Most therapists ultimately find their way into niches, the glorified ‘you made it!’ standard of the mental health practice. As interns, we are encouraged to adopt the ‘dabble’ mentality as we find what facet of focus emphasizes our curiosity. This is what encourages us to become masters of our trade. Or so it goes.
Neurodiversity is my chosen niche, however I feel somedays it’s a peephole into an expansive, chaotic world where one diagnosis has the capability of presenting so colorfully different from the other, even though they share the same lettering. ADHD, Non-Verbal Learning Disability, and Autism Spectrum Disorder pepper my notes, and are woven into the predominate population that I work alongside with. It’s peculiar that I have spent so little time utilizing this platform to share therapist tangents from this niche. Although I identify fiercely as an Ally to the Neurodivergent community, I have a strong desire to respect the privilege I carry as a Neurotypically-titled adult. Please note as I speak on my behalf of my Neurodiversity therapeutic experience, I am not speaking from a place of inherent experience, only a pupil from the outside looking in. Autism is not a cluster of behaviors, behavior is simply a symptom of the struggle. The struggle is the singular perspective that reacts to the full picture of stimulus presented. There is an existential belief that we all experience the world from different shades of perspective, so in that Autism is refined by the shades of individualization. Compulsive lying is a mask of ingrained desire to connect through saying what has been taught as ‘correct’. Thematically, I notice those struggling to experience success long enough to recognize what is different from survival mode. Routine navigations in a world with varying and consistent dumpster fires. While there is a strength in singularly attending to one fire at once, this inevitably results in a perceived failure of achieving ‘correct’ use of time and resources. Ultimately, there is vacillation between panicked and pressured productivity and Autistic burnout. Research has shown Autistic burnout results from the sensory and emotional overload that correlates from long-term masking and suppression of autistic traits. “Out of compliance “ “Quirky” “Commonly misses the mark” I’m routinely dumbstruck at how threatening variation is. ‘Different’ carries such heavy stipulations. It’s the kind of awkward smirk I get when a couple is arguing so passionately about change they’d like to see in the other, yet it’s the change that is so desperately needed in themselves. The solution seems so plain and concise. We are all varying shades of different. Even the folks that can be tucked away so inconspicuously into the box of ‘normal’. The box so dutifully deemed standard, yet carries own dents, scrapes, and scuffs. Those who assume the power to define normal are largely ones to talk. It’s that smirk again. I have met some pretty remarkable people through the work that I have the honor of doing. They radically shift my perspective for the better. The kinder. The more empathetic. Autism, nor any other diagnosis interrupts their remarkability. We are all worthy of burning the scuffed up, dented box of stifled and poorly defined normal. Why? It’s simply the boogieman beneath your bed. Somewhere in myself I can empathize with missing a mark or ten, deviating haphazardly out of compliance, and possessing a quirk or two. Normal exists on a spectrum, just as Autism does. No two ‘normals’ coexist. Perhaps that is why it’s so dangerous. So easily manipulated. The next time someone presumes the power to cultivate a definitive normal, remember to pause and smirk, fully knowing the truth about that particular boogieman.
0 Comments
I haven’t done this in a while. I’ve let my tid-bits and tangents shuffle through my mind without much thoughtful attendance. A nod of acknowledgement perhaps, but there’s far too much to do to carve out space for anything more.
