The body-unconscious is where life bubbles up in us. It is how we know that we are alive, alive to the depths of our souls and in touch somewhere with the vivid reaches of the cosmos. – D. H. Lawrence
I work with kids who have attachment and trauma issues. Big ones. And until a few weeks ago, I honestly didn’t know what they were feeling. Thanks to Hurricane Sandy, I have experienced more of an understanding. In my case, I call it menopausal anger disorder. (Maybe they will put that in the new DSMV to go along with shyness and some other ridiculous new psych diagnoses.)
After being trapped in the house for almost two weeks with a bored teenager, without the Internet (need I say more), hit with storms of epic proportions, I found myself in an odd state. Some combination of frustration and fury bubbled under the surface of my skin. I could feel it fizzing like a soda bottle that had been shaken, but had yet to be opened.
Somewhere in that mess–I vaguely remember it being after the trees were down and before the foot of snow fell—I had the ill fortune of being part of a PPT (for those fortunate enough to have missed this experience, it is a school planning and placement meeting) for one of my clients. The bumbling, the ignorance, the violation of confidentiality and lack of respect for my 15-year-old client, who was unlucky enough to be one of the few foster children in a homogenous suburb, was enough to bring my effervescence to the exploding point. After a particularly insensitive comment was made about the child, my usual quiet, cooperative demeanor was washed over by a tsunami of outrage.
I am not proud of how I handled the anger. In fact, it mortified me. I know only too well that the best way to accomplish most anything is through calm, calculated thoughtfulness. I now have some school administrators who are probably throwing darts at a photo of me in the teachers’ lounge. And I am sadly not upset that I told them off, even though I know I could have done far more by slowly roasting them over the fire they had set for themselves.
After I finished obsessing on my behavior, and replaying the story in my head and with my patient friends and spouse, I took my own medicine, and focused on the next steps I attempt to move my clients to: Agreeing that I did the best I could in the moment, strategizing on how to avoid it in the future, and looking for the silver lining. It took a lot of looking to find it.
First, I realized that the bubbling, always on edge feeling is exactly what a lot of the kids I work with are experiencing every day, from when they wake up until they finally fall asleep, through no fault of their own. It is stuck inside of them from their earliest days, when they were not cared for properly, were taken from the heartbeat of their birth mom and sent to live with someone else, neglected or downright abused at the hands of others, even before they were able to speak. It is stored without words or clear memories, and leaves them hyper-vigilant, ready to fight or shut down, literally at the blink of an eye. They are always close to blowing the top off the bottle; always trying to hold it back. And after they do blow it off, they are bathed in shame and remorse.
It can be so tiring, so much, for a little person to do that. Especially when they don’t know what’s going on. I am an adult, and it was just a brief stint for me. They have been feeling that way for as long as they remember. It is their normal.
It was good for me to feel that and to know what they live, and how hard they try. That gives me even more reason to do everything I can to help them get out of this, to heal. They deserve better.
The second good thing was the realization that although what I did was decidedly not the best way to handle things; my anger was not misplaced and was not bad. It is good and right to be angry sometimes, and when a child is being disrespected and retraumatized is as good a time as any. The intensity of the feelings I had that day cemented the experience in me. The school administrators were wrong, and it was not my job to play nice with them. It’s ok for me to be a force to be reckoned with. However, as a friend of mine pointed out, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” She is right. Next time, I will do even better.
Strangely, as I worked through my post-explosion angst, Eric Erickson’s description of the task of middle age came to mind—the choice of generativity vs. stagnation. It has to do with what we ultimately give back to this world. Yes, parenting is big. But there is more. If we do not move on and learn to contribute beyond our circle of comfort, care beyond our family, the alternative is stagnation.
It would be easy for me to stop with the satisfaction that I did my best and learned a lot from the school experience. But some of the effervescence is hanging around. It’s not about one foster child, or about just my clients. The feeling reminds me that I need to do more, go beyond being too busy all the time, and make the effort to address, even in very small ways, things that need attention, from factory farming to sex trafficking. It is the best way I can think of to give thanks for the blessings in my life.