therapy | most hopeful

Apr 12 2013

learning to live, social work, what they are teaching me

worried about big legos

During a week filled with worries about class schedules, family illness, nonprofit fundraisers, big decisions, and tax nightmares, I found myself most concerned Wednesday afternoon about whether or not I would have a chance in the “intergalactic battle” being created at my feet with enormous legos.

I needed to type out a quick note for his grandmother on letterhead before our session was over, and I asked him if he preferred I do it at the beginning or the end. He said he would start building his army while I typed the letter, and then I could build mine, and then the war.

Halfway through the paragraph-long letter, I caught myself looking down at my feet and thinking, “How am I going to beat him? He’s built a fortress around his robots, and he has soldiers lining the wall on the inside and outside! I need to get finished with this letter so I have a chance at all!”

He was talking the entire time I was typing, which was adding to my stress. “You know I’m going to beat you, Donald. This wall is impenetrable. And these robots can break through all of your walls. Are you getting scared yet, Donald?”

And I WAS getting scared. I found myself trying to type faster so I could get to work on my own fortress and walls and robots.

So for about fifty minutes on Wednesday afternoon, I was laying on the floor in my office with an incredibly brave nine-year-old, who recently found his mother dead in her bed and called the police, worried about whether I had enough mega blocks to make an army big enough to contend with his.

I didn’t, of course. He won, not that I was trying to go easy on him; I wanted to win, but he beat me. We began to talk about his planning, his bravery, his skill, his initiative. These were all the things which led him to beating me in our intergalactic war on the bamboo rug in my office. There were all the things which also led him to cope in miraculous and hope-affirming ways with the loss of his mother and a world turned upside down.

And it would be his lesson in these things which made me consider my class schedule, family illness, nonprofit fundraisers, big decisions and tax nightmares with the eyes of a nine-year-old who is much braver and stronger than I.

Every conversation is privilege with answers waiting to be found by all involved. If it doesn’t feel that way, our arrogance is leading.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Tagged grief, children, social work, death, therapy, imagination, identity, childhood, narrative therapy, Lego, loss of a parent, narrative theory, play therapy, mapping, play, mega blocks

Jan 16 2013

the illusion of the one thing

Privileged, I sat and listened to seven different people today, varying in ages and colors and backgrounds and struggles, all sharing the clouds in which they find themselves. I saw myself in them today, all of us looking for the one way of thinking about it or labeling it or diagnosing it that would set them, set me, set all of us free. If that one thing was found, they could get the right medicine or the right outlook or take the right action or make the right choice to fix it all.

“Fixing it all” is of course the goal they hurried in with, and the goal I hurry in most places with. It is, of course, the goal that all of us most often run into the cloudy situations with. Tell me the one thing that will fix all of this.

We scramble and wrestle and our ears turn red and our voices raise and tears fall and our heart rate takes off. Everything in us is trying to churn together to locate, isolate and intervene on that one thing.

Our inevitable not finding it leads to our heartbrokenness, growing frustration and often to our hopelessness.
And there is in the places where we sit quietly, listening to the clock tick, watching the moth walk across the window, feeling that part of our sock that isn’t fitting right, we begin to let go the illusion of the one thing. And we take a breath, and we see that in the middle of the cloudy struggle, there is still a ticking clock. Still across the window a walking moth, still a tangled sock buried deep down in our boot.

And in those moments, we realize the cloudy struggle isn’t all that is true. And there, our hope begins.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged Clocks and Timers, controlling, counseling, doubt, hope, listening, optimism, running, social work, stress, therapy, wanting, Windows, wondering diagnosing, worry, Wrestling

Jan 07 2013

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learning to live, social work, what they are teaching me

dinner at the coffee table

I don’t know why it has all come together in my brain this way.

Growing up, I remember being furious that this rule was put in place, even in middle and high school, that I MUST be present at the dinner table at least three or four nights a week. If I went out after that, that was one thing. If I ate or not was another thing, but my presence at the dinner table was required three or four nights a week. (I don’t remember which, so obviously it wasn’t as traumatic as I would like to pretend.)

