Another day, another ambivalent dollar (Tim, Kevin, Bobby)

One would think that my twenty-five years of doing individual therapy and crisis would have given me good instincts with just about any client. However, a recent session may cast doubt. This was a 15-year-old boy brought to the center by his custodial maternal grandmother. She was one of those countless elders who had raised a failed, drugged, gangster moll daughter, yet you’d never suspect it of her, of course, from the naïf, sweet, caring manner.

“Tim's mother left him a year ago. She’d shack up for weeks with her men – a lot of them.” “He was her whipping boy. She blamed him for everything.” After the session, I wrote: “He is a man of almost no words.” I came to learn that he had no hobbies besides video games, had no strong feelings or desires, no motivation for school. His face was neutral, manikin-like. “There was an atmosphere of muteness” that suggested an understimulation similar to what I’d seen in 1995 in my new Little Brother. I remember visiting 10-year-old Kevin’s home for the first time. My assumption was that there’d be a single foster parent out of her league. Instead, the door was opened by a skinny 12-year-old girl as both biological parents sat in their easy chairs, watching television. The father had mild MR, the mother had . . . him. They were understimulating.

Tim was not "challenged." For a label, he was seriously dysthymic. Underneath that was grief and the other colors of the volcano. He drew Oaklander’s “Small Boat in a Big Storm.” The drawing was depression-simple and stark. But the narrative: “The boat is floating to the bottom because of the waves. It will be gone.” How is it feeling? “Scared, overwhelmed, maybe no hope of escaping the storm. One big wave got it.” He said he could sometimes feel that way.

In the tenth session I talked for an hour. The weeks up to that point, nothing had engaged him, he had offered nothing though was OK to answer questions. Now I wanted to be stimulating, while speaking not good news. I told him I didn’t think we could do any serious therapy, because that would mean thinking about his mother in a way that would be harmful to a young teen. Adults can sometimes be strong enough to condemn a parent, but a child cannot. There may be occasions where it would be necessary to ask an adolescent to look for his deeper feelings: if he were severely depressed or delinquent or violent or extremely defiant or self-harmful. None of these was true of him. But, I said, this didn’t mean he was fine. I told him about Bobby, the happy-go-lucky adjudicated 16-year-old I’d worked with at a residential treatment center in Ohio. I had bet him that deep under his chipper surface, he was “always angry.” He accepted the bet and lost. After some minutes of closed-eyed silence, he said: “You’re right. There’s a wrong feeling in there, in me.” I told Tim that Bobby was righter than I had been: “Wrong” was not just anger. It was burnt-in hurt, frustration, self-isolation, fear. I said: “I believe this is you, too.”

The session was ending, and I left my client with an inexcusable ambivalence. I said that while I wouldn’t ever push him to talk about his past, his mother, he might want to think about the hurt and anger under his calm surface. He could talk about these things if he ever wanted to. I’m saying that this wasn’t fair of me, because where did he think we could go now, a young man who brought no positives, no energy to the session? But I’m sure the grandmother will bring him back, probably week after week. I always have a perverse hope for my clients. And I’m sure she will need to to continue expiating guilt with virtue.