is thinking of her. He askes me how my weekend was, and I hesitate. As always, he immediately picks up any sense of something hidden, maybe a lie, a betrayal. I tell him we just got the news that my father is dying, sooner than later. As I stare out the door, I talk about the timing of this event. My sister was in town, and we were having a weekend long music event on our farm. I talked about receiving the news and the fact that my friends, whom I loved just passed me around from one to the other all weekend. Even though they could not change the news, or take back the future, they helped me hold my grief and bear it better. The same reason I wanted him to trust me with some of his pain.
Offering up this much of yourself is controversial. It is standard practice to keep yourself totally separate from your patients, offering a virtually blank slate. This doesn’t seem to work with these guys. They need something of you to connect to, to trust. So I jumped off of this cliff. When I turned back to him he was holding his head, wiping his eyes and looking at me. The first serious sense that I had reached through to him since the day he said he needed to talk about his emotions.
So now, I unlock it and take two steps back. Most of them get it right away, and most of them hold the door for me rather than going in first. Mr. Sotheby is familiar with this ritual, and he got to perform in in front of a myriad of people from the neighboring unit getting their store in the hallway. I hope it was a positive perception rather than one of me dominating him. I’m pretty sure it was the later.
As we were walking toward my office I caught him fiddling in his pants. As you might imagine, this can be a sign of something totally inappropriate. I was a bit surprised and gave him the horrid older sister raised eyebrows.
He opens the door for me, and rearranges his pants. He has a tape in them. A song he wants to play for me. It’s an underground rap group from Detroit, and the song is the one most close to how he feels about his mother. I should have written the title and artist down. I’ll try to remember to do it and add it into the blog.
Anyway, it is brutal and sad. His mother’s birthday has just passed. He is thinking of her. He askes me how my weekend was, and I hesitate. As always, he immediately picks up any sense of something hidden, maybe a lie, a betrayal. I tell him we just got the news that my father is dying, sooner than later. As I stare out the door, I talk about the timing of this event. My sister was in town, and we were having a weekend long music event on our farm. I talked about receiving the news and the fact that my friends, whom I loved just passed me around from one to the other all weekend. Even though they could not change the news, or take back the future, they helped me hold my grief and bear it better. The same reason I wanted him to trust me with some of his pain.
Offering up this much of yourself is controversial. It is standard practice to keep yourself totally separate from your patients, offering a virtually blank slate. This doesn’t seem to work with these guys. They need something of you to connect to, to trust. So I jumped off of this cliff. When I turned back to him he was holding his head, wiping his eyes and looking at me. The first serious sense that I had reached through to him since the day he said he needed to talk about his emotions.
Good Friday 1
Friday was amazing. Three emotional scores in a row, and I came home on a therapy high.
The first was a young man from a small town. He has been in the juvenile and now adult system since about the age of 11. He is on his B prefix at 19, and sat rigid and sad in my chair. He kept ma’aming me until I started to feel about 90 and asked him to back off it a bit. I did my orientation spiel, including the my few weak, ubt usually effective comedy lines. All I got was ma’amed. About 20 minutes into the hour I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Usually, I get the paperwork done, and then work on the engagement. But he was so sad. He had been on the unit for two days, hanging in his cube, avoiding interacting with anybody else. He had not “checked” me out, and didn’t know what to expect.
He had gone into his local mental health about six months before he caught this last bit. He needed to talk. Instead they threw some medication at him and sent him back into the street. He sold the medication, and remained isolated and full of pain. Another betrayal by the system.
He talked with me a little bit. As soon as they threw him into the County jail system, his fiancé and his mother both stopped communicating with him. He has been with the fiancé since he was 14. She is apparently now with some guy named Dave. We’ve made a beginning. I hope I can find a way to help.
The first was a young man from a small town. He has been in the juvenile and now adult system since about the age of 11. He is on his B prefix at 19, and sat rigid and sad in my chair. He kept ma’aming me until I started to feel about 90 and asked him to back off it a bit. I did my orientation spiel, including the my few weak, ubt usually effective comedy lines. All I got was ma’amed. About 20 minutes into the hour I couldn’t stand it any longer.
Usually, I get the paperwork done, and then work on the engagement. But he was so sad. He had been on the unit for two days, hanging in his cube, avoiding interacting with anybody else. He had not “checked” me out, and didn’t know what to expect.
He had gone into his local mental health about six months before he caught this last bit. He needed to talk. Instead they threw some medication at him and sent him back into the street. He sold the medication, and remained isolated and full of pain. Another betrayal by the system.
He talked with me a little bit. As soon as they threw him into the County jail system, his fiancé and his mother both stopped communicating with him. He has been with the fiancé since he was 14. She is apparently now with some guy named Dave. We’ve made a beginning. I hope I can find a way to help.
A Journey
I have a guy, Mr. Inato (previously Mr. I) who was taken off of the unit, probably long after medical should have been involved, to the local hospital. His labs indicated that he was at the edge of death. He was in one of my groups, and two weeks went by without him. I was only able to look at a modicum of information about his physical status, and was completely sure he was dead.
In group, they asked, and I told them to pray to whatever god they held dear. I couldn’t give them additional information as it was confidential. Mr. Stewart, who lives across the hall from him offered up he was completely incapacitated when they took him out and pissing blood.
The next day, he is in a wheel chair in Control. I see him an inelegantly blurt out, “you’re not dead!”
He wasn’t, but was still very weak, and needed a wheelchair to get around. This means he needs to have one of the other guys push him to meals and med line and so forth. And it’s not like this other guy just stands around like a butler waiting on the whim of Mr. Inato to cart him around. I needed to speak with him about his meds and didn’t want to go through the whole production of dragging him. I could leave a massage with custody, but I don’t want them responsible for communicating medication issues. Besides, I could just walk down the hall, into his unit and tell him.
So I waited in my office for somebody in a uniform to walk by so I could snag him as an escort. It didn’t take long, and one of the Sergeants stuck his head in my office. I asked to accompany me, explained what I wanted and we went briskly down the hallway chatting, into the unit, past the unit officer, and to the very end of the second hallway. I was pleased I hadn’t dragged him out as he couldn’t have been further away from me unless he had been in a totally different building.
I knocked, went in, crouched down to the bottom bunk, gave him my message and talked for a moment. All’s well, he understood and wasn’t upset or otherwise put out. I stand up, the Sergeant guarding my back smiles and we turn to leave. And the passage is blocked by the bigwig custody in charge of the building and the unit officer, with about four of my guys lurking not-so-innocently in the background. Her eyes are bugging out of her head and her eyebrows are waggling madly around on her forehead. Apparently she had decided there was some kind of emergency; apparently related to the noise I made as I walked down the hallway with my heals (I am always noisy, so I don’t get it), and the fact that I had unit command with me. Her passage in turn had set the whole unit buzzing, and I had to soothe all my guys as I made my retreat, carefully not laughing at her misplaced excitement.
In group, they asked, and I told them to pray to whatever god they held dear. I couldn’t give them additional information as it was confidential. Mr. Stewart, who lives across the hall from him offered up he was completely incapacitated when they took him out and pissing blood.
The next day, he is in a wheel chair in Control. I see him an inelegantly blurt out, “you’re not dead!”
He wasn’t, but was still very weak, and needed a wheelchair to get around. This means he needs to have one of the other guys push him to meals and med line and so forth. And it’s not like this other guy just stands around like a butler waiting on the whim of Mr. Inato to cart him around. I needed to speak with him about his meds and didn’t want to go through the whole production of dragging him. I could leave a massage with custody, but I don’t want them responsible for communicating medication issues. Besides, I could just walk down the hall, into his unit and tell him.
So I waited in my office for somebody in a uniform to walk by so I could snag him as an escort. It didn’t take long, and one of the Sergeants stuck his head in my office. I asked to accompany me, explained what I wanted and we went briskly down the hallway chatting, into the unit, past the unit officer, and to the very end of the second hallway. I was pleased I hadn’t dragged him out as he couldn’t have been further away from me unless he had been in a totally different building.
I knocked, went in, crouched down to the bottom bunk, gave him my message and talked for a moment. All’s well, he understood and wasn’t upset or otherwise put out. I stand up, the Sergeant guarding my back smiles and we turn to leave. And the passage is blocked by the bigwig custody in charge of the building and the unit officer, with about four of my guys lurking not-so-innocently in the background. Her eyes are bugging out of her head and her eyebrows are waggling madly around on her forehead. Apparently she had decided there was some kind of emergency; apparently related to the noise I made as I walked down the hallway with my heals (I am always noisy, so I don’t get it), and the fact that I had unit command with me. Her passage in turn had set the whole unit buzzing, and I had to soothe all my guys as I made my retreat, carefully not laughing at her misplaced excitement.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Gay is gay
Crappy day today. I suspect I’m beginning my PMS cycle. But the guys were incredibly irritating, needy and whiney. My regular Thursday group is struggling with a new member who has been overtly gay and is now using Christianity to “fix” himself. I find this concept repulsive and distressing. My belief is gay is gay. It is what you are. For us to judge somebody on this proclivity is tantamount to judging somebody for the color of their skin. I have a little bit more flexibility for judging on what you’ve done.
Ms. H points out that many of these guys have been sexually abused by men. This fact makes their tolerance very low. Perhaps those who have been sexually abused by women have the same intolerance, but I doubt it. Teaching tolerance is what she suggests, and what I attempted today. I must admit, of the seven, only two were virulently anti-gay. Two were trying to help me process and two stayed out of it. I just cannot tolerate that kind of hate in the group. It belongs in the yard. I can’t possibly kick the gay guy out; but that leaves me with kicking the intolerants out. Again, a decision without a clear right choice. I guess I just continue forward.
This guy has experienced years of this kind of response, and he is totally capable of fending it off and keeping himself cocooned and safe. It’s not like this makes me happy. It breaks my heart. So today is a breaking my heart day. One guy left early as he could not tolerate the conversation. Do I delve into their own abuse, do we need to go that deep?? Is this group dying and I need to make some change?? Crap.
How do I fix everybody? How do I keep them all safe?
Ms. H points out that many of these guys have been sexually abused by men. This fact makes their tolerance very low. Perhaps those who have been sexually abused by women have the same intolerance, but I doubt it. Teaching tolerance is what she suggests, and what I attempted today. I must admit, of the seven, only two were virulently anti-gay. Two were trying to help me process and two stayed out of it. I just cannot tolerate that kind of hate in the group. It belongs in the yard. I can’t possibly kick the gay guy out; but that leaves me with kicking the intolerants out. Again, a decision without a clear right choice. I guess I just continue forward.
This guy has experienced years of this kind of response, and he is totally capable of fending it off and keeping himself cocooned and safe. It’s not like this makes me happy. It breaks my heart. So today is a breaking my heart day. One guy left early as he could not tolerate the conversation. Do I delve into their own abuse, do we need to go that deep?? Is this group dying and I need to make some change?? Crap.
How do I fix everybody? How do I keep them all safe?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Character Catch Up
For those of you following the embedded stories in this blog, let me catch you up.
Mr. Stewart was saved from riding out. (Read previous few blogs) I was able to do this by cashing in chips not yet in existence. The day he was let out of seg was beautiful out, and I called him in to read the riot act before group the next day. I didn’t think I could tolerate him in group if I didn’t have a moment to vent my frustration on him. It was his one free day on the yard before three weeks of Top Lock (where you can’t even leave your bunk to pee without permission) and Loss of Privilege (where you can work and pee at your discretion, but are otherwise contained to your bunk). The first night out of Seg he received a letter from a friend.
A mutual friend of theirs, somebody he had known for over 20 years had killed herself. She had a period of significant sobriety, gone back to school, graduated, found employment, and then been sucked back into the drugs and laid down on the railroad tracks. This is a favored way of death in this area, something the Amtrak people must dread with every fiber of their being. She lived for 20 minutes after she was crushed into some mass of tissue and shattered bone. I leave you to imagine his response. It was poorly timed, but as one of my coworkers mentioned, at least he could show me the letter and obituary. He was not in a foreign place with no support.
Mr. Rose is back as of night before last. Two stints in the hospital and one in an intermediate care center. He came back nominally stable, and refusing treatment. As fragile as he was, he is not allowed back into the yard until I clear him. As he came in late, he spent the night in Seg, and I saw him in the morning. Five days without meds. He comes back to a yard where he was threatening people and left a legacy of incipient violence, and now he needs to walk back out. If you’ve read me for a while, you can imagine how I snatched him up. He signed back up for service and took his meds.
He explained to me today that he was feeling so good on his meds – no need to try to hurt anybody, no mood swings that he had to stop. He had to make sure he was still there. Last night on the yard he tracked down a guy that owed him money. Apparently verbally terrified this kid enough he went to custody. Mr. Rose was pulled in and asked to explain himself, which he tells me he did. I was too tired tonight to check and see if his story held up to custody’s understanding. He expressed regret today, as he had suggested he ride out to a higher level, then realized he was better off where I knew him and could follow his case. Might just be bullshit. Hard to tell with this guy. He seemed rather embarrassed that I had the nooses he gave me in Seg tacked onto my corkboard.
I told him I would put a cot in the corner of my office and keep him where I could watch him. The meds had kicked in enough he could smile at the image. He has parole, and I will tell him tomorrow. Hopefully this will keep him focused on not acting like an idiot.
Mr. Stark (second blog) has been having one success after another. He has beat two tickets, one legitimate, one not. He has practiced “soft eye contact” with the officer that takes offence to his alpha male stance. This dodged another potential ticket. But he is also curbing his behavior to avoid more trouble. He explained to me today he had made me a promise. Regardless of all the insanity, he feels honor bound to follow through, so thus has been trying to make a change. Next week we will talk about how he changes his image on the yard. It should be interesting.
Mr. Sotheby continues to work under the radar. His knuckles were all bruised and scabbed last week.
Mr. Stewart was saved from riding out. (Read previous few blogs) I was able to do this by cashing in chips not yet in existence. The day he was let out of seg was beautiful out, and I called him in to read the riot act before group the next day. I didn’t think I could tolerate him in group if I didn’t have a moment to vent my frustration on him. It was his one free day on the yard before three weeks of Top Lock (where you can’t even leave your bunk to pee without permission) and Loss of Privilege (where you can work and pee at your discretion, but are otherwise contained to your bunk). The first night out of Seg he received a letter from a friend.
