Only the beginning

Fall has officially arrived, but only barely. I can’t wait until the leaves burst into their true glory. These are some trees outside our living room window that have started to turn. I really noticed them this morning. The pictures don’t do them justice; they’re stunningly gorgeous, and a lot more pink than they appear in these pics. But they’re pretty anyway.

Your mama’s not around, there’s no telling what we’ll do when we’re free

It occurred to me recently that I’ve become one of those boring old people that lionizes their youth beyond all recognition, despite the fact that I hated it when I was stuck in it (of course). This has come to my attention more starkly lately because I’ve been writing a young adult novel based on my youth. Not quite autobiographical, but not completely fiction, either. The events (mostly) are fictitious; the people, and the settings, not so much. The characters are all thinly veiled or composites, which, I guess, isn’t really so unusual for fiction.

What writing the book has done, is re-engage me with all of the things I did love about that age of the early 90’s, the summer of 1994 to be exact, especially the music and the aesthetic. It’s funny, because one cultural marker I keep returning to over and over while I’m writing is that appalling movie KIDS. How I loathe that film for its faux nihilism and reveling in violence both physical and emotional while pretending to condemn it. Besides, it’s just boring as hell. But man, I love the aesthetic of that film. I imagine my novel to be the anti-KIDS. Yes, my book contains a teenage suicide, some drugs, sex, a little violence, a gun. Kids wandering wild through the endless and desolate night (nothing new when it comes to teenagers, really). But those kids are me, and my friends, and things we really did and experienced, and while the kids also hate it at the time, I’m looking back at it through a lens smeared with the vaseline of nostalgia and longing. I get the feeling that Larry Clark filmed KIDS with a feeling of resentment and a giant boner, which is never a good combination. I also realize that KIDS came out in 1995, a year after my book takes place, but that’s irrelevant; the song remains the same.

It’s been really fun listening to a lot of music from that era that I loved, but haven’t listened to in a long time: old Hole, Automatic For the People, Nirvana, Little Earthquakes, a lot of random punk, some industrial (My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, Ministry), Green Day, old Rancid, Smashing Pumpkins, Sonic Youth, and lots of 80’s music that my friends and I ate up at that point, like The Smiths, Concrete Blonde, New Order, Jesus and Mary Chain. If there is one song, though, that I’ve listened to over and over and over that I feel gets me in the mood to write, it’s “Natural One,” by Folk Implosion, which, yes, was from KIDS. And it’s just a fucking awesome song. I’ve also been pretty inspired by some newer music as well, though, that I think fits the tone and ambiance of the book, like Frightened Rabbit, Bon Iver (who I’m in love with right now), Blonde Redhead, and just in the last week, Big Pink.

It’s weird how much I feel like I’m siphoning off of that movie for my writing, but it’s almost like an attempt to rewrite that movie and get it right. One of my characters is even based, in a strange way, on Chloe Sevigny, probably my favorite actress, and to me, someone who represents a true adult product of that era that’s still around. I don’t know if anyone else remembers this Details layout, but I do, and I loved it. I really wanted to be those kids, at least until I saw the movie.

There was, without a doubt, a serious strain of nihilism and hedonism running through youth culture at that time, far more than now, I think. If Kurt Cobain was considered the spokesman for my generation, then it was nothing but shattered idealism and hopelessness. In some ways, the book I’m writing is a recognition, I think, of that pervasive feeling and attitude with which we all grew up, but also an attempt to move past it, to acknowledge that youthful malaise with a weary, but much wiser, adult sensibility, and to finally acknowledge that people like Cobain are no role models, and I kind of hope my future kids know who he is, but either think he’s just as much of a douche as I do, or that they just don’t care. I can’t quite concede that kids are better off with Lady GaGa than with Courtney Love, but maybe they are. Who knows.

Hopefully I’ll finish the damn book. I’ve written up to and a little past the climactic point, and the rest is all come-down and denouement. It’s been a lot of fun to write so far, and I hope that someone will find it a lot of fun to read someday. I’m writing primarily with a contemporary teenage audience in mind, but there’s definitely a part of me that hopes 30-something’s will pick it up and feel as nostalgic and silly reading it as I do writing it.