As with many things I now reflect back on from growing up, I hated this rule at the time, and yet now I wouldn’t trade anything for it.

And a few nights ago, I joined some incredible friends from present day around their coffee table for dinner. At our home growing up, when I was huffing and puffing about having to be home for dinner around a table, we would every now and then sit around the coffee table, the same one I now have in my den, and eat pizza and watch TV together. I remember being angry that my parents could guess what was going to happen on the TV show, and I was likely more angry about this because I wanted to be anywhere but there at the moment.

But a few nights go, legs crossed over pillows on the floor, eating while sitting around their coffee table, I found myself in a kind of time freeze. The four year old daughter of my friends was pretending to make meals or be a drummer with her metal bowls and plastic whisks, and we were eating sushi with chopsticks out of styrofoam sakura to-go boxes.

There was much that reminded me, though, of growing up. The space for imagination and casualness, and play and informality. The insistence of good food even though it was spread out across a coffee table reminded me of how much has changed, and how little has changed at the same time.

And today, I’m in a counseling session with a family who can’t pay the bills so they share a home with another family. Four parents, five children, three minimum wage jobs, exponential stress. They were sitting in my office, a mom and dad, completely undone by the situation, and parenting skills to reflect the same. As they were talking, I found myself returning to the living room coffee table a few nights ago with incredible friends learning to be good parents, a four year old playing kitchen, and myself wondering how things will be remembered ten years later.

For all of us.

And most of all, I found myself glad that someone made me sit down for dinner three or four nights a week, no matter how unbelievable and unrealistic a request it seemed at the time.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged asking, child, Coffee, Coffee table, conversation, counseling, dinner, imagination, listening, parent, Parenting, social work, therapy, tips

Jul 17 2012

2 Comments

grief and trauma, what they are teaching me

apparently still and incredibly crisp

floored again in dialogue with a client today
the incredible resilience following him into the room
ignored by the very person living under so much
withstanding, but still struggling
struggling with real and reasonable and incredible grief

and still holding it together
hair on, face on, courtesy on, honesty on

the wrestling only barely under the surface of
otherwise apparently still and incredibly crisp waters
all hiding
all hoping
no one notices what a mess
we all show and tell each others stories

and in hiding and hoping no one notices
we all ourselves fail to notice
our fighting resilience as the only thing stronger than our struggles
and the only thing strong than our fight to hide our struggles

until we see it through a dark mirror
that we all look much the same
and we are all incredibly resilient as we float over
otherwise apparently still and incredibly crisp waters

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged conversation, counseling, dialogue, grief, hoping, listen, listening, ptsd, resilience, strength, strong, struggle, therapy, trauma

Jun 30 2012

divine proxy | intro to a series

The notion is not a new one, but it appears to be one seldom discussed explicitly, unless I am missing the entire conversation altogether (please let me know if I am). I want to spend a few posts on the idea of divine proxy. I hit the concept in “Congregation as Expert; a New Way Forward” during the ”Culture and Crises” lecture series. It’s something that lurks behind practitioners in the helping fields, especially those practitioners who are Christians, as we falsely imagine that we are the changing force in the lives of our clients. It’s something that lurks in church offices and behind the desks and efforts of those who try to help and change situations being faced by others.

Today, the idea itself could use explanation, however brief.

Divine proxy is the idea that when someone is speaking from authority, whether professional or religious, whether self given, institutionally given, or transcendently given, they are then interacted with, heard or perceived as becoming the official voice of the source of the authority.

So, …

a therapist who speaks on matters of relationships can become the final authority on a specific relationship.

a pastor who speaks on matters of moral or spiritual issues can become the actual voice of God on specific matters with individual people.

So, …

if a therapist has a misguided view, or is offering a personal, cultural or biased view on someone else’s specific relational situation, the someone heeds the advice as fact, and acts accordingly whether or not everything in them says otherwise and the result is damaging and more disabling. Or maybe they do heed advice even though they feel otherwise, and it is helpful and healing and the person comes to know that to be true later. Or, the person finally hears what deep down he or she knew all along about the situation, and they are set free because the professional speaking offers a more authoritative voice than the person views his or her own voice as being.

