Thursday Re-View — Of Storms Within

S shuffled into my office at the Cancer Center carrying a worn Bible in her left hand. A middle-aged large-boned woman who had never married, she had short gray hair, men’s jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. With her tired eyes and slumped shoulders, she looked like she hadn’t smiled in years, at least.

S referred herself for issues regarding her role as primary caregiver to a brother who was dying from cancer. For the past 30 years, she had taken care of five different relatives through their cancer illness and death: her mother, brother, sister, aunt, and grandmother.

Thirty years ago, on her deathbed, S’s mother grabbed the collar of S’s blouse and made her daughter swear to “take care of” her brothers and sisters. S still felt her mother’s grip on her throat and on her life.

S fulfilled her promise to the point that she even nursed her aunt through her cancer: the same aunt who, whenever there was a thunderstorm when S was a little girl, made her niece get under the covers of her bed so that she could pray over the “bad girl” that God was punishing with his rage; the same aunt whose son raped and abused S for several years as a pre-teen; the same aunt who, when she found her son sexually abusing 7-year old S, forced the terrified little girl to sit in a washtub while she poured scalding hot water on S, calling her “a filthy whore.”

S, the “bad girl,” felt guilty that she was tired of giving up her life to ungrateful relatives; that she was mad at God for his continued punishment of her; and that she was now seeking counseling help when all of her “Christian friends” [note: her emphasis] told her that it was a sin against God to do so.

S’s spiritual assessment revealed that her paternal grandfather was Native American. When S spoke of him, her voice lowered, her face softened, and her body visibly relaxed. Having died years earlier, S described her grandfather as the only person who had ever shown her love, and the only person whom she could ever trust. He had lived on a farm, and when she visited him as a child, they would walk the fields together, hand in hand. He taught S to respect nature; that she was one with mother earth and all her creatures. The gentleness of her beloved grandfather’s Native American spirit world was distinctly at odds with the punitive God of her mother’s teachings.

A myriad of experiences with my Lakota friend Sonny seeped into my consciousness as I listened to S’s memories (see Mitakuye Oyasin). After several weeks with S, I carefully broached the topic of the dichotomy between what S had learned from her mother and aunt about the “burning pit of fire” that was hell, and S’s quiet certainty that her grandfather lived on peacefully in the spirit world. At times, she even felt his presence around her. S’s eyes widened as she struggled to reconcile the vast differences between those two beliefs. That being enough, we left the discussion for a later time.

The next week, S returned, but without the Bible that her friends had given her. However, she began the session with more accounts of the pressure she continued to receive from her friends about the counseling they viewed to be the “devil’s work.” At her pronouncement, a tiny part of me shuddered, certain that S was going to discontinue therapy. Instead, S went on to say that she put the question of counseling before her grandfather. At home, she had performed her usual ritual of sitting on the floor with his picture, and lighting a candle. She gave him my name and asked what he saw in my heart.

He showed S a majestic, snow-covered mountain with a crystal clear stream running zigzagged down its side. Her grandfather told S that my heart was as pure and deep as the mountain stream, and to trust that I would help her. He promised her that through me, S would come to know God.

The eyes of the heart, used yet another time, in yet another way. In that moment, I heard the echo of Sonny’s voice, raised in a sacred Lakota healing chant. Once again, God enacted His circles of grace.

S stayed with her brother through his death, all the while working on promises kept vs. those that were unreasonable; on justified guilt vs. unjustified; on the completely foreign thought of taking care of herself for once, rather than taking care of everyone else. And of returning to nature, where lightning was simply a weather phenomenon and nothing more. Where once nature had terrified her, now it gave her peace.

After her last session, I noticed that S had left a small grocery bag beneath her chair. I grabbed it and ran after her, only to find that she had disappeared. I asked my secretary to call S and tell her about the package she accidentally left. When I came back from lunch, the package was on my desk, with a note written in my secretary’s handwriting saying that this was for me. I opened it to find a color picture of a river strewn with rocks, the trees up to its edge splashed in fall colors of reds and oranges and golds. S described such a place as a favorite of her and her grandfather’s when they used to take walks together when she was a little girl.

