Unpacking the ‘Soul Crisis’
David is a high school teacher in a rural area just outside of a major US metropolis. He has over 150 students on his daily roster, an endless number of papers to grade, emails to answer, and meetings to attend. Since the pandemic, he has at least 2-3 students in most of his classes who are so shut down that David despairs of ever penetrating their stone walls. He is alternately despairing and frustrated and doesn’t know how to motivate or help them be engaged in their learning. In staff meetings, he hears that he isn’t the only one, and yet the expectation is that staff and students pick up where things left off in February, 2020.
Callie is the clinical director of a short-term residential crisis facility for adolescents in the juvenile justice system. In the last decade, the town has experienced ever-increasing tensions between the lower and upper socioeconomic classes as the gap widens. This dynamic is alive and well when residents from various neighborhoods are thrown together. Fights, bullying, and defiance are ongoing issues despite staff training in de-escalation. The budget has decreased, and staff turnover is high. Despite these new challenges, Callie’s program is expected to continue to provide the same level of services for less money and less experienced staff. Callie is exhausted and numb at the end of her work week.
Jacinda is an associate therapist working towards licensure. She is getting her supervision hours as an adolescent therapist at her local community behavioral and chemical dependency clinic. Committed to her clients, she is hopeful and yearns to make significant impacts in the lives of her teen clients. Although she is using therapeutic modalities that have been shown to have some success, there are a handful of clients with whom nothing seems to work. The home situations are highly troubling, school refusal is standard with these teens, and reports of suicidal ideation are at an all-time high. Callie laments to her supervision team that these kids are “just so resistant to therapy.” She doesn’t know how to help them and, “honestly, it seems like they really don’t want to be successful.”
Resistance to healing, defiance, and apathy are more than symptoms. These are ways that our adolescents are trying to communicate their current state of being. In a previous blog, I concluded that adolescents are in the midst of a soul crisis because the world is going to hell in a handbasket. However, I’ve rethought my argument. I don’t think it’s world events that are causing the crises. In my observation and work, I believe our expectations of adolescents, our lack of compassionate curiosity about the behaviors and symptoms that teens are exhibiting, and the tendency to pathologize these behaviors are what has created these crises. Our teenagers aren’t having a soul crises because bad things are happening in the world but because there is little to no support for their embodied, natural expressions of suffering in the world.
William Wordsworth wrote in 1802, “The world is too much with us; late and soon.” The world has always been too much with us and will continue to be so. Anyone will have activated parts in the face of the world being too much. Teens are no different. Throw in a global pandemic, the threat of nuclear war from Russia, ever-widening socioeconomic inequities, and climate crisis into a cauldron with all that comes during adolescent development, stir it up a bit with family and friend drama, add a dash of tragedy and trauma with the latest mass shooting, and there you have it—all the ingredients needed for behaviors that Western capitalist views deem pathologies. These responses manifest as:
refusing to go to school or to follow through on assignments;
unmotivated to find a way out of suicidality and depression;
oppositional defiance;
avoiding anything hard, challenging, or seemingly irrelevant to their personal lives;
more extreme risk-taking behaviors;
and/or increased isolation.
When we pathologize normal, expected reactions to the world being ‘too much with us,’ we have created a soul crises. C. G. Jung describes soul as “a kind of life force” (CW 8 ¶662) that is “intangibly interwoven with the world and with matter.” (CW 13 ¶198) In other words, soul is the aspect of our humanity that animates our lives, connects who we are with the larger world, and assures us that we have a vital role to play in our communities. To diagnose rather than to make room for suffering invalidates the one who suffers. When we pathologize teenagers’ suffering, we are telling them their suffering has no place in our schools, communities, and therapy rooms. This is a soul crises.
If you are an adolescent service provider working with teenagers who are experiencing crises of the soul and you are unsure how to effectively navigate these interactions or are expected to fix rather than support, then more than likely you, too, are experiencing a crisis of the soul. Giving it your all every day, bringing all of your skills to bear, and not feeling like you are effective, aren’t connecting with your teenagers, and are unsure of how to support your teens in the midst of their suffering can be exhausting and demoralizing.
Unfortunately, most current human service systems are designed for providers to serve the system rather than the humans we’ve come to serve. Nor are those systems really designed with the staff’s mental and emotional needs in mind. When I left the public education system over a decade ago, there was little to no room to address the suffering within that system. I hear from teachers and students still involved in public education that there has been little improvement.
In an ideal world, this is what I would love to see for our kids and for David, Callie, and Jacinda:
David shifts (not eradicates) his main objective from ensuring that his students get the skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s workforce to nurturing their love of lifelong learning, creative endeavors with room to fail, and curiosity.
Callie sees an opportunity to develop trauma-informed care in her staff and conflict-transformative skills in her residents. She even dreams of empowering the youth, so they see themselves as part of the solution.
Jacinda comes to understand that her role is to trust that her clients need to navigate suffering, and that she has the skills and resources to companion her teens with calm and courage in the dark places, knowing that the way to healing is through the darkness, not around it.
These are movements away from pathologizing, fixing, rescuing, and invalidating teens’ understandable reactions to a world too much with them. We can learn to convey that their experiences matter, they won’t be left alone in their suffering, and they have a vital role to play in addressing issues affecting their lives.
Photo by Budimir Jevtic