“Too often we underestimate the power of a
touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the
smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”
Leo Buscaglia
It is the
simple things in life that are often the most meaningful.
A young man and
I were working on his math. He’s been
working hard and now the formulas and methodology of his algebra was making
sense to him. My tutoring today consisted
of listening to him explain his processes, and watch him work his problem,
applying his knowledge, and seeing him find the answers.
“I think I
understand this now,” he said.
Pride filled
his voice, and he gave me a seldom seen smile.
“What else do
you need to work on?” I said. “You’ve clearly got your math under control.
He looked down
at his shoes, then out the window. His
Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, as he pondered my question. A minute, then another passed without an
answer.
He cleared his
throat, finally cluing me in. His
therapist needed him to make a list, a list of challenging events in his life,
times when he was abused, and was abusive to others.
This would be
the last barrier to complete therapy and move on with his life, to becoming
free of what has burdened him, held him down.
He looked away,
tears filling his eyes.
“It’s so hard,”
he said. “I can’t seem to get started. I
can’t write it down.”
“Hard because?”
I asked.
He fell silent,
still looking down. A tear ran down his
cheek.
“It’s…. it’s
overwhelming. There’s just so much,” he
said.
We sat there,
letting the heavy words fill the air. It
was hard for me to breathe, the air now thick with his emotions and the weight
of this task.
“Take a
breath,” I said. “This is a safe
place. We’ll take this on together, and
work on it just like we do with math.”
“In math, one
of the first steps is to write down the problem, give names to what you’re
working on,” I said. “One step at a
time.”
He looked at
me, and I nodded. Another tear ran down
his cheek. He took a deep breath, then
another, re-inspecting his shoes. A few
more minutes passed. He gave me a slight nod.
“I can be the
writer today” I said. “I’ll be your
secretary.”
He looked away,
over my shoulder, and started to speak, beginning his story with the last time
he was in a difficult situation, a time of chaos and pain.
I picked up my
pencil and began to write on the tablet we’d used for our math, starting a
fresh page.
He spoke almost in
a whisper. I leaned closer, barely able to hear his words. The room was silent except for the
scratchings of my pencil against the paper, and his soft words, his voice
cracking and choking over them.
I gulped, feeling
my own sense of revulsion, panic, horror, and angst build up in my gut, as he
told one story, then another, and another.
Working backwards
in his life, he moved quickly from one incident to the one before it, giving me
two or three sentences, names, ages, what happened, how he reacted, how he
felt. At first, it seemed jumbled, but I
began to see the order, how he’d been preparing his story, rehearsing and
editing it in his mind, probably for months.
He spoke fast
enough that each story was only a line on my tablet, often just fragments of
sentences, a first name. I wrote
quickly, finding myself near the bottom of page two before he took another
breath and looked down at his shoes.
Once, I had to
prod, a few words of encouragement. His
look told me he thought I’d be a harsh judge for this story, condemning and
berating him.
“It’s OK,” I
whispered. “It happened, so it needs to
be on the list. No judging today.”
He took a big
breath and let it out. Another long
minute of silence.
The first time, I
can’t remember much,” he said.
“I can’t remember,”
he finally said. “I was two years old,
and there was something, something with a friend of my dad’s.”
“I don’t know, but
there’s something,” he said.
“It’s OK,” I
said. “When you’re two, you probably
don’t remember a lot, at least consciously.”
We talked about the
conscious brain and the subconscious, and how different parts of the brain have
different tasks, and work differently.
And how we deal with trauma, and don’t deal with it very well. But, our
body remembers, in ways that aren’t always clear to us.
He nodded, relating
all of this to what he’d learned in therapy and his psychology classes, and in
all the thinking he’d been doing.
He looked at the
list, shaking his head.
“Wow, that’s a long
list,” he said.
“A good list, “ I
said. “You’ve done good work today,”
Our time was coming
to an end, and I needed to leave.
I tore off the
pages I’d written, and handed them to him.
“Here’s your list,”
I said. “We’ve written it down, so you
don’t have to keep it in your head any more.
But, you’ll have it if you need it.”
He looked at me,
penetrating deep into my eyes.
“Oh,” he said. “You mean I don’t have to keep all that
inside of me, thinking about it all the time?”
“No,” I said. “You
have your list, on that paper. Kind of like a grocery list, or a list of chores
for the day.”
“It’s a reference,
I said. “You can put it in a safe place, and refer to it if you need to.”
“And, once you’ve
put words to all that, then you’ve named the problem, you’ve identified it, and
you don’t have to keep thinking about it,” I said.
He nodded, and let
out a big whoosh of air.
“So, the problem,”
he said. “Kind of like a math problem
then? Write it out, apply the formulas
and work the solution, huh?”
I nodded, and he
chuckled.
“Just like a math
problem,” he said. “One step at a time.”
“Uh, huh,” I said.
“Just like a math problem. And, you can
solve it, right?”
“Yes, I can,” he
said.
“Yes, I can.”
---Neal
Lemery 12/19/2016