There was a note typed in the corner:

I KNOW

When I see the wind blow gently through the trees,
I know you’re there.
When I stop to see life’s reflections in the rivers and streams,
I know you’re there.
When the scent of the flowers fill the air with their aroma,
I know you’re there.
How do I know you care?
I know you’re there.

Godspeed, S. Be well as you finally begin your own journey. Wherever it takes you, know that He loves you and that He will always be there.

Thank you for the privilege of sitting with you in the darkness. Walk on now, bathed in light, and in peace.

__________________________________________

Thursday Re-View — From a Boy into a Man

He was a nice-looking young man, married, with warm brown eyes that always looked down, as if afraid meeting someone’s gaze would let them in to a place where he didn’t want to go.

His needs were simple – to explore grief-related issues regarding the recent death of his father-in-law. But in therapy, as in most things in life, those simple things can become complex fairly quickly, whether we want them to or not.

Almost 2 months into our sessions together, J had a major disagreement with his wife, during which he revealed to her that someone had sexually abused him as a child for almost 8 years.

Though this rape by his stepbrother occurred nightly, no one in the house was aware of it. If they were, it was neither acknowledged nor stopped.

While J described his rape at the hands of his abuser, I was bereft of words. The details were horrific. The most heart-wrenching part for me was to see the little boy J in the adult J’s eyes; to see the anguish, pain, bewilderment and betrayal that cried out from those many years ago. In my presence, for the first time in his life, J shared the details of that loss of innocence. He bared his soul. The little boy’s eyes beseeched me to understand, and to not betray or judge him. The hurt in his eyes mirrored what I felt he must see in my own.

Suddenly, I felt a single tear trace its way slowly down my cheek as I listened to J’s story. With that, my soul embraced his and wept. J told me later that my single tear meant more to him than anything I could have said at that moment. It validated him as worthwhile, and it told him, without words, that I walked with him in his pain.

Inside the grown man who had to sleep with the lights on and the bedroom door open, who could barely touch his wife without remembering another kind of touch from his stepbrother, who felt safer in downtown Baltimore than inside his own home, was the little boy who wanted desperately to love and trust and be loved, but felt compelled to withhold himself to be safe.

As a wife and mother, I saw J as a little boy who was ashamed and embarrassed by what had happened to him, who felt responsible for allowing the abuse, and who still struggled with the fact that no one had protected him.

In listening to J’s story, I heard about the desecration of one person’s dignity; yet, I was also witness to the strength, resilience and courage of a little boy. J’s spirit could not be broken. His soul, the very essence of who he was, thrived. I was determined to fan the flickering flame of J’s spirit until it was a bonfire.

As a psychotherapist, I saw that the abuse and its secrecy brought with it shame, low self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, depression, guilt, and PTSD. Where to begin with a man who was stuck developmentally at about 8 years old?

After working with several behavioral modification techniques and guided imagery, I asked J if he had any neighbors or relatives who were about 8 years old. With a picture of a nephew in J’s mind, I asked him to compare the little boy to J’s abuser in size (the perpetrator had been large for his age). I quietly asked if a boy the size of his nephew could have overpowered J’s abuser. Awareness dawned in J’s eyes; it had not been a fair fight,, and there was nothing that any little boy could have done to overpower his attacker. In that moment, J began to forgive himself for not stopping the abuse.

Further into J’s therapy, I suggested that he write a letter to his mother, who had never acknowledged the abuse. J continually struggled with their relationship, and whether or not to have his mother as an influence in his daughter’s life. The relationship was adversarial at best, with only limited communication. The letter writing was for healing, rather than toward the eventual mailing of the letter.

