Lessons on Humanity for the Adolescent Service Provider

Being with teenagers in the human services industry is challenging. We hear stories that wrench our guts and hearts. Compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma are often the fallout from this work. We hear and confront some of the darkest shadows of our humanity—how adults harm children, knowingly and unknowingly, with ill intentions and well intention. I believe, however, that those of us called to the work know it is sacred and that there is much wisdom to be mined here. To that end, I share some stories and lessons learned from my work with young people. [Please note that these are composite descriptions.]

Alisa couldn’t sit still or stop talking. I had her sit in the front corner of my 7th grade class, so we could keep an eye on one another. There were days I had to tell her to go out in the hall with her journal and wait for me. When I had a moment, I’d sit with Alisa and ask her what was going on. She’d tell me that Mom and her boyfriend got into a fight. Or that this month they were living in a hotel. I don’t want to be here, she’d tell me, to which I answered, You’re going to find your way through this, I promise. Let’s see if we can figure out what you need to do that. Some 15 years later, Alisa and I found each other on Facebook, and I see that she indeed made it through.

Selwyn, age 15, was referred to me early in my counseling career. His previous therapist told me, His parents are trying to kill him. She didn’t mean it literally, but once I got to know Selwyn, I understood that his parents were trying to kill his spirit. But Selwyn’s spirit was big and refused to go down without a fight.

From Alisa, I learned how to sit with young people with curiosity and listen to hear what is alive behind/beneath/around the disruptive behaviors. Selwyn taught me that feistiness, rebellion, defiance, and mischief-making are gifts when someone attempts to emotionally murder us. Years later, I learned about the Greek god Hermes and realized that Selwyn embodied so many of the powerful energies of this archetypal god. Rather than denigrating the chaos that Selwyn caused, I learned to value the necessity of it when faced with a world such as his.

Fawn proudly showed me some of her first journal entries after I introduced my 6th graders to the power of journaling in getting us through hard times. Her entry was filled with pornographic words and descriptions. I fled to the school counselor’s office during the break and made my first call to Child Protective Services. I learned heartbreak and how dangerous the world is from Fawn. I also learned how to tap into a compassion larger than my grief.

There was Keller, who walked out of class, off the campus, and would have kept walking all the way to the other end of the world to escape the bullying. I met this part of Keller and celebrated it—this part of him that was wise enough to know the confines of a school campus and all of the rules put in place to keep him safe didn’t keep him safe. So this part of him, brave and stoic, walked. It became clear to me from Keller that survival and an inviolable need for self-preservation are potent resources that need to be nurtured and tended to with care and respect.

And Jaylyn and Stella who created an entire fantasy world between the two of them in which hero after hero after hero came to save them from monsters and demons—fantasy on the pages but oh too real when they would return home. We talked for many hours about their heroes, fleshing them out, researching, and drawing the weaponry they needed. I learned how to straddle the imaginal world and pull that power into this one, so Jaylyn and Stella could traverse their days with courage, knowing they weren’t alone, that their heroes lived in them.

I have worked the last 30 years in multiple settings with adolescents from ages 11 to 23. Along the way, almost every single kid I’ve worked with has taught me what it means to be human.

Carl Jung wrote,

“Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar’s gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-halls, in the salons of the elegant, the Stock Exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul.”
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology

We could add to the list of these gritty examples of human life that of the adolescent and the world which they inhabit today. Being with adolescents from this perspective gives us the opportunity to explore, confront, and move ever deeper into our own humanity, our own human being-ness. Being with adolescents takes us deeper into our experiences of being alive on this planet at this point in history. This posting isn’t to solely outline how we benefit from being with young people. If we move into this work with this radical, and dare I say it, holy acceptance of what it means to be human, the young people we work with know that we are their companions and that they belong here.

Photo by jospannekoek