(A reflection for Family Foundation School staff in preparation for staff training)
Those of us who have any sort of addiction recovery story probably remember what it felt like when we finally found people like us, people who understood us and did not reject us. They were kind to us. They didn’t excuse our behavior but they didn’t treat us as foreign, strange, or less than them in any way. They accepted us, as we where.
This has always been the basic philosophy of our school. Radical acceptance of the sick and broken, “just like us”, who are to be nurtured, and guided, never coddled and enabled, to responsible adulthood.
From the beginning we expanded the range of problems and types of students who we lived with. After 30 years of doing this, we collectively know that the 12 steps can work for all sorts of problems. But what works in AA isn’t just the 12 steps. It’s also 12-stepping. And that means radical acceptance.
As a school we have continually expanded our capacity to empathize with people who seemed different at first. After a while we came to understand them. With that understanding we were able to modify what we did so that we could continue to offer the same kinds of help to more and more kids. 10 years ago we did not do a good job with students who had anxiety or students who cut. Now that is no big deal. In the past, we willfully tried to control the bulimic and the over-eater alike. We have a much more balanced approach toward food addictions today. Lately we have been stretching and growing again—this time—we are expanding our capacity to help immature, oppositional and highly reactive students. The same principles still apply.
The work must start inside each of us. We can’t help people when we come from a position that is critical or judgmental. If you are an addict of any sort remember how you felt and behaved toward your spouse or parent in your addiction. The harder they tried to control you the less they were able to help you. If you are co-dependent, remember where all that nagging got you. I truly believe that we will be able to create new approaches and adapt what we currently do so that we can work effectively with these explosive students, if we work our own programs.
Think of our students as “newcomers” to the world of responsible adulthood. Even when kids reject our help initially, we try our best, to treat them with love and respect, offering them an invitation to join us. Most of us do an excellent job, most of the time. But all of us have trouble with some kids some of the time. There is no shame in it. Our personal troubles are only shameful if we deny them.
Sometimes it feels like too much. We can’t figure out what to do. We want somebody else to come to our rescue, make our decisions, take the problem away. Things are changing and we feel out of control. When this happens to me I get mad and have self-pity. Since my understanding of God and spirituality is fundamentally based upon the Big Book, my thoughts turn to the promises.
What has happened to them, especially the one about “intuitively knowing how to handle situations that used to baffle us”? Most likely that intuition is blocked by negative emotions. Our collective judgments and resentments rob us of creativity and push us to retaliate instead of teach.
All of our students are constantly seeking out clues about our attitude towards them. They want to be accepted as persons, just like the AA new-comer. And you can’t lie to them. We all have an amazing capacity to read each other. Even when we aren’t aware of it, our brains are processing all the signals from body posture and movement, facial expression, tone of voice that let us know which persons are safe and which persons are a threat, who respects us and who does not, who cares for us and who does not.
Here is a head-start on the staff-training for next week. Our most difficult students are often hyper-sensitive. Try as we might, we cannot cover up our deepest feelings about them. Some of their bad behavior may be (in whole or in part) a reaction to what they are perceiving as disdain, resentment, judgment, and REJECTION from us.
When I have difficulty with students, do I thoroughly examine my own thoughts, feelings and judgments toward them? Could my attitudes and beliefs be feeding into their sickness? (..and making my life more difficult too…)