If a pastor has a misguided view, or is offering a personal, cultural, or biased view on someone else’s specific moral or spiritual issues, the someone heeds the view as fact––from God rather than from the individual––and acts accordingly whether or not everything in her or him says otherwise and the result is damaging and more disabling. Or maybe the advice is heeded even though the individual feels otherwise, and it is helpful and healing and the person comes to know that to be true later. Or, the person finally hears what deep down he or she knew all along about the situation, and finally freedom is experienced because a pastor speaking offers a more authoritative voice than the person views his or her own voice as being.

We can quickly see how the influence of authority gives incredible weight, whether someone turns a back and walks away from the perceived authority and the authority represented forever, or someone follows the authority because it is seen as direct from the authority source, and therefore should be heeded.

While it may sound pointless or semantic, the issue quickly becomes incredibly personal and incredibly immediate. I think about people who experience great healing because a pastor sees the presence of divine proxy, and takes great caution to express anger and action toward injustice and evil. I think about the latest story coming out of a megachurch about a spiritual abuse and misogyny that is only headed because the pastor has an unquestioned direct link to God, and questioning is called disloyalty to him…and God. I think about other church experiences where people continued to go home to abusive homes because the pastor says the wife should act more like Jesus to make the husband come around.

So it’s not pointless, and it’s not semantic, and it’s worth the time to consider, even if it’s only mine. So, the first time for a series on mosthopeful.com. We’ll see what happens.

Next up: divine proxy | stories of the phenomenon

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged abuse, Christian, christian counseling, Christianity, church, counseling, danger, distrust, divine proxy, do no harm, God, grief, harm, healing, hoping, Pastor, pastoral counseling, pathology, power, proxy, risk, social work, Spiritual abuse, therapist, therapy, threat, trust

May 07 2012

1 Comment

what they are teaching me

reversing the questions

I find myself often asking questions to clients that I know I need to be asking myself. Much of the art of clinical work has little to do with giving answers or telling people what they need to know, as these things are never beneficial when I am struggling with something.

The art seems instead to be in asking the questions, out loud, that we are unable to ask ourselves when we are holding on with dear life to whatever it is that is holding on to us so tightly. And in all the ways that my clients are generous enough with me to offer the space for me to put a new question in the air, it is in that same moment that I hear that question being asked out loud.

Often, like it was today, the words float in space and I recognize that I am hearing the question posed for the very first time as I ask it to the person sitting across from me…

“Why do you think you need the last word?”

“Why do you think it is so important that they understand what you are saying?”

“Why do you think they heard it one way when you intended something very different?”

“Why do you think that became so unbearable for you? What about it is really so impossible?”

‘Why do you think those words from that person meant so much to you?”

“Why do you think you worry about this particular possibility so much?”

“What is it about you that makes this in particular worth so much?”

The bravery my clients show in speaking their realities into the air offers me the opportunity to hear, usually for the first time, the questions that I have not yet been brave enough to ask myself. And so as they share in their own vulnerability, I am able to take a more honest look at whatever is buried in my quiet interior. I am able to ask myself a question that I didn’t even know I needed to ask.

Paired with the gift this has become is the frightening reality that at whatever moment I think I know enough to tell a client what they should know or need to do…in that moment I am missing the opportunity to learn from them what I need to be asking myself.

Their humility and bravery, and generosity with their humanity, are teaching me a great deal about what it means to be a human being in the world.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged answering, Ask an Expert, asking, bravery, humility, Humorous, listening, out loud, Question, questions, Religion and Spirituality, speaking, therapy

Apr 18 2012

3 Comments

grief and trauma, what they are teaching me

when others tell their stories

It often takes only a few minutes into a counseling session for me to realize that I have no way of speaking solutions into the room. A story begins, a tear drops, and people began to share with me the kinds of things I would never be brave enough to speak out loud to another…or myself for that matter. And after only a little bit of training in graduate school, I learned that me offering advice isn’t the craft of therapy to begin with.

