Jack Brennan Perspectives

At one of our Family Focus training sessions earlier in the year, I found myself unsure about whether I was repeating an idea that I might have already spoken on many weeks earlier (the trainings are a long fourteen straight weeks, excluding holidays, hurricanes, and so forth.) One of the group members pointed out to me that there was nothing wrong with that as repetition is one time-proven way of learning.  Sounds good to me.

And as I have noted in the blog before, one of the inherent risks of writing a blog is repeating oneself over time.  I know no reasonable way of avoiding that over the course of years so I leave it to the reader to decide when they’ve read all that I have to say and the repetition is getting out of hand.  In the meantime, I blog…..

A continuing theme of the blog has been the damage caused by bureaucrats who misunderstand that following procedures and applying rules should not be robotic.  Computers are robotic. Either you give them what they want, the exact way they want it, or you go nowhere.  If the computer form, for whatever reason, does not accept periods in one’s name then you don’t enter on the form your middle initial with a period after it.  If the computer wants your birthday in this ridiculous form: mm/dd/yyyy, then good luck writing 9/3/50 on it.  You will go nowhere till you do it the computer way.

Humans though are not computers and shouldn’t act like them.  We all have millions of examples of humans that don’t get that (I was up at the Social Security office yesterday e.g.).  What a breath of fresh air then to find folks on the other end who listen and respond as human beings and not robots.

Two stories:

1. My grandsonson has insulin dependent diabetes. He recently got suspended from school and sent to the temporary school for the “bad boys and girls.” What I call “doy-doy” school. At this school, there is no resident nurse, simply an on-call one.  There was concern about this by the higher-up medical folks in the district who wanted me to get permission for him to attend by his endocrinologist . That doctor of course wouldn’t/couldn’t speak to his behavior impacting the diabetes etc. etc..  CATCH-22.  I responded to the head nurse that an on-call nurse was far beyond anything I had at home and my grandsonson was allowed to go out and about the neighborhood, the malls, the stores, by himself. He was an expert on his diabetes and I was not taking extraordinary risks with him in allowing this. Indeed, he was safer at school with an on-call nurse then he was at home, with no nurse. In addition, I would never be more than 15 minutes away because I had to pick him up each day anyway.  Her response? “Good point. I’ll double check with the head doctor, but in the meantime, send him to school.” A human response (but it felt like a small miracle.)

2. Folks with criminal records – 65 million Americans now, according to last Tuesday’s NY Times* – have a terrible time with job applications.  Some want to know if you were ever arrested; some, if you were ever convicted.  Some go back forever, some only go back seven years.  Offenders, often more desperate for jobs then the regular unemployed, have to decide whether to risk lying or risk being automatically rejected for having a record.  This past week, an ex-con I call my nephew, got hired for a perfect job – four miles from home, full time, decent hourly wage, paid holidays, vacation etc. (Remember when those were normal jobs?) When the background check came back, however, the job offer was rescinded.  It turned out not to be his history that brought this on, but rather that he’d lied on the application.  He does that so automatically – right or wrong – that he didn’t even remember that he’d done it.  He was devastated by the rescinding of the offer. So I wrote a letter to the company giving context (as I’d done with the nurse in the first story) and asking them to reconsider. Not wanting someone else to be hired in his place, I emailed the letter over so it got there the very next morning before the company opened for the day.

The personnel person called me immediately.  Human. We talked. Human. She promised to go to her higher ups. Human.  And within hours, the job rescindment was rescinded.  Human – and miraculous – still again.

Our lives are lived in context.  Bureaucrats don’t get that.  Humans do.  Are there human bureaucrats?  Yes, of course.  They are called responsible adults.

Jack

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* http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/target-bans-the-box/?hp&rref=opinion

After going from December 12, 2012 until March 6, 2013 without doing a posting, I decided that the only way the blog could get its due was if I posted at the same time each week. I chose Sunday mornings, which was consistently the quietest time of my week. I decided to commit to that until June 30^th to see how it went.  And more or less, it went pretty well.  Until, that is, June 9^th.

Around that time I was making plans to have my grandson (13) return home.  He began visiting each weekend and I had to drive him here on Fridays, and back on Sundays.  Each of those weekend days was a one hundred mile round trip.  And suddenly the “consistently quietest time of my week” disappeared.  When my grandson came home for good in mid-July, the only “consistently quietest time of my week” came when he was asleep.  And when that happened, I couldn’t stay awake much longer myself.

