And then! (Along came Jones, but not.)

That was sort of a stupid place to leave off with that story but oh well. It's a blog. The stakes are low.

So at this clinic, as I may have talked about in a roundabout way, there were families wherein the whole bunch of them came to therapy. As I got jaded about the place my conclusion came to be that the kids were there for free babysitting and the parents were there because that was the rule. It's a good rule, actually. I'm not saying kids never have their own problems, but I still think fondly of Dr. Russian Woman* for sometimes saying "what this kid needs is a parentectomy."

Things get done a certain way when you're in an environment of fast-paced despair. I had this kid whose real name I wish I could share because it was really funny, but I'll just call him Jake, and then one day, because Jake's brother's therapist went on maternity leave, I got to see them together for what got called "family therapy" when in fact it was pure logistics.

Attempting therapy with Jake was, of all the professional experiences in my life, the one I have been least prepared for. A therapist later would point me to an article by I think Neil Altman (who wrote The Analyst in the Inner City) called "Hyperactive Ghetto Child." Provocative title, but I remember the article as a good one though the content now is gone from my head. Anyway it was basically about Jake and his kind: uncontainable, seemingly uknowable little balls of id that bounce around your office. Jake would try to play with my computer, hide under my desk (leading to me freaking the fuck out that he was going to hit his head and my career would be over) and ask me, with respect to every object in my office "I can have this?"

I had no idea in the world how to connect with him on any level. I tried being blandly nice. I tried being blandly firm. The time he got under my desk I actually yelled at him because I had lost any sense of what to do. Analytic sorts might look at this as him producing in me the kind of reaction he was used to from others. I tentatively buy that.

Despite the fact that Murgatroid had shown no interest in discussing anything but paperwork, I broke down and asked her: what the hell do I do? She said: why don't you take him out of the office, try a different environment. There was this incredibly sad room full of cheap, mostly broken toys, and I took Jake there. It's hard to know whether this was terrible advice in terms of eliminating what little holding environment we had established, or just didn't work out. But it was a disaster. The Chamber of Derelict Toys had some kind of pipes in the middle, and not long into our session, Jake was climbing these. Again, visions of injury, lawsuit, careerdammerung.

I don't want to whitewash my role in the next part of the story. I got seriously, but seriously behind in Jake's notes. I had no idea what to write. For a while, at first, I tried writing really detailed notes, as analytic as I could make them. Murgatroid would say in an exasperated tone "these are really interesting, but" and then she'd tell me how they had to sound for Medicaid.

It's another thing I've kind of suppressed, but there was some pretty specific language that had to be in there that demonstrated perceptible behavioral change in each session. This is a lovely idea but it is not how therapy works. I will make that absolute statement and not hedge.

Writing my attempted riffs on Klein or Winnicott or whoever wasn't working time-wise anyway, but now it seemed like the two options were do that and cause myself a lot of stress or write formulaic lies, absolutely divorced from the actual experience, making both sides of the equation false: 1) I had no idea what I was doing with Jake and nobody seemed about to throw me a clue. 2) I had to discard what little content I could scrape out of telling Jake for the thousandth time that he couldn't have the plastic clock on my desk and imagine some change we had made in his life.

This imaginary change would somehow improve his life with his foster parents, who didn't seem to have any particular feelings about him, good or bad. This imaginary change would somehow improve his life in a rough, neglected school in a neighborhood of no political importance. This imaginary change would somehow mitigate the disconnect between his career goals (I am fairly sure I never saw a male child out there who didn't think he was goign to be a professional basketball player) and his numbingly bleak options.

You can imagine how writing this kind of galling fiction did not engage me. What you may not be able to imagine, if you are a functional person who goes through the day doing what needs to be done, is that I just stopped writing his notes. This is called acting out. I knew perfectly well you can't do this, because audits happen, and the auditors are no friend to anyone**, and a blank chart can be a real disaster for a clinic.

The next chapter is about the shit hitting the fan.

*There were two people who fit this description, and then Dr. Russian Man who was a bit blustery and not of great interest to me. I was kind of fond of both Drs. Russian Woman though the social heirarchy of the workplace meant neither was someone I really connected with. Also they were older, married people. But I'd have liked to have lunch some day with Dr. Russian Woman II because she was smart and sane and didn't seem to be a part of the air of disfunction that pervaded the Fuckaway Center.

**I guess if you're teabaggy you could say they're a friend to the taxpayer. To think this, though, you pretty much have to start from a position of paranoia about social services as a plot to steal everyone's money.