Yet this hypocrite sits on her phone for at least two hours every night drowning out all noises, even the internal ones. It feels rotten to admit that those two hours are sometimes the highlight of my days. The two hours I am subconsciously trudging through the mud toward. No one needs me. No one is outwardly suffering within my physical vicinity. Nothing else needs to be tended to or cleaned up or soothed. My mental and emotional exhaustion outweighs my cravings for authentic attunement. It finally happened last night, where my own emotionality outweighed my desire to sink into mind-numbing social media escapism. I was sitting with my head on my husband’s chest after we got our tumultuously teething toddler down for the night. The tears started from no solid pinpoint and the anxiety lingered throughout today. Being a human really gets in the way of being emotionally tight-lipped. Building up a dam to the emotional turmoil that ricochets within my heart is far easier than allowing myself to feel the damn thing. I don’t have time to sit with the ache of my chronic fear and trepidation when there are so many other sources of pain surrounding me. So many people in and out of the therapy room are sputtering for air from the obstacles and challenges that grip their throats. My whole career is built on a platform defined by the notion of ‘safe space’. A space in the world where others can come and hang up their masks and defenses at the door. To feel safe enough to peek at what lies beneath the armor and drives the misery, anxiety, depression, compulsion to drink, cut, argue; the list is endless. The world is not safe. This is nothing new. The boogieman has crept around corners and within alleyways for as long as humanity has existed. Yet, the type of unsafe that is hammering into people is unnervingly unfamiliar. Rights that some argue come with humility are being revoked like angry parents snatching a child’s toy from their grasps without much rhyme or reason. As a therapist, my client’s well-being is my number one priority. I was raised by the book of ethics and nurtured by the hands of professionally powerful human rights advocates. Yet here I am, tears rolling down my face as I look at the wreckage of an ocean’s worth of demolished presumed safety. I am not writing these words to ask for validation or understanding. I just keep thinking about those who sit across from me with pain echoing behind their eyes. I have become way too savvy at seeing pain others try so desperately to keep quiet from the outside world. It’s not safe to feel unwell right now. It’s difficult to shake the modified natural selection that is swirling in the air. Buck up, button up, and whatever you do, do not look vulnerable. Vulnerability is dangerous. Because its antidote is empathy. I think that’s what I crave. I crave for empathy to lose its derogatory connotation. I crave for the fixers to pause their agenda to see the pain behind so many eyes, their own eyes even. It’s so hard to sit with so much pain in and out of the therapy room. I’ll be OK. We will be OK. Even my tumultuous teething toddler with the patience of a fly will be OK. There’s just so much relief in letting words hit the air. Letting uncomfortable emotions escape the confides of your lips. Your feelings are safe within the cozy walls of my eclectic office. Your experiences, your pain, your perspectives are all inarguably yours to hold and process. Let’s just let it all hit the air. Let’s start there. It’s raining.
For the past few days there have been periods of steady, rhythmic rain drumming against the windows that box me in. I love this sort of downpour. It quiets the world in ways that fly under the radar of cultivating discontent. There has been so much discontent lately. The kind that’s sticky and alludes to unfiltered pain. The sort of dissatisfaction with life’s happenings that oozes from others desperate for a place to put it down. Frantic word vomit sputters onto those unarmed, unequipped, and many times unwitting. I tell my husband frequently that I wish I possessed the skills to be mean. To be able to bluntly shut down something that is not serving me, and to be able to relentlessly attend to my own needs above others. Something in the universe disarmed this ability within my soul and added an extra splash of empathy. My empathy for other’s experiences outweighs my own needs time and time again. It’s chronically exhausting. Lately I feel like Lucille’s sign ‘Psychiatric Help 5 cents’ has been nailed to my forehead. Those I know in different ways have been showing up with such forceful, palpable pain it’s slammed me into a chokehold of holding space. Disarming internal bombs before they detonate. Panic whipping wild within their eyes. Their eyes. Windows to the soul when in a romantic setting, but geysers of trauma in a realistic sense lately. I just want to hide. The work I do is raw, vulnerable, heavy, and inevitability dark. There’s hardly a day that escapes from the reminders of how woven tragedy is into our DNA. I’ve been trained on how to compartmentalize and hold space, but y’all, I am just a human. When I leave work, I am breathing through a bendy straw. My chest is tight, and my heart is shaking off the ache of others. My mind hurriedly attempts to leave all the ick at the door. I am thumbing through the pages of my memories or current events that donate levity to my soul. Thankfully, my