It took several weeks, but at the end of a session, as he made to leave, J put a few handwritten pages face down on the desk. When I read it privately, I cried. J told his mother exactly what happened for all those years; how all he ever wanted was her love and protection. He explained how he realized that he wasn’t responsible for the abuse, and that he was not a bad person. Instead, he was a human being with value who deserved to be loved. J pledged that he would spend the rest of his life protecting his daughter from harm, and becoming a better man. What happened to him would never, ever happen to her.

J’s story does not end here; his recovery would be a complex process. He never mailed the letter, but eventually told his mother all about the abuse during a heated phone call. She responded by denying such a thing happened, and called him a liar. While J hoped that his revelation would finally give him a loving, compassionate mother, he was not surprised by her reaction.

The breakthrough, however, was in J.

The little boy’s voice had finally been heard, and in the release of his secret, his heart was opened to healing. J’s journey was long, with more work and more struggles as he integrated this new J into his marriage. Yet it now included hope for the future. The man could finally forgive, love, and accept the little boy.

The shadows in dark rooms no longer held a threat; J’s eyes saw them flooded with brightness.

My heart saw a little boy at last grown into a man.

Seeing with the eyes of the heart…

__________________________________________

Thursday Re-View — The “Greatest Therapist Award”

The handwriting is looping, the capitalization non-existent, the ragged piece of paper torn on one edge, but with a faint flower at the top. It looks like the effort put into the note is considerable, the pressure of the words seen through the paper from the other side.

It is childlike. It is simple. It is a priceless treasure given to me upon my departure from Community Mental Health that I keep under glass on my desk.

No, it wasn’t written by a child. It was written by a 31-year old woman – a patient for 2 years. A woman-child. A woman whose emotional maturity was paralyzed in early adolescence, when she had several children as a result of sexual abuse by her father…abuse that her mother never stopped. A woman who never finished junior high and who ran away to get away from the monster at home, only to meet more of them on the streets and under the bridge where she slept. Where she did what she could to eat and to take care of her children until Child Protective Services removed them and placed them in Foster Care.

No protection for her, but at least there was for her children. And for the children with different fathers from severed relationships who came after that.

Rape. Childbirth. Physical abuse. Homelessness. Death of one of her children and institutionalization of another. Arrests and incarceration. Drugs and alcohol. Prostitution. Multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations. Emotional abuse.

Self-esteem: zero. Worthlessness: 100%. In her mind, that is. And in the mind of the bruiser of a man whose son she raised as her own, who beat her up regularly, even though she took any and all that he threw at her.

But she never left. Why?

Where could she go?

She had no job – who would hire her? She had no high school diploma, with her jail time checked honestly on every application. Applications where the handwriting would look like it looked in the note above.

But she loved the squirrels outside her window, and had names for each one of them, and when her boyfriend killed one with a BB gun when he was drunk, she carefully dug a hole and buried it while he slept off the rage and the drink.

Until the next time.

Non-compliance with therapy appointments and medications until she realized that I saw past her bravado and resistance to the little girl underneath.

She was hard to like, but her survival instinct was easy to admire.

For several months, she never missed an appointment. I looked over her shoulder while she filled out applications with an agency that was willing to hire people with an arrest record. We picked out an outfit together for her interview, her boyfriend there to have the final approval on what she wore.

She didn’t get the job.

But she finally got a driver’s license so if another opportunity presented itself, she would be ready. She started to study for her GRE but didn’t have the money to sit for the exams. A fairy godmother took care of the fee at the local office that registered people for the review classes that she got thrown out of for being disruptive.

She always had difficulty with anger management, but she was also sleep deprived, since everyone around her did whatever they could to prevent her from studying. She passed all but one part of the exam for her GRE anyway, and got a tutor for the higher math.

Her father got a cancer diagnosis, and she struggled mightily with whether to go see him to tell him that she still loved him as a daughter, or to go see him to kill him for the despicable horrors that he visited upon her as a little girl. Normal feelings for what she had been through, and I daresay far above anything her father would have felt.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, for me, a chance at another job, this one in higher education. One with a secretary to answer the phone and a computer to make appointments, with time off and supplemental help. Nothing like the limited resources of Community Mental Health that wore people out.