A mutual friend of theirs, somebody he had known for over 20 years had killed herself. She had a period of significant sobriety, gone back to school, graduated, found employment, and then been sucked back into the drugs and laid down on the railroad tracks. This is a favored way of death in this area, something the Amtrak people must dread with every fiber of their being. She lived for 20 minutes after she was crushed into some mass of tissue and shattered bone. I leave you to imagine his response. It was poorly timed, but as one of my coworkers mentioned, at least he could show me the letter and obituary. He was not in a foreign place with no support.
Mr. Rose is back as of night before last. Two stints in the hospital and one in an intermediate care center. He came back nominally stable, and refusing treatment. As fragile as he was, he is not allowed back into the yard until I clear him. As he came in late, he spent the night in Seg, and I saw him in the morning. Five days without meds. He comes back to a yard where he was threatening people and left a legacy of incipient violence, and now he needs to walk back out. If you’ve read me for a while, you can imagine how I snatched him up. He signed back up for service and took his meds.
He explained to me today that he was feeling so good on his meds – no need to try to hurt anybody, no mood swings that he had to stop. He had to make sure he was still there. Last night on the yard he tracked down a guy that owed him money. Apparently verbally terrified this kid enough he went to custody. Mr. Rose was pulled in and asked to explain himself, which he tells me he did. I was too tired tonight to check and see if his story held up to custody’s understanding. He expressed regret today, as he had suggested he ride out to a higher level, then realized he was better off where I knew him and could follow his case. Might just be bullshit. Hard to tell with this guy. He seemed rather embarrassed that I had the nooses he gave me in Seg tacked onto my corkboard.
I told him I would put a cot in the corner of my office and keep him where I could watch him. The meds had kicked in enough he could smile at the image. He has parole, and I will tell him tomorrow. Hopefully this will keep him focused on not acting like an idiot.
Mr. Stark (second blog) has been having one success after another. He has beat two tickets, one legitimate, one not. He has practiced “soft eye contact” with the officer that takes offence to his alpha male stance. This dodged another potential ticket. But he is also curbing his behavior to avoid more trouble. He explained to me today he had made me a promise. Regardless of all the insanity, he feels honor bound to follow through, so thus has been trying to make a change. Next week we will talk about how he changes his image on the yard. It should be interesting.
Mr. Sotheby continues to work under the radar. His knuckles were all bruised and scabbed last week.
Monday, April 13, 2009
What I Learned
This has been an eventful week, where I have learned quite a bit, actually, more than I might have wished.
I learned that there is heroin available on the unit, in addition to tobacco and marijuana.
I learned that most of my guys have participated in illegal activities as well as physical violence at some point in their bit.
I learned that you should never hit somebody with your hands (actually, John D. McDonald taught me that as a teen, but he advocated a weapon: a bad choice in prison.) You should use your elbows. It doesn’t leave marks indicating you’ve been fighting, and it is a much stronger bone, not prone to breaking.
I learned through a delicate exchange that I could smuggle in contraband. I guess, actually, I didn’t learn this, I assumed, when I bothered to consider, this was a possibility. As it was floated as a joke, I reacted as if it were a joke and declined. Of course there was nothing truly funny about it.
So Mr. Sotheby suggests to me that this level of trust is what I’ve been looking for from my guys. He is right, and now it just scares me. I just haven’t understood how many ways the guys can leave me….
I learned that there is heroin available on the unit, in addition to tobacco and marijuana.
I learned that most of my guys have participated in illegal activities as well as physical violence at some point in their bit.
I learned that you should never hit somebody with your hands (actually, John D. McDonald taught me that as a teen, but he advocated a weapon: a bad choice in prison.) You should use your elbows. It doesn’t leave marks indicating you’ve been fighting, and it is a much stronger bone, not prone to breaking.
I learned through a delicate exchange that I could smuggle in contraband. I guess, actually, I didn’t learn this, I assumed, when I bothered to consider, this was a possibility. As it was floated as a joke, I reacted as if it were a joke and declined. Of course there was nothing truly funny about it.
So Mr. Sotheby suggests to me that this level of trust is what I’ve been looking for from my guys. He is right, and now it just scares me. I just haven’t understood how many ways the guys can leave me….
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
To Mr. Stewart
Mr. Stewart,
I’ve read your letter through now a couple of times. A copy is enclosed and I would like you to keep it with you.
It is a moment you’ve taken to speak truly – from the shiny bit that hides under the fear and rage. It speaks – you speak- from the part of you that is good and has value. You need to keep it for when you feel desperate and bad; when you need to find your way back to your essential humanity.
As I thought about what you said, your need to hit somebody and be hit; that this was the culmination of your self-hate from your flop, I suspect I know what happened. You let yourself get wrapped up in believing you were worthless. Believing you were trash and nothing you could do would change this reality. Perhaps you had begun to hope. And this would make it all the more scary and desperate. So you set out to prove to yourself what everybody thought of you. And you blew up your life again.
I’m sorry it took me too long to figure this out. I know intellectually how violent you can be. Emotionally I rejected that knowledge and refused to hear what you were telling me.
Next time you get to that point, and I daresay there will be a next time. Please feel free to say loudly and clearly that you could do with a couple of days in Seg. It’s called a Mental Health Emergency. It is done without the suicide precautions. Take that that time to read your letter to me again. I would also suggest you take that time to do some crying – it can be a great release for pain and grief and fear. It also heals instead of continuing to increase the burden of hurt you keep piling on yourself.
My greatest fear is that you will be ridden out and just give up. All the work you’ve done in the past months will get wadded up and thrown into the back of your mind. You got your flop in October (that was the time you began to actually work on issues). The date the flop began was totally arbitrary and unconnected to the changes you had begun.
The depressed, anxious, angry person of September was losing his grip… I’m not being very clear now, am I.
THE PERSON YOU WERE IN FEBRUARY WAS NOT THE PERSON WHO WAS FLOPPED. It was a trick of the calendar. It did not reflect some failure in therapy or your work with me.
You can sink into the morass of the choice you made, or figure out how to make a different one next time. I would prefer the later.
Mr. Stewart was released back onto the unit against the better judgment of custody, but because I asked.
I’ve read your letter through now a couple of times. A copy is enclosed and I would like you to keep it with you.
It is a moment you’ve taken to speak truly – from the shiny bit that hides under the fear and rage. It speaks – you speak- from the part of you that is good and has value. You need to keep it for when you feel desperate and bad; when you need to find your way back to your essential humanity.
As I thought about what you said, your need to hit somebody and be hit; that this was the culmination of your self-hate from your flop, I suspect I know what happened. You let yourself get wrapped up in believing you were worthless. Believing you were trash and nothing you could do would change this reality. Perhaps you had begun to hope. And this would make it all the more scary and desperate. So you set out to prove to yourself what everybody thought of you. And you blew up your life again.
I’m sorry it took me too long to figure this out. I know intellectually how violent you can be. Emotionally I rejected that knowledge and refused to hear what you were telling me.
Next time you get to that point, and I daresay there will be a next time. Please feel free to say loudly and clearly that you could do with a couple of days in Seg. It’s called a Mental Health Emergency. It is done without the suicide precautions. Take that that time to read your letter to me again. I would also suggest you take that time to do some crying – it can be a great release for pain and grief and fear. It also heals instead of continuing to increase the burden of hurt you keep piling on yourself.
My greatest fear is that you will be ridden out and just give up. All the work you’ve done in the past months will get wadded up and thrown into the back of your mind. You got your flop in October (that was the time you began to actually work on issues). The date the flop began was totally arbitrary and unconnected to the changes you had begun.
The depressed, anxious, angry person of September was losing his grip… I’m not being very clear now, am I.
THE PERSON YOU WERE IN FEBRUARY WAS NOT THE PERSON WHO WAS FLOPPED. It was a trick of the calendar. It did not reflect some failure in therapy or your work with me.
You can sink into the morass of the choice you made, or figure out how to make a different one next time. I would prefer the later.
Mr. Stewart was released back onto the unit against the better judgment of custody, but because I asked.
From Mr. Stewart
Ms. Mclain,
I’ve been sitting in this box for 5 ½ days now, and it just dawned on me how crazy I am. I mean I’ve always known this, but I’ve just affirmed my beliefs. I found myself thinking about my reason for being in here and started laughing to myself about it. I literally “created my own prison.” I’m not a stupid man, but man, do I do stupid things.
Remember me telling you about how I’d been depressed and angry ever since my flop started? There was only one way for it to go unless I stopped it, and that’s right where I’m at. I wasn’t dealing with any of it in a healthy manner. I just pray that I can stay here and continue to work with you on these issues, because I really need some frickin’ help! I do appreciate all the help that you’ve given me so far, and I hope that it can continue. I’m not sure how much more I can say without being inappropriate, so I’ll move on.
You asked me why I never told you about my daughter being ill. I didn’t really think about it, I guess. But there’s more to it that that. When I tell people one of two things happens or both sometimes: I’m somehow defective because of it, or I think she is and that’s why I’m not there, because I’m an asshole who doesn’t care about her. It’s all bullshit! And to tell you the truth, I was told by Laurie a long time ago to stay away from her for her own good. Not because I was a bad father, because I wasn’t. Because of my heroin use and the crazy life I led. She was right. Dammit was she ever right and the thought that I had abandoned my child over a drug has fueled the fire that has continually sent be back to it. Crazy, huh? I miss her with all my heart and soul. I don’t even know what she looks like. Do you know how that feels? Of course not. So when I get a look on my face like you think I’m no good or bad, that’s just how I feel.
I really need your help to work through this and everyone else’s voices telling me I’m shit, because that’s how I feel, and no good can come from feeling like that.
Thank you for everything.
I’ve been sitting in this box for 5 ½ days now, and it just dawned on me how crazy I am. I mean I’ve always known this, but I’ve just affirmed my beliefs. I found myself thinking about my reason for being in here and started laughing to myself about it. I literally “created my own prison.” I’m not a stupid man, but man, do I do stupid things.
Remember me telling you about how I’d been depressed and angry ever since my flop started? There was only one way for it to go unless I stopped it, and that’s right where I’m at. I wasn’t dealing with any of it in a healthy manner. I just pray that I can stay here and continue to work with you on these issues, because I really need some frickin’ help! I do appreciate all the help that you’ve given me so far, and I hope that it can continue. I’m not sure how much more I can say without being inappropriate, so I’ll move on.
You asked me why I never told you about my daughter being ill. I didn’t really think about it, I guess. But there’s more to it that that. When I tell people one of two things happens or both sometimes: I’m somehow defective because of it, or I think she is and that’s why I’m not there, because I’m an asshole who doesn’t care about her. It’s all bullshit! And to tell you the truth, I was told by Laurie a long time ago to stay away from her for her own good. Not because I was a bad father, because I wasn’t. Because of my heroin use and the crazy life I led. She was right. Dammit was she ever right and the thought that I had abandoned my child over a drug has fueled the fire that has continually sent be back to it. Crazy, huh? I miss her with all my heart and soul. I don’t even know what she looks like. Do you know how that feels? Of course not. So when I get a look on my face like you think I’m no good or bad, that’s just how I feel.
I really need your help to work through this and everyone else’s voices telling me I’m shit, because that’s how I feel, and no good can come from feeling like that.
Thank you for everything.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Owning Mr. Stewart, part II
Mr. Stewart has been in Seg now for four days without his tickets being heard. The odds are he will be ridden out. I’ve decided, on Monday, to talk to the committee that makes this decision and argue that he needs to stay with us for mental health reasons. He will likely score an Assault ticket, but it won’t be enough to send him to a higher level, so he could possible stay. The guy he assaulted is looking at Parole in the next six weeks, so he will be gone. The possibility of another incident is small, since both of them have told me they are willing to stand down.
To ask that he stay puts my reputation in questions. Am I “overly familiar?” Do I have a relationship with Mr. Stewart that is wrong? I have a relationship that is totally different from what Custody has. But he is my patient, not just an inmate. I have similar relationships with a number of guys, and I must admit, I care for a significant amount of the guys on my caseload. I also care for a significant number of the staff I work with. I care for a significant number of my husband’s friends. If I didn’t like him, I couldn’t do very useful therapy.
And of course, I now own him…
To ask that he stay puts my reputation in questions. Am I “overly familiar?” Do I have a relationship with Mr. Stewart that is wrong? I have a relationship that is totally different from what Custody has. But he is my patient, not just an inmate. I have similar relationships with a number of guys, and I must admit, I care for a significant amount of the guys on my caseload. I also care for a significant number of the staff I work with. I care for a significant number of my husband’s friends. If I didn’t like him, I couldn’t do very useful therapy.
And of course, I now own him…
Fix It
The week continues. Mr. Stark comes in on Thursdays: Mr. Invisible.
He is working hard for me, mildly aware of Mr. Stewart in Segregation and my pain and fear. After last session, I want him to talk about the tangle of love, hate and pain engendered by his rape. I start by suggesting love is something that is supposed to be warm and safe. He leaps up from his seat and starts to pace around my office. The new office is big enough to hold ten guys for group, so there is room. As I have mentioned, custody walks by every ten minutes or so and looks in. My goal is to sit quietly, so nobody is alarmed by his angst. He tells me love has never involved anything vaguely safe.
He is a musician. One of his expressions is heavy metal. He tells me this week he has played with the prison bands. He has been asked to lead guitar with songs full of hate. For the first time he has looked at the faces around him, and as he plays, they are suffused with rage and anger. And he is repulsed. He feels that he is funneling his own hate into the crowd, and is responsible for eliciting this response from others. And now, he no longer wants this. Of course he is not doing this; he is just finding resonance from others fighting the same demons he fights.
He flings himself back into his chair, digs in his pocket and gives me the four picks that live there. In prison, these must have a huge value. I’m vaguely confused as to how he even has them, but there is no time to ask.
“I can’t play heavy metal anymore.”
His music is so important to him. It is the thing that keeps him afloat in this crazy world of prison. And he is up again, pacing. I think he just gave me his music. I think in retrospect he was asking me to judge this part of him. If I found it wanting or wrong, I was to take it away from him; I should take his picks. If I did so, he would do his best to acquiesce to my decision. I can’t even imagine what comes next.