daughter and husband are good at these contributions. I know I know. “You need to be better at holding boundaries.” But how do you hold boundaries in the moment of distinct agony? How do you death grip your bendy straw when the other’s straw broke in half? How do you turn away from the eyes that haunt you long after the gaze has been broken? These are the moments my soul cries out for Sadie. The creature who traded my bendy straw out for a proper snorkel. It feels so silly to still grieve an animal as hard as I do. But who would really know? Sometimes, other’s view of me makes me feel so disposable. Like my depth doesn’t have a place because it doesn’t appear to be hemorrhaging. Most of the time, I am used to this, and I am at fault for giving in. But other times, I crave to be seen. I have a deep need to remember the good. Not just for levity, but for survival. We all do. It’s within humanity’s blueprint to play. It’s tethered to the foundation of resiliency to catch our breath in the face of the unimaginable. Even our mechanisms for crying demand we ‘come up for air’, as we can only heavy cry for 10–15-minute intervals before our system drags up to the surface for a break. Seriously. It’s kind of neat. It is vital to our livelihood to remember the good. Even if it feels like utter bullshit in that moment. Because here’s the thing. It’s temporary. Every single bit of this life. That feeling, that job, that situation, that age. None of it is doomed for permanence. Even when permanence is begged for. Life is a tumultuous rollercoaster crowded by twists, turns, drops, and highs you never fathomed. It’s up to us to decide how we lean into the turns, or shy away from the chaos. I miss the newspaper.
My childhood memories are sprinkled with sleepy barefoot walks down the driveway. Memories of my nose crinkling as I gingerly picked up the soggy blue plastic that kept the paper crisp despite the morning dew and Florida stickiness. Toddling back into the house, carefully freeing the paper from its confines, and shuffling the ‘life’ section from the rest of it. I’d hand the bulk of the ‘boring stuff’ to my dad, while plopping down in the adjacent seat at the kitchen table with my waffles, the comics, and horoscopes. These memories dance through my mind as I sit perched in a fake leather chair, HGTV blasting in my right ear in a surgery center waiting anxiously for my dad to toddle out from hip replacement surgery. Time is such a wild phenomenon. While it’s constructs are completely manmade, its themes and tempo perpetuate the fragility of it all. Something about its constructs rob us of intentionality to truly marinate in a moment as quiet and routine as leafing through the paper with your father on a sleepy morning before he shuffles you to school. On the mundane car ride he haphazardly flips through your hastily scribbled out flashcards, quizzing confidence into your Spanish-challenged soul before a daunting quiz. After four years of Spanish do you think I retained a thing? Nope. Did I pass every year with As and Bs? Yep. How? The dutiful and lighthearted commitment of my sweet Papa on these drives to school. He was just as foreign language challenged as I was (and still am), so his meanderings through the pronunciation of words made it impossible to fight a smile and helped my perfectionistic soul not take life so seriously. This surgery is my first, existential reminder of the fragility of my parents. As amorously privileged as this is, my parents have been projected as invincible superhumans within my narrative. What a blessing it is that it took thirty-one years for the realization that my Papa is undeniably as human as I am. But still, big yikes. Spirit oozes from my father, the legacy of those before him ebb and flow from his wisdom. Even when faced with debilitating pain, you’d never known the toll. His dedication to fatherhood has been unwavering, yet untraditional. Just as his father danced to the melodies of time without a desire to control it, my father danced to the melodies of raising a daughter. His grip on my will never tightened. His voice never rose. Fear was never a part of enforcing the rules. Somehow, along the journey of time, my Papa shared the spirit within the tempo of time’s gift. He showed me how to soak into the small moments, lean into gratitude of joys big and small, and to never underestimate the power of a genuine smile. Today, and so many days before it, he’s tap dancing to the melody of fearlessness. Because at the heart of it all, fear distracts our spirit from the gifts of time. When we lead with fear, we sidestep the beauty in the journey. The bravery of our growth. We deny ourselves the opportunity to see the beauty in all the unusual places. So, here’s your reminder to reacquaint yourself with the quiet moments. The subtle ones that fly under the radar due to our own daunting tasks of time. Shake off the tradition of fear and stress to conform to constructs that inevitably wear out our spirits. Smile at the silly. (Like bears!) Seek out the comics. Feel it to heal it. And look for the beauty. It’s out there, I pinky promise. Being a therapist is strange. Everyday promises anything but monotony. What will I bear witness to today? What will folks bring into the space? A retched experience with a boss, a horrific, sudden loss of a parent, extra flatulence, a treasured pet snake… the possibilities are colorful.