In September, I finalized his adoption, committing myself – though the judge never mentioned this – to noise, and interruptions for too many years; as well as to my grandsonson or is it my songrandson?  Certainly, the quiet Sunday mornings went away.  Four days before his adoption finalization, I became the new executive director of Family Focus.  With the combination of the two, it finally dawned upon me just how much of my work requires uninterrupted concentration. 

One of the advantages of working at FFAS is that so many of us are based in offices at home.  Yet, some years ago, one of my co-workers actually moved out of her home office and went out and rented an office in the next town over.  I don’t think I fully grasped the fullness of why she did that, until the past few months.  It’s not like I never had kids before, but as the years passed and they grew up and moved out, I unwittingly took on more and more work that requires concentration.  Uninterrupted concentration.  Consistently uninterrupted concentration. I am not a multi-tasker.

School up here starts ridiculously early.  The first class begins at 7am; the bus is at 6:25.  So from 6:25 until about 9 or 9:30, I do have a solid block of time during which I am both awake and able to concentrate.  I have used that time since school began (unusually late in September) to get caught up on much undone business. And as I did so, I began to get very happy: consistent uninterrupted time – for hours – each school morning.  The blog was on my list of things to do, although it wasn’t (obviously) at the top of that list.  But it was moving on up.

And then, my grandsonson – yeah, that’s an accurate description – got suspended from school for behavior that was once considered normal, although even back in the day one had to be called on it, and even punished for it. He brought a pocket knife to school. That is what boys do. As a kid, I did it myself – I used to whittle; and I was a Cub Scout.  Before Columbine, of course.

The suspension lasted for three weeks.  And that only because I hired a lawyer – you can imagine what that cost – to protect him from the 45 days – one quarter of the school year – that they were seeking.  What’s next? The death penalty?

This morning my grandsonson went back to school. Finally.

And I got back my uninterrupted time. Not as consistently as my Sundays once were – given all the normal days off from school, that’s now just history.  But the best I am going to get for far too many more years most likely.

So I am back.  

Still again.

Let’s try Tuesday mornings and see how that goes.  Maybe with some make-ups thrown in on some other days, huh?

Jack

One of our FFAS kids, now a young adult, wrote a poem to open up the evening on Friday night.  His name is David Whitaker. His words just floored me, when I finally got a chance to concentrate on them. It was a wonderful gift for Maris.  And for me. Different words for the same concept: “If Not For You….”

Ohana

=====================================

Thank you, David.

Jack

[Yeah, yeah, I didn’t post last week. I apologize to all who were expecting the once a week posting. So today, I’ll post two, okay?]

My boss at Family Focus, Maris Blechner, an agency founder and the sole executive director for almost twenty-six years, has decided that it’s time to retire.  It won’t happen till the end of August, but her staff decided that we wanted to give her a retirement party and to schedule it before summer vacations kicked in.  The party happened on Friday night.

The theme for the party we had decided on months ago, almost as soon as we decided on having the party.  We took it from that wonderful Bob Dylan song, made much more popular when it was covered by the late, and still greatly missed, George Harrison: “If Not For You…..” (The Richie Havens’ version – which I discovered only upon searching for as many versions as I could find is – to my mind – the best of the forty plus that I found, and given Havens’ death last month, has a special poignancy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbMjefHfd9Y.)

I doubt that anybody gave Maris more grief that I did over these years.  There were times I wanted to kill her, and I am sure there were even far more times that she wanted to kill me.  But, as I have said repeatedly, in many contexts, one measures who a person is by the best you have ever witnessed of them.  Not the worst; not the average; not the typical; not the stuff that you hate; not the stuff that frustrates you.  Their best is what defines them.  All else is only human failure to live up to whom we are.

Maris created an agency  – and did what she needed to do to keep  it alive for all these years – whose lifeblood is empowerment: empowerment of her staff; empowerment of the families who come to us to adopt; and empowerment of the kids for whom we transition into families.

At the event, I had to speak – as the incoming director.  I stood up on the stage of this beautiful classy room at Columbia University’s Italian Academy, and I looked out at all the folks who had come to show their respect for and gratitude to Maris, despite the travel advisories, and realities, of torrential rains from the first tropical storm of the season.  And I thought, “Yep, if not for you…..”

You know, if you had a great relationship with your third grade teacher, you might well want to honor that teacher and thank him or her.  But, the truth is that if that teacher never existed, you would still have finished the third grade, and you would have had a different third grade teacher.  It might not have been as good an experience; it might have been even a horrible experience.  But it would have happened.