Lock & Load

Yesterday was one of the worst days of work ever. In addition to it just being totally nuts and out of control and violent for 10 hours, some kid got her hand crushed in our big, magnetic doors that go outside. Every door in every unit on the entire campus locks from both sides, and every staff has a master key that works for all of them. But they lock through these weird magnet things mounted on then, and they’re extremely heavy and spring loaded that they won’t stay open unless something equally heavy can prop it (I guess this is partly because of the magnets and partly for protective purposes).

So, we have two fenced-in yards in the crevice part of the L-shaped building where the ends of two separate units meet. When kids get particularly violent, sometimes we can just do a “transport” with two people and toss them outside, since we’re a lock-down facility; they can’t get out of the yard, though many have tried. That’s particularly useful when kids are setting up the entire unit and it looks like things could blow and then you have a small mutiny on your hands. And no one wants that.

So, on the unit that adjoins the unit where I usually work is the SCIP unit, where the worst of the worst kids go. And not always the “worst” in terms of behavior, but the ones who need the most care: the hyper-violent, yes, but also the psychotic, and the ones that need the most one-on-one attention. For instance, this is the only unit of 4 on the campus where the “staff counter,” where the computers, phones, etc. are kept, is enclosed in the same unbreakable plastic that is all over the rest of the campus where you might normally find glass, such as on windows. In every other unit, the counters are open. I cut my teeth on this unit when I first started working there, and I’ve occasionally had the opportunity to go back and work a shift, or part of a shift, but I don’t relish it.

So last night I came in from doing a restraint on one of our own kids in the hall, when my boss asked if I could go over to SCIP and help them out. I could already hear the blood-curdling screaming echoing off the walls, so I groaned and said, “Sure,” because that’s what you do. I knew shit was going down, but I didn’t know what.

So I get over there, and there are only two boys on the unit, but they’re going batshit crazy, and there are already 3 male staff over there trying to make sure they don’t get violent. I became the fourth. Just outside the door leading to the yard was the new girl, who’s completely insane, lying on the ground, screaming like she’s being tortured, surrounded by several staff, a nurse, and a therapist. As it turns out, they were tossing her outside (which, as it turns out, is against regulation….) when she ran back toward the door (which they always do when you throw them outside) and someone slammed it – catching her hand. Which then became stuck because the doors automatically lock because of the magnets. The kids in general there get very protective of each other when they’re not trying to kill each other, and when one kid gets genuinely hurt, they other kids freak out and think the staff are trying to kill them. (I won’t even go into the restraint I had to do with another staff a few weeks ago outside on a teenage boy who had a bloody nose that eventually got blood everywhere, and the kids starting ganging up on us because they thought the staff had bloodied him up, and there were no other staff around to help us, and it was really scary. And gross.) Which is why the two boys on the unit, two of the most violent and aggressive and crazy on the whole campus, were freaking out. The situation was eventually defused.

I don’t know who slammed the door on her hand, or what’s going to happen to them, because the girl is in DHS custody, and someone’s head will have to roll for it. But at least two of her fingers were crushed, literally, everything ripped off down to the bone. Gone.

To give you an idea of the environment in which I work, when the Team Leader for that unit came back inside and I asked if there was anything further I could do to help, she very matter-of-factly said that after they took her to the hospital, someone needed to clean up the large pool of blood on the step outside, and the chunks of skin that were all over the door. Then smiled at me.

Which immediately made me queasy, combined with the chilling screams I’m sure the entire city was hearing, and as soon as possible I sneaked back to my own unit and avoided any further blood or chunks of skin cleaning up duty.

Being physically and verbally assaulted non-stop by 11 pre-teens was preferable to that. This is what I do for money.

Change cracks everything open

So it seems that our fortunes in Portland have shifted yet again, and my and Tom’s plan to stay another year after I graduate next fall will most likely fall by the wayside. We both really love the city, and in some ways, it’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived (of course, I’ve only lived in 5 places), but neither of us especially want to stay here long-term. We both want to go back to Austin, probably sooner rather than later, but we’re leaving our options open.

Tom is steadfastly preparing to apply to graduate schools for a PhD program for next fall, which could basically take us anywhere (I’m crossing my fingers for UT or somewhere in North Carolina, but I’m open). I’ve also made a few tentative decisions of my own. I’ve been struggling with the idea of going on and pursuing my own PhD in Counseling, but I haven’t been super excited about it. There are several reasons for this, too nuanced and boring to go into here, but one decision I think I’ve made recently is that I’m no longer sure I want to focus primarily on therapy as a future career goal. I know, I know, it’s all I’ve talked about going on 4 years now. I still very much want to be involved in the mental health industry, but maybe in a slightly different capacity, with just doing some counseling on the side.