Today it was a fist fight. A sibling had apparently met their quota of sly comebacks and the other’s patience had had enough. A sucker punch and some odd swings later they were wrestled apart. This sounds like something that should phase someone right? Yet, I sat in my grey, cozy chair unflinching. “Yikes” was the monotone, stand-alone reaction that floated through my thoughts. Later that night I remembered the family session and recalled (ethically appropriate) parts of the story to my husband. The inflections embedded within the narrative mimicked one that would mirror a story read in the newspaper about a neighbor lady’s flower garden. A space filler, something worth commenting on but hardly thought provoking. My husband looked at me with a smirk and said something along the lines of “You should have led with that story when talking about your day.” In that moment I realized how detached I had been to my day. Something so far from ordinary had become my threshold for normalcy. Yikes. I am fairly certain my newly adopted survival technique of muted attachment isn’t a recommended one. I chatter every week about the necessity of ‘healthy’ self-nurturing yet here I sit, leaning heavily into the purgatory of detachment. This fog first set in after the cacophony of pregnancy and postpartum complications I transparently experienced a bit ago. Looking back, it’s quite a phenomenon of how well I was able to ‘pretend’ to function last summer when I was nothing but a faded shell of a well-witted human. I’d put on a mask made of hurriedly- crafted porcelain, only to hurl it toward the wall the moment I exited the therapy office. I was a mess. A tattered, questionably existing, mess. Cheers to therapy, a fierce tribe, a loving husband, and the promise of change that time doles out. But the fist fight woke me up to the work I still have ahead of me. My soul is still under construction. My identity hardly resembles a put-back-together-humpty-dumpty. I had quickly glued some pieces in place and accepted that as ‘good enough’. Aren’t we worthy of more though? The ‘good enoughs’ aid in our pursuit of survival, yet leave us wobbly on the ledge of anything more. Survival can bring about short-term contentment when that ledge overlooks a calm, comfortable day. Yet, when the winds pick up, we realize how tired we are from holding on so tightly when the weather was nice. The point of this tangent is to remind you (and me) that our happy doesn’t belong in the ‘good enough’ category. It’s OK to feel tired of wrestling with your hurts, your icks, and your shame spirals. It’s OK to pause the pursuit of joy in trade of a respite. However, don’t let the respite morph into your normal. Or else you’ll find yourself snapping out of it in the face of a fistfight. Duck! There is a common collection of questions one might ask when getting to know another.
“What do you do for work?” “Where did you grow up?” “What sports team do you root for?” Amongst this ritualistic curiosity typically comes the question “What TV shows do you like?”. Most everyone has one simmering on the surface. Some gravitate toward dry humor such as The Office. Others find comfort in cringy reality TV and the ridiculousness the cameras tend to catch. Then there are folks like me who have a show running on repeat for the rest of forever. Without a doubt that show is Friends. It’ my lullaby, my Sunday morning cartoon, and the cozy noise that hums in the background of a particularly lonesome or lazy day. I had a handful of friends painfully reach out to me Saturday night to gently share the news of Matthew Perry’s death. Their pensiveness was endearing, and it’s made me thoughtful of our connections to the actors and actresses that play such subconscious (or sometimes all consumingly conscious) roles within our life stories. Media is as blended into our identities as the colors of our eyes. Quotable moments of movies, episodes, and blurbs circulate our thoughts. They are the essence of our generic coping tools. I didn’t discover Friends until I was in college. Each character was differently relatable, and each episode brought such random and cozy comfort. No matter the chaotic rhetoric of the day, Friends was undeniably always there for you. Twelve years later, and the motely crew continues their jovial meanderings as my bedtime story. When we think of secure attachments, it’s the consistent and reliable presence of a caretaker within our early years. Our attachment styles predict our tendencies to form certain types of relationships within our adult lives. For many, attachment styles stray from secure and lean more into the insecure styles led by anxiety, avoidance, or overarching disorganization. Not only did Friends showcase each type of attachment style, but they did so in an approachable and relatable manner. In a way, the cast was present for so many people when others in their lives were not or could not be. (Hop over to Different Spectrums Podcast to listen to the episode where I had the delightful honor of exploring attachment styles within Friends with lovely humans if you’re curious.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpyWBgZezio&ab_channel=DifferentSpectrumsPodcast Motion pictures in all forms have the potential to provide security. This is something that is an innate human craving. We need connections for survival. When our realities contribute uneasy insecurities, it is valid that we turn to worlds that offer stability. Predictability. Endings we can expect. Matthew Perry was one of those contributors to peace. So many sought solstice within the confides of his humor. His projected spotty self-esteem. His profound love. His masked pain. Rest easy Friend. Enjoy a hot cup of joe with Gunther for us. Hush little darling, don’t say a word.
