There’s nothing like watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to bring things up for me. Sometimes I think I go into it just to get those buttons pushed. Otherwise I try to bury what I’ve been feeling about the internship. Bury it deep enough that I won’t have to deal with it. Not that this works, as I’m discovering. When I was working my internship at the hospice and did grief education I told clients that grief needed to be experienced and moved through, however long it took. There weren’t any short cuts. This was not advice I took myself. For many of the griefs I’ve experienced throughout my life, I’ve only let myself feel them a little before I push it away. “I’m over it,” I tell myself. But somehow this internship triggered a lot of that old loss, sent me back to my old self in a lot of ways. In talking with my supervisor, I’ve learned that working with kids can do that. It’s an interesting reaction really, working with kids of certain ages bringing up stuff from yourself at that age. My supervisor said that a lot of times people chose to work with kids at the age that was hardest for them. Healing ourselves through healing others - or maybe trying to be the people that we needed at the time and didn’t have.

Needless to say, I had a difficult time ending with the kids. And for the last month of the internship and even the next week or so I was thinking I would never work with kids again. It was too hard, I felt like I couldn’t do enough. But just over the past few days I’ve been rethinking that decision. Part of the shift started when I was typing up my progress notes for the client files. I’d taken notes right after each session, but I’d never read them over all at once. I started to see the changes that had happened for each of the kids I’d seen. Sometimes they were tiny changes - the nearly silent student beginning to narrate his actions during session and during our last session asking if I would be coming back; sometimes they were bigger changes - the client who had a very difficult time getting on the bus to go to school was able to do so with much less issue. The attachment between me and several clients was strong - I will remember them forever - and that’s hard to release.

Working with kids is a double edged sword, in a way. It touched me in a way that only happened rarely when I worked with adults. And it happened with each kid. Even the one who tested my boundaries at every turn, even the one who sat in complete silence during each session, refusing to participate in the only way she could. Each of them touched my heart. It made it hard for me to understand that I couldn’t solve all of their problems. But it made me push my boundaries and do the best I could. It inspired me. I was making a difference, even if it was only a small step.

But seeing all of the things I couldn’t change - parents with addictions, abusive relatives, poverty, loneliness, loss… that hurt. It helped some when I would hear that it wasn’t just me hurting - McGee said he wouldn’t have been able to do what I did. It’s a sentiment I heard several times. Part of me feels a bit proud (ever so humble, me) but another part of me feels that it’s not that difficult - you just have to be there for a child. How could someone not do it?

I was watching an early-ish episode of Law and Order: SVU called “Serendipity”. It was the first episode with ADA Casey Novak, and she was having a hard time seeing what happened to the kids they dealt with. There was a scene where she was talking with Detective Olivia Benson. It was Detective Benson who said, “Lesson One. Nobody can handle the children.” They go on to discuss the various challenges of this job, when ADA Novak asked, “Why do you guys do it?”

Detective Benson’s answer was simple, “Because somebody has to.”

And part of me responded to that. Someone does have to - and I have, I can. I like kids. I would like to make a difference for them. So maybe I shouldn’t cut myself off from working with them just because it’s not easy. Life isn’t easy. I’ve got time to think about it, but as I heal from this internship, I hope that I heal stronger so that I can get back in the ring and go around again.

Posted on June 22nd, 2005 by Kat
Filed under: General