I’m not sure that sitting in a room by myself listening to people talk all day long is the best thing for me. I’m a social creature by nature, a doer, I like to be involved and be in the middle of things. I thrive on being active, and useful, and collaborating. Which has been leading me to believe more recently that maybe a career in social work would be more up my alley. I love non-profits, and organizations, and groups of people coming together to do something, and advocate.

A friend of mine here just started PSU’s combined Master’s in Social Work/Master’s in Public Health program, and I’ll be really anxious to hear what he thinks about it. Public Health is something in which I’ve become very interested in lately, but in a social welfare sense, not a medical sense. A degree like that would prepare me to manage or run non-profits, among many other things. I guess what I need to find out is whether or not a degree like that would really be necessary to work in the upper echelons of community service groups. I suppose it couldn’t hurt, regardless.

I enjoy doing therapy, but in the grand scheme of things, what most helps combat my inner darkness and despair at the fate of the world is being active. This is something I have discovered about myself over the past year or so. It’s good to know. I’m often completely overwhelmed by my own feelings of inadequacy or powerlessness, and in no small way, enriching my own community is a nice balm for that.

I’ve mostly given up on politics, especially at the federal level, to do anything meaningful to make the world a more equitable, hospitable, and kind place to live. It’s not going to happen. But if I can help make the place that I live kinder, gentler, and existing maybe just a little easier for a few people, perhaps my battered idealism can survive – bruised and tattered, but still flying proudly.

Not that I don’t think counseling alone can do that, but organizational power gets me excited. I’m not sure I’m ready to turn around and go back to school yet right away next year, but it’s something I’m looking at. When Tom figures out for sure where he’s applying, I’ll look there as well and see what’s on offer. Right now I’m still trying to just live in the moment, working a lot, spending a lot of hours at my internship, and enjoying myself.

Compassion Fatigue

Everyone in the “helping professions” feels it from time to time. They warn us about it in school and make sure we take time for “self care.” People who don’t take time for themselves are the ones that burn out. I didn’t think I would start feeling it quite so soon, but I think my particular case has more to do with my job with the imprisoned children than with anything else. My reservoir of compassion for dealing with constant disrespect and violence (and getting bloodied in the line of duty) is running dry.

Or maybe I’m just feeling fatigued. Been having an extremely difficult time getting out of bed in the mornings. Maybe sleeping too much. Fighting off allergies so bad that I’m having sinus headaches for days that make me nauseous. I’m resisting the idea that maybe it’s a low-grade depression setting in. The days are already so short. It’s raining more. The sky has been gray, and the days chilly and windy. I love fall; I’m looking forward to the crisp air and leaves changing, but dreading the gray skies and rain. Conversations with long-time Portlanders has again started to turn to UV lamps installed in living rooms and above headboards. I’m so worried about healthcare reform that my stomach is in knots and it keeps me awake. Before there was the potential for anything to be better, it was tolerable (barely). But now that we’ve gotten so close to such a better world, having it slip away will be devastating.

But the internship is going really well. I’m loving some of my clients, and doing really good work, which is pleasing me a great deal. There are some other organizations in town I’m super excited to maybe start getting involved with (like this one that I totally have a crush on, and that SMYRC is going to start working with in some capacity, and that thrills me) in all of my free time (*snort*). This city has such incredible social service agencies. It’s so inspiring. Too bad it’s totally fucked in almost every other capacity. The city can’t even pay schoolteachers anymore, so they’re just firing them all. During the last legislative session, the governor warned (perhaps somewhat hyperbolically) that if teachers want to keep schools open, they should start working for free. It’s incredibly depressing. Oregon is officially broke and jobless.

But I’m happy overall. With my internship. My clients. School. My little nest with my boyfriend and my kitten and my warm books. Leonard Cohen at the Isle of Wight in 1970 on the TV right now.

