They are going to college

 

My three high school seniors graduated with valiant effort and are now heading to college. One to distant though within-state Reno, another to San Francisco where she might wear some flowers in her hair, the third staying local but with stringent, nay mer­ci­less plans to transfer on and eventually work in chemical engineering for the govern­ment. They are all capable of follow­ing their dream or meeting a goal. It’s hard to ex­press how deeply touched, how good I feel about them. And in some surprise, that’s hardly from any notion that I might have been some small part of their success. It actu­ally feels more associ­ational than causal, as if I had just been there to watch them make it.

Some introspection, clarification. None of my three lost their depression, which was there from the beginning: I saw them all for two years. Let us be realistic. Depression is planted in the earliest years, in a home where the child’s feelings do not prosper. As bright, parent-like, disrup­­tive and inspira­tional as I’d like to have been, I could not change their roots, which must con­tinue to feed them. In fact, a part of me always assumes that the feeling-centered depth therapy approach, where even teens are coun­tenanced to feel their worst about self and family, is a double-edged sword. These kids are not pointed in a predominately positive-looking, positive-thinking direc­tion, but instead are supported at a deeper level. This is not in service of Truth as an abstract value (as Bertrand Russell said that children should always be told the truth). It comes from my passion­ate care for any child’s emotional truth, which is the only place I can be with her in care. Bettel­heim was right: “I speak here of the child’s private world . . . Each of us is imply­ing in his way that one cannot help another in his ascent from hell unless one has first joined him there.”*

Take the chemistry of depression, change some of that general suffering to pointed pain: the specific injuries in the home which they could now express out of them; and in time find the depres­sion leavened. Add a companion – two of my teens attended nearly every week; the other flitted in and out – and the “leaving home” stage of moving out of childhood is made easier. Maybe not a great deal easier, but enough.

This is my formula, wishful or real. Based on it, might I predict whether they will keep in touch with me when they’re in college, and maybe even through their years there? I suspect they won’t. Because depth therapy worked to give them themselves, not to give them me.

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* The Empty Fortress, 1967, p. 10.