He saves me by launching into another topic, starting again with the disclaimer that he is retarded.
I cringe. I have little energy left this week with Mr. Stewart in Seg. The last time Mr. Stark started a topic this way it was horrific. I don’t have the energy for this.
He doesn’t wish to tell me the story, but he knows he needs to. It haunts him and not telling me is a form of lying. He owes $24 to a guy that sold him drugs in the past couple of months; time before I lowered the boom about his behavior. His brother is supposed to feed money into other inmate’s accounts from Mr. Stark’s savings at home. But for some reason, his brother has dropped off of the face of the earth in the past months, and this debt has gone unpaid. He suspects his brother is using again.
Yesterday he was approached by a group, a pseudo-gang, of men demanding the money. The person he owed had sold the debt. He fliped immediately into prison mode and invites them to come one by one into the shower with their knives and he will slice their faces off. They back off and leave with verbal threats. Such violence, offered to me with the most sheepish face. I have no doubt he would be able to do such to at least half of them before winding up another causality in Seg or God forbid, the hospital. But if he chooses this recourse, he ends up leaving me. So he asks me what to do.
Excuse me, I am white naive country girl; I’ve no idea what to do with this crazy prison yard politics and power struggles. I can’t even believe he asks me. I express this and ask for a list of options.
He explains what I already know, what those of you reading this blog know. Now that he has made a stand, if he backs down, he loses face, and the consequences could lead to an escalated level of violence. All I know is I can’t lose him, too. Not two of them in the same week.
“Fix it. Fix it, Mr. Stark” I have nothing else to offer him.
Lunch sits in my stomach like a wad of clay. Two of them in one week will leave me, both for seemingly meaningless things. Maybe the husband is right, and I don’t have the strength for this work.
I have to walk across the yard this afternoon a couple of times to fix some medication problems. It is an early spring day, and most everybody is out and milling around. Mr. Stark should be at work in the music center. I’ve not yet begun to seriously worry; I’m saving that for the ride home. Again, all these guys are dressed the same, and picking them out of the crowd can be difficult. Suddenly somebody peals off of a conversation going the opposite direction and matches my stride. Mr. Stark.
“I’ve fixed it, it’s taken care of, Ms. McLain.”
In two hours? I want to stop and snatch him up and ask for more details. But I keep walking.
“I didn’t do it exactly how you might want.” He means he was threatening violence in some manner, he was being a prisoner.
“I don’t care. But you took care of it?” and I look at him sideways. It is normal for people to stop me to talk and sometimes to walk with me. I know that huge portions of the yard pay attention and balance to make sure I am not favoring one above another. We need to appear low key as he gives me this most important piece of information.
“Yup, I fixed it.”
And our paths diverge.
I come out moments later after dropping off the meds. He is standing down the walk from me yelling instructions and commands across the yard. He gesticulates with power and intent. He is the man that crouches outside my office waiting to be called in. I guess he has taken care of it. I have not found him in Seg in the following two days…
He is working hard for me, mildly aware of Mr. Stewart in Segregation and my pain and fear. After last session, I want him to talk about the tangle of love, hate and pain engendered by his rape. I start by suggesting love is something that is supposed to be warm and safe. He leaps up from his seat and starts to pace around my office. The new office is big enough to hold ten guys for group, so there is room. As I have mentioned, custody walks by every ten minutes or so and looks in. My goal is to sit quietly, so nobody is alarmed by his angst. He tells me love has never involved anything vaguely safe.
He is a musician. One of his expressions is heavy metal. He tells me this week he has played with the prison bands. He has been asked to lead guitar with songs full of hate. For the first time he has looked at the faces around him, and as he plays, they are suffused with rage and anger. And he is repulsed. He feels that he is funneling his own hate into the crowd, and is responsible for eliciting this response from others. And now, he no longer wants this. Of course he is not doing this; he is just finding resonance from others fighting the same demons he fights.
He flings himself back into his chair, digs in his pocket and gives me the four picks that live there. In prison, these must have a huge value. I’m vaguely confused as to how he even has them, but there is no time to ask.
“I can’t play heavy metal anymore.”
His music is so important to him. It is the thing that keeps him afloat in this crazy world of prison. And he is up again, pacing. I think he just gave me his music. I think in retrospect he was asking me to judge this part of him. If I found it wanting or wrong, I was to take it away from him; I should take his picks. If I did so, he would do his best to acquiesce to my decision. I can’t even imagine what comes next.
He saves me by launching into another topic, starting again with the disclaimer that he is retarded.
I cringe. I have little energy left this week with Mr. Stewart in Seg. The last time Mr. Stark started a topic this way it was horrific. I don’t have the energy for this.
He doesn’t wish to tell me the story, but he knows he needs to. It haunts him and not telling me is a form of lying. He owes $24 to a guy that sold him drugs in the past couple of months; time before I lowered the boom about his behavior. His brother is supposed to feed money into other inmate’s accounts from Mr. Stark’s savings at home. But for some reason, his brother has dropped off of the face of the earth in the past months, and this debt has gone unpaid. He suspects his brother is using again.
Yesterday he was approached by a group, a pseudo-gang, of men demanding the money. The person he owed had sold the debt. He fliped immediately into prison mode and invites them to come one by one into the shower with their knives and he will slice their faces off. They back off and leave with verbal threats. Such violence, offered to me with the most sheepish face. I have no doubt he would be able to do such to at least half of them before winding up another causality in Seg or God forbid, the hospital. But if he chooses this recourse, he ends up leaving me. So he asks me what to do.
Excuse me, I am white naive country girl; I’ve no idea what to do with this crazy prison yard politics and power struggles. I can’t even believe he asks me. I express this and ask for a list of options.
He explains what I already know, what those of you reading this blog know. Now that he has made a stand, if he backs down, he loses face, and the consequences could lead to an escalated level of violence. All I know is I can’t lose him, too. Not two of them in the same week.
“Fix it. Fix it, Mr. Stark” I have nothing else to offer him.
Lunch sits in my stomach like a wad of clay. Two of them in one week will leave me, both for seemingly meaningless things. Maybe the husband is right, and I don’t have the strength for this work.
I have to walk across the yard this afternoon a couple of times to fix some medication problems. It is an early spring day, and most everybody is out and milling around. Mr. Stark should be at work in the music center. I’ve not yet begun to seriously worry; I’m saving that for the ride home. Again, all these guys are dressed the same, and picking them out of the crowd can be difficult. Suddenly somebody peals off of a conversation going the opposite direction and matches my stride. Mr. Stark.
“I’ve fixed it, it’s taken care of, Ms. McLain.”
In two hours? I want to stop and snatch him up and ask for more details. But I keep walking.
“I didn’t do it exactly how you might want.” He means he was threatening violence in some manner, he was being a prisoner.
“I don’t care. But you took care of it?” and I look at him sideways. It is normal for people to stop me to talk and sometimes to walk with me. I know that huge portions of the yard pay attention and balance to make sure I am not favoring one above another. We need to appear low key as he gives me this most important piece of information.
“Yup, I fixed it.”
And our paths diverge.
I come out moments later after dropping off the meds. He is standing down the walk from me yelling instructions and commands across the yard. He gesticulates with power and intent. He is the man that crouches outside my office waiting to be called in. I guess he has taken care of it. I have not found him in Seg in the following two days…
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Owning Mr. Stewart
It has been a long week, and I hardly know where to begin. Mr. Stewart, one of my regular guys has gone off of the deep end. Somebody in a different unit owed him a tiny bit of money. But as custody has reminded me, this is a huge thing; something that might call your manhood into question.
Mr. Stewart tried to call this guy out into the common area. This did not work. So Mr. Stewart went into his old unit and pulled this guy out. A Major Out of Place ticket. Both are now sporting horrid black eyes and other wounds. Mr. Stewart owned up, stating he took the first blow, but only because he thought the other guy was coming at him. It’s all on tape, and a huge portion of the inmates witnessed this, including the blood that sprayed everywhere.
So I walk in on Wednesday morning and check the segregation board. Who is in the hole from last night? And I see Mr. Stewart’s name and number with “fighting,” penned in behind it. The other guy is on my caseload also. The other guy has always passed through my office as an afterthought. He is a long term con, and is uninterested in counseling or change, he just wants the meds. You know who I support.
I am so angry, and hurt and full of grief and loss, because one of them will be surely ridden out to another prison. I have spent so much time with Mr. Stewart, and we had begun to make some sort of progress, and he is now maybe leaving due to something so tiny in my eyes.
I speak to the other guy, and hear the story; pretty close to what is on the ticket. Then I pull up a chair to Mr. Stewart, and talk through the meal slot. I can’t rationalize pulling him out, in belly chains, needing an extra custody person to supervise my safety. I just need to lean over and shout through the slot. So angry, so disappointed, I cry in front of custody again before I go in. I would feel so much better if I could grab him by the collar and slam him against the wall and scream in his face. Of course, this would be so normal and recognized; this is how everybody he has cared about has always treated him. Maybe in some sick way it would comfort him.
And I start talking to him and he does this horrible dismissing shrugging thing he does when he is very disturbed. Even though I know why he does it, it enrages me further. I am tight and cold and angry. I suggest he come close enough I can grab him by the throat, and he smartly keeps his distance. He is just showered, and his newly long hair is tangled. Those of us with long hair know you comb out the bottom few inches and then work up. I suggest this to him and he continues to comb the tangles from the top. This just angers me more.
He gives me prison dead eye. I suggest he knock that off. I then ask him to apologize, as I see he is either refusing to acknowledge why I am angry or is unable to speak it to himself. Shrugging, dead eye. And he yawns.
And I begin to consider leaving; this is doing me no good. I have a whole day in front of me, and I don’t need to wind up so hard I can’t do my job. He must have sensed this, and suddenly he is before me and I can see him. He apologizes. He tells me he understands how much it hurts me to have him in the Hole. And he is again this lost boy trying to find a way out, as he has been in my office for so many weeks. If I save him am I hurting him? I hope not. I if I save him, I will hope to own him and be able to push him in the directions I think he needs. Let’s see what happens…
Mr. Stewart tried to call this guy out into the common area. This did not work. So Mr. Stewart went into his old unit and pulled this guy out. A Major Out of Place ticket. Both are now sporting horrid black eyes and other wounds. Mr. Stewart owned up, stating he took the first blow, but only because he thought the other guy was coming at him. It’s all on tape, and a huge portion of the inmates witnessed this, including the blood that sprayed everywhere.
So I walk in on Wednesday morning and check the segregation board. Who is in the hole from last night? And I see Mr. Stewart’s name and number with “fighting,” penned in behind it. The other guy is on my caseload also. The other guy has always passed through my office as an afterthought. He is a long term con, and is uninterested in counseling or change, he just wants the meds. You know who I support.
I am so angry, and hurt and full of grief and loss, because one of them will be surely ridden out to another prison. I have spent so much time with Mr. Stewart, and we had begun to make some sort of progress, and he is now maybe leaving due to something so tiny in my eyes.
I speak to the other guy, and hear the story; pretty close to what is on the ticket. Then I pull up a chair to Mr. Stewart, and talk through the meal slot. I can’t rationalize pulling him out, in belly chains, needing an extra custody person to supervise my safety. I just need to lean over and shout through the slot. So angry, so disappointed, I cry in front of custody again before I go in. I would feel so much better if I could grab him by the collar and slam him against the wall and scream in his face. Of course, this would be so normal and recognized; this is how everybody he has cared about has always treated him. Maybe in some sick way it would comfort him.
And I start talking to him and he does this horrible dismissing shrugging thing he does when he is very disturbed. Even though I know why he does it, it enrages me further. I am tight and cold and angry. I suggest he come close enough I can grab him by the throat, and he smartly keeps his distance. He is just showered, and his newly long hair is tangled. Those of us with long hair know you comb out the bottom few inches and then work up. I suggest this to him and he continues to comb the tangles from the top. This just angers me more.
He gives me prison dead eye. I suggest he knock that off. I then ask him to apologize, as I see he is either refusing to acknowledge why I am angry or is unable to speak it to himself. Shrugging, dead eye. And he yawns.
And I begin to consider leaving; this is doing me no good. I have a whole day in front of me, and I don’t need to wind up so hard I can’t do my job. He must have sensed this, and suddenly he is before me and I can see him. He apologizes. He tells me he understands how much it hurts me to have him in the Hole. And he is again this lost boy trying to find a way out, as he has been in my office for so many weeks. If I save him am I hurting him? I hope not. I if I save him, I will hope to own him and be able to push him in the directions I think he needs. Let’s see what happens…
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
My Whole Self
Today my brother forwarded an email from a college friend of his. What I don’t think I have mentioned, and I neglect, is the importance of the support I get from family and friends as I forge my way through this insanity. My family is concerned I am crashing and burning from the intensity of this experience.
Brother writes to his friend, “Not sure you have the time or interest for this sort of thing, but my sister is documenting her new job in a blog, and its not as bad as it sounds. Her new job is doing therapy in a state prison. And she is scary unto it to the point of stressing her marriage and freaking out her family and herself. And she is writing about that too.”
Who he writes to is a ghost person for me in his life. I suspect I met Mr. K. when I went down to my brother’s college graduation, but I don’t have a clear memory. Two decades from brother’s graduation, if I remember correctly, this is a guy who had gone into law, and is perhaps, himself, walking through some sort of craziness of his own. Dave responds back, “Thank you. It's beautifully written but painful to read. Really dark and painful. I think I'll keep going.” I cherish this interchange, and it helps move me forward.
I was on the phone to the parents tonight, and they share the brother’s fear I am losing myself. Strangely, as fearful as they were of my marriage to my very unconventional husband, they are now afraid I am jeopardizing this relationship.
In November, I started to understand the compulsion this job had on me. I told myself it was passing; it was growth; it was finding my path. Of course, it would pass. Frighteningly, it has not. So I try to explain to myself and them.
I am attracted to the power of it. I am a uterus in a sea of testosterone. One of my second shift, female officers offered up TMT – Too Much Testosterone. They are at the dregs of their lives. They are alone, unhappy and desperate to connect. And I walk among them, hopefully sowing flowers.
For me to speak their pain to them is mesmerizing; how can I know? The bulk of abuse most of them has suffered has make them quest for love, and to act out in anger and criminal behavior. A tiny bit of love from me goes a horribly long way.
