A Baseline of Trust

You’re looking into the face of a thirteen year old girl. She’s avoiding making eye contact and is staring at the floor with her arms crossed. She failed the last school year, and is now repeating eighth grade. Last week, her older brother was shot in a gang fight. She started skipping classes again, and is on probation. If you don’t intercede, she will most likely drop out of school.

It is just the two of you in the counseling session. How do you create a baseline of trust so that she’ll open up to you? This is a typical scenario that my social worker interns will face in their first one-on-one counseling sessions. Creating trust with our students - or “clients” as we refer to them - is the main objective in the first session.

The kids we work with have tumultuous lives and few people they feel they can trust. How do you connect with a child or adolescent who is experiencing severe emotional turmoil due issues like poverty, neglect, violence and/or is the victim of drug and alcohol abuse at home?

It sounds strange, but, it’s the small things that work best. For instance, always be on time for meetings you set up with a student. If you’re late, our kids will discredit you immediately. You said you would do something, and you didn’t do it, and now you are crossed off their list of people they will respect and open up to.

Then, there are trust-building games. I trained my social workers in this one called The Feeling/Talking/Doing Game. Sounds corny but, it sets up a framework for both the social worker and the child to talk about their feelings and experiences in different types of situations. The students are given 10 tokens to start off with, and those tokens can be used to buy items in the school bookstore or for snacks. There is a stack of cards and a board. Each card states something you must either say or do. For instance, a card could say “name a time when you felt frustrated”, or “sing your favorite song”. Essentially the actions are meant to put the children a little bit outside of their comfort zone in order to get them to start opening up emotionally.

Of course, they have the right not to do whatever is requested on the card they pick up. But, if they refuse, they lose one of their 10 tokens. It is up to them, but the incentive is obviously there for them to participate. The game helps social workers identify students’ vocabulary of feelings. Students may only be able to identify a few basic ones, like anger, happiness, and sadness. Throughout the game, the social workers try to discover the feelings that children most commonly experience. But we also help them develop an understanding of many others types of emotions, like ambivalence, exhaustion, contentedness, etc. Students may never have heard of these types of emotions before, so we are helping them to understand themselves and their many different emotions in a more complex way.

In turn, the social workers can use game-playing as an opportunity to find ways to relate back to the child, to show that they have shared certain experiences and feelings. After, I regroup with the interns and we talk about the feelings that the students identified. If they are seeing that certain students are predominantly feeling anger for example, then we devise means for working on anger management with the student. And, with our kids, anger is the predominant emotion.

Stepping Up and Breaking Through

Jose is in high school! He was one out of five students selected to take high school freshman level psychology classes as part of a program with PACE. Every day during 8th period he and four other students take the bus over to the high school. Last year during 8th period he was either wandering the hallways or not in school at all. Needless to say this is a huge accomplishment for Jose. He’s loving it and totally stepping up to the plate.

I’ve been holding off from asking him about his mom. For one thing, and this is one of the challenges of my job, I can’t do intensive therapy with students. I also don’t want to open a Pandora’s Box at a time when he’s excelling so much. I don’t want to dig up the emotional turmoil he is managing to cope with right now.

Part of why he’s doing better this year, besides the fact that his mother’s health is stabilized, is that he’s still living with his aunt. Jose was fighting with his mom’s boyfriend so much last year that he started staying out all night. He was finally moved to his aunt’s house and she actually has legal custody of him now. She is 23 years old, a mother of three, works full-time and goes to school at night. I thought I was juggling a lot! She literally gives us hugs she is so happy to see Jose’s improvements. It is good to know he is in a stable home environment with a positive role model. But, I also know his aunt is overwhelmed with responsibilities and has limited time for Jose. For now at least he’s keeping himself on track, and if and when he shows signs of slipping, I know his aunt will do all she can to help us keep him focused on graduating.

The main challenge I am facing now in class is finding a way to break through to a group of girls who are feeding off each other’s apathy. They are struggling to keep up with the class academically. It’s a combination of weak skill sets and a lack of interest. They are already on probation. If they do not improve they will be asked to leave our class, and most likely that means they will be held back another year or drop out altogether. I have to break through the apathetic wall they have up. Each one of them has to have some interest, something that I can use to get them reinvested in school. I know one likes to write, so I signed her up for our newspaper group. Hopefully by my next blog post I’ll have “cracked the codes” of the others. Stay posted.

We also hooked up with Big Brothers, Big Sisters mentoring program. Every week five of our kids will travel to this one company’s offices to meet with their mentors. They’ll take part in workshops on everything from drugs to college preparedness. This was the missing piece of our program. We wanted our kids to do something outside of the schools, and Big Brothers, Big Sisters is perfect program for us.

Uniforms, Introductions, and Rewards

It’s been an incredible week. Every single kid in our “overage” class showed up, each day, in full uniform. It may not seem like a big deal, but for me it’s clearly a huge gesture of respect and determination from this group. It’s a sign that I succeeded in breaking through to these kids on a personal level, that I tapped into their sense of hope and got them to buy-in to Open Heart-Open Mind’s program. On some level, I ignited their desire to change their lives.

Jose in particular blew me away. He’s not turning a new leaf – he’s just being his true self - a young gentleman, a strong leader, a determined and hardworking person. I knew last year this was his real nature, and that all the angry behavior and blowing off school were effects of his stress. I’d be lying though if I said I didn’t worry that he’d still end up in jail, despite the counseling. Luckily his arrest this summer sparked him to do some serious reflection on his life, and now he’s determined to graduate from middle school.

Its clear to me he’s not going to let anything get in the way of reaching this goal. He’s already emerged as a class leader, keeping the other kids in check. He even spoke to a few on his own that were showing disrespect, telling them that they need to take the class seriously or they will ruin this opportunity for everyone else. Jose also took it upon himself to walk right up to our new interns who were sitting in the school cafeteria during lunch. He stretched out his hand, looked them in the eyes, and introduced himself, following up with “Pleasure to meet you”. Amazing. I’ve never seen him or any other student I’ve worked with behave this way.

I can’t put into words how rewarding, and nerve-wracking this is. Now that I’ve got Jose and the other students to buy-in, I need to deliver. I need the steps I’ve laid out for them to graduate from middle school to actually work and I’ve got to keep them engaged even when they stumble, face hurdles, and feel the sting of disappointments.