RAD

This past week I was assigned to read an article for class entitled “Reactive Attachment Disorder: What We Know About the Disorder and Implications for Treatment” from a professional journal titled simply Child Maltreatment. Reactive Attachment Disorder is a nebulous “disorder” applied broadly to children who, primarily, have suffered abuse and neglect from their primary caregivers before the age of 5, who then have difficulty forming close bonds with any other caregivers, and which presumably carries into later life, making it difficult for the child to form close bonds with anyone. Their relationships are generally marked by anxiety, distrust, fear, heightened arousal, hostility, etc. This can also, paradoxically, especially in young children, lead to indiscriminate affection, generally to strangers, which, in later life, can manifest in highly dependent or co-dependent relationships when the person with “reactive attachment disorder” hasn’t learned effective coping skills or age-appropriate self-care skills.

There is a lot of controversy surrounding the diagnosis in general (like, whether or not it even actually exists, for starters), but that’s not what I wanted to write about. Particularly when studying treatments for children, in the past there have many, many ill-conceived therapies and treatment methods with absolutely zero emperical basis in effectiveness, and in this article, the authors extensively review some of the more discounted and troubling treatments people in the past have used to treat RAD. Sometimes when you read these things you just slap your forehead and wonder what on Earth these “professionals” and “doctors” could possibly be thinking. And I quote:

One of the more controversial and more well known of these treatments is the coercive technique, also known as holding, attachment, or rage reduction therapy. As critiqued by James (1994), these types of techniques involve three primary components: prolonged restraint for purposes other than protection, prolonged noxious stimulation (e.g., tickling, poking in the ribs), and interference with bodily functions. More specifically, treatment appointments are scheduled in which several adults hold the child immobile for a prolonged time period. This restraining is not related to the child’s immediate behavior, and the procedure may be repeated daily. During the restraining period, the clinician actively attempts to provoke and arouse the child by providing noxious stimulation such as yelling repeatedly in the child’s face, poking or tapping the child, tickling, or pulling on limbs. The child may try to resist by screaming, fighting, or crying, but eventually breaks down. When the child reaches the point of surrender, he is then given to his caregiver(s), to whom he reportedly instantly attaches…the child is theorized to have repressed rage, which is interfering with his ability to form an attachment. The prolonged restraint, noxious stimulation, and interference with bodily functions are theorized to release the rage and teach the child that adults can and will control him. He is then thought to be capable of forming a healthy attachment. Parents may be told that this is the only way to keep their child from becoming a serial killer, murderer, or psychopath, and that alternative conventional treatments will not work for their child.

As someone who works with kids who could probably every single one be described as having some sort of reactive attachment whatever, I feel like I at least partially understand the desperation some parents, foster parents, or adoptive parents must feel when trying to deal with their kids. And as someone who does have to engage in “non-violent physical crisis intervention” holds on children who are getting violent, I can tell you that it’s awful, and makes you feel a little bit like a monster every time you have to do it. But in that case, the kids are displaying an imminent threat to themselves or someone else, and that’s what you have to do to keep everyone safe.

I don’t even know where to begin with what’s been described above.

A few witches burning gets a little toasty

I’ve been working for over 2 weeks now trying to come up with some sort of intelligent response to the comments written by Catherine on my last post. I don’t want to write a defense of myself, really, nor do I want to dispute her arguments, because I think they’re good ones. I think the reason I’ve had so much trouble coming up with a reasonable response is because I don’t really know how I feel. About what I wrote or about religion in general. Surprisingly enough.

Right after I wrote that last post, I had some time between clients at my practicum, and I picked up a book that was sitting on my office shelf called Gay Spirit (I’m always sort of amused by such titles), and flipped open to a random page. As it happened, I opened the book up to an essay by a gay priest called something like, “Telling a lie for Christ,” all about the relationship between the church and gays. God had been co-opted, he argued, by the haters, who acted as if they owned God and had some special privilege to how God was portrayed and worshipped in our society, and gay people had simply let this happen, thusly cutting themselves off from a rich storehouse of art, philosophy, ritual, community, and spirituality. The church has always had a rocky relationship with gay people, condemning their desires and lives to the fires of hell, while at the same time, many saints were known and obvious homosexuals (not to mention all the priests, bishops, ministers, and nuns who are gay), many of them living in times, places, and eras that didn’t frown so vehemently upon such things as western culture now does. The author also philosophized that much of this hatred of homosexuality in western culture has come about through our own utilitarianism. Everything in our culture must serve a purpose, and be useful in some tangible way, and the idea of homosexuality throws this belief into a tailspin. After all, homosexuals just have sex for the sake of having sex (gasp! no one else does that!), and not for the sole purpose of reproduction. Likewise in our society, art for the sake of art is frowned upon, because really, what could possibly be a bigger waste of time than simply creating art for the sake of enjoying it, or just to marvel at its wonder, beauty and possibility? I’m not sure why else one would bother creating art, actually, unless, of course, it is for the purpose of worshipping Jesus. Interesting theory.