For someone who was exhausted with compassion fatigue, it was a relatively easy choice.

But it was so terribly hard to leave the patients in my case load. And she was one of them. Right when she seemed to be making some headway, another person who she had slowly, hesitantly learned to trust was abandoning her.

Who to save? It had to be me. Because I cannot “save” anyone but myself, and I needed to give some of the compassion that I so easily poured into others, to myself.

So everyone was transitioned to new psychotherapists whom I thought would be a ‘good fit,’ and I had enough advance notice to properly ‘terminate’ my clients.

I wish I could tell you that she passed the final portion of her GRE, left what would hopefully be her last abusive relationship and found a full-time job.

But I can’t.

I don’t know what happened to her…not even if she kept her appointments with the new therapist. Not every story has a happy ending, or at least an ending that we are a part of or even privy to.

But I do have the tiny stuffed green frog she gave me on the last day, one she got from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. And I have the “Greatest Therapist Award” next to me on my desk.

Not to remind me of my award, but to remind me of the special woman-child I was so privileged to work with for 2 years.

To remind me of what a survivor looked like…a woman so tough that she was still standing, a woman so gentle that she named each of the squirrels in her back yard.

Thank you for gifting me with a glimpse into your life and sharing things that no one else knew. For keeping a small shred of hope alive even when the voices all around you ridiculed and berated.

I wish you happiness and warmth and smiles; sunshine and rainbows and sweetness.

But most of all, I wish you love.

Pure love. Of yourself and from someone good and decent and kind.

You deserve nothing less.

The privilege was mine, lovely lady. Be well.

You are in my thoughts and in my heart…go out and shine!

____________________________________________

Of Storms Within

S shuffled into my office at the Cancer Center carrying a worn Bible in her left hand. A middle-aged large-boned woman who had never married, she had short gray hair, mens’ jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. With her tired eyes and slumped shoulders, she looked like she hadn’t smiled in years, at least.

S referred herself for issues regarding her role as primary caregiver to a brother who was dying from cancer. For the past 30 years, she had taken care of five different relatives through their cancer illness and death: her mother, brother, sister, aunt, and grandmother.

Thirty years ago, on her deathbed, S’s mother grabbed the collar of S’s blouse and made her daughter swear to “take care of” her brothers and sisters. S still felt her mother’s grip on her throat and on her life.

S fulfilled her promise to the point that she even nursed her aunt through her cancer: the same aunt who, whenever there was a thunderstorm when S was a little girl, made her niece get under the covers of her bed so that she could pray over the “bad girl” that God was punishing with his rage; the same aunt whose son raped and abused S for several years as a pre-teen; the same aunt who, when she found her son sexually abusing 7-year old S, forced the terrified little girl to sit in a washtub while she poured scalding hot water on S, calling her “a filthy whore.”

S, the “bad girl,” felt guilty that she was tired of giving up her life to ungrateful relatives; that she was mad at God for his continued punishment of her; and that she was now seeking counseling help when all of her “Christian friends” [note: her emphasis] told her that it was a sin against God to do so.

S’s spiritual assessment revealed that her paternal grandfather was Native American. When S spoke of him, her voice lowered, her face softened, and her body visibly relaxed. Having died years earlier, S described her grandfather as the only person who had ever shown her love, and the only person whom she could ever trust. He had lived on a farm, and when she visited him as a child, they would walk the fields together, hand in hand. He taught S to respect nature; that she was one with mother earth and all her creatures. The gentleness of her beloved grandfather’s Native American spirit world was distinctly at odds with the punitive God of her mother’s teachings.

A myriad of experiences with my Lakota friend Sonny seeped into my consciousness as I listened to S’s memories (see Mitakuye Oyasin). After several weeks with S, I carefully broached the topic of the dichotomy between what S had learned from her mother and aunt about the “burning pit of fire” that was hell, and S’s quiet certainty that her grandfather lived on peacefully in the spirit world. At times, she even felt his presence around her. S’s eyes widened as she struggled to reconcile the vast differences between those two beliefs. That being enough, we left the discussion for a later time.

