141-The Sheriff of Everything
Heart guard
Drug Court counselors witness some horrible stuff.
The people we encounter in the outside world wash every day, wear clean clothes, and often greet us with smiling pleasantries. We glide through our days, awash in the plenty that is all around us. Gleaming store shelves filled with food and clothes. Clean roads slide our humming automobiles toward safe and sturdy homes, a sweet melody fills the air.
But when you scratch the surface of the Drug Court world, the clean and pleasant veneer crumbles. Under the surface there are squirming nests of past traumas and a buzz of current crises . Our clients sometimes had bad outcomes in Drug Court. They hurt others or permitted themselves to be hurt, in the most dreadful and inventive ways. They were sick and weak and undernourished, physically and mentally. They died young or got lost in a stinking mess of trouble and mistakes and regrets. After years of exposure to deprivation and misery, some clients had become the junkyard dogs of our society, snarling and snapping at the passing visions of fortune and plenty. They can’t help but feel abandoned and alone.
And they have children. O, the children. Passed through the meat grinder of the social services system, they were tossed from here to there, picked up, examinied, used and then discarded. We found client’s kids huddled in psychological corners, trembling with the cold fear that the world is unsafe, and that some unspeakable horror lies around every corner. They come to believe that they have done something to deserve the pain and rejection they have experienced, because they can at least have some control over that, they can try to be better.
We counselors would clock in, learn the tragedy and hot drama of the week and clock back out to return to our cool comfortable world. The Southern summer heat isn’t so bad if you are out in it all day. What’s hard is the going out into the stifling humidity and then inside to the cool dry air, then back out in the heat, then back into the cool. It drains you and saps your strength.
Early on, I would venture unguarded and unprotected, into that sea of misery. I held my compassion and goodwill before me, thinking that if I loved my clients for a while, then they would soon take over, and learn to love and value themselves, and they would get better. Sometimes it worked, we sang and danced down the road of recovery, feeling great about ourselves and each other, counting the sober days and months as their lives improved and problems slipped away like raindrops streaming down a well waxed car hood. It was all goodness and light.
But sometimes bad stuff happened. People I had allowed myself to love unconditionally did unspeakable things or they lay down on the railroad tracks late one night, drunk, and just gave up. It’s hard not to take it personally, hard to keep your heart from breaking.
Eventually I did what smart counselors do. I donned a protective “heart guard” of aloofness, a distance from my clients, telling myself that I am not responsible for their outcomes. Telling myself that I am a guide but that I cannot do it for them. Engaging in gallows humor with colleagues that would embarrass casual observers but that only represents the healthy counselor’s decision to laugh rather than cry about the horrible stuff that we witnessed. If we failed to protect ourselves in these ways, we either burned out or fled the profession. If we stayed on unprotected, our compassion and unconditional positive regard turned into a snarling and bitter anger and disappointment, became judgmental and blaming disapproval for our clients. Not therapeutic.
I only met one counselor who could weather the storm unprotected. Ann was the director of the Drug court program. We called her the “Sheriff of Everything” because she knew everything about everybody and had the power, through the court, to permanently alter the course of our clients lives. Early in the drug court program she decided to play the bad guy to the counselor’s good guy roles. She made the tough judgments and swiftly delivered the harsh consequences required to gain the attention of these junk yard dogs of the criminal and addiction world. But she also celebrated their victories, showered them with praise, held their babies and hugged their mothers. She loved each one of these unlovable societal shadows just like a mother wolf loves her cubs. And when they failed and she had to eject them from the den, it broke her heart.
She could have put on the protective heart guard that she encouraged the rest of us to use. But she chose not to. She told me I was a good counselor, that I had learned how to draw a balance between compassion and healthy distance. But I worked my high wire act with a safety net and made sure that I couldn’t be burned too badly by the hot dramas that played out around us. But Ann did her work without a net. She danced her dance of nurturance and tough love high above the crowd, and when clients failed, she felt the pain for a long time.
Was it worth it? I saw the price Ann paid, all her sleepless nights of pain and guilt and anxiety. But ask the dozens and dozens of recovering people who trace the start of their recovered lives back to the program she built, and to her love for them. Ask the clients who wrote to her from the prisons she sent them to when they failed drug court, to thank her for caring about them when no one else did. Or ask the hundreds of family members who got their lives and freedom back, whether their loved one recovered or not. Or ask the counselors that she encouraged and supported and fought for every day. We all know it was worth it.
Dave Seward
February 2010
Drug courts are problem-solving courts that take a public health approach to criminal offending using a specialized model in which the judiciary, prosecution, defense bar, probation, law enforcement, mental health, social service, and treatment communities work together to help addicted offenders into long-term recovery. Instead of punishment, their purpose is to address one of the underlying drivers of crime and, in the process, reduce the use of imprisonment, potentially leading to substantial cost-savings. Drug courts aim to do this by incentivizing or mandating offenders into addiction treatment combined with frequent drug testing and regular monitoring by the judge.