Everything I would like to say about this subject would obviously never be able to fit into a single blog post. And while I think Catherine (full disclosure: she’s my cousin) has some great points, particularly that if my main concern about my own civil rights is a largely governmental one, why would I encourage and support protesting in churches? Well, I suppose my answer to that is that despite “official” separation of church and state, religion still has such a death-grip on politics in this country that until the church releases, government never will. And frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever back down from my love and support of theatrical protest, and I don’t necessarily think the example of the church protest that I wrote about was the wrong thing to do. Maybe the church and me just have some irreconcilable differences and we really should just call it a day. I resent that it is encumbent upon me to do the reconciling, and I won’t do it. Not anytime soon. I have been too hurt and felt too threatened by the church to simply extend the olive branch and smile peacefully. (Besides, theatrical protest can often change the course of events on major social issues.)

When I went to Portland Pride this year, I was shocked at the number of churches that participated in the parade. And not just fringy new-age or Unitarian churches. Methodist and Catholic churches. Marching alongside everyone else, with their rainbow banners and their frumpy middle-aged congregations, smiling and waving at the drag queens and half-naked, glitter-covered party boys. I guess that’s pretty ballsy, even in a city like Portland, and I have to respect and admire it on some level. But it doesn’t preclude me from thinking that they’re still part of the problem. Liberal and loving of the gays or not, you’re still a Catholic church that is engaged in an economic exchange with one of the most hypocritical, hateful, oppressive, and violent organizations in the world. And from that stance, I will not back down or apologize.

A wholesale rejection of god and faith is not conducive to moving forward in a so-called liberal democracy. I understand that. Religion will never go away, and I can acknowledge that religion can do a lot of good in the world and in people’s lives. But I can fully reject the hatred, fear and violence that comes along with evangelicalism and the right-wing in the United States (and elsewhere). Even though I feel deeply inside that there is something besides us out there, and some kind of spiritual world (though I would never be so arrogant as to assume that I know what it is, where it comes from or what it means), I believe that the idea of a benevolent personal god who hears prayers and has a vested interest in our outcomes as humans is ridiculous and ultimately trivializes the massive wonder and majesty of the spiritual world that I do believe exists.

This is my latest epiphany in my thinking about this stuff. It’s fun to think about. I enjoy it. I just wish that so many other people who are religious and claim to have a relationship with “god” enjoyed thinking about it as much as I do. If they did, they probably wouldn’t be filled with such fear and disingenuous certainty and fortitude that makes them so certain I am a cretin and a demon. That is not spirituality, that is politics. And until we reasonably untangle the two things in this country, I don’t know that a reasonable and open dialogue is possible.

Maybe these are my people

The liberal, feel-good, pseudo-hippie part of my personality thinks we can all sit down and get to know each other and overcome our bigotry, but another (much, much larger) part of me thinks the days of talking are coming to a swift end, and it’s time to just go kick some ass. It’s turned into a war out there (begun and stoked daily, I might add, by the right wing, who thrives on the hatred and intimidation), and it’s interesting to me that the religious leaders and followers in this country talk their shit and incite their violence every day of the week, but as soon as some militant political group hangs a banner on their church, the church is suing, and running scared.

Get used to it, bitches. There’s more of it coming.

It was not a happy homecoming. About 20 activists formed a picket line out front while a dozen others snuck inside to disrupt the service. One faction rose to chant, “Jesus was a homo,” while flinging pamphlets, glitter, and condoms into the air. Another dropped an 18-foot BASH BACK! banner from the balcony. As ushers scrambled to collect the condoms, two women moved toward the pulpit, where they launched into a lusty kiss.

The response was harsh from nearly all camps. The local paper described the protest as “boorish” and “self-defeating.” Chuck Norris, a well-known conservative, condemned it in a blog post, and Bill O’Reilly, who branded the group a mob of gay terrorists, called on Michigan attorney general Mike Cox to take a stand. Cox declined, but Bash Back!’s members remain wary of outsiders. It took me three months to arrange this meeting.