The next week, S returned, but without the Bible that her friends had given her. However, she began the session with more accounts of the pressure she continued to receive from her friends about the counseling they viewed to be the “devil’s work.” At her pronouncement, a tiny part of me shuddered, certain that S was going to discontinue therapy. Instead, S went on to say that she put the question of counseling before her grandfather. At home, she had performed her usual ritual of sitting on the floor with his picture, and lighting a candle. She gave him my name and asked what he saw in my heart.

He showed S a majestic, snow-covered mountain with a crystal clear stream running zigzagged down its side. Her grandfather told S that my heart was as pure and deep as the mountain stream, and to trust that I would help her. He promised her that through me, S would come to know God.

The eyes of the heart, used yet another time, in yet another way. In that moment, I heard the echo of Sonny’s voice, raised in a sacred Lakota healing chant. Once again, God enacted His circles of grace.

S stayed with her brother through his death, all the while working on promises kept vs. those that were unreasonable; on justified guilt vs. unjustified; on the completely foreign thought of taking care of herself for once, rather than taking care of everyone else. And of returning to nature, where lightning was simply a weather phenomenon and nothing more. Where once nature had terrified her, now it gave her peace.

After her last session, I noticed that S had left a small grocery bag beneath her chair. I grabbed it and ran after her, only to find that she had disappeared. I asked my secretary to call S and tell her about the package she accidentally left. When I came back from lunch, the package was on my desk, with a note written in my secretary’s handwriting saying that this was for me. I opened it to find a color picture of a river strewn with rocks, the trees up to its edge splashed in fall colors of reds and oranges and golds. S described such a place as a favorite of her and her grandfather’s when they used to take walks together when she was a little girl.

There was a note typed in the corner:

I KNOW

When I see the wind blow gently through the trees,
I know you’re there.
When I stop to see life’s reflections in the rivers and streams,
I know you’re there.
When the scent of the flowers fill the air with their aroma,
I know you’re there.
How do I know you care?
I know you’re there.

Godspeed, S. Be well as you finally begin your own journey. Wherever it takes you, know that He loves you and that He will always be there.

Thank you for the privilege of sitting with you in the darkness. Walk on now, bathed in light, and in peace.

__________________________________________

From a Boy into a Man

He was a nice-looking young man, married, with warm brown eyes that always looked down, as if afraid meeting someone’s gaze would let them in to a place where he didn’t want to go.

His needs were simple – to explore grief-related issues regarding the recent death of his father-in-law. But in therapy, as in most things in life, those simple things can become complex fairly quickly, whether we want them to or not.

Almost 2 months into our sessions together, J had a major disagreement with his wife, during which he revealed to her that someone had sexually abused him as a child for almost 8 years.

Though this rape by his stepbrother occurred nightly, no one in the house was aware of it. If they were, it was neither acknowledged nor stopped.

While J described his rape at the hands of his abuser, I was bereft of words. The details were horrific. The most heart-wrenching part for me was to see the little boy J in the adult J’s eyes; to see the anguish, pain, bewilderment and betrayal that cried out from those many years ago. In my presence, for the first time in his life, J shared the details of that loss of innocence. He bared his soul. The little boy’s eyes beseeched me to understand, and to not betray or judge him. The hurt in his eyes mirrored what I felt he must see in my own.

Suddenly, I felt a single tear trace its way slowly down my cheek as I listened to J’s story. With that, my soul embraced his and wept. J told me later that my single tear meant more to him than anything I could have said at that moment. It validated him as worthwhile, and it told him, without words, that I walked with him in his pain.

Inside the grown man who had to sleep with the lights on and the bedroom door open, who could barely touch his wife without remembering another kind of touch from his stepbrother, who felt safer in downtown Baltimore than inside his own home, was the little boy who wanted desperately to love and trust and be loved, but felt compelled to withhold himself to be safe.

