Showing Up
I have a patient, a 17-year old I’ll call Emma, who struggles with depression, cutting and binge eating, along with more run-of-the-mill adolescent struggles. Each week, as I write my note for our session, the ticker for how many times we’ve met goes up: “This is Emma’s 51st session...52nd session...53rd session.” And that’s just since her most recent hospitalization.
The type of therapy I practice, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), assumes depression and anxiety can be practically and sufficiently addressed in 8 to 10 sessions. Clearly, I am a terrible therapist.
Many of us feel this same struggle as parents. We might ask ourselves daily, if not hourly, “Is what I’m doing working at all?” “Will this ever get better? What if it doesn’t?” We are certain we are terrible parents.
In the year between college and graduate school, before becoming a parent, I worked as a caseworker for a nonprofit serving at-risk teens. Kids who were truant from school, oppositional at home, and/or smoking a lot of pot were referred to our program. The hope was that intervention and support would keep them at home, and improve their relationships with their parents. Among other things, my job involved arriving at my clients’ homes before the sun was up to help parents physically drag kids out of bed and get them to school (fun!). I drove the streets of the city where I worked in the afternoons and evenings, checking on “my kids” at the park, finding them at friends’ houses, often letting them just ride along with me to keep them out of trouble.
The state agency that helped fund our nonprofit asked annually for data on the program’s effectiveness. Were we succeeding in keeping more kids at home, in school, and off drugs than if I wasn’t waking them up at the crack of dawn, or calling them at curfew to make sure they were where they were supposed to be?
We thought it was working. I certainly wanted to think so. But how could we prove it? We could compare the percentage of kids in our program who were diverted to foster care or group homes to similar kids who weren’t in our program. But what did that tell us about the effect of the program on any particular kid? Nothing, really.
In parenting, we don’t really care how effective our parenting approach is for kids in general. We care about how effective it is for our unique-in-all-the-world kid. And so often, we just don’t know. Just as I wonder if anything I’m saying or suggesting is helping Emma, if my being her therapist will help her make a safe passage to adulthood, we are left to wonder if what we are doing is right or “enough” for our kid to keep them safe as they unfold into being. That unfolding is the epitome of what is brutiful (the phrase coined by Glennon Doyle to describe all that is both brutal and beautiful in life).
Research tells me that the techniques I teach and suggest to Emma in therapy are effective, and empirically supported--though I wonder just how effective if I can only get her to practice 1/10 of them between our sessions, and that’s when I’m lucky.
We have a lot of good research telling us which parenting practices are most effective at raising happy, healthy, generally well-adjusted humans. We share a lot of them with you in Bless This Mess. But when you are practicing and practicing every day, and your kid still makes bad decisions, screws up, defies you, harms themselves: where can you turn for the strength to stick with it?
Sometimes, when I’m struggling to feel like a good-enough therapist or parent, when I wonder if anything I’m doing is helping at all, I think of the clichéd poem, Footprints in the Sand:
One night I dreamed a dream.
As I was walking along the beach with my Lord.
Across the dark sky flashed scenes from my life.
For each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand,
One belonging to me and one to my Lord.
After the last scene of my life flashed before me,
I looked back at the footprints in the sand.
I noticed that at many times along the path of my life,
especially at the very lowest and saddest times,
there was only one set of footprints.
This really troubled me, so I asked the Lord about it.
"Lord, you said once I decided to follow you,
You'd walk with me all the way.
But I noticed that during the saddest and most troublesome times of my life,
there was only one set of footprints.
I don't understand why, when I needed You the most, You would leave me."
He whispered, "My precious child, I love you and will never leave you
Never, ever, during your trials and testings.
When you saw only one set of footprints,
It was then that I carried you."
In Bless This Mess, we turn to God as the example of a perfect parent. Sometimes we have to walk alongside our kids (or our patients) as they wander seemingly far off course. Sometimes we have to carry them. Sometimes we want to throw them into the ocean.
But here is something I have the privilege of knowing from my experience as a therapist, now having watched many kids and teens make a safe (if rocky) passage to adulthood. Most of them turn out okay. While it may not feel like it in the moment, the chances that you will literally lose your child along the path are slim. Even if you lose sight of them for a time, odds are good that they will come back to you.
About once or twice a year I receive the gift of an email from one of the first patients I ever saw as a clinical psychologist. There was a point in time when she literally could not get out of her room due to the compulsions of severe OCD; when depression kept this brilliant person from even attending school. I saw her for far more than 53 sessions.
She’s an adult now, living on her own in a distant city, with a college degree, a longtime job and a healthy relationship. She tells me she still uses a lot of the CBT techniques she learned in therapy with me. The fact that she emails me, though, makes me believe that most of what I did to help her emerge into health was keep showing up for her when she needed me to.
Now that she can drive, Emma comes every week to therapy on her own. She asks for virtual visits if we can’t meet in person. I’ll keep showing up as often as she does. That’s all any of us can do, really: just keep showing up for the kids we love.
~Ellen