Yesterday I had a guy who has been in for a drug related murder for fourteen years. I don’t mean to suggest killing somebody who did you wrong in a drug deal is okay, but I’d rather he killed that guy than breaking into my house and killing me for the $40 in my wallet. English is his second language. He was almost a child when he came in, and nearly illiterate in English. It had been four days since his parole came through, and I assumed he knew about it. He has always been cautious and watchful with me. He came into my office, and I beamed at him and grinned. He set aside the prison dead eye and beamed back. I assumed it was because he already knew about his parole. He did not. He was just so enchanted that somebody would look at him with such positive regard, he responded. Not a criminal, not a felon, not an animal. Just a lost soul. He was only slightly more excited about the parole than the fact I had looked at him with my whole self.
And THIS is the thing that keeps me sane and whole. I can do tiny, little thoughtless things. Ways of interacting that those I love don’t even consciously register. And that second, that moment can change the course of the day for my guys. And when I concentrate hard, and am conscious, what might I accomplish? What might they find in their selves to become?
Brother writes to his friend, “Not sure you have the time or interest for this sort of thing, but my sister is documenting her new job in a blog, and its not as bad as it sounds. Her new job is doing therapy in a state prison. And she is scary unto it to the point of stressing her marriage and freaking out her family and herself. And she is writing about that too.”
Who he writes to is a ghost person for me in his life. I suspect I met Mr. K. when I went down to my brother’s college graduation, but I don’t have a clear memory. Two decades from brother’s graduation, if I remember correctly, this is a guy who had gone into law, and is perhaps, himself, walking through some sort of craziness of his own. Dave responds back, “Thank you. It's beautifully written but painful to read. Really dark and painful. I think I'll keep going.” I cherish this interchange, and it helps move me forward.
I was on the phone to the parents tonight, and they share the brother’s fear I am losing myself. Strangely, as fearful as they were of my marriage to my very unconventional husband, they are now afraid I am jeopardizing this relationship.
In November, I started to understand the compulsion this job had on me. I told myself it was passing; it was growth; it was finding my path. Of course, it would pass. Frighteningly, it has not. So I try to explain to myself and them.
I am attracted to the power of it. I am a uterus in a sea of testosterone. One of my second shift, female officers offered up TMT – Too Much Testosterone. They are at the dregs of their lives. They are alone, unhappy and desperate to connect. And I walk among them, hopefully sowing flowers.
For me to speak their pain to them is mesmerizing; how can I know? The bulk of abuse most of them has suffered has make them quest for love, and to act out in anger and criminal behavior. A tiny bit of love from me goes a horribly long way.
Yesterday I had a guy who has been in for a drug related murder for fourteen years. I don’t mean to suggest killing somebody who did you wrong in a drug deal is okay, but I’d rather he killed that guy than breaking into my house and killing me for the $40 in my wallet. English is his second language. He was almost a child when he came in, and nearly illiterate in English. It had been four days since his parole came through, and I assumed he knew about it. He has always been cautious and watchful with me. He came into my office, and I beamed at him and grinned. He set aside the prison dead eye and beamed back. I assumed it was because he already knew about his parole. He did not. He was just so enchanted that somebody would look at him with such positive regard, he responded. Not a criminal, not a felon, not an animal. Just a lost soul. He was only slightly more excited about the parole than the fact I had looked at him with my whole self.
And THIS is the thing that keeps me sane and whole. I can do tiny, little thoughtless things. Ways of interacting that those I love don’t even consciously register. And that second, that moment can change the course of the day for my guys. And when I concentrate hard, and am conscious, what might I accomplish? What might they find in their selves to become?
Monday, March 30, 2009
Gone
Mr. Stark got called up by the Parole Board again. Apparently they are reconsidering his flop.
Today I left early for lunch, and he was sitting in the cage with a bunch of men waiting for their parole hearings. I knew he was up this week, but it could have been Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. I caught his eye, and a jolt went through me. I want him to get parole. I want him to go back into the world and have a life. But we are not even close to done with the work needed to safeguard him from the hate, and insanity and drug world to which he is returning. I walked with him as he was being returned to his unit and checked his head. He is anxious, but he has not flipped into the defensive, non-caring mode. He is back in Control when I return from lunch. I would stop and grab him by his collar and knock him around until I am sure he understands what he needs to do to leave. Of course, I cannot do this. I can neither touch him, nor do something so violent.
I imagine the piece of paper in my box that tells me of his parole. I am not ready for him to leave. I imagine I will hear about him being moved to a prison closer to home. And whoosh, he will be gone. I want to find a way to hold him and keep him safe. But I cannot journey out with him. He will have to find a way to keep himself safe. I have to hope he holds me in his head in a way that helps guide him; in a way that helps him remember there is another, better way to live his life.
Today I left early for lunch, and he was sitting in the cage with a bunch of men waiting for their parole hearings. I knew he was up this week, but it could have been Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. I caught his eye, and a jolt went through me. I want him to get parole. I want him to go back into the world and have a life. But we are not even close to done with the work needed to safeguard him from the hate, and insanity and drug world to which he is returning. I walked with him as he was being returned to his unit and checked his head. He is anxious, but he has not flipped into the defensive, non-caring mode. He is back in Control when I return from lunch. I would stop and grab him by his collar and knock him around until I am sure he understands what he needs to do to leave. Of course, I cannot do this. I can neither touch him, nor do something so violent.
I imagine the piece of paper in my box that tells me of his parole. I am not ready for him to leave. I imagine I will hear about him being moved to a prison closer to home. And whoosh, he will be gone. I want to find a way to hold him and keep him safe. But I cannot journey out with him. He will have to find a way to keep himself safe. I have to hope he holds me in his head in a way that helps guide him; in a way that helps him remember there is another, better way to live his life.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
The Husband
So last Thursday I wrote about Mr. Invisible. I told you my husband was not happy.
We are trying to work through this. I am trying, at least. He told me I needed to quit; that these guys are taking my soul. Today he opined I was, “being taken advantage of.” I’m trying to find some place to speak of this clearly. Our friend, Julie, says it is my quest for a level of stimulation my husband finds distasteful and repugnant. He cannot watch anything on television or the movies that is shocking, violent or too sad. I quest for this level of stimulation. At the same time he is right, it drains me in a way. And then I am less available to him.
I don’t talk about him much except as a passing reference. He makes things. His days are pretty constant and very far away from any trauma besides what he concocts in his brain. My days fluctuate wildly between feeding energy and draining.
We have loaded guns in our bedroom closet. This is new. This is to dissuade the guys that he believes might hunt me down after they are released. He is no longer afraid I will be hurt on the facility. He is now afraid they will become so attached they will come after me when they are released.
When I was 22, I had this dream about who I would be. I wanted to be this quiet, centered earth-mother person. Somebody who could absorb and be quiet. I am the farthest thing from quiet and calm. I finally understood this goal was beyond my personality, beyond my character, and I needed to give it up. I’ve spent the next decades working through this reality. The easy description of me is I’m a loud, pushy, bitchy person. I do not give in easily to society’s expectations of me. I am not cute or nice. I am me.
And now I am in prison. As I’ve said in earlier blogs, my mother made me do it. My great friends are totally unsurprised by how this environment has worked for me. These men are the boys I dated in high school. They are the lost souls that I saw and could not save at that time. They are known to me. I am fierce, and strange and authentic. I demand a lot, and I do not abrogate my ideals. The guys tell me I am real, a compliment I cherish and have never heard before. They do not judge me and they do not find me wanting.
So they come into my office, and each starts as a person, not a felon. Some of them are so dead; their shiny bits have been destroyed and their desire for interaction is puerile and oriented toward sex. They cannot find something larger. They persist and I send them elsewhere as in Proposition.
And so the majority finds me. I say something or do something that catches them. And then out of their pain and their fear and their hopelessness they decide to take another chance with me. Each finds another reason to believe and trust me. And each moves toward something new at their own pace.
Mr. Invisible takes a leap that I have asked him for, and I have never imagined how it might affect me. For any man, especially in a prison situation, to admit to a woman that they were looking for love from the man that sodomized them is huge. It is not something that can be conjured for my interest. It is far too possibly humiliating and horrifying to even float out unless you have some huge goal. A goal such as finding wholeness and seeing the need to slough off the insanity of your childhood. Again, he has gifted me with such a secret, such a moment that I am devastated by both his trust and the horror of his experience.
Then the husband suggests he is using me? What is the husband thinking? He is thinking that I am taking something from him and giving it to somebody ELSE. He wants me to come up with some concrete plan of when enough is enough. When I stop giving of myself. How nebulous. I don’t know how to do this.
Mr. Invisible has taken my soul for a number of hours. After I write about it, I remain so sad, but I am no longer wracked with sorrow. I can spend ten hours of my blessed life to alleviate some of his pain. If my horribly privileged husband has to give up some comfort, so be it. I’ve put up with his obsessions for years; he can deal with mine now. I am doing good. I am convinced of this.
We are trying to work through this. I am trying, at least. He told me I needed to quit; that these guys are taking my soul. Today he opined I was, “being taken advantage of.” I’m trying to find some place to speak of this clearly. Our friend, Julie, says it is my quest for a level of stimulation my husband finds distasteful and repugnant. He cannot watch anything on television or the movies that is shocking, violent or too sad. I quest for this level of stimulation. At the same time he is right, it drains me in a way. And then I am less available to him.
I don’t talk about him much except as a passing reference. He makes things. His days are pretty constant and very far away from any trauma besides what he concocts in his brain. My days fluctuate wildly between feeding energy and draining.
We have loaded guns in our bedroom closet. This is new. This is to dissuade the guys that he believes might hunt me down after they are released. He is no longer afraid I will be hurt on the facility. He is now afraid they will become so attached they will come after me when they are released.
When I was 22, I had this dream about who I would be. I wanted to be this quiet, centered earth-mother person. Somebody who could absorb and be quiet. I am the farthest thing from quiet and calm. I finally understood this goal was beyond my personality, beyond my character, and I needed to give it up. I’ve spent the next decades working through this reality. The easy description of me is I’m a loud, pushy, bitchy person. I do not give in easily to society’s expectations of me. I am not cute or nice. I am me.
And now I am in prison. As I’ve said in earlier blogs, my mother made me do it. My great friends are totally unsurprised by how this environment has worked for me. These men are the boys I dated in high school. They are the lost souls that I saw and could not save at that time. They are known to me. I am fierce, and strange and authentic. I demand a lot, and I do not abrogate my ideals. The guys tell me I am real, a compliment I cherish and have never heard before. They do not judge me and they do not find me wanting.
So they come into my office, and each starts as a person, not a felon. Some of them are so dead; their shiny bits have been destroyed and their desire for interaction is puerile and oriented toward sex. They cannot find something larger. They persist and I send them elsewhere as in Proposition.
And so the majority finds me. I say something or do something that catches them. And then out of their pain and their fear and their hopelessness they decide to take another chance with me. Each finds another reason to believe and trust me. And each moves toward something new at their own pace.
Mr. Invisible takes a leap that I have asked him for, and I have never imagined how it might affect me. For any man, especially in a prison situation, to admit to a woman that they were looking for love from the man that sodomized them is huge. It is not something that can be conjured for my interest. It is far too possibly humiliating and horrifying to even float out unless you have some huge goal. A goal such as finding wholeness and seeing the need to slough off the insanity of your childhood. Again, he has gifted me with such a secret, such a moment that I am devastated by both his trust and the horror of his experience.
Then the husband suggests he is using me? What is the husband thinking? He is thinking that I am taking something from him and giving it to somebody ELSE. He wants me to come up with some concrete plan of when enough is enough. When I stop giving of myself. How nebulous. I don’t know how to do this.
Mr. Invisible has taken my soul for a number of hours. After I write about it, I remain so sad, but I am no longer wracked with sorrow. I can spend ten hours of my blessed life to alleviate some of his pain. If my horribly privileged husband has to give up some comfort, so be it. I’ve put up with his obsessions for years; he can deal with mine now. I am doing good. I am convinced of this.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Invisible
“I’m gonna tell you something that will sound stupid or retarded.”
I had just said something to him that he had to check to see if I was rejecting him.
This sentence is often followed by something inappropriate. So I sighed and was wary.
He was sodomized at gunpoint as a child by his father’s friend.
“When he raped me first, he was violent. The second time it was not. I just thought this was how adults worked. Then he didn’t come back after that. I thought I had done something wrong.”
And at age eight, love and pain and fear became intertwined. He had been rejected by his rapist. His parents had already disengaged from him. Love and hate become the same. Pain and love are the same. He is bad, and doesn’t deserve love. He told his mom about the rape. She slapped him and called him a liar. The man was incarcerated two years later for raping his children. His mother was too high to remember this conversation.
And for him, hate and love and rage and rejection become the same. Safety is something beyond the pale, nothing that you can find a base for. You are bad. The only person who pays attention to you, you have driven away. You are tiny, young, and fragile and nobody loves you truly.
I cried. And it made him frantic. Hurting me is not allowed. But I need to take the pain from him somehow, and help him find something more meaningful than hate = love. If hate and love are the same thing, all you can do is immerse yourself in drugs.
My husband is not happy. I came home tonight crying. He doesn’t think my job should take this toll. He wants me to walk away. Of course this causes me more pain. This guy comes to me; he tells me things in ways he has not done before. My job is to take it, process it and release it to the world at large. And my job is not to condemn him for his confusion. My calling is to take his pain, and continue to care. He has little idea what love without pain is about. So it costs me something. So what?
Each time he comes to my office or I see him on the yard, he is more present. This is what I get back. I want to be a healer. He is, for the first time maybe in his life, looking at something different. He and I have taken him there. How is this not worth it?
Let me explain what I don’t think he evens gets.
He has two modes, due to the abuse. One is invisible. The new psych I am training still can’t tell who he is. When he waits in the hallway for our sessions, he hunkers down in the corner and practices invisibility. He becomes tiny. But he has this berserker presence when he feels threatened. I only sense this as he has not done it to me. When you are terrorized as a child you go one of two ways. One is to become victim; one is to become the aggressor. Many of these people become abusers themselves. He has had enough self, enough of his shiny bit that he has not gone to the abuser. But there are moments when somebody threatens what he cherishes that he becomes big. He gets at least four inches taller; his hands are big enough to crush my skull. He can dominate most of the men in the facility, but I am not sure he knows it. He should be somebody who worries me, but I know my biggest worry is him doing something out of control to protect me.