When my father couldn’t take care of us after my mother’s death, I think every last one of our aunts and uncles stepped up to offer to take one of us.  Every last one.  Good people and I loved each of them.  But it was Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank who changed our world.  Specifically, Aunt Rita’s thinking and realness that changed our world.  The power of “If not for you….” has been very personal for me for a long long long time. And Msgr. Huntington?  “If not for you…” It comes down to the experience of being saved as a person, not just rescued as a student, a nephew, a client, a neighbor, and so forth.  It doesn’t have to be directly – like Aunt Rita and Chris Huntington saved me. It can be by creating an enviornment, a structure, a way of “doing” like Maris has done. It can be by being the support for the ones who can then do it directly.  It can be by creating an agency that gives kids the parents who then change their world.  And as one of the parents there Friday night, Joyce Wilcox, pointed out to me, by giving parents the kids who then change the parents’ world.

Friday night, standing at that podium, looking around the room at so many of the children, many now grown, who had been adopted through us, I was overwhelmed.  One after the other after the other had been children who had been effectively, and disgracefully, written off by the system till we came along, with our empowering placement protocols. We not only got them adopted, we got them adopted forever.  Not a counterfeit adoption in the room.

At one point, from the podium, I began to tease my adult son, Luis, standing up front among all these people. Luis was one of those kids twenty-two years ago. He was referred to us at twelve and we were told he would be dead due to his brain tumor by twenty years old.  All kids with his kind of tumor were dead by twenty.  Did that deter Maris?  Did it deter any of us at FFAS?  Yeah right…..we couldn’t find a family for him, and that’s how I ended up with him.  But now, twenty-two years later, and fourteen years past the predicted end of his life, he was standing there in that room. And I said directly to him, “Luis, it was I who made the decision to adopt you, right?”  And proud as anything, as though the impact on his brain of that still-there-tumor didn’t exist, he yelled up to me in front of all these people, “You got it wrong. I made the decision.” And when I then said, “Okay, Luis, but it was a twenty year contract right?”  he responded, “Maybe for you it was twenty years, but for me it is forever.”  Lots of kids in that room Friday night – grown or not – could identify immediately with Luis’ words that came from his deeply rooted and strongly felt sense of empowerment. Their parents too.  Maris created the protective umbrella under which she and her staff were able to bring that into existence.  All the rest, good or bad, that she did, or didn’t do – all of it – pales by comparison.  No Maris? No Luis in that room Friday night.

And these kids, if not adopted by the families who adopted them, would not have been adopted elsewhere.  They wouldn’t have been adopted at all.  That is a fact that we all know.  And it gives the words “if not for you” an impact like no others I’ve ever experienced.

To know that you have changed the world for a particular kid, and his parents, forever and for real by the choices that you have made, should make it clear why we chose as our final summing up theme for Maris’ tenure, “If Not For You…..”  The words to the song are not precisely applicable, but they are so close…..to what Maris has given to so many. Including me.

=================================================

If not for you

Babe, I couldn’t even find the door

I couldn’t even see the floor

I’d be sad and blue, if not for you

If not for you

Babe, the night would see me wide awake

The day would surely have to break

It would not be new, if not for you

If not for you, my sky would fall

Rain would gather, too

Without your love I’d be nowhere at all

I’d be lost, if not for you

If not for you

The winter would hold no spring

Couldn’t hear a robin sing

I just wouldn’t have a clue, if not for you

If not for you, my sky would fall

Rain would gather, too

Without your love I’d be nowhere at all

I’d be lost, if not for you

If not for you

The winter would hold no spring

Couldn’t hear a robin sing

I just wouldn’t have a clue, if not for you

If not for you

=========================================

If not for her………..

Thank you, Maris.

Jack

Two days ago, I asked my adult (college graduate) grandson if he knew who Helen Keller was, He told me he had “heard of her.”  Then I asked my son with the severe learning problems.  He laughed and said, “Yep, I know who she is.”  I was relieved.  So, I asked him to tell me and he told me that she was part of the joke.  Joke?  “What joke?” I asked him.  And he told me that when someone doesn’t clean something right on his job, the other guys will say, “Who are you? Helen Keller?”  That’s all he knew of her…..This is worse for me than recognizing that the music of my much loved and still listened to Beatles will disappear into history as my generation dies off.