As a wife and mother, I saw J as a little boy who was ashamed and embarrassed by what had happened to him, who felt responsible for allowing the abuse, and who still struggled with the fact that no one had protected him.

In listening to J’s story, I heard about the desecration of one person’s dignity; yet, I was also witness to the strength, resilience and courage of a little boy. J’s spirit could not be broken. His soul, the very essence of who he was, thrived. I was determined to fan the flickering flame of J’s spirit until it was a bonfire.

As a psychotherapist, I saw that the abuse and its secrecy brought with it shame, low self-esteem, sexual dysfunction, depression, guilt, and PTSD. Where to begin with a man who was stuck developmentally at about 8 years old?

After working with several behavioral modification techniques and guided imagery, I asked J if he had any neighbors or relatives who were about 8 years old. With a picture of a nephew in J’s mind, I asked him to compare the little boy to J’s abuser in size (the perpetrator had been large for his age). I quietly asked if a boy the size of his nephew could have overpowered J’s abuser. Awareness dawned in J’s eyes; it had not been a fair fight,, and there was nothing that any little boy could have done to overpower his attacker. In that moment, J began to forgive himself for not stopping the abuse.

Further into J’s therapy, I suggested that he write a letter to his mother, who had never acknowledged the abuse. J continually struggled with their relationship, and whether or not to have his mother as an influence in his daughter’s life. The relationship was adversarial at best, with only limited communication. The letter writing was for healing, rather than toward the eventual mailing of the letter.

It took several weeks, but at the end of a session, as he made to leave, J put a few handwritten pages face down on the desk. When I read it privately, I cried. J told his mother exactly what happened for all those years; how all he ever wanted was her love and protection. He explained how he realized that he wasn’t responsible for the abuse, and that he was not a bad person. Instead, he was a human being with value who deserved to be loved. J pledged that he would spend the rest of his life protecting his daughter from harm, and becoming a better man. What happened to him would never, ever happen to her.

J’s story does not end here; his recovery would be a complex process. He never mailed the letter, but eventually told his mother all about the abuse during a heated phone call. She responded by denying such a thing happened, and called him a liar. While J hoped that his revelation would finally give him a loving, compassionate mother, he was not surprised by her reaction.

The breakthrough, however, was in J.

The little boy’s voice had finally been heard, and in the release of his secret, his heart was opened to healing. J’s journey was long, with more work and more struggles as he integrated this new J into his marriage. Yet it now included hope for the future. The man could finally forgive, love, and accept the little boy.

The shadows in dark rooms no longer held a threat; J’s eyes saw them flooded with brightness.

My heart saw a little boy at last grown into a man.

Seeing with the eyes of the heart…

__________________________________________

The “Greatest Therapist Award”

The handwriting is looping, the capitalization non-existent, the ragged piece of paper torn on one edge, but with a faint flower at the top. It looks like the effort put into the note is considerable, the pressure of the words seen through the paper from the other side.

It is childlike. It is simple. It is a priceless treasure given to me upon my departure from Community Mental Health that I keep under glass on my desk.

No, it wasn’t written by a child. It was written by a 31-year old woman – a patient for 2 years. A woman-child. A woman whose emotional maturity was paralyzed in early adolescence, when she had several children as a result of sexual abuse by her father…abuse that her mother never stopped. A woman who never finished junior high and who ran away to get away from the monster at home, only to meet more of them on the streets and under the bridge where she slept. Where she did what she could to eat and to take care of her children until Child Protective Services removed them and placed them in Foster Care.

No protection for her, but at least there was for her children. And for the children with different fathers from severed relationships who came after that.

Rape. Childbirth. Physical abuse. Homelessness. Death of one of her children and institutionalization of another. Arrests and incarceration. Drugs and alcohol. Prostitution. Multiple suicide attempts and hospitalizations. Emotional abuse.

Self-esteem: zero. Worthlessness: 100%. In her mind, that is. And in the mind of the bruiser of a man whose son she raised as her own, who beat her up regularly, even though she took any and all that he threw at her.

