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.

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.

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.

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.