Helen Keller, or more accurately, her teacher, Annie Sullivan, has been a personal hero of mine for decades.  When I was a child care worker, working in the institutions, I used to say that Annie Sullivan should be the hero of all child care workers.  For those reading this who have no idea who either woman is – would such people be reading this? – a quick Google search will tell you plenty.  For everyone else, I am going to assume that we are each familiar with “The Miracle Worker” – the fifty one year old movie, if not the play, or the now 111 year old book that both were based on: “The Story of My Life.”

The NY Times obituary* for Helen had this paragraph: “After Helen’s illness, her infancy and early childhood were a succession of days of frustration, manifest by outbursts of anger and fractious behavior. ‘A wild, unruly child’ who kicked, scratched and screamed was how she afterward described herself.”

Hmm….I wonder how we’d approach the care of Helen today.

Here is Helen’s description of how Annie did it:

“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water** and my teacher placed my hand under the spout.

“As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.

“I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free. There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that in time could be swept away.”

Helen had an awakening.  She had a realization.  She woke up.  She got it.  She changed. She was freed.

And  “In 1964 she was one of 30 Americans on whom President Johnson conferred the nation’s highest civilian recognition, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.”

Can you imagine that award for any of our kids?  I certainly can and hope to see the day.

I am who I am today hugely due to, as I have said many times, the gifts of themselves that Aunt Rita and Msgr. Christopher Huntington gave to me. It wasn’t behavior management or medication or therapy on their parts that helped me.

It was simply teaching me real truths, in the context of loving me for real.

I have had many who cared about me; many who were attached to me.  But these two freed me.

That is what our model needs to be: teaching with the goal of freeing.  If behavior management is needed, fine. If therapy is helpful, good. If medication moves us along that road, then by all means let’s use it.  But those things are not ends in themselves – they haven’t the power to free anyone. Not because those who need them are broken, but because these things are only tools. Tools are needed to build, but they, of themselves, build nothing.

Coming to recognize the truth – not all truth now, but simply the relevant truth – is what frees people. All people. Including and especially our kids. Annie Sullivan is the model.  Not psychiatry, not psychology, not social work – tools all, but tools only.

Helen Keller was the incredible beneficiary of Annie Sullivan’s belief in Helen’s wholeness.

I hate to see that witness lost to history.

It remains too real.

Jack

* [http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0627.html]

**[http://www.biography.com/bio-now/anne-sullivan-the-miracle-worker-20761491]

I was reminded this past week of two very painful life changing events in my life, that led to wonderful changes in my thinking pretty much immediately.

The first was the death of my mother, forty seven years ago yesterday.  She was killed early in the morning in a (single car) car crash.  My father, who was driving, was hospitalized.  It fell to Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank to inform us kids. Some time between the crash and our alarms going off to get us up for school, they came over to wake up my fifteen year old self, my almost fourteen year old brother, and my ten year old sister.  They told me first, and then my brother, as we shared a room.  Then one of them, Uncle Frank I think, was going across the hall to tell my sister.  I begged them not to.  I remember that Aunt Rita’s response to me was simply that they had to, but I also remember her being surprised by that immediate and non-thinking reaction on my part.

Years later, I became a foster parent to my first three kids, brothers, eight, ten, and twelve. They had a fifteen year old brother who was in Children’s Village. Some months later, I heard through the grapevine that that boy had been referred to the foster home department.  Immediately, I reached out to the foster department and told them that I wanted him here with us.  They refused.  They told me that I had “too many kids.”  I was shocked, and horrified.  I fought. Ultimately, without telling me, they went and asked him if he wanted to come live with me.  He, of course, said no.  And with that, they closed it out, perfectly sure of themselves. When I asked them if they had told him first that I wanted him with us, they said they had not.  I begged them to let me talk to him and they refused. I said to them, what else could he have said to them but “no” when he had experienced me taking his brothers and essentially abandoning him (I had known him for many years)?  I said to them that he needed to hear first hand from me that I wanted him with us and that I had gone to get him the second I learned that he was being referred to a foster home.  Only then could you trust his “no.”  They refused.

When he was eighteen, I adopted him out from under them anyway.  But for those in-between three years, he lived with believing that I didn’t care about him.  (I couldn’t tell him because he had to live within the agency with those folks till he was eighteen.)

That behavior on the part of my caseworker, and her boss (significantly to me: neither had kids) is my definition of arrogance.  My intended behavior towards my sister that night my mother died, was also arrogance.  Not in the “overbearing” definition which I have been accused of many times in my life, but rather in the sense of “presumptuous claims or assumptions.”