But she never left. Why?

Where could she go?

She had no job – who would hire her? She had no high school diploma, with her jail time checked honestly on every application. Applications where the handwriting would look like it looked in the note above.

But she loved the squirrels outside her window, and had names for each one of them, and when her boyfriend killed one with a BB gun when he was drunk, she carefully dug a hole and buried it while he slept off the rage and the drink.

Until the next time.

Non-compliance with therapy appointments and medications until she realized that I saw past her bravado and resistance to the little girl underneath.

She was hard to like, but her survival instinct was easy to admire.

For several months, she never missed an appointment. I looked over her shoulder while she filled out applications with an agency that was willing to hire people with an arrest record. We picked out an outfit together for her interview, her boyfriend there to have the final approval on what she wore.

She didn’t get the job.

But she finally got a driver’s license so if another opportunity presented itself, she would be ready. She started to study for her GRE but didn’t have the money to sit for the exams. A fairy godmother took care of the fee at the local office that registered people for the review classes that she got thrown out of for being disruptive.

She always had difficulty with anger management, but she was also sleep deprived, since everyone around her did whatever they could to prevent her from studying. She passed all but one part of the exam for her GRE anyway, and got a tutor for the higher math.

Her father got a cancer diagnosis, and she struggled mightily with whether to go see him to tell him that she still loved him as a daughter, or to go see him to kill him for the despicable horrors that he visited upon her as a little girl. Normal feelings for what she had been through, and I daresay far above anything her father would have felt.

Then, seemingly out of nowhere, for me, a chance at another job, this one in higher education. One with a secretary to answer the phone and a computer to make appointments, with time off and supplemental help. Nothing like the limited resources of Community Mental Health that wore people out.

For someone who was exhausted with compassion fatigue, it was a relatively easy choice.

But it was so terribly hard to leave the patients in my case load. And she was one of them. Right when she seemed to be making some headway, another person who she had slowly, hesitantly learned to trust was abandoning her.

Who to save? It had to be me. Because I cannot “save” anyone but myself, and I needed to give some of the compassion that I so easily poured into others, to myself.

So everyone was transitioned to new psychotherapists whom I thought would be a ‘good fit,’ and I had enough advance notice to properly ‘terminate’ my clients.

I wish I could tell you that she passed the final portion of her GRE, left what would hopefully be her last abusive relationship and found a full-time job.

But I can’t.

I don’t know what happened to her…not even if she kept her appointments with the new therapist. Not every story has a happy ending, or at least an ending that we are a part of or even privy to.

But I do have the tiny stuffed green frog she gave me on the last day, one she got from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. And I have the “Greatest Therapist Award” next to me on my desk.

Not to remind me of my award, but to remind me of the special woman-child I was so privileged to work with for 2 years.

To remind me of what a survivor looked like…a woman so tough that she was still standing, a woman so gentle that she named each of the squirrels in her back yard.

Thank you for gifting me with a glimpse into your life and sharing things that no one else knew. For keeping a small shred of hope alive even when the voices all around you ridiculed and berated.

I wish you happiness and warmth and smiles; sunshine and rainbows and sweetness.

But most of all, I wish you love.

Pure love. Of yourself and from someone good and decent and kind.

You deserve nothing less.

The privilege was mine, lovely lady. Be well.

You are in my thoughts and in my heart…go out and shine!

____________________________________________

The Welcome Angel

I met Dannie when her social worker discharge team brought her to my office after more than a year in a residential mental health facility. Probably in her mid-thirties, but looking much older, she was petite, wiry – all coiled muscle – with high cheekbones that validated her ethnic background. Her long hair was held back by a headband across her forehead. Her shoulders were slumped, her skin a pasty gray, with a shuffle in her reluctant steps. Her voice was deep and scratchy, the type that country music would describe as “whiskey and smoke.”

We had nothing in common.