The ones who turn into mommas are no longer heard. Sacrifice your body, hand over your identity. Hope to God there’s some sort of motherhood affinity. As a woman, I had heard whispers of the rumor that postpartum women are sorely uncared for. Politics are obsessed with our wombs, doctors are persistently checking our urine for proteins and listening to the fetal doppler as we cook our little humans, and there is nothing but chaos upon the grand entrance of our babies. Once that cry pierces the air, ‘congratulations’ shower all around. Love bombards you. You hardly have anytime to remember your name as your focus shifts haphazardly to the shrill cry bubbling from the brand-new human no longer cozy inside of you. They are a ‘them’ now and it’s overwhelming for all parties involved. The noise peaks. Then comes the ‘hush’. My anxieties were hushed as I white-knuckled my existence through the first few days of human functioning after being torn apart. Those first bathroom trips post-delivery hold their own unique horror. My body intuition was hushed as I continued to feel ‘off’ 36 hours post-delivery and my blood pressure marched its way higher and higher. “You’re just nervous to take baby home.” “You are not calm enough. Just breathe” Reality finally proclaimed my body’s truth as my blood pressure peaked to the 170s. “Oops, you have postpartum preeclampsia.” There was no time to mentally prepare for the 24 hours of pure hell as the doctors started a magnesium drip to stave off the seizures. “Make sure to pump. Make sure to be present for your baby’s first bath. Make sure to make memories through the blinding, horrific pain of a preeclamptic headache. “ Hush. “The medicine is over. Gain your composure and go home.” Hurry up and make haste through the brain fog. Squint through the retinal damage. Grit your teeth through the lingering headache. You are a mother now. “Just stare at your little girl, you won’t remember any of this.” I remember. My love for my daughter is fierce, raw, and instinctual. I am protective and our bodies are forever linked. I feel her flow through my veins with every beat of my heart. She is joy. But this love does not negate my memories. Trauma is harbored in my body. Health anxiety bounds chaotically within my heart. Whenever I become aware of my heart’s rhythm I am paralyzed with fear for a moment. I flash back to that hospital bed. To the time my eyes failed me. To the needles, the IVs, the hazy hallucinogenic flu the magnesium forced me into. The five days of blinding pain from a cervical tear. My body remembers the time it lost all faith in itself. Hush. Women’s healthcare fails postpartum mothers. Our humanness is hushed. Our challenges are shamed. Our bodies are no longer an incubator. No longer platforms for political gains, no longer medical marvels. We return to plain ol’ women. Nonchalantly traumatized women hustling for healing whose strength is so intimidating to our systems they cowardly thrust their heads in the sand. I not so quietly hope they choke on that sand. Yesterday, our private practice opened its doors to invite a handful of Neurodiverse teens into our well-known social skills group. It has been over two years since our last group was conducted largely due to the restricting impacts of the pandemic. The laughter and melting away of first group nerves warmed this tired therapist’s soul to its core. I did not realize how badly I was craving a hefty helping of normalcy.