“I guess we did scare the shit out of them,” Mel says. “It was awesome,” adds Andy. “It’s a pray-the-gay-out-of-you place. Gays should be there protesting every day.”

Yes, it’s a Details article, so it should probably be taken with a grain of salt. I like it, though. I like it a lot. (And any group that harasses parishioners in church is usually pretty okay by me.)

There will be an answer

On this blog, it is my prerogative to have epiphanies about things everyone else already knows and understands and accepts, and then write about said epiphanies as if what I have written is a revelation of some sort and I am a genius. This tends to happen to me most of all when I read anything old, such as old literature, or old non-fiction books, and I realize that the world has never really been any different than it is now, and the ways of the righteous, the progressive, and the liberal pretty much always win out in the end because it is, in fact, the prerogative of evolution to be inherently liberal. This happened to me in a very big way this week reading Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck, in which Steinbeck, in 1960, with his poodle, Charley, drives in a camper 10,000 miles from one side of America to the other, then back again. It’s a fascinating travelogue filled with lots of witty, sensitive insight about this great and tragic country we call the United States of America.

What I think I found most interesting were his complaints about the homogenization of America; the obliteration of regional dialects because of television; the new big business agriculture which was just starting to take hold in the country, and which Steinbeck quite rightly predicted would eventually make us all sick and kill us; how bland the food is; and how vehicles, traffic, highways, and the rapidly expanding suburbs were beginning to strangle our culture and lifeblood and turn our once vibrant, diverse and exciting cities into lifeless tombs.

What aroused in me something besides smug validation, though, was the fourth part of the book, where Steinbeck writes extensively about traveling through Texas (a land he says people either passionately love or passionately hate, and while he kindly withholds judgment, he makes it pretty clear where his feelings lie), and then through New Orleans to witness a group of women who call themselves “the Cheerleaders” in action. At the time these “bestial and filthy” women were making national headlines by standing outside a federally segregated school (it must have been nice to live in an era when politicians, and especially presidents, had a spine) to daily scream at, harass, curse, threaten, and try their damnedest to intimidate a single tiny (described as a “mite” by Steinbeck) black girl attending an all-white school. Steinbeck’s account of being privy not only to these women but the crowd of hundreds who came every morning and every afternoon to cheer the “cheerleaders” on, is heart-wrenching. The hate and fear that resided in all of these people’s blackened hearts must have been a terrifying sight to behold, and while I was reading this chapter with an increasingly heavy heart, it reminded me of what is happening in the United States today, most notably the feverish bile on full and proud display in the “town hall meetings” happening around the country. As my new favorite writer Joe Bageant wrote recently regarding health care reform:

Ideology has utterly triumphed. It has separated us from ourselves and built itself a home inside our consciousness, from whence it operates now as our reality. There is no going back, only forward. Given that we are a nation of children who prefer to close our eyes and make a hopeful wish with Tinkerbelle, rather than give hope the piss test, then let us hope to high hell. We may as well go for broke. So let us hope that, in going forward, new and unforeseen developments in the national consciousness occur. Developments that offer an escape from this one so deeply colonized by the corpo-political machinery we created — and which in turn recreated us. One that will break us loose from enthrallment. Maybe collision with a giant asteroid. Or that Garth Brooks will be barred from making a fifth comeback tour. That’s one hope. A consciousness shattering event by American standards.

Another hope is for an absolute and total collapse of the system.

“Progress” has been referred to in metaphor as giving birth: it’s ugly, noisy, and messy, and god damn, it hurts like hell, but in the end, it’s worth it. This has been the case throughout history.

Steinbeck makes the astute hypothesis that the South is so unwelcoming to outsiders because when a person (or a society) is ashamed of what they are doing, they don’t like to have witnesses to said shameful behavior because they then view the witnesses as the ones causing the trouble, like the guy Steinbeck meets in Louisiana who, when he sees his New York license plates, says to him, “It’s the goddamn New York Jews cause all the trouble.”

As scary as the South is now, it must have been one of the scariest places on Earth in the early 1960’s. Steinbeck was so disturbed and troubled by his experience in New Orleans that he aborted the rest of his trip and drove straight home, deflated and depressed, back to New York.