She remained standing after I invited her to be seated, looked up for the first time, met my eyes with a spark in hers and informed me: “You have 5 minutes, and then I’m walking out of here.” Under the spark in her gaze was pain, made all the more marked by the deep circles under her eyes.

I was wrong; we had quite a bit in common.

As I worked with Dannie, I came to know of her struggles with addiction – to alcohol, to prescription drugs, to family conflict and to abusive men. Her present boyfriend was soon to be released from prison, and the rescuer in her struggled with letting him back into her life. I reminded her that if that was her decision, she risked losing the progress she had made with staying sober, not having another suicide attempt (she had two prior to our meeting) and remembering that she, as a human being, had value and worth.

I so hated to see this strong woman – the one who told me that this boyfriend was better than some of her others because “he always made sure to hit me where no one could see it” – lose ground in her healing and recovery. But I believe in the autonomy of my clients – and Dannie needed to feel in control of something, even though I believed that taking control in this instance would be to refuse his coming back to live with her.

Life, like therapy, is never without setbacks, and a new concern was a health issue that flared up, with a prognosis that offered only maintaining her present health and not letting it decline, rather than any type of cure. Coping with that, along with the depression, addiction and everything else, became a daily task.

One day, in Dannie’s latest update on her continuing family conflicts, she asked my opinion about something. Apparently when Dannie went to her mother’s grave site, she saw a wrought iron angel lawn ornament stuck next to the tombstone, the word “Welcome” in big letters. Dannie was horrified and appalled, especially since she found out later that it was her very own sister who had put bought this for their mother, when her sister had a few too many beers. Dannie removed it and threw it away, only to return a week later to find another one in its place. Wasn’t that terrible?

She looked at me, at once aghast, angry, yet expecting no less from her family. Then, I saw it – the faintest gleam in her dark eyes, that fiery spark that only Dannie had after a life filled with 10 kinds of despair. The edges of her mouth curved up a bit, and she looked down at the floor. But I could see her shoulders start to shake. I couldn’t help it – this therapist started to laugh, struggling to keep it private, since Dannie wasn’t looking at me.

Her eyes met mine and we both burst out laughing at the same time; a rollicking, easy, raucous laughter that, I found out later, had quite a few of the other offices in the hall wondering what in the world was happening in Theresa’s office. Dannie and I were bent over, laughing, until tears ran down our faces. An angel in a cemetery – okay, but a welcome angel?

The absurdity of it caught us both, and in that moment, for Dannie and me, there was nothing else but our sharing joyously in something macabre, yet somehow, in some way, making sense in the larger scheme of things. It felt good and it felt right; it was beautiful. We collected ourselves, then were able to segue perfectly into her own fears about dying, a topic which she had always skirted in the past.

Unexpectedly, I left that job to take another position that I felt called to, and with a month until my departure, I said my goodbyes to Dannie. I felt certain she would be in good hands with the therapist assigned to take over her case. Our 5 minutes that turned into a few years was done, and I was proud of her progress and transformation. When she thanked me for saving her life, saying that she’d never forget me, I answered that she did the work, and that it was a privilege for me to have been part of even a small portion of her life journey. I also mentioned that whenever I saw a wrought iron welcome angel, I would think of her and the laughter we shared.

Not long after, I heard that Dannie had passed away. “Oh no…” My sadness was immediate. I was afraid to ask, but I had to ask, how she died. A suicide? No. An overdose? No. As a result of physical abuse? No. The answer – “of natural causes” related to the condition we knew about. Her body shut down; it was time.

I breathed a sigh of relief. At the time of her death, Dannie was sober and still living on her own, having refused to take back the abusive boyfriend. It was unfortunate, but it was a good death. Yes – a good death.

Now, whenever I see an angel lawn ornament, I smile, think of Dannie and send her a prayer.  Sometimes, I can almost hear her laughter, but then I realize it was only the wind. (Maybe. Then again, maybe not…)

Thank you, Dannie, for the gift of your generous and strong spirit. You mattered.  You made a difference.  You shine in my heart, and in my memory. I am so blessed.