Okay, my real biggest worry is he will become so overwhelmed by the vulnerability of what we are doing he will explode it. But the other thing he is getting is the possibilities of love without pain. And of course, the pain is what he is trying to erase with the drugs. And now I am spinning.
But he is not. He has found something to anchor him. He is moving forward, and I watch with pride and love.
I had just said something to him that he had to check to see if I was rejecting him.
This sentence is often followed by something inappropriate. So I sighed and was wary.
He was sodomized at gunpoint as a child by his father’s friend.
“When he raped me first, he was violent. The second time it was not. I just thought this was how adults worked. Then he didn’t come back after that. I thought I had done something wrong.”
And at age eight, love and pain and fear became intertwined. He had been rejected by his rapist. His parents had already disengaged from him. Love and hate become the same. Pain and love are the same. He is bad, and doesn’t deserve love. He told his mom about the rape. She slapped him and called him a liar. The man was incarcerated two years later for raping his children. His mother was too high to remember this conversation.
And for him, hate and love and rage and rejection become the same. Safety is something beyond the pale, nothing that you can find a base for. You are bad. The only person who pays attention to you, you have driven away. You are tiny, young, and fragile and nobody loves you truly.
I cried. And it made him frantic. Hurting me is not allowed. But I need to take the pain from him somehow, and help him find something more meaningful than hate = love. If hate and love are the same thing, all you can do is immerse yourself in drugs.
My husband is not happy. I came home tonight crying. He doesn’t think my job should take this toll. He wants me to walk away. Of course this causes me more pain. This guy comes to me; he tells me things in ways he has not done before. My job is to take it, process it and release it to the world at large. And my job is not to condemn him for his confusion. My calling is to take his pain, and continue to care. He has little idea what love without pain is about. So it costs me something. So what?
Each time he comes to my office or I see him on the yard, he is more present. This is what I get back. I want to be a healer. He is, for the first time maybe in his life, looking at something different. He and I have taken him there. How is this not worth it?
Let me explain what I don’t think he evens gets.
He has two modes, due to the abuse. One is invisible. The new psych I am training still can’t tell who he is. When he waits in the hallway for our sessions, he hunkers down in the corner and practices invisibility. He becomes tiny. But he has this berserker presence when he feels threatened. I only sense this as he has not done it to me. When you are terrorized as a child you go one of two ways. One is to become victim; one is to become the aggressor. Many of these people become abusers themselves. He has had enough self, enough of his shiny bit that he has not gone to the abuser. But there are moments when somebody threatens what he cherishes that he becomes big. He gets at least four inches taller; his hands are big enough to crush my skull. He can dominate most of the men in the facility, but I am not sure he knows it. He should be somebody who worries me, but I know my biggest worry is him doing something out of control to protect me.
Okay, my real biggest worry is he will become so overwhelmed by the vulnerability of what we are doing he will explode it. But the other thing he is getting is the possibilities of love without pain. And of course, the pain is what he is trying to erase with the drugs. And now I am spinning.
But he is not. He has found something to anchor him. He is moving forward, and I watch with pride and love.
A gift
Here I sit, the end of the day. And I look at what I think I’m doing. It happens a lot. My guys are so needy, they look for so much. They need me to love them and I do what I can to find the parts of them worthy of my love. Worthy? Hubris???
Today I had a session with Mr. Stewart. It was exactly what it should have been. We’ve had two sessions of angst, after I told him to shut the fuck up. They were horrible hours where my own anxiety was out of control; I can only imagine where his own thoughts were. Finally, thanks to years of training, I understand that I am absorbing his anxiety. My own reaction (countertranferace) is the clue. Christ, where is my head to take hours to understand??
Imperfection is intolerable to me.
Center down, relax, just have a conversation. Stop pushing so hard. I want it all, now. My fear that he will do something, or the system will do something to take him away from me makes me crazy.
For seconds, sometimes for minutes, I feel that I hold him. He stops fighting and he is mine. At this moment I need to find the best of myself and open that to him. But there are so many factors fighting against that; what does he leave my office with?
And today we entered one of these moments. I can’t predict these, they are unimaginable and not to be choreographed. All I can hold is my centering thought. He needs to feel and understand that I see him, that all of his craziness and all of his fear is only static. I see him.
I can reach beyond his internal chaos when I remember to do so. It is nothing to me. It is everything to him. And each time I do it, it is like something new. He can’t remember; he becomes so immersed in his own pain that he can’t hear. He told me today I am one of the hardest people for him to read, that what I say and my tone sound incongruent to him. I think it is because I am pushing him, and he feels this is judging.
He asks me in the last session if I will transfer him to the next psych. Why would he think that? How have I betrayed him to believe this? Intellectually I know this is his fear. Emotionally I feel the loss of him. This is where I finally understand what is happening. He is so afraid I will discard him that I have become afraid he will discard me. We are in a horrible cycle of fear. As each of us becomes more anxious, our behavior becomes more untrue. We cannot find the essence of what is happening.
So I take the plunge, and I tell him my fear. That I am being so pushy and obnoxious that he is going to get up, walk out of my office and never come back. It is his fear reflected, but not less horrible because of it. I am rigid remembering the moment, now.
And he gifts me. He looks at me, beyond my age, beyond what I look like, beyond being other, beyond his preconceived notions of my essence; his soul looks at me. “I will not leave you.” He has transcended his own fear to reassure me. He gifts me.
Today I had a session with Mr. Stewart. It was exactly what it should have been. We’ve had two sessions of angst, after I told him to shut the fuck up. They were horrible hours where my own anxiety was out of control; I can only imagine where his own thoughts were. Finally, thanks to years of training, I understand that I am absorbing his anxiety. My own reaction (countertranferace) is the clue. Christ, where is my head to take hours to understand??
Imperfection is intolerable to me.
Center down, relax, just have a conversation. Stop pushing so hard. I want it all, now. My fear that he will do something, or the system will do something to take him away from me makes me crazy.
For seconds, sometimes for minutes, I feel that I hold him. He stops fighting and he is mine. At this moment I need to find the best of myself and open that to him. But there are so many factors fighting against that; what does he leave my office with?
And today we entered one of these moments. I can’t predict these, they are unimaginable and not to be choreographed. All I can hold is my centering thought. He needs to feel and understand that I see him, that all of his craziness and all of his fear is only static. I see him.
I can reach beyond his internal chaos when I remember to do so. It is nothing to me. It is everything to him. And each time I do it, it is like something new. He can’t remember; he becomes so immersed in his own pain that he can’t hear. He told me today I am one of the hardest people for him to read, that what I say and my tone sound incongruent to him. I think it is because I am pushing him, and he feels this is judging.
He asks me in the last session if I will transfer him to the next psych. Why would he think that? How have I betrayed him to believe this? Intellectually I know this is his fear. Emotionally I feel the loss of him. This is where I finally understand what is happening. He is so afraid I will discard him that I have become afraid he will discard me. We are in a horrible cycle of fear. As each of us becomes more anxious, our behavior becomes more untrue. We cannot find the essence of what is happening.
So I take the plunge, and I tell him my fear. That I am being so pushy and obnoxious that he is going to get up, walk out of my office and never come back. It is his fear reflected, but not less horrible because of it. I am rigid remembering the moment, now.
And he gifts me. He looks at me, beyond my age, beyond what I look like, beyond being other, beyond his preconceived notions of my essence; his soul looks at me. “I will not leave you.” He has transcended his own fear to reassure me. He gifts me.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Who are you?
My unique hit counter has sky rocketed in the past few weeks. Who are you people reading my blog? I can’t but imagine you are passing it on. Tell me what you think; I’m dying out here.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Walk Through the Fear
Is there anybody out there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anybody else at all??*
Mr. Sotheby came in today. He had initially instigated treatment by very clearly asking for it. We have had four or five sessions. The last two sessions have been totally insane for me. I can’t really tell where his issues and mine are intersecting and separate. He gives me this amazing writing that I would copy and take home to my support, but that would ask too much of him.
And yet, the person he gives me in writing is so much more present than the body I have sitting next to me in session.
I seem entirely unable to push him. I can’t tell if I am channeling his own wish or just thrashing around in my particular issues. Like a rock, he looks at me. Sometimes his eyes are animated and I feel his reality, and then a small change occurs and he is gone. Prison Dead Eye.
He has given me a few explanations at the same time he reassures. He does not want my pity. He does not possess girlish emotions. I can not possibly understand his pain. I think all are true but missing the essence. I suspect the issue is trust. And that’s when he reassures me that indeed he does trust me, and I know more about him than anybody else in the facility, except a couple of people with whom he has done years of time.
After Mr. Sotheby left, I bounced off my frustration in the main office. My boss just thinks he is in my office because I, “smell good.” Implying I have the coochie. My husband has been driving this into my head lately. “They all have sex with you at night…”
I just can’t believe it. For God’s sake, I am older than his mother. If this is all it is, I just need to pack up and go home. I am too naive to do this job. If I find he is just playing me, when I am so sure he is not, I’m fucking doomed.
Mr. Sotheby tells me he thinks things were going along at a nice pace. I can’t imagine what he is talking about, except conversation at about four miles an hour. He tells me he sees my name on his itinerary and feels happy. Such a lovely compliment, and again, I don’t think he is bullshitting me. But he could be.
So many people lie, and I know I don’t always know for sure; I want to see the best. I’ve caught a few playing me. God, if he is doing this, he will be the nightmare I’ve been waiting for; the incident that crushes me. Then I get to be the one to decide if I trust again or just relegate the rest of my patients to animals.
I see him, and I wish I could walk up to him and just touch him on the forehead. To let him lean in, and for a moment give up what he holds, relax, and maybe take a moment to feel safe. In fact, I wish that for so many of them including some of the officers. Too much pain exists in this place.
Both my friends I talked to about it, Meem and Mel, tell me I need to back off and just let it go: let him talk and find his own pace. He’s not leaving soon, so I really shouldn’t feel so much pressure. I guess we both have to walk through our fear.
*Pink Floyd
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anybody else at all??*
Mr. Sotheby came in today. He had initially instigated treatment by very clearly asking for it. We have had four or five sessions. The last two sessions have been totally insane for me. I can’t really tell where his issues and mine are intersecting and separate. He gives me this amazing writing that I would copy and take home to my support, but that would ask too much of him.
And yet, the person he gives me in writing is so much more present than the body I have sitting next to me in session.
I seem entirely unable to push him. I can’t tell if I am channeling his own wish or just thrashing around in my particular issues. Like a rock, he looks at me. Sometimes his eyes are animated and I feel his reality, and then a small change occurs and he is gone. Prison Dead Eye.
He has given me a few explanations at the same time he reassures. He does not want my pity. He does not possess girlish emotions. I can not possibly understand his pain. I think all are true but missing the essence. I suspect the issue is trust. And that’s when he reassures me that indeed he does trust me, and I know more about him than anybody else in the facility, except a couple of people with whom he has done years of time.
After Mr. Sotheby left, I bounced off my frustration in the main office. My boss just thinks he is in my office because I, “smell good.” Implying I have the coochie. My husband has been driving this into my head lately. “They all have sex with you at night…”
I just can’t believe it. For God’s sake, I am older than his mother. If this is all it is, I just need to pack up and go home. I am too naive to do this job. If I find he is just playing me, when I am so sure he is not, I’m fucking doomed.
Mr. Sotheby tells me he thinks things were going along at a nice pace. I can’t imagine what he is talking about, except conversation at about four miles an hour. He tells me he sees my name on his itinerary and feels happy. Such a lovely compliment, and again, I don’t think he is bullshitting me. But he could be.
So many people lie, and I know I don’t always know for sure; I want to see the best. I’ve caught a few playing me. God, if he is doing this, he will be the nightmare I’ve been waiting for; the incident that crushes me. Then I get to be the one to decide if I trust again or just relegate the rest of my patients to animals.
I see him, and I wish I could walk up to him and just touch him on the forehead. To let him lean in, and for a moment give up what he holds, relax, and maybe take a moment to feel safe. In fact, I wish that for so many of them including some of the officers. Too much pain exists in this place.
Both my friends I talked to about it, Meem and Mel, tell me I need to back off and just let it go: let him talk and find his own pace. He’s not leaving soon, so I really shouldn’t feel so much pressure. I guess we both have to walk through our fear.
*Pink Floyd
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Thongs
So, another group session, and somehow the conversation goes to cross-dressing. Apparently there is a guard infamous for wearing women’s undergarments. It strikes me as a very bad choice in prison to be known for this particular proclivity. But the question arises as to why somebody might do this.
I pull the current DSM off the shelf to find the diagnostic category, and as I flip through the tome, I start talking about it. I’ve had three or four clients over the years that either cross-dress or are looking at sex change, and I casually mention this. They are amazed. It seems like such a bizarre and rare occurrence; how could I possibly have experience with it?
I explain about the sexual arousal part of this activity and the concept of being caught in the “wrong” body. They’re still stuck in the thought that I actually have treated guys with this issue. I point out that men don’t generally get together, drink beer and talk about their underwear.
“Well, do women?”
“Of course we do!”
Silence.
“What if you came home and S (the husband) was in high heels and a black lace thong?”
“Well, that would be a problem; after almost thirty years I’d be a bit freaked I didn’t know that about him.”
“You’re BLUSHING.”
“I’m sure I am, and Mr. Diaz, if you’re not careful, I’ll picture you all in high heels and thongs… Omigod, Mr. Diaz, there you are heels, thongs and your black socks.”
And now he blushes.
I pull the current DSM off the shelf to find the diagnostic category, and as I flip through the tome, I start talking about it. I’ve had three or four clients over the years that either cross-dress or are looking at sex change, and I casually mention this. They are amazed. It seems like such a bizarre and rare occurrence; how could I possibly have experience with it?
I explain about the sexual arousal part of this activity and the concept of being caught in the “wrong” body. They’re still stuck in the thought that I actually have treated guys with this issue. I point out that men don’t generally get together, drink beer and talk about their underwear.
“Well, do women?”
“Of course we do!”
Silence.
“What if you came home and S (the husband) was in high heels and a black lace thong?”
