Further adventures of FPS in Fuckaway

It's tough to remember whether there was a time when I thought I could make a go of it at the Fuckaway Center. I can sense doom at twenty paces, usually, and the writing required an especially large wall to fit on.

Beyond the massive supervision fail, there were a dozen reasons to hate being out there, and the only reason to stay (at the time, better job market) was that it seemed like my path to being a therapist. But, yeah, much to dislike. Coworkers who found the place utterly normal and my evident distress about it a little bit crazy, that was one thing that should have told me to get out. You can go around saying "isn't this place terrible?" but between the possible objective reality that the place isn't terrible and you are just Doing It Wrong and the possible objective reality that they are all nuts who can't see the disasters around them, well, there ain't much twain.

I should say more about why it felt like a madhouse (ok, stupid choice of words considering it was in some sense functionally a madhouse.) I should say more about why it felt like everything there was profoundly bad. Because the truth is, clinics like that might well feel a bit like an emergency room. The populations that have to rely on interns and people straight out of grad school for their mental health care because that's what Medicaid will pay for are not easy to take care of.

Often the baseline of "things going wrong vs. things going ok" is already pretty low, and in Rockaway in particular, well, the people who came through that door were very rarely there to discuss how nervous they were about their retirement funds. In all but the most floridly psychotic clients (and maybe there, too) there was content that you could dig into--and I mean this less to reduce clients to their interestingness-level to a pretentious young therapist, I hope, than to talk about the difficulties and possible inefficacies of talk therapy across some serious barriers to understanding, many of which could be navigated with good superivison but see above. Or below. Stupid blog format vs. referential conventions.

But wait, this is actually the point. I had a lot of clients I didn't know what the fuck to do with, and nobody was giving me the least suggestion of what the fuck to do with them. This could have been because they assumed I was better prepared for this work than I was. This could have been because they had little idea more than I did, were all inured to How Things Are and just saw the people, let them sit there in their offices while they wrote billable notes, and called it a day. There could be other explanations.

I'll never know. I do know I had serious misgivings about asking for help, not just because Murgatroid seemed, and I won't try to paint myself as less than judgmental here, just not to be very smart. Also because of how things were discussed higher up.

Aunt Slappy did something I read as very supportive early on, and then came to have enormous misgivings about. So, let's take for example the kid clients I had.

Backing up, to the point of incoherence, I had always hoped not to work with kids because I'm awful with them, but in a community mental health setting, you get a ton of kid clients no matter what. It's a socoieconomic thing I probably don't have the perspective to dissect, but to me it always looked like people with kids they didn't particularly like, but also kids who lived in a terrible environment and were hard to manage by any standard, bringing them in and saying "fix him. Or just take him off my hands for an hour."

I was hopeless with these kids. I can't imagine I did a damn thing for them. I talked to them in the useless, annoying tone of a person who doesn't know how to talk to kids. In some cases, I spent the hour just trying to keep them from hurting themselves on sharp desk edges because they were so hyperactive, or saying "no you can't have that" when they picked up thing after thing and said "I can have this?"

It's tiring having that kind of privation bounced off you and thinking about where need that ceaseless comes from. It's tiring and distressing trying to make some tiny connection with someone you have no idea how to connect with. Sometimes you take these frustrations out by getting mad at the parents, who in many cases really do seem like walking horrors.**

I was too busy talking to Murgatroid about my charts to ask about any of this (which is its own story) but sometimes I'd talk to Slappy, and she would be, as I started to say, apparently supportive. She'd take my side anyway. She'd fume at the parents. And then eventually it occurred to me that I was standing in the office of my clinic supervisor listening to her say about some kid's mother "I know that woman from way back. She's a piece of shit."

Someone once said to me "Oh, I've had my analysis. I don't have countertransferences anymore." I didn't bother to express my skepticism because it was a friend and someone who indeed reacts fairly to many things and seems to have benefited from analysis. TPSAII*: all people's training and all their advancement within the field sometimes means very little or nothing about how they react to Things That Happen. I was working in a place mean to help people, ruled with a tanned leather talon by someone who referred to these people or their families, frequently, without any encouragement to stop and think about this stuff, as garbage.

This was not a place I needed to be.

Right, yeah, I'm going to keep going....


*The point, such as it is. I have decided this is probably something I should just abbreviate.

**Hey, sorry. The last entry was funnier, right?