Many years ago – decades now – my boss in my last job accused me of being arrogant.  We had a long discussion about it and he came back to me and said that upon further thought, he decided that I was “abrasive.”  And I said, “absolutely.”  He was surprised how immediately I had accepted that.  I told him that abrasive is always in the mind of the “abrased.”  And that most often it was the truly arrogant who felt that I was abrasive as I went after their “presumptuous claims or assumptions.”

Out of my experience with my son came two rules at Family Focus: one, adults go first – always.  And two – every decision we make about one of our kids or one of our families has to pass “the forty year test.”  How, we are required to ask ourselves, will this decision  I am making, impact this child or this family forty years from now, when I am long gone from this position, and maybe from this earth?  That arrogant caseworker and her boss didn’t stop to think that by me adopting the three brothers, the fourth brother would be a part of our lives, one way or another, forever whether they agreed with it or not. And how would that look to the boys: that three got one life, and the fourth, a very different life.  And that then becomes the starting point: will this be right in the long term. Not “too many kids.”

Out of my experience with Aunt Rita that night, came my recognition that I wasn’t trying to protect  my sister – there was no protecting her after all – but rather trying to protect my own feelings about her devastation and my need to respond to it.  With Aunt Rita’s words, I realized that I was being stupid: my sister “had to know.”  But only later did I realize that I was really being arrogant.

I had – and have had for three weeks now – a responsibility to speak to a fifteen year old kid about some stuff that will impact her life from today until at least forty years from now.  But the powers-that-be, afraid of the current behavioral impact on her of what I have to say (all of which is affirming and empowering so I don’t even get that) have forbidden it.  Exactly what I would have done to Aunt Rita and Uncle Frank, had I the power to keep them from talking to my sister that terrible and life-changing night.  So was my thinking forty seven years ago incredibly mature and years beyond my age? Or are the current powers-that-be thinking like a fifteen year old, and a very arrogant one at that?

The only question that matters is how their arrogant decision will impact this teen “forty years from now.”  Not whether I will shake her world today.  Even if they were right about my shaking her world today – which they are likely not.  This teen is entitled to a conversation with me.  And she will get it.  Perhaps not till she’s eighteen and free of them and their arrogance and power, like my son became.

And this posting this morning will serve as evidence to her then that I wanted to talk to her now.

Hmm….this blog has it’s benefits for me far beyond any I had originally thought of……

Humble Jack, the Abraser

I came home late yesterday afternoon from the annual adoption conference up in Albany. One of the workshops I went to was run by Wendy’s Wonderful Kids (WWK), a non-profit arm of Wendy’s set up originally by Dave Thomas himself to promote adoptions of the foster kids in the country who have no one.  It was, of course, all about their success – their tremendous success actually.  The leader of the workshop was prepared, knowledgable, and articulate.  So I asked her the question that I have not been able to get an answer to since Family Focus decided a long while ago that we were not ready to partner with this program.  While she was unable to answer the question either, she did give me the name of a higher-up in the organization that might be able to, and I will follow up for sure.

The question is: what happens when it doesn’t work?  How do you protect the child –  the mulitply-betrayed child, by definition (or he/she would not need to be part of the program) – how do you protect the child when all these extensive, personal (they look into the child’s background to find folks who know/knew the child) and “aggressive” (to use their word) means to find a family don’t work?  What does that do to the child who now knows definitively that there is nobody, even among all the people he/she has ever known, that will become family?

And then there’s the question of funding.  WWK now partners, we were told, with at least one state government, whose funds will allow them to hire 50 child recruiters.  Each recruiter is expected to carry about 20 cases.  That is a thousand kids.  And that opportunity for those kids is mind-blowing to us in the field.  It is wonderful.

But those of us in the field, older than say 25, know that government money comes and government money goes for reasons that too often have nothing to do with the value of the programs being defunded.  What happens to those 1000 kids who will be in various stages of this program, if (when?) the state government pulls out?

So I will go to the person at WWK who might be able to answer these questions.  But I am pretty will sure that there will be no answer.  Because nobody thinks like that.  Aunt Rita (Happy Mother’s Day) would say that nobody thinks, period.

I was very very lucky as a teenager to be in a high school that confronted us with the big questions of life very early.  Talking about “ends vs. means.” would not have been out of place in my school from the ninth grade on.  From today’s perspective it would appear to be a fantasy educational experience.   But it was – lucky for me – very real.