“Well, that would be a problem; after almost thirty years I’d be a bit freaked I didn’t know that about him.”
“You’re BLUSHING.”
“I’m sure I am, and Mr. Diaz, if you’re not careful, I’ll picture you all in high heels and thongs… Omigod, Mr. Diaz, there you are heels, thongs and your black socks.”
And now he blushes.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Devil-Spawn
Mr. Stark, the subject of “Antisocial” has become one of my regular therapy guys. I have changed my mind from my first fear of him.
It is so hard to extract a history from a person. What if you came home at age eight every day, and if you walked wrong or sneezed or made a seemingly meaningless comment you were snatched up and beaten? What if the only thing your mom did to help was wipe the blood off your face, in the dark, in your room? What if the school called because you had gotten in a fight with a classmate, and your father broke your arm to teach you a lesson? What if you heard at ten that your mother had been unfaithful, and your father thought you were the ill-gotten offspring of this liaison? And so he hated you? And your younger brother was treated completely differently. It’s not like you did something….
You learn that you are intrinsically evil, bad, wrong. And then the thing that marks you as devil-spawn in your father’s eye is your art, and that is the thing that might save you. The other man had the same skills you demonstrated at an early age. How the hell do you work that through as a child?
Well, Mr. Stark worked it through. It involves drugs and violence and rage. You make that man in your house stop hurting you by hurting him worse. Every person that even vaguely threatens you becomes somebody to destroy. But even in this miasma of hate, he understands he should not hurt his girlfriend or her child. He treats me with care as he vibrates with hate. After our last session, I processed the case with my friend, and we looked at his meds. He is on a tremendous selection of meds that help him control his violence.
I wrote, in Antisocial, “He will never understand why I do what I do. He can grasp my feeling for him, but he will never understand in some internal way why I come to work and try to find a thread to lead him and his (hated) brethren out of hell.” I appear to have been quite wrong about this assessment.
Regularly, after our initial sessions, he got in trouble: four tickets in total. The third session, I reflected the thought to him that the therapy was scaring him, and causing him to find a way to destroy it. Enough tickets and he will be ridden out to a higher level, and he will have ruined something else that is beginning to become precious to him. I gave him strict instructions to avoid thoughtless agitation and acting out in the next week.
The day was long, and I was late leaving. There is a holding area in Control for prisoners being processed in some way. It can be as simple as waiting for the parole board or as serious as awaiting the outcome of a ticket. There is a scrunched up pile of prison clothes with a winter watch-cap pulled down past the eyebrows of the person hiding in the collar of his coat. Guess who?
Since he had unsuccessfully hidden from me, he sits up for our conversation and pushes his hat back.
“Mr. Stark, what are you doing here,” fierce glare.
He claims innocence this time, which I actually believe, since he has never done such with me before. He had been hauled down to control to “chat” with the Lieutenant. And of course, he became immediately belligerent. The Lieutenant responded by threatening him with a ticket, a short vacation in the Hole, and taking his beloved job away (his job has to do with his art). Mr. Stark cleverly responded by starting to take off his coat and shirt to change into the jumpsuit required for the Hole. The Lieutenant threw him back in the hallway, pending further discussion. I don’t know why he made this decision, but I am thankful for it. It gives me time to smack him around a bit before his next “chat.”
“I’m not going to fucking apologize for something I didn’t do and I’m not sorry for.”
That’s me, stupid female, once again requiring unreasonable behavior.
“What is your goal, Mr. Stark? Managing your responses or letting them manage you? You may not be sorry for what they’ve accused you of, but it might be nice to apologize for acting like an asshole.”
Twenty minutes later we’d gone over everything twice, and I was ready to go home. I offered to stay and go in with him if the Lieutenant allowed me, but he declined. I also suggested he offer up that I had been reading him the riot act out here for a while if he thought it would help.
The next day he was not in segregation, and I had been so sure I’d find him there. I spoke to the Lieutenant that afternoon as I was leaving. Apparently Mr. Stark had turned his behavior around, been appropriate, and as such had dodged the ticket and returned to his unit. I admit, I was amazed and relieved.
And still, I’ve not addressed the issue of his understanding my work. This story was to illustrate how much rage and reaction he carries. He is bottled up so tightly that any provocation can get out of control well beyond the reasonable expectation. I suggested he needed to let me help him carry some of that pain. He looked at me as though I had suggested he beat me, started spluttering and I was afraid might leave session. Curious. Didn’t understand that reaction.
He could not possibly ever do anything to hurt me, he explained. And frankly, he thought it a little masochistic of me to want him to do so. So I explained the process of letting him share it, taking some of it from him, and channeling it out into the universe so it dissipates and hurts neither of us. Perceptive as he is, he asks why it won’t hurt me as it passes through. And I admit it probably will, but that is okay. It is worth it for the outcome, and it is what I do.
What I do?? He has his music. I have my therapy. And somehow putting them out there as the voice of our souls brought him in. and he did it. the next session he brought in lyrics and material that allowed him to voice his pain.
It is so hard to extract a history from a person. What if you came home at age eight every day, and if you walked wrong or sneezed or made a seemingly meaningless comment you were snatched up and beaten? What if the only thing your mom did to help was wipe the blood off your face, in the dark, in your room? What if the school called because you had gotten in a fight with a classmate, and your father broke your arm to teach you a lesson? What if you heard at ten that your mother had been unfaithful, and your father thought you were the ill-gotten offspring of this liaison? And so he hated you? And your younger brother was treated completely differently. It’s not like you did something….
You learn that you are intrinsically evil, bad, wrong. And then the thing that marks you as devil-spawn in your father’s eye is your art, and that is the thing that might save you. The other man had the same skills you demonstrated at an early age. How the hell do you work that through as a child?
Well, Mr. Stark worked it through. It involves drugs and violence and rage. You make that man in your house stop hurting you by hurting him worse. Every person that even vaguely threatens you becomes somebody to destroy. But even in this miasma of hate, he understands he should not hurt his girlfriend or her child. He treats me with care as he vibrates with hate. After our last session, I processed the case with my friend, and we looked at his meds. He is on a tremendous selection of meds that help him control his violence.
I wrote, in Antisocial, “He will never understand why I do what I do. He can grasp my feeling for him, but he will never understand in some internal way why I come to work and try to find a thread to lead him and his (hated) brethren out of hell.” I appear to have been quite wrong about this assessment.
Regularly, after our initial sessions, he got in trouble: four tickets in total. The third session, I reflected the thought to him that the therapy was scaring him, and causing him to find a way to destroy it. Enough tickets and he will be ridden out to a higher level, and he will have ruined something else that is beginning to become precious to him. I gave him strict instructions to avoid thoughtless agitation and acting out in the next week.
The day was long, and I was late leaving. There is a holding area in Control for prisoners being processed in some way. It can be as simple as waiting for the parole board or as serious as awaiting the outcome of a ticket. There is a scrunched up pile of prison clothes with a winter watch-cap pulled down past the eyebrows of the person hiding in the collar of his coat. Guess who?
Since he had unsuccessfully hidden from me, he sits up for our conversation and pushes his hat back.
“Mr. Stark, what are you doing here,” fierce glare.
He claims innocence this time, which I actually believe, since he has never done such with me before. He had been hauled down to control to “chat” with the Lieutenant. And of course, he became immediately belligerent. The Lieutenant responded by threatening him with a ticket, a short vacation in the Hole, and taking his beloved job away (his job has to do with his art). Mr. Stark cleverly responded by starting to take off his coat and shirt to change into the jumpsuit required for the Hole. The Lieutenant threw him back in the hallway, pending further discussion. I don’t know why he made this decision, but I am thankful for it. It gives me time to smack him around a bit before his next “chat.”
“I’m not going to fucking apologize for something I didn’t do and I’m not sorry for.”
That’s me, stupid female, once again requiring unreasonable behavior.
“What is your goal, Mr. Stark? Managing your responses or letting them manage you? You may not be sorry for what they’ve accused you of, but it might be nice to apologize for acting like an asshole.”
Twenty minutes later we’d gone over everything twice, and I was ready to go home. I offered to stay and go in with him if the Lieutenant allowed me, but he declined. I also suggested he offer up that I had been reading him the riot act out here for a while if he thought it would help.
The next day he was not in segregation, and I had been so sure I’d find him there. I spoke to the Lieutenant that afternoon as I was leaving. Apparently Mr. Stark had turned his behavior around, been appropriate, and as such had dodged the ticket and returned to his unit. I admit, I was amazed and relieved.
And still, I’ve not addressed the issue of his understanding my work. This story was to illustrate how much rage and reaction he carries. He is bottled up so tightly that any provocation can get out of control well beyond the reasonable expectation. I suggested he needed to let me help him carry some of that pain. He looked at me as though I had suggested he beat me, started spluttering and I was afraid might leave session. Curious. Didn’t understand that reaction.
He could not possibly ever do anything to hurt me, he explained. And frankly, he thought it a little masochistic of me to want him to do so. So I explained the process of letting him share it, taking some of it from him, and channeling it out into the universe so it dissipates and hurts neither of us. Perceptive as he is, he asks why it won’t hurt me as it passes through. And I admit it probably will, but that is okay. It is worth it for the outcome, and it is what I do.
What I do?? He has his music. I have my therapy. And somehow putting them out there as the voice of our souls brought him in. and he did it. the next session he brought in lyrics and material that allowed him to voice his pain.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Deadly Force
Today we learned how to hurt a prisoner. We also learned how to kill them…use deadly force. I’m sweaty and slightly stinky from this exercise. My friend from my last job, Sarah, was with me. It is her third day at the prison. We had been taught for years about how to non-violently contain a patient: how to break holds, how to hold somebody with the minimum of potential for damage. We certainly had never been trained to kill somebody. At the hospital, we had hands on patients as an almost weekly occurrence.
Early in my career in the hospital, a couple of memorable “take downs” happened. One was a floor below the main unit, in a locked space. Me, Kathy and a very angry borderline woman. We hit the emergency button as she rampaged through the room, throwing chairs and ripping at her arms with her fingernails. As we got her to the floor (we were both in skirts and nylons) and were draped over her bucking body (I was kneeling on one shoulder with an arm and Kath was on her thighs; she was face down), the insouciant voice of our male nurse comes singing out of the intercom, “And how may I help you today?” I believe I told him to get his fucking ass down here before the patient succeeded in getting free again. Apparently my tone was quite communicative, as he arrived barely seconds later as the code was called over the hospital loudspeaker.
The second was upstairs in the main unit, again with Kathy. We were co-therapists, so often together. This was a person that fancied himself to be Jeffrey Dahlmer. I don’t remember why he had to go to the floor, but she and I each had a shoulder, again wearing nylons and skirts. Someone else was on his legs. She had kicked off her heals, and as we waited for the shot of Haldol and Valium, I noticed his mouth was open and straining, and about an inch from her big toe. Kathy still has her toe.
I would mention we worked in a very conservative small town hospital. The director’s secretary would actually be dispensed to our work place to clarify the near intolerance of slacks on women. I would also mention this was the early 90’s, not the 50’s or anything… I don’t work there anymore.
So there were these terrifying rubber torsos on posts, attached to heavy weights at the bottom to keep them from toppling over when you practiced your strikes. The faces were the classic nightmare of a felon, lantern jaw, lowered brow, aggressive beak of a nose. I haven’t met anybody yet that even comes close to that look. Maybe all of those guys are at higher levels. The scariest guy I’ve met was a gorgeous man, classical features, beautiful eyes, muscular but not that look of hyper chest muscles from too much time in the weight pit.
I practiced nerve shots to the neck, arm, trapezoids and chest. You must strike from a high defensive posture and yell orders in a loud and carrying voice from the diaphragm. Years of theater make the voice the easiest aspect for me. Your violence level is dictated by the perceived danger and force necessary to neutralize it. Deadly violence is allowed if you believe yourself in danger of death or serious injury. This apparently includes rape. We are given a couple of throat strikes which are considered deadly force.
My friend, Sarah, now referred to as the “blonde 12 year old,” was making delicate strikes and squeaking out the commands. I hope she can find the voice of death if she needs it, has her Personal Protection Device within reach, and feels free to knee him in the balls if necessary (a deadly force move). I hope this is all just a safety exercise, and I never have to put hands on another patient.
Early in my career in the hospital, a couple of memorable “take downs” happened. One was a floor below the main unit, in a locked space. Me, Kathy and a very angry borderline woman. We hit the emergency button as she rampaged through the room, throwing chairs and ripping at her arms with her fingernails. As we got her to the floor (we were both in skirts and nylons) and were draped over her bucking body (I was kneeling on one shoulder with an arm and Kath was on her thighs; she was face down), the insouciant voice of our male nurse comes singing out of the intercom, “And how may I help you today?” I believe I told him to get his fucking ass down here before the patient succeeded in getting free again. Apparently my tone was quite communicative, as he arrived barely seconds later as the code was called over the hospital loudspeaker.
The second was upstairs in the main unit, again with Kathy. We were co-therapists, so often together. This was a person that fancied himself to be Jeffrey Dahlmer. I don’t remember why he had to go to the floor, but she and I each had a shoulder, again wearing nylons and skirts. Someone else was on his legs. She had kicked off her heals, and as we waited for the shot of Haldol and Valium, I noticed his mouth was open and straining, and about an inch from her big toe. Kathy still has her toe.
I would mention we worked in a very conservative small town hospital. The director’s secretary would actually be dispensed to our work place to clarify the near intolerance of slacks on women. I would also mention this was the early 90’s, not the 50’s or anything… I don’t work there anymore.
So there were these terrifying rubber torsos on posts, attached to heavy weights at the bottom to keep them from toppling over when you practiced your strikes. The faces were the classic nightmare of a felon, lantern jaw, lowered brow, aggressive beak of a nose. I haven’t met anybody yet that even comes close to that look. Maybe all of those guys are at higher levels. The scariest guy I’ve met was a gorgeous man, classical features, beautiful eyes, muscular but not that look of hyper chest muscles from too much time in the weight pit.
I practiced nerve shots to the neck, arm, trapezoids and chest. You must strike from a high defensive posture and yell orders in a loud and carrying voice from the diaphragm. Years of theater make the voice the easiest aspect for me. Your violence level is dictated by the perceived danger and force necessary to neutralize it. Deadly violence is allowed if you believe yourself in danger of death or serious injury. This apparently includes rape. We are given a couple of throat strikes which are considered deadly force.