And it also doesn’t take long to realize the kind of disrespect or arrogance that my solution-speaking or advice-offering would actually be suggesting. It seems, when I think about it for a moment, that in no situation would I ever allow someone who has talked to me for thirty minutes, once a week, for a month, tell me what to do with my life or how to orient my grief or what to do in my marriage.

And yet the role of counselor or therapist or even pastor sometimes has those connotations attached.

So in a kind of powerlessness, when others begin their stories, begin to tell the truth about the life they have been living in and wrestling with and learning from since birth, my only option is to switch into the mode of curiosity. And in that curiosity, I become another human being in the room, asking questions that the person sitting across from me may never have asked before even to themselves.

And in the magic of the room, new things are learned. New things are learned for my own life and for the client’s life.

Good helping doesn’t come from being the answer-man, but rather from being the questioner, a facilitator of the insight that is buried within the person who has come in seeking counsel. And more often than not, as two human beings sit in the room listening to each other in spaces that don’t judge, don’t lie, don’t have other agendas… people find their ways.

There is a deep, dangerous humanity in offering to simply bear witness to the grief, pain, fear, horror, loss, confusion or despair of another. And in staring it in the face, we both become, together, a little more human.

djordan
Pine Tree Dr.

Tagged Counseling Services, grief, Grief Loss and Bereavement, Human, learning, listening, listening well, Mental Health, secrets, social work, therapy, truth

Apr 11 2012

2 Comments

learning to live, what they are teaching me

we can assume

I remember once, as a scared-to-really-break-the-rules child, maybe twelve years old sitting at the dinner table, and having made an assumption. I can’t recall what it was about, because to this day, that isn’t what lesson was made clear to me at the table.

What I do remember, though, is that once I had made the assumption, my mom asked me: “Donald, do you know what happens when we assume?”

You all know how this goes. I had not heard it before, so mom made me break the word down from the back to the front.

“me.”

“u.”

I couldn’t do it. I remember my eyes getting very big, and mom, with serious face, saying, “you need to say it.” “I can’t.” “You need to say it. What’s the other word?” “I can’t.” “Donald…”

“ass.”

Then a read face, then giggles, then I’m scared for breaking the rules again.

***

Several years later, in grad school, I was taught one of the golden sets of, yes, assumptions, that we as social workers are to carry like a carpenter carries a hammer. Known as Saleeby’s Strengths Perspective, those who are close to me have no doubt heard me repeat it as a mantra, probably (hopefully) most often for myself. One in particular comes to mind most often:

Assume that you do not know the upper limits of one’s capacity to grow and change, and take individual, group, and community aspiration seriously.

Almost daily with clients, with today as no exception, as they come into my office and sit down on the couch, my own arrogance and ignorance trumps my skill and I find myself assuming that I know someone’s upper capacity to grow and change.

A drunk.
A lazy parent.
A greedy slumlord.
A bad kid.
A messed up family.

Paranoid.
Depressed.
Perpetrator.
Manipulator.
Narcissist.
Insecure.

There is an incredible gift I’ve been offered by those who love me well, and love me most, and that is the gift of assuming they do not know my upper capacity to grow and change. And because of this, they take my aspirations seriously. And because of this, I am often able to meet my own aspirations.

And so, in my work as in my life, the challenge is to assume I do not know the upper limits of others’ capacities to grow and change, and to therefore lean into their aspirations with great expectation. This results in treating people with dignity and respect, and assuming that I don’t know all there is to know about another. Not after the first, fiftieth, or five-hundredth time meeting them.

So, we can assume that we do not know the upper limits of one’s capacity to grow and change, and we therefore take individual, group, and community aspiration seriously.

And thanks for making me say it, mom.

djordan
Pine Tree

Tagged assume, assumptions, grow, grow and change, saleeby, social work, social worker, strengths, strengths perspective, therapist chair, therapist couch, therapy

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apparently still and incredibly crisp

reversing the questions

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