The entire WWK workshop on Friday inevitably led me to thinking about ends and means.  The obvious “end” or goal of the public adoption programs at Family Focus, like all such adoption programs, is to find families for the children who so desperately need them.  But we long ago decided that in dealing with kids who have experienced such deep consequences from the failure of the adults – many different adults (and coming from well-intentioned adults doesn’t change the experience)  – that it was our responsibility to protect those kids even – no, especially – from our failures.  We decided that a successful adoption program required us to be successful for these kids even when we failed in our goal of getting them adopted.  Absurd talk? Confusing?

It’s actually pretty simple. It’s where my high school’s question of whether or not the “ends” justifies the “means” comes in.  We recognized that if our processes for getting these kids adopted, at least, empowered the kids, they would be better off for having dealt with us, no matter what the outcome.  Their experience of themselves would be forever changed, even if they ended up not getting adopted.  To go through our processes would be to make decisions, not to have them made for you; it would be to have your “no” respected, not opening the door to adult harassment: “C’mon, this is better for you; don’t throw away such a great opportunity etc.”; it would be to experience the protection of having your boundaries defined and protected without being “guilted” into anything.  Empowerment, which erases victimization, became our means to adoption.  Or did empowerment become our “end” and adoption our “means”? Who cares?  We can argue that in philosophy classes.  Meanwhile, we empower.

Our “Chocolate Milk Club,” by the way,  becomes our protection from defunding.  The income that comes from the monthly dues, will allow us the fiscal means, at least for cash ourlays, to finish out any case we begin.  Of course, that also requires a staff so committed to the value of empowerment that they would finish the work on any case for free.

The first question we have for any and every successful program we see is “how do you protect the kids when your processes fail?”  Your 70% success rate really doesn’t mean much to the other 30%.  Or your 90% success rate really doesn’t mean much to the other 10%.  Even your 99% doesn’t mean much to the other 1%.  If you don’t see that, we must be very wary of your “means”  no matter how good your “ends” look, even to us.

Covering for one’s inevitable failures always requires asking, and answering, this question: “What if we are wrong?”

Happy Mother’s Day.

Jack

I began the week by being told by a psychiatrist that when it comes to mental illness, I am “naïve.”  He told me that I do not have the same belief (or words to that effect) in mental illness that I do in physical illness.  As he was talking I kept saying to myself: “yep, yep, yep, that’s true, I don’t.”  He was clearly missing the fact that I am proud of that conviction.  I don’t deny the existence of mental illness, but the unspoken context is too often “permanent damage.”  And even if that were true, the deeper, and key, context always seems to be that damage to the psyche is the same as damage to the person. Folks don’t talk that way, of course, but they don’t NOT talk that way.

To wit:  “He has cancer” or “She has heart disease” or “I have diabetes”.  The cancer, heart disease, or diabetes is not identified as the person.  On the contrary, the person has these physical conditions.  But watch with mental illness: “He is schizophrenic” or “She is bi-polar” or “I am an addict.”

There is some overlap, of course: “I am diabetic” or “He has post traumatic stress disorder.”  But mostly, it seems to me, the language of our culture says that we “have” physical illness, but we “are” mental illnesses.  Interestingly, despite the apparent truth that lifestyle choices bring on many physical illnesses, we seem to recognize that they could happen to any of us precisely because they exist outside of us as people.  However, mental illnesses, being something that folks “are” could not happen to us because we “are not” schizophrenic, or bipolar or an addict.

Once we move from “have” to “are,” the personhood of the person in question simply disappears.  I am not saying that this is taught.  I am saying that it is the reality of how we speak, and how we think, and therefore, how we respond, far too often, to the person who “has” a physical disease but “is” a mental one.

In the field of foster care adoption, it is this thinking that allows folks to give up their already adopted children, rather than focusing on solving the problem of living with or at least relating to these very difficult children as their parent.  Within their social circles, I can’t imagine an adoptive parent getting away with telling folks that they gave up their child because he had heart disease, or because he had diabetes, or because he had cancer.  Such people would be looked upon as disgusting and shallow folks.  But giving up a kid who doesn’t relate to us as we expect, or want, or understand?  A whole different ball game.  All we have to do with our friends, our families, and ourselves even is to tell a few stories of the behaviors of these kids – perhaps their coldness, or their apparent consciencelessness, or their dangerousness, or even their abusiveness.  Then, everyone is with us and we can give our kids up fully justified and supported by our people.  Of course, we have already first given up, and very slickly so, the idea that they are “our” kids.  That’s what allows the rest.

Yet, every regular old parent has dealt with any one of those pathological behaviors in their regular old children: when the children were two years old.