My friend, Sarah, now referred to as the “blonde 12 year old,” was making delicate strikes and squeaking out the commands. I hope she can find the voice of death if she needs it, has her Personal Protection Device within reach, and feels free to knee him in the balls if necessary (a deadly force move). I hope this is all just a safety exercise, and I never have to put hands on another patient.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Shut the Fuck Up, part 2
After my return from South America, I understood this issue was not yet resolved (you need to read Part 1 to understand what is happening next). We needed to spend a group in meta-therapy, discussing what had happened two weeks before.
I started the meta-group with my own experience. I explained I had walked into group knowing that one or two of the guys met the criteria. I was also pretty sure what their response would be, which was pretty nondescript. When you are anti-social, you are not so worried about the label, by definition. I thought I would bring a sense of relief to the rest of the guys. It would clarify my belief in them, isolating only the problem behaviors.
Instead, they saw what I was saying in a much more negative way. Mr. Stewart was first to identify the feeling I had experienced, “Ms. M thinks we’re a bunch of fuck ups.” He was unable to come back to this bald expression of what he thought was happening, but clearly, this was it.
As I process I want to get back to the Ms. M. thinks you’re fucked up notion. But they can’t stay there; they need to go to where I lost control….
As I talk with them now, I am better able to find my own space. I realized and explained, as the group continued, I felt further and further away from them. Suddenly, I became “other.” I can’t tell you how uncomfortable with this I am. It is not what I think of group. I know that I am different, and my life has taken another path. I so desperately (I wish this were not the word) I need to not be placed as “other.” My feelings for them are intense and loving. So I take a chance, and put my own vulnerability out there.
Of course, this was the focus of everybody’s memory: my loss of control.
The group stopped me in my reiteration of the experience, asked me to repeat my statement, and asked Mr. North to do an interpretation. Interestingly, Mr. North, who was there for the first half hour, had to leave for a group essential for his parole. He had missed the critical incident, so he could be a more objective observer, which he tends toward, anyhow.
I will take a moment to express my intense satisfaction that the group going in this direction, it is precisely what I wish of them, regardless of the taxing it does on my soul.
“What you don’t understand is you are the people I hung out with in high school…” my statement.
“What do you think she meant by that?” Remember, Mr. North has not heard Mr. Stewart’s interpretation.
“Well, it sounds pretty, well, judgmental. If she was a guy I would get pretty pissed,” Mr. North carefully opines.
“Yeah, I’d a fucking had to kill her,” Mr. Stewart states in an angry, tight voice.
I don’t get it. Although they let me explain, I still don’t get the strength of the response, something that could override the months of time we’d spent together and trigger such an outpouring of anger and fear.
Apparently, there is a history for many of these guys, both in the Outside World and here. Friends, family, other staff, in an effort to “bond,” or some such, give the message, “I was like you, so I understand you. And then I got my shit together. Why are you still such a fuck up?” I’m still not sure I’m quite right in explaining this. But the clear point was I had somehow appeared to dip my foot in this river of condescension.
The reality was that the strength of the relationship kept them all from walking out at the initial session. In that light, it spoke to an amazing testament of their tolerance.
I started the meta-group with my own experience. I explained I had walked into group knowing that one or two of the guys met the criteria. I was also pretty sure what their response would be, which was pretty nondescript. When you are anti-social, you are not so worried about the label, by definition. I thought I would bring a sense of relief to the rest of the guys. It would clarify my belief in them, isolating only the problem behaviors.
Instead, they saw what I was saying in a much more negative way. Mr. Stewart was first to identify the feeling I had experienced, “Ms. M thinks we’re a bunch of fuck ups.” He was unable to come back to this bald expression of what he thought was happening, but clearly, this was it.
As I process I want to get back to the Ms. M. thinks you’re fucked up notion. But they can’t stay there; they need to go to where I lost control….
As I talk with them now, I am better able to find my own space. I realized and explained, as the group continued, I felt further and further away from them. Suddenly, I became “other.” I can’t tell you how uncomfortable with this I am. It is not what I think of group. I know that I am different, and my life has taken another path. I so desperately (I wish this were not the word) I need to not be placed as “other.” My feelings for them are intense and loving. So I take a chance, and put my own vulnerability out there.
Of course, this was the focus of everybody’s memory: my loss of control.
The group stopped me in my reiteration of the experience, asked me to repeat my statement, and asked Mr. North to do an interpretation. Interestingly, Mr. North, who was there for the first half hour, had to leave for a group essential for his parole. He had missed the critical incident, so he could be a more objective observer, which he tends toward, anyhow.
I will take a moment to express my intense satisfaction that the group going in this direction, it is precisely what I wish of them, regardless of the taxing it does on my soul.
“What you don’t understand is you are the people I hung out with in high school…” my statement.
“What do you think she meant by that?” Remember, Mr. North has not heard Mr. Stewart’s interpretation.
“Well, it sounds pretty, well, judgmental. If she was a guy I would get pretty pissed,” Mr. North carefully opines.
“Yeah, I’d a fucking had to kill her,” Mr. Stewart states in an angry, tight voice.
I don’t get it. Although they let me explain, I still don’t get the strength of the response, something that could override the months of time we’d spent together and trigger such an outpouring of anger and fear.
Apparently, there is a history for many of these guys, both in the Outside World and here. Friends, family, other staff, in an effort to “bond,” or some such, give the message, “I was like you, so I understand you. And then I got my shit together. Why are you still such a fuck up?” I’m still not sure I’m quite right in explaining this. But the clear point was I had somehow appeared to dip my foot in this river of condescension.
The reality was that the strength of the relationship kept them all from walking out at the initial session. In that light, it spoke to an amazing testament of their tolerance.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Shut the Fuck Up, part 1
I have been flaking off of my writing. Partly because I took a week off to enjoy the pleasures of 29 inches of incessant downpour in the rain forests of South America. We deluded ourselves a bit about the expectable weather.
Two days before we left, I had a group I was unsure about. I had been asked to do a presentation about anti-social personality disorder by one of the guys, Mr. Stewart. I have done this in individual, but never in group. It has been fairly successful in the individual format, but I was unsure about the group thing. I bounced it off our doc, and he thought it an experiment worth trying.
I’ve tried it; I’m over it, now. Never again. Seven minutes in I could see where it would end, but I had gone too far to back out. As I wrote the criteria on the board asking the guys to evaluate themselves, I could feel it was turning into a session of perceived judgment and disengagement. It ended with me putting part of myself out there for them, to try to bring it back. This backfired for reasons I now understand, but at the time were fairly devastating. After my return, we processed what had happened. I will remind you that this Thursday group is the one most important to me; the one that has more effect than it should on my self perception.
As the group progressed, the energy got pretty frenetic and out of control. They begin to tell war stories about their childhoods, and the scary things they did. Of course, this needs to be controlled. It is not what group is for. At the same time, I understand they need to talk about this on some level.
But it continues, and instead of processing, the excitement level increases, and I can’t bring it back. I attempt to define the difference between having a personality that involves emotional disengagement and lack of remorse, and simply behaviors that are outside the socially acceptable norms.
Suddenly I am watching them reveling in their criminal behavior. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to believe it, and I don’t want them to see this as their label. I feel frantic. They are no longer my guys. I am alone in a room of criminals and I suddenly am the evil symbol of Middle America. At the time, I did not understand how horrible this experience was for me, regardless of what was happening to them. But nonetheless, I responded to my own issues.
“What you don’t understand is you are the people I hung out with in high school…” I offered up as a way back.
And then it gets really ugly. Mr. Stewart leaps on that with anger I know is there but has never been directed at me before.
“So, you’re telling us we are the people you left behind, that you ‘grew out’ of.”
“NO!”
“Who thinks Ms. M. is saying we are the ‘bad boys’ she now thinks are shit?’
The majority of the group raises their hands. Horror.
I try again, “What I meant…”
Mr. Stewart interrupts and reiterates what he has said before.
We cycle through this a couple of times, and I am hysterical and rapidly leaving behind my professional self.
I remember telling Mr. Stewart to “Shut up.” They tell me I said, “Shut the fuck up.” I must admit, I meant the later, regardless of the actual words.
As soon as I said it, I was crushed, and I put my head in my hands and congratulated Mr. Stewart for being the first person in over 20 years who had reduced me to such a horrible statement. And I apologized. And I was almost in tears.
Somehow, this allowed them to stop. They did let me clarify my meaning, and left with at least a skeletal feeling of things being put back into perspective. But, at least to me, it didn’t feel done.
What a great way to leave on vacation. It wasn’t an open wound, but it was only bandaged, and we could all pray for the anti-biotic to keep the infection at bay.
Two days before we left, I had a group I was unsure about. I had been asked to do a presentation about anti-social personality disorder by one of the guys, Mr. Stewart. I have done this in individual, but never in group. It has been fairly successful in the individual format, but I was unsure about the group thing. I bounced it off our doc, and he thought it an experiment worth trying.
I’ve tried it; I’m over it, now. Never again. Seven minutes in I could see where it would end, but I had gone too far to back out. As I wrote the criteria on the board asking the guys to evaluate themselves, I could feel it was turning into a session of perceived judgment and disengagement. It ended with me putting part of myself out there for them, to try to bring it back. This backfired for reasons I now understand, but at the time were fairly devastating. After my return, we processed what had happened. I will remind you that this Thursday group is the one most important to me; the one that has more effect than it should on my self perception.
As the group progressed, the energy got pretty frenetic and out of control. They begin to tell war stories about their childhoods, and the scary things they did. Of course, this needs to be controlled. It is not what group is for. At the same time, I understand they need to talk about this on some level.
But it continues, and instead of processing, the excitement level increases, and I can’t bring it back. I attempt to define the difference between having a personality that involves emotional disengagement and lack of remorse, and simply behaviors that are outside the socially acceptable norms.
Suddenly I am watching them reveling in their criminal behavior. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to believe it, and I don’t want them to see this as their label. I feel frantic. They are no longer my guys. I am alone in a room of criminals and I suddenly am the evil symbol of Middle America. At the time, I did not understand how horrible this experience was for me, regardless of what was happening to them. But nonetheless, I responded to my own issues.
“What you don’t understand is you are the people I hung out with in high school…” I offered up as a way back.
And then it gets really ugly. Mr. Stewart leaps on that with anger I know is there but has never been directed at me before.
“So, you’re telling us we are the people you left behind, that you ‘grew out’ of.”
“NO!”
“Who thinks Ms. M. is saying we are the ‘bad boys’ she now thinks are shit?’
The majority of the group raises their hands. Horror.
I try again, “What I meant…”
Mr. Stewart interrupts and reiterates what he has said before.
We cycle through this a couple of times, and I am hysterical and rapidly leaving behind my professional self.
I remember telling Mr. Stewart to “Shut up.” They tell me I said, “Shut the fuck up.” I must admit, I meant the later, regardless of the actual words.
As soon as I said it, I was crushed, and I put my head in my hands and congratulated Mr. Stewart for being the first person in over 20 years who had reduced me to such a horrible statement. And I apologized. And I was almost in tears.
Somehow, this allowed them to stop. They did let me clarify my meaning, and left with at least a skeletal feeling of things being put back into perspective. But, at least to me, it didn’t feel done.
What a great way to leave on vacation. It wasn’t an open wound, but it was only bandaged, and we could all pray for the anti-biotic to keep the infection at bay.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Men Don't Wear Red
Three months ago, I had a youngster come into my office on a parole violation. Although he was not antagonistic, he was withdrawn and unwilling to trust. Not so very strange. I told him to think about what he wanted, and if therapy was the answer, raise his hand and we would do such.
Two weeks ago or so, I came in on a Wednesday morning, and he was in the Hole on a fighting charge. My job is to check and make sure they are not secretly suicidal. Mr. Sotheby claimed he was not and gave the Prison Dead Eye. This is my own slang, and it means when you look at somebody, nothing looks back at you. It is a very unnerving experience and not one that does not makes you feel warm and fuzzy.
This week he appears back in my office. Now, after seeing him in the Hole, I was somewhat confused. My very intricate tickler file tells me I like him and would schedule him at the end of the day as a positive way to leave work. And yet he was totally unavailable emotionally last I saw him. It is Friday, so I am not as contained and appropriate as I am at other times in the week.
He is fairly perky and interactive. I tell him, as I might not have on a Tuesday, that he is marked as somebody I like in my very detailed tickler system. He doesn’t appear to absorb this as interesting information.
I ask him about the Fighting ticket, and he politely avoids the question. He does tell me a couple of staff have tried to get the truth out of this occurrence. I don’t really care about the legalities of what happened, but generally understand he has taken a stance, and doesn’t want the reality in his chart. I do care about what he is generating with Custody, and he allows as to how he got some flack for having an “attitude.”
Yes, he had a clear attitude when I saw him in the Hole. Suddenly he is engaged, and his previous casual, oblique body language becomes taut. “I didn’t give YOU an attitude,” he insists. He is right, he didn’t. Instead he gave me prison dead eye. After initially being shocked at this suggestion, he agrees he did do this to me.
But, nonetheless, great, he feels better. Let’s downgrade him to remission status. This allows me to follow the rules and only see him once every three months. I don’t mean to dismiss his hurt, but I know that dragging somebody kicking and screaming to therapy does nothing for him and makes me tired and angry.
When I suggest this, his face starts moving around as though there was a small, persistent animal caught behind the skin. I watch this and apparently make a strangled guffaw. Insulted and suspicious, he looks at me, “What did that mean?”
Again, it is Friday, so I am more up front than other times in the week and simply tell him, “You are either thinking up a really good lie to tell me, or you are struggling to find the way you want to express something.” I am tired and amused. I am not invested in his answer. I’m sure he is working up to some outrageous lie.
Instead, after a fairly notable pause, he says, “I think I need to talk to you about my emotions,” and blushes furiously. “My mother said that men don’t talk about their emotions.” And suddenly, he morphs from a liar to a small, sad child.
“My mother told me a bunch of things about men. Men don’t wear red.” Blush, blush, blush.
And he grabs my attention. He has climbed the wall of my Friday indifference. He is asking for therapy. He is writhing in his request.
Crap, I’ve not scheduled enough time for this contingency. But a dyke has opened. He is now pouring information out to me.