While the rain stirs an array of different emotions for many, today it seems to carry a veil of calm. As if the dreariness outside fluffs the comfort within the therapy room. The haze highlights the warmth of the lightening. The music of the rainy downfall adds an extra touch of security. Lately a theme of guilt has floated in between the rainstorms as clients come and go from my blue comfy couch. A slew of people-pleasers grace my office, and the narratives of self-sacrifice hold steady despite cravings of change. I can resonate with this flavor of client, as I am a recovering people-pleaser at heart. It’s funny how doing my own work aids in my abilities as a therapist. I have been dutifully challenging my narrative of toxic selflessness to rescue myself from the depths of soulful burnout. While bending over backwards for the sake of others’ wellbeing brings a level of fulfillment, my soul screeches otherwise. A handful of weeks ago, I despised being a therapist. The ‘Sunday scaries’ were ferocious as they rocked my nerves. The restlessness I experienced in session proved to be unnervingly distracting. The best thing that I’ve done for myself in quite a while was to recognize and validate my chosen limits. Not the limits that I previously lived my life by. Not the ones that defined survival while teetering on the edge of crumpling under the burdens. The ones that I chose after attending to my mentality’s longevity. If we pay attention to the whispers of our soul, we won’t have to listen to its screams. Boy, was mine loud. The howls are still ringing in my ears, as I rise from the shambles of unhealthy boundaries. I had to dig deep to set unwavering boundaries around my work hours. I had to release the guilt of going home at 6pm vs flexing to the requests for later hours. Forgiving ourselves for our humanness many be one of the trickiest tasks in the handbook of human functioning. I had to genuinely grant myself grace for setting my schedule to a maximum of five clients a day. Every day I challenge myself to respond verses react to other’s requests of my heart. Whenever a sentence is poised with the beginnings of “Can you….” I will myself to pause and truly consider if I can fulfill the request without sacrificing myself. It's not only a shift in priorities but it’s an adjustment of lifestyle. One we have to lean into mindfully or else we are tempted to slip back into old self sabotaging mentalities. So, if you find your ears ringing from the shrieks of protest arising from deep within your soul… Please listen to them. Validate their experiences. For this is the only way we get back to the whispers. Mean neighbor has an odd fixation with the cleanliness of our condo complex’s dumpster. I spot him meticulously tending to the area surrounding the green monstrosity at least a few times during any given week. His most dutiful days seem to be when the lawn maintenance humans are here. Once they buzz around on their riding lawnmowers as quickly as humanly possible, mean neighbor emerges from his garage with his gizmos and gadgets to make sure there is no blade of grass anywhere near the dumpster. He rakes around the edges, fantasizing the epitome of squeaky clean any standard dumpster could ever dream of. (If you don’t recall who mean neighbor is, he has his own story of humility toward the beginnings of the blog. He’s hardly ‘mean’ anymore, and somehow we have meandered to our own understandings of one another.) I am working from home today. While the world convinced me COVID and the Flu were the prominent germs floating around, here I sit, nursing a fever. Negative for this, negative for that. An antibiotic was tossed my way with little more than a “good luck” from a random Urgent Care doctor. Life has been carrying on to its own divergent pace. The therapy room has been perplexingly darker lately, which nosedived me into a heaping pile of burnout. The trauma and abuse that’s been sputtered out as results of oversight, lack of shits to give, and overall lethargy of systems that are ‘supposed’ to keep people safe have been relentless. My ongoing struggle of caring too deeply has spun me into a fun hole of ‘I don’t want to play anymore’. Yet here I am. Covered in metaphorical tattered bandages rolling the dice with my good hand. Life is not marching forward how I planned it to and it’s irritating my soul. Subsequently, I just rolled my eyes and chuckled at myself after finishing that sentence. Of course life isn’t following our rules. She looks at our plans and laughs too. In my meticulous planning, the horse we ‘invested’ in would have been sold months ago, my husband and I would be sitting pretty to take on a mortgage, and we would be happily house hunting while excitedly jumping into our evolving plans and priorities with both feet. Work would be chalk full of hustling, yet