Many things have changed and improved in the United States since 1960, but there will always be new enemies, new progress to fight and rebel against, and new groups of people to hate and oppose and fear. But always, the rage, the bile, the hatred, the violence, the fear, the clinging to the old and inefficient ways of conducting business, is a direct response to progress, to the inevitable march forward and on to better things.

There is at least some comfort in that.

In Treatment Season 1

Watching HBO’s series In Treatment is both fascinating and exciting and incredibly tedious. Which, as it turns out, is also kind of how therapy in general is. It’s a gimmicky premise, but one that works quite effectively: when it’s on television, it runs every night of the week, Monday through Friday, for 9 weeks, giving it a 45-episode arc. But each day of the week focuses on the same client. Like, every Monday’s episode is Laura, every Tuesday’s episode is Alex, and so on. Then on Friday, Dr. Paul Weston goes to see his own shrink and one-time supervisor, Gina, played by Dianne Wiest, who is always fun to watch. And if you know the intricate details of the therapeutic world, that last sentence should have raised a red flag: Dr. Weston’s shrink used to be his supervisor, which qualifies as a dual role, and is a questionable ethical decision, and thus, you have much of the tension of the show.

Not on this relationship specifically, though there is a lot of interesting tension between the two of them, but on relationships in general. In Treatment is actually written by a team of therapists, so apparently, what goes on in Dr. Weston’s office is very much like the true therapeutic experience. Problem is, being scripted, Dr. Weston is a brilliant psychotherapist and always seems to know exactly what to say to his clients. But what In Treatment does so well is slowly peel back the onion layers of each of his clients to painfully reveal their true selves. The show brilliantly presents the characters as often being one way in the beginning, but then proving that the only way to truly get to know someone, if that’s even really possible, is by spending a whole lot of time with them. In therapy is, theoretically, when people are supposed to be most themselves, and this can also apply to the doctors.

The most problematic client is Laura, a loose-cannon anesthesiologist, who is young, beautiful, highly sexual, and extremely damaged. She replaces intimacy with sex, and it is revealed in the first episode that she is madly in love with Dr. Weston, her therapist. While it is not immediately clear what Dr. Weston’s feelings are about this, it becomes so very soon. The idea of therapists and patients falling in love with each other (or at the very least being very sexually attracted to each other) is not a new one, and there is a whole code of ethics surrounding it, including how long therapists should wait to have a relationship with a client after terminating therapy (5 years), and so on. It is also soon revealed that Paul has plenty of marital troubles of his own, and away we go!

Having said that, however, there is no real plot to speak of on In Treatment. The tension and “stories” come from each client’s sessions, and their own unique development and arcs. It’s a whole show where people literally sit around and talk to each other on couches. That’s pretty much it. I don’t think you have to be someone particularly interested in the therapeutic process to enjoy the show, or be moved by it; you just have to be someone that is fascinated by people. It’s definitely the ultimate in character development.

In addition to Laura, there is Sophie, who was my favorite character, a teenage gymnast who may or may not have deliberately tried to kill herself and has some serious Daddy issues. She comes across as the most believable, and, to me, the most sympathetic, maybe because she’s a kid who has been taken advantage of by adults for her entire life and has a wellspring of rage and resentment to show for it. (And perhaps this is a good harbinger that in my own practice I should stick to working with kids; I think they’re inherently more sympathetic.) I also thought her arc was the most fascinating and rewarding.

But there is also Alex, the fighter pilot who accidentally dropped a bomb on a madras in Iraq, killing 16 school boys, and claims to have no guilt about it, despite the fact that before he started therapy he went running one day and didn’t stop until he had a heart attack. His is possibly the most surprising character, and even though his story ends pretty unsatisfyingly, it doesn’t feel arbitrary or half-assed.

Much like when you meet a person in real life, it took me a while to get into In Treatment, for the characters to grow on me, and for me to get invested in their stories. Of course the whole therapeutic process angle of it fascinated me, even if the characters made me crazy, but I guess that’s therapy for you. And it’s weird: when I finally finished the first season last night, I realized I’d spent only 4 hours with each character (less time with some of them), but I felt like I really knew them, and really understood them, and if I met them in real life I would have some idea of how to relate to them. And that, to me, is a powerful testament to therapy in general, and why I love this field so very much.