I stop him, and note what he has told me, and assure him I will put him on my regular schedule.
He is content, and leaves, and I take a quick look at my tickler. I had no memory of his history up to this point.
He went into prison at 17 for a non-violent crime. His juvenile record was such the courts were just frustrated and tired with him, so tried him as an adult. He had run away at 14 from a horrendously abusive step-father. While he was in on his first bit, at 19, his stepfather murdered his mother and his younger half sister. Mom was trying to leave him and save her daughter from his abuse. Mr. Sotheby knows in his heart, if he had been home, he would have helped his mother safely leave. He was in prison for a series of stupid, adolescent choices, and because of that, his mother and beloved sister are dead.
He has emotions he needs to talk about.
Two weeks ago or so, I came in on a Wednesday morning, and he was in the Hole on a fighting charge. My job is to check and make sure they are not secretly suicidal. Mr. Sotheby claimed he was not and gave the Prison Dead Eye. This is my own slang, and it means when you look at somebody, nothing looks back at you. It is a very unnerving experience and not one that does not makes you feel warm and fuzzy.
This week he appears back in my office. Now, after seeing him in the Hole, I was somewhat confused. My very intricate tickler file tells me I like him and would schedule him at the end of the day as a positive way to leave work. And yet he was totally unavailable emotionally last I saw him. It is Friday, so I am not as contained and appropriate as I am at other times in the week.
He is fairly perky and interactive. I tell him, as I might not have on a Tuesday, that he is marked as somebody I like in my very detailed tickler system. He doesn’t appear to absorb this as interesting information.
I ask him about the Fighting ticket, and he politely avoids the question. He does tell me a couple of staff have tried to get the truth out of this occurrence. I don’t really care about the legalities of what happened, but generally understand he has taken a stance, and doesn’t want the reality in his chart. I do care about what he is generating with Custody, and he allows as to how he got some flack for having an “attitude.”
Yes, he had a clear attitude when I saw him in the Hole. Suddenly he is engaged, and his previous casual, oblique body language becomes taut. “I didn’t give YOU an attitude,” he insists. He is right, he didn’t. Instead he gave me prison dead eye. After initially being shocked at this suggestion, he agrees he did do this to me.
But, nonetheless, great, he feels better. Let’s downgrade him to remission status. This allows me to follow the rules and only see him once every three months. I don’t mean to dismiss his hurt, but I know that dragging somebody kicking and screaming to therapy does nothing for him and makes me tired and angry.
When I suggest this, his face starts moving around as though there was a small, persistent animal caught behind the skin. I watch this and apparently make a strangled guffaw. Insulted and suspicious, he looks at me, “What did that mean?”
Again, it is Friday, so I am more up front than other times in the week and simply tell him, “You are either thinking up a really good lie to tell me, or you are struggling to find the way you want to express something.” I am tired and amused. I am not invested in his answer. I’m sure he is working up to some outrageous lie.
Instead, after a fairly notable pause, he says, “I think I need to talk to you about my emotions,” and blushes furiously. “My mother said that men don’t talk about their emotions.” And suddenly, he morphs from a liar to a small, sad child.
“My mother told me a bunch of things about men. Men don’t wear red.” Blush, blush, blush.
And he grabs my attention. He has climbed the wall of my Friday indifference. He is asking for therapy. He is writhing in his request.
Crap, I’ve not scheduled enough time for this contingency. But a dyke has opened. He is now pouring information out to me.
I stop him, and note what he has told me, and assure him I will put him on my regular schedule.
He is content, and leaves, and I take a quick look at my tickler. I had no memory of his history up to this point.
He went into prison at 17 for a non-violent crime. His juvenile record was such the courts were just frustrated and tired with him, so tried him as an adult. He had run away at 14 from a horrendously abusive step-father. While he was in on his first bit, at 19, his stepfather murdered his mother and his younger half sister. Mom was trying to leave him and save her daughter from his abuse. Mr. Sotheby knows in his heart, if he had been home, he would have helped his mother safely leave. He was in prison for a series of stupid, adolescent choices, and because of that, his mother and beloved sister are dead.
He has emotions he needs to talk about.
Love?
I’m reading and studying when Mr. Stewart comes in today. I take my feet off of my desk, set the book aside, and look at him. I’m happy to see him; he appears in an upbeat mood.
“What, what’s wrong?’ he asks me. And his face vacillates between his beautiful open smile and his dead prison eye.
Against my better judgment, S. has seen his picture on the public prison site. S. needs some sense of who I talk about at home. His first response to this picture was, “he’s trouble, and he’s dead.” This was my own first assessment. Nobody home; nobody there.
But he is there, he is home, he is just horribly wounded.
“Nothing is wrong… why do you think something is wrong?”
“Well, the way you looked at me…”
“I was happy to see you, what do you think I was feeling?”
“You looked at me funny.” I think, in fact, I just looked at him and saw him, not something that most people do in most situations. S. suggests I was just distracted by what I was doing, and instead of my usual therapy open look, I gave him something disengaged. Apparently, I do this.
He settled down, and gave me open face. So I asked him the first question I had planned, “what was going on with you last Thursday (in group).” He had been right on target, open and engaged. Of course, I was pleased by this. I wanted him to acknowledge it.
“What, what did I do?” Again he assumes he has been bad. Instead of taking the burden off of him, I ask him what he did. He needs to process and have some belief in what he did.
He does tell me what I observed. His mood was good, he got the conversation, and most important, he was able to talk about it without being, “an angry asshole.”
And although I can’t remember the third incidence of his fear of badness, it occurred in the first seven minutes.
There are two things important happening here. The first is he cannot evaluate his own behavior in an insightful way. Apparently he did not leave group that day, knowing he had contributed and been an active thoughtful member. I suspect all he left with was the FEELING. And I hope the feeling was satisfied, and impressed with himself. But I wonder.
The second is harder for me to grasp, because it is my own shit. I see his beauty and his compassion and the respect he gives to me. This is not required. It is not anything he needs to do to get out of prison. He tolerates me stirring in his psyche once a week, and jerking his emotions around.
He has fallen into thinking of himself as a convict, as somebody who is intrinsically bad.
And here I am, avoiding my own shit, again. I am hurt that he comes into my office, after this amount of time, and believes that the first thing I’m going to do is castigate him for something. How have I not communicated clearly to him that I find him worthy of love?
I should probably stop here, because the last sentence is the edgy bit. But I’m not going to stop here.
I’ve reviewed with S. again, and he is more clear this time with his thoughts, and I’m repressing less. I now remember what Mr. Stewart thought was me badding him. I believe that part of the uproar with his siblings is understanding his potential (I hate this phrase, but it is pretty accurate.) I said I had, “empathy with his siblings and his ex-girlfriends.” As I formulated my next sentence, he gave me his immediate interpretation.
“Because I am such a fuck up.” A statement, not a question.
Grrrrrrrr, NO. I think I was pretty clear in what I said next. I reiterated that I thought he had much of good, and watching him crash and burn was untenable. But we are kept with his automatic response that he is bad.
****
We are talking, and I take my water bottle up, and I’ve filled it to the edge. I now dribble a very cold wad of water down my cleavage. And of course, I swear, grab a Kleenex, and go to swab myself out. But of course, I’m in prison, and he is a man. As I turn away from him to do this personal bit of hygiene, I see his reaction. He turns himself and looks down, giving me the respect and the privacy of this moment.
He will not remember this, I don’t think. And if he does, he will not think about the meaning. The meaning being he gave me respect, more important than the possible titillation of watching me reach into my sweater. He is, after all, a young man imprisoned for most of a year without contact with women. And still he give me this without thinking, because he is good.
I think of myself as very good at narrating what happens between people. But S. asks me if I’ve clearly expressed any of this. I’m not sure I have. It seems so clear to me, but maybe not to the other.
He carries the label of habitually violent criminal. Something I had not quite absorbed. Although this speaks to his behavior, and his quest for drugs, it does not speak to his soul, his shiny bit. He is worth saving.
“What, what’s wrong?’ he asks me. And his face vacillates between his beautiful open smile and his dead prison eye.
Against my better judgment, S. has seen his picture on the public prison site. S. needs some sense of who I talk about at home. His first response to this picture was, “he’s trouble, and he’s dead.” This was my own first assessment. Nobody home; nobody there.
But he is there, he is home, he is just horribly wounded.
“Nothing is wrong… why do you think something is wrong?”
“Well, the way you looked at me…”
“I was happy to see you, what do you think I was feeling?”
“You looked at me funny.” I think, in fact, I just looked at him and saw him, not something that most people do in most situations. S. suggests I was just distracted by what I was doing, and instead of my usual therapy open look, I gave him something disengaged. Apparently, I do this.
He settled down, and gave me open face. So I asked him the first question I had planned, “what was going on with you last Thursday (in group).” He had been right on target, open and engaged. Of course, I was pleased by this. I wanted him to acknowledge it.
“What, what did I do?” Again he assumes he has been bad. Instead of taking the burden off of him, I ask him what he did. He needs to process and have some belief in what he did.
He does tell me what I observed. His mood was good, he got the conversation, and most important, he was able to talk about it without being, “an angry asshole.”
And although I can’t remember the third incidence of his fear of badness, it occurred in the first seven minutes.
There are two things important happening here. The first is he cannot evaluate his own behavior in an insightful way. Apparently he did not leave group that day, knowing he had contributed and been an active thoughtful member. I suspect all he left with was the FEELING. And I hope the feeling was satisfied, and impressed with himself. But I wonder.
The second is harder for me to grasp, because it is my own shit. I see his beauty and his compassion and the respect he gives to me. This is not required. It is not anything he needs to do to get out of prison. He tolerates me stirring in his psyche once a week, and jerking his emotions around.
He has fallen into thinking of himself as a convict, as somebody who is intrinsically bad.
And here I am, avoiding my own shit, again. I am hurt that he comes into my office, after this amount of time, and believes that the first thing I’m going to do is castigate him for something. How have I not communicated clearly to him that I find him worthy of love?
I should probably stop here, because the last sentence is the edgy bit. But I’m not going to stop here.
I’ve reviewed with S. again, and he is more clear this time with his thoughts, and I’m repressing less. I now remember what Mr. Stewart thought was me badding him. I believe that part of the uproar with his siblings is understanding his potential (I hate this phrase, but it is pretty accurate.) I said I had, “empathy with his siblings and his ex-girlfriends.” As I formulated my next sentence, he gave me his immediate interpretation.
“Because I am such a fuck up.” A statement, not a question.
Grrrrrrrr, NO. I think I was pretty clear in what I said next. I reiterated that I thought he had much of good, and watching him crash and burn was untenable. But we are kept with his automatic response that he is bad.
****
We are talking, and I take my water bottle up, and I’ve filled it to the edge. I now dribble a very cold wad of water down my cleavage. And of course, I swear, grab a Kleenex, and go to swab myself out. But of course, I’m in prison, and he is a man. As I turn away from him to do this personal bit of hygiene, I see his reaction. He turns himself and looks down, giving me the respect and the privacy of this moment.
He will not remember this, I don’t think. And if he does, he will not think about the meaning. The meaning being he gave me respect, more important than the possible titillation of watching me reach into my sweater. He is, after all, a young man imprisoned for most of a year without contact with women. And still he give me this without thinking, because he is good.
I think of myself as very good at narrating what happens between people. But S. asks me if I’ve clearly expressed any of this. I’m not sure I have. It seems so clear to me, but maybe not to the other.
He carries the label of habitually violent criminal. Something I had not quite absorbed. Although this speaks to his behavior, and his quest for drugs, it does not speak to his soul, his shiny bit. He is worth saving.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Antisocial
When you miss the learning that others have value. When you are raised with so little love and caring that you believe the basic premise is to meet your own needs. When you act on impulse regardless of how it effects others. When you use kittens for shark bait, and don’t understand why I want to kill you for even considering that.
Is it hopeless? Should I shunt you out of my office?
But what if your desire is art and true love? Two of the closest meanings to my heart?
He has an art beyond card making or hobby shit. He makes beautiful things. He had a woman he loved beyond his art, whom he gave everything up for. He gave up his art. And then he started the prison/jail cycle, and left her at home for years on end. She gave him a disease. She crossed the line he had set. She became worthy of death and dismemberment.
He asks me if romantic love is possible. And he tells me about the violent acts he has done to get money for his drugs. He is skilled at his art and does beautiful work, intermixed with violent expression. What do I do?
He will never understand why I do what I do. He can grasp my feeling for him, but he will never understand in some internal way why I come to work and try to find a thread to lead him and his (hated) brethren out of hell. I think I can help him see his choices lead him away from that which fills his immediate need and find the long term goal. Otherwise, he could stay in prison for the next fifty years and practice his craft in this very limited way. He could decide to abide by societies rules and give up that desire for immediate gratification?
Is it worth my time and energy? Will I just help him leave and destroy somebody else? Smash their face in for the $50 in their wallet? Or do I just sigh and decide to support him through my tax dollars through the next fifty years in the prison system?
Will these questions destroy my marriage? Will they destroy me?
Is it hopeless? Should I shunt you out of my office?
But what if your desire is art and true love? Two of the closest meanings to my heart?
He has an art beyond card making or hobby shit. He makes beautiful things. He had a woman he loved beyond his art, whom he gave everything up for. He gave up his art. And then he started the prison/jail cycle, and left her at home for years on end. She gave him a disease. She crossed the line he had set. She became worthy of death and dismemberment.
He asks me if romantic love is possible. And he tells me about the violent acts he has done to get money for his drugs. He is skilled at his art and does beautiful work, intermixed with violent expression. What do I do?
He will never understand why I do what I do. He can grasp my feeling for him, but he will never understand in some internal way why I come to work and try to find a thread to lead him and his (hated) brethren out of hell. I think I can help him see his choices lead him away from that which fills his immediate need and find the long term goal. Otherwise, he could stay in prison for the next fifty years and practice his craft in this very limited way. He could decide to abide by societies rules and give up that desire for immediate gratification?
Is it worth my time and energy? Will I just help him leave and destroy somebody else? Smash their face in for the $50 in their wallet? Or do I just sigh and decide to support him through my tax dollars through the next fifty years in the prison system?
Will these questions destroy my marriage? Will they destroy me?
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