At Family Focus we are currently doing a retrospective of what we have learned over the 25 years of our existence.  It is a lot.  But in looking at that very long list, I have been trying to figure out what is the most important reality that we have recognized. It is probably this:

A normal reaction to an abnormal circumstance appears abnormal, while an abnormal reaction to an abnormal circumstance appears normal.

“Appears” is the operant word here.

I don’t deny that “mental illness” exists.  But I insist that there is a person, exactly as worthwhile as me, existing beyond that illness, just as there is a worthwhile person existing beyond any physical illness.  And I don’t, and won’t, trust any psychiatrist who doesn’t make it clear that they recognize and respect that.  Hell, I don’t trust any person who doesn’t show me that same recognition and respect for that core truth.  Which, of course, comes back to this core truth: there is nobody who is better than anybody else.  As people we are each exactly equal in the dignity and respect we are each entitled to.  And that is true despite any behavior we exhibit, or any illness  – physical or mental – that we have.

Jack

P.S.  For an example of a trustworthy psychiatrist, one who gets it, and shows that he gets it, one into whose care I would easily leave my children or grandchildren, or yours for that matter, please look up Dr. Bruce Perry and his wonderful book with the very revealing full title: “The Boy Who Was Raised As A Dog: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing.”

I was at a meeting this past week to address some concerns I had about a young teenager, whose future I am involved with.  It happened to be with a psychologist, but that is not an intrinsic part of my point – although it is troublesome to me.  The man was not new but was new to the case and had been updated from the old worker.  He pretty much began our conversation by telling me that he was aware of, and understood, my concerns.  And immediately I knew that this man, at least at this point, was not to be trusted.

What kind of stupid talk was that?

How could I be so certain that he was not to be trusted?  Because I had two huge concerns. The first I had spoken of to the former worker, and more than once at that, and I figured that he’d been updated on it. But the second, even bigger, concern I had never voiced to anyone.  Ever.  So not only had he not – no way – been updated on it, but he sure as hell couldn’t have “understood” it.

This is an example of something I call “not seeing the invisible” or, at least not covering for the possibility that there could exist things that you might not see.  It is arrogant.  It is common. It is culturally accepted. What would have been wrong with him telling me that he had been updated from the earlier worker on what she understood to be my concerns? Then repeat them for me in his own words perhaps.  And then ask me two questions. First, ask me if he had understood accurately what he’d just reported to me; and then second, ask me whether or not that covered the whole of my concerns.  A “no” from me to either one opens up a real conversation.  A “yes” to both gives us a common ground to start this new relationship from.   Either way we begin on the firm ground of mutual respect.  We become what I call a “we.”

Why couldn’t he have been open to the possibility that third hand information is rarely accurate enough, even among professionals?  And why was he not covering for the possibility that I had other concerns that either I had not spoken of to the first worker or that she had not understood the seriousness of and therefore hadn’t updated him?

I, of course, dealt with all this – I made visible all my concerns – and to his credit the man saw it and fixed it.  So I trust that he will fix what he sees: he’s a good man, he appears to have integrity.  But I still do not trust that he will cover for what he doesn’t see.

And I kept thinking: what chance does a kid have with “helping” folks such as this, when the kid does not have the internal resources that we develop as we grow up; or the external protections that our families provide for us?

Covering for what one doesn’t see appears to me to be the main work that any person in the helping professions must learn to do.  Actually I think it goes deeper than that.  Anyone in any relationship needs to do that.  I have had some pretty serious experiences in my life where a problem had clearly developed in the relationship and yet the other person made all sorts of assumptions and then acted on them without ever checking with me first – as this psychologist hadn’t done. Rather than being open – to the possibility that there might be something going on that they don’t see.  But that openness would require a stance of vulnerability, at least to this extent: I could be wrong; I may have done wrong; I may not see what it is I did wrong; I may have to change my stance.  Let me enter into a conversation to find out because it’s the only way to find out.  Let me enter into a conversation so that the other person and I are on the same page.  I call it, as I said, creating a “we.” And it is not something that happens anywhere near enough.  What do we do instead? We create an “us.”  Not: let the two of us, as equals, create something real between us, which means having a conversation. (And a real conversation eschews “blame.”)

The man I met in prison, Micheal (sic),one of the three who beat up Abe, has done exactly that: he has entered into a conversation with me, despite the reality that he contributed to the death of my son.  He wants real and he’s going after it with the father of the man who died in part because of his actions.  Courageous, no?  My respect for him is deep.

