The section in which we go into therapy...
...as a group. And fail. Miserably.
The process of adoption is littered with booby traps. Actually, that isn’t really the right way to describe it, but I bet I got a chuckle out of some of you just be saying “booby.” I know it got me giggling.
Anyway, we did encounter a few tricks when dealing with DSS, mostly during the one-million-questions-which-will-make-my-head-asplode phase. Most of the questions are fairly loaded and require careful thought so as to phrase things in a way that won’t make you seem unfit for parenting.
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Define ‘arrested.’ Are we talking about being brought down town for questioning, or formally charged? Look, a duck!”
Every once in a while they would catch me off guard and I’d answer too quickly.
“Have you ever been in therapy or counseling?”
This seemed like a straightforward and easy question because I hadn’t been in therapy or counseling and neither had my wife – