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Perspectives
on Innovative Ways to Help Professionals Who Help Youth to
Help Themselves:
A
Process of Healing Emotional Hurts
By John Bell*
YouthBuild USA Director of the Training & Learning
Center
As
youth workers, our goal is to run a successful program in
which young people are respected, their ideas are taken seriously,
they are part of the decision-making of the program, they
feel cared about by staff and they are learning real and important
skills. If we achieve this goal, then, whether we like it
or not, the young people will lay in our laps a lot of the
pain they are carrying around from racism, poverty and personal
family background. It doesn't matter what our official job
title is. Most of us will wear the counselor's hat at times.
We
will serve the young people better if we prepare ourselves
a little for the "counselor's role." Most of our
programs are not "therapeutic communities." Most
of us are not professional counselors. While many of our programs
have skilled and appropriate professionals to refer specific
young people to when counseling is needed, there is a lot
we can do to promote the healing of past hurts within the
limits of the program.
What
follows is an exploration of some basic ideas about human
nature and the healing process. Much of the theory is derived
from my own experience and from
Re-evaluation Counseling, a well-developed peer counseling
approach.
Basic
Human Nature
When I ask people the question, "Do you think people
are good or bad?" the answers run the gamut:
•
"Bad, but you can teach people to be good"
•
"Neither good nor bad, but the potential for both"
•
"Basically good, but conditions can force people to
act bad"
None
of us know for sure. We are all using a model of what people
are like, right? My model assumes that by nature, human
beings are:
•
Inherently
Valuable
•
Enormously
Intelligent
•
Deeply
Caring
•
Immensely
Powerful
•
Infinitely
Creative
•
Naturally Cooperative
•
Innately
Joyful
Source
of the Trouble: We Get Hurt
Now I can hear some of you thinking, "This guy is from
another planet, if he thinks people are like this! This guy
is whacked out! He hasn't been around my block!" Right?
Well, if people's nature really is like I think it is, then
you have to ask the question, "How come people do not
look and act like that? What happens to make people look and
act different from that?"
If
we made a list of what happens to people, it would include
the following and much more. We get hurt by rejection,
not being loved, neglect, physical and sexual abuse, racism,
sexism, adultism, oppression, physical injuries and illnesses,
drug and alcohol abuse, stereotypes, poverty, negative environments,
low expectations from others, limiting belief systems, etc.
Results
of Being Hurt
When people are under stress or are in a state of emotional
upset, you can usually observe that they are not functioning
up to their normal capacity. You can hear indications of this
in the things people commonly say:
•
"After my mother died, I walked around in a fog for
weeks"
•
"I was so nervous about the test that I forgot everything"
•
"I was so mad I couldn't see straight"
So
the first, immediate result of hurt is that our thinking power
temporarily diminishes. And if we get hurt over and over
again in a similar way, that area of our intelligence gets
permanently interfered with and shuts down.
The
second result of being hurt is that we begin to feel bad about
ourselves. Most of us are not being loved, respected or
cared about while we are being hurt. So the message we get
is that something is wrong with us-we are not good enough,
smart enough, capable enough, deserving enough, etc. We are
left with bad feelings about ourselves in the area of repeated
hurt.
Patterns
Develop
To deal with the effects of being hurt, we develop ways of
coping and surviving that I call "patterns." Many
of these are rigid, repetitive ways of thinking, acting and
feeling that once helped us get through a difficult time but
are now obsolete and don't fit the present, but still hang
on. There are three kinds of patterns that are useful to know
about. They will show up in your youth program and each can
be dealt with differently: occasional, chronic and patterns
due to societal treatment.
Occasional
Patterns
The first type of patterns is what can be called "occasional."
These are behaviors or reactions we have only when certain
sets of conditions are present. For example, have you ever
had "stage fright?" What happens to you?
In normal conversation, we don't sweat, get nervous, forget
our words or go blank. Therefore we know we had some negative,
hurtful experience in a group situation to cause these non-normal
reactions. If you ask someone, a young person in the program,
for example, who admitted getting scared speaking in front
of groups to describe the first time they felt this way, almost
always it will be rooted in a specific experience when they
were younger. Other kinds of occasional patterns are phobias
like fears of dogs or heights.
Nowadays,
we are more aware of many of our occasional patterns. We think
of them as our little "hang-ups." Mostly, we don't
think of them as too serious. But they do tie down a portion
of our emotional energy and our effectiveness. I once knew
a woman who was a tenant organizer. It turned out that she
could never go to the top floor of any building. This not
only seemed irrational but it made her a less effective organizer,
since she had to leave out the people on the top floor. On
a hunch, one day I asked her, "What ever happened to
you on the top floor of a building?" She said, "That's
it! I was raped on the top floor!" She did some counseling
work about that incident, and eventually, her fear of the
top floor disappeared.
Chronic
Patterns
The second kind of pattern people develop are "chronic."
These behaviors and feelings are continual, always present,
ongoing. These are heavier patterns that are the result of
often-repeated hurtful experiences. People often identify
with their chronic patterns, saying, "That's just who
I am." You can recognize a person in the grip of chronic
pattern because that person is almost always that way,
no matter whether the circumstances warrant it. For example,
do you know anyone who is:
•
Chronically shy?
•
Always critical? Predictably tears down any good idea or
initiative.
•
Always depressed?
•
Always complaining?
•
Always needing to be the center of attention?
A
very useful insight connected to the assumption people are
basically good but they get hurt is that whatever pattern
or non-resourceful state a person is showing you, they are
showing you how they got hurt. If someone is constantly
critical, you can be sure that he or she was roundly and constantly
criticized as a young person. If someone is chronically shy,
you can bet they got a heavy dose of rejection or neglect,
that somehow they did not get welcomed out. If someone is
continually and irritatingly hogging center stage in any group,
you can know that he or she did not get some kind of real
attention they needed when they were small and they are desperately
grasping for it now, without lasting success, in most cases.
This
insight gives you big clues about how to help or handle such
patterned behavior. For example, a person caught up in a critical
pattern needs huge amounts of appreciation-the direct opposite
of the pattern. Unfortunately, because of being so critical,
this person rarely gets appreciated, and in fact often gets
criticism coming back. (What goes around comes around.) If
you can take the edge off by appreciating the criticizer,
you might be able to help him or her change that pattern.
Patterns
Due to Societal Treatment
The third type of pattern comes from having been systematically
mistreated or disrespected because you are part of a particular
group in society. People play the role of either "victim"
or "oppressor." Remember, according to my assumptions,
neither role is our real human nature. We get conditioned
into accepting these roles. And most of us flip back and forth
between the two. For example, men who were the victims of
abusive beatings as boys, often grow up to beat women and
children. White people, oppressed as children, working class
or female, often turn those feelings of being disrespected
towards people of color, in our society. An African American
mother, under the emotional pain of being oppressed as an
African American, as a woman as a young person previously,
can end up becoming oppressive to her own children.
Many
of the ways we feel bad about ourselves come from having been
raised in certain groups. These patterns show up everywhere.
People who have been so mistreated that they cannot think
outside of the victim role often feel terrible about themselves,
unworthy, powerless, deserving of mistreatment. They commonly
feel negatively about others in their same group. This is
"internalized oppression."
For
other people, it is too painful to experience the feelings
of being a victim of abuse or oppression, so at the first
chance, they "flip" to the other end of the relationship.
It is more comfortable to be doing the beating than receiving
the beating. But, again, what you can know is that people
who are acting abusively or oppressively toward others have
been abused or oppressed themselves. This flipping from one
end of an oppressive relationship to the other is a dynamic
that helps hold the "isms" in place.
How
Healing Happens
The
main points of this model so far are:
•
Human nature is assumed to be inherently valuable, creative,
loving, powerful
•
We get hurt in hundreds of ways
•
The hurts have these two main results: we feel bad and our
thinking shuts down
•
We develop three kinds of habits or patterns of coping that
once helped us survive but now actually interfere with our
lives
•
As a result of this process, we have moved far away from
knowing our true natures
The
good news is that not only do we get hurt, we have a built
in way of healing. People have many different ways of healing
emotional pain: time, faith, talking to someone, praying,
facing the problem, taking positive action and attitude, etc.
But most of these different methods have a common thread:
the emotional release of pain by crying, feeling fear, getting
angry or laughing. This seems to be the salve that heals the
wounds.
Healing
is natural and built-in and comes with the release of the
pain that holds patterns in place. Release means:
•
Crying about grief and loss
•
Shaking, shivering about fear
•
Feeling anger about frustration, injustice
•
Laughing about light fears, embarrassments
Much
healing happens naturally. You can see it most clearly in
infants and young children. When a toddler falls and hurts
his knee, gets lost in the supermarket, is frustrated trying
to tie his shoe or gets scolded, what is usually the first
thing he does? Cry. You don't have to teach him to cry. It's
a natural response. It's his way of getting someone to pay
attention to the fact that he is hurting. And if he can get
someone to pay attention to him long enough and welcome his
crying, then the child releases the emotional part of the
pain, gets it out of his system, and returns to being his
regular self, not sulking, not holding the pain in, not shut
down in any way.
But
what usually happens? Some parent, teacher, older sibling
or other older person interferes with this process. Most people
are uncomfortable with crying and believe that the child will
feel better if the child stops crying. People use various
methods to shut down the tears:
•
"There, there, everything is alright. No need for crying"
(Invalidating the hurt)
•
"Here's your pacifier (or ice cream cone or lollipop)"
(Shoving something in his mouth)
•
"Look at the pretty bird" (distracting him)
•
"Shut up or I'll really give you something to cry about"
(adding fear and threat to an already painful experience)
One
way or the other, the young person gets the repeated message
that it is not good to cry. So what happens when the hurt
can't be expressed in the natural way? The child has to store
it, eat it, sit on it, repress it, keep it inside. This happened
to most of us. We had our built-in capacity to heal our hurts
interfered with. As a result, as we grow, so grows our load
of unreleased pain.
When
was the last time you:
•
Cried or felt like crying?
•
Shivered in fear of felt a cold sweat?
•
Were angry?
•
Laughed in embarrassment?
If
we were to share our experiences, it would be quite touching.
Sometimes the memory is still fresh and tears or other feelings
might come with the retelling. Most of us are walking around
carrying a trainload of past grief, fear and anger.
How
to Create Safety
So if we have a built-in way of healing our hurts and if we
know that the release of feelings will unlock more of our
real human nature, then the question becomes how do we create
conditions and places where this level of healing can happen?
What
makes you feel comfortable enough to share personal things?
Most people include most of the following conditions which
help create safety:
•
Feeling respected and cared about
•
Being really listened to
•
Eye contact
•
Body language communicates interest
•
Undivided attention
•
No judgment coming from listener
•
Compassion and understanding
•
Feeling liked and appreciated
•
Being assured of confidentiality
The
"quality of attention" makes all the difference.
Most of the young people we work with are conditioned to look
like they don't care. Looking bored and apathetic. But what
is the truth? We all care deeply about what is happening to
us, to those around us, to our world. We're all watchful.
But most of us have been hurt when we showed our caring, so
we learned to hide it, to put on a fake front. When asked
about this, the young people agree. I then say, "In the
support groups (or rap session) I want you to practice looking
like you do care!" When they protest, saying,
"Oh, man, that's phony," I say, "But you just
told me that when you look like you don't care, that's
not true. So that's phony, too! I'm asking you to try on the
other mask that looks like you do care." And I've got
them!
In
the program or staff meetings for that matter, the more we
ask people to practice giving each other quality attention,
the better the communication, respect and sense of safety
will be. In one-on-one counseling sessions, support groups
or rap sessions, to the extent we can deepen the safety deliberately,
the more often people will actually release their feelings
and thereby hasten the healing.
A
word of caution: this healing process is natural and happens
at a different pace for each person. It should never be forced
or rushed. There are real reasons why people don't trust,
don't open up, don't show their feelings. There has been very
little opportunity or safety in the world for most of us to
do our own healing. There has been even less safe for most
of the young people in our programs.
Results
of Releasing Painful Feelings
There are short term and long term benefits to releasing our
feelings. How do you usually feel after you have a good cry?
We feel better, like a burden has been lifted. It doesn't
necessarily make the problem or source of the hurt go away,
but it clears the mind to better be able to handle the situation.
Crying hard over the death of a loved one doesn't change the
fact that he or she is gone, but it gives us more mental space
to deal with the relatives, the arrangements, the necessities
of reality. So the short term result is that we feel better
and think more clearly.
The
long range effect of repeatedly talking, crying, shaking,
getting angry and laughing about a specific troublesome theme
in one's life, is that one's patterns melt and eventually
disappear.
Release Plus New Actions
One crucial piece in the healing process, in addition to releasing
the painful feelings, is to decide to act or think differently.
For example, if a person has struggled with a chronic "shy"
pattern, then to fully recover, he or she would not only talk
about the early experiences of being neglected rejected, ignored
or whatever led to the development of "shyness"
as a coping mechanism, but would also decide to act differently
than his or her shy pattern would normally do. It might mean
deciding to walk into a group with the attitude and posture
that expected people to like him or her and reach out "forcing"
oneself to be friendly and outgoing-exactly the opposite of
being a "wall flower." What happens when you take
a new direction like this? One is that it sets things up to
bring different results. The person gets different feedback
or treatment. Another is that it usually brings up the painful
feelings the shy habit was designed to keep down. It will
be excruciating at first, but well worth the effort.
Return
to Our Real Nature
In summary, we have a description of our basically good human
nature that gets obscured by hurt and mistreatment, which
make us feel bad and think less clearly and develop coping
patterns over time. We also have the built-in ability to heal
from all past hurts by telling other warm attentive listeners
about our experiences and releasing the painful feelings.
We can learn how to deliberately create deeper safety that
allows people to let their feelings out. Doing that repeatedly
helps us feel and function better and eventually eliminates
our rigid patterns. Releasing feelings and trying on new,
pattern-breaking directions and actions eventually will bring
us back to knowing and feeling our real natures.
*John
Bell is the current Director of the Training & Learning
Center for YouthBuild USA, and former Director of Leadership
Development. He is also a Member of Perspectives On Youth's
Advisory Board. To Read his biography, you can click
here.
Editor's note: John
Bell is the driving force behind YouthBuild USA's recently
launched Academy for transformation, which provides the tools,
concepts, insights, and skills needed to accelerate youth
transformation. The Academy offers a variety of learning and
training resources including customized and multi-day workshops,
e-learning opportunities, fellows programs, issue specific
forums and think tanks, training institutes, publication and
training materials, and consulting services. To learn more
about the Academy for Transformation and other YouthBuild
programs, you can click here: www.youthbuild.org.
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