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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.