manageable. The promises of Spring would keep us giddy for summertime. There life goes again, succumbed by her peals of laughter. In reality, life cannot be dutifully maintained like the dumpster in our condo complex. Perhaps this is why mean neighbor is so fixated on it. It’s a segment of his life he can rejoice in his perception of control. The horse we ‘invested’ in is still sitting pretty in the barn she was intended to depart months ago. Our budget is playing with options B and C to explore ways of moving into the house-buying stage. The market is deliriously inflated. The world is rolling in its own fire as war rages across the pond and our own power-crazed politicians gleefully stomp on our country’s attempts at progression forward. My husband and I are holding onto one another as we jump into our shifting priorities despite the cacophony of chaos swirling around us. Because here’s the thing. If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that life is going to unravel in the ways she sees fit. Most of the time, that unraveling will make no sense to me. A lot of the time I’ll question the motives and intentions of those I see are contributing to the happenstance of events. Occasionally, I’ll curse the perceived injustice that washes over my experiences. But mostly I’ll roll my eyes at life’s melody and lean into the discomfort of learning how to not wait for the storm to pass, but to dance in the rain instead. As the days creep into the promises of Spring, I am growing increasingly weary of the Education crisis that looms in the distance. As many different systems within society teeter on the edge of collapse, our education sector may be the most vulnerable to crumbling. Teachers are waving their white flags of defeat as the encumbering demands of the invalidating oversight prove to be too heavy to carry. Lines of support for students are stretched all too thin. Children are tumbling into the cracks of mismanagement. Mental health priority has all but faded into the background of distant memories.
Reform rises out of brokenness. As a therapist who dances with systemic dynamics, I am aware of this cycle of building anew. Yet, this knowledge does not give my empathy any comfort for the souls suffering at the expense of a collapsing education system. As sectors decline, the mental health crisis unarguably skyrockets. Recently, I was informed of an exchange between support staff at a public school and a student. This student had experienced trauma woven throughout their life. While PTSD raged behind this child’s eyes, outwardly, there were no visible indicators of the demons that danced within their memories. Happenstance, triggers at home lowered the child’s window of tolerance for discomfort. Upon arrival to school, it took a simple straw to push the child over their edge of tolerance and into a meltdown. The overworked school staff huffed in exacerbation, interpreting this expression of emotion as lack of compliance. As they approached the child trapped within their feelings with little vocabulary to capture their internal experiences, the adults in the room reinforced a shame-based narrative. “Use your words.” “You have to communicate if you want any help from us.” “You will not speak to me like that.” Little did the staff know they were using the same trauma-laced language as the child’s abuser. Now the child went from an emotionally fueled act to a full blown PSTD induced flashback. The child shut down further. The staff laid on the shame-based language thicker. Eventually, the child exhausted themselves and crumbled in defeat of invalidation. The school staff enforced consequences of behavior fueled by humanness. Suddenly, the child’s narrative shifts from a cry for help to internalized shame. Trust in the system they spend hours of their life in becomes muddled by embarrassment and confusion. I cannot tell you how common this interaction pattern is. Our education systems are desperate for trauma-informed care and language. Now more than ever. The World is still reeling from a Pandemic that exacerbated mental health struggles, amongst other things. Victims were trapped on lockdown with their abusers. Tensions spilled over into chaos. Our society is a battlefield of the invisibly wounded. As a therapist, it’s within my responsibilities to serve as an advocate. Educational advocacy for our little humans is one of my passions. Despite the defeat I feel as broken systems tower over us, I will march forward. I will use my voice to enhance the stories of the voiceless. Let’s continue to commit to validating our youth’s experiences. Let’s increase mental health awareness in our schools for students and teachers alike. Let’s fight for the rights and the well-being of those who will run our worlds one day. |
Katherine Scott,
|
Proudly powered by Weebly