What stops us from that – from asking questions?  Well for one thing, to ask questions is to reveal our recognition that we don’t know everything that we think we should know.  I suspect the usual suspect here: the fear of being blamed by the other or ourselves if we find out that we did wrong, especially if the wrong came about because we assumed wrong.  I can’t count the number of times I have heard people defend themselves from something that they finally see was wrong, by immediately jumping to: “I didn’t mean to hurt you; I didn’t intend to do wrong.”  Who the hell cares?  That’s not the point. Most of the evil in this world is not done intentionally; it’s done stupidly.  The point is to solve the problem and move on.  Where do we get this idea that the wrong is mitigated enough as long as I did it unintentionally?

Conversation requires assuming that we might not get it; listening to the words of the other person, both unspoken and spoken; eschewing blame but holding accountable; and making sure, ultimately by asking questions, that one is responding to the other person.  In my experience? There is nothing more wonderful, nor more powerful. I think it the source of many of the miracles I have experienced in my life.

But, sadly, there appears also to be nothing more rare.

We.

Jack

This past week I was taking my son (see “Rant on Can’t” – post before last) to his bus stop as I do every weekday morning so he could catch the bus to work.  The weather report was on the radio and the prediction for one day this past week was for it to be 70 degrees. My son turned to me and said, “70 degrees is good, right?”  Now, had I made some comment of joy prior to him saying that?  Probably. I am in Syracuse as I write this morning and it is 34 degrees so I am well sick of the cold by this late in April.  I was certainly happy to hear “70 degrees.” But what does it matter? He heard the weather report; he may have heard me comment; and he added the two together to come up with the conclusion that 70 degrees is a measure of good weather.  And then he checked it with me to confirm.  All that is what thinking consists of, doesn’t it?

I thought of his teacher and the teacher’s life-deadening perspective on “limits.” And it reminded me of why the phrase “developmentally delayed” is so much more accurate than the word “retarded.” My son’s experience of learning has always been – and still is to a lesser degree – screened first by his determination to not feel the laser sharp pain and humiliation of being called “stupid,” or worse, feeling stupid.  I doubt that he ever felt “stupid” on his own anymore than I feel “stupid” because I can’t do brain surgery.  No, the feeling of stupid came because he had internalized what the culture surrounding him had announced as true.  And then he used (for evidence that they were right) the irrelevant but true facts of the things that he saw he could not do, or did not know how to do. And then – my favorite theme apparently – he blamed himself for being “retarded.”  [in recognition of the pain that that word has inflicted upon him over his life, it is a word that is absolutely forbidden in my house, by the way. We never let it pass without comment.]

It is a very short jump then – and a sign of emotional health – that he refused and refuses to place himself in any circumstance where he might feel stupid.  What has astonished me for over twenty years now is that he apparently unconsciously figures out in advance what those circumstances would be and avoids them with a ten foot pole. Brilliant, no?

For him then to ask me if 70 degrees is a good thing….no, he didn’t ask that. For him to confirm his hypothesis that 70 degrees is a good thing reveals how internally strong he has become in accepting himself as whole.  That affirmation of himself – which is what it is – is not only what thinking always leads to, it is what loving oneself is all about.  And that is what spiritual freedom is.  With it, the world then opens itself to us – or more accurately, we become open ourselves to the world, no longer worried about defending ourselves from it.  And what better definition of psychological freedom?

Every so often, I remember learning as a kid that God has a very special connection and  relationship with those whom we define as handicapped.  He gives them less in order to witness for the rest of us what we really need in this life. But it’s a measure of God’s trust in them, in their ability to take it that they have been so chosen.   I’m sure I am not remembering it right – but the point is there: at best, nobody is better than anybody else. And at worst (for us): “the first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

The real handicaps come into existence when we fall for the blame for being ourselves that are thrust upon us by others.  For African-Americans in our culture, James Brown got to the heart of it a generation ago (two generations?) with his song “Say it Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” Followed shortly thereafter with Jesse Jackson  and the phrase he used over and over and over: “I Am – Somebody.”

Some years ago – and,  if I have written this before, apparently the price of reading a blog over time is dealing with repetition from the writer – there was a very discrete moment in time, when I realized that this son of mine would be okay when I was no longer alive. Something happened on one of his jobs and one of his co-workers said something about him being retarded.  My son went up to him – he told me – and asked him what made him think that he was “so much better than I am.”  I don’t know if that really happened. But my relief came from knowing that my son knew that’s the truth of it. You don’t let the attacks inside you: you respond to them straight out.  He knew when to respond, and how to respond, to attacks on his “self.”

Would that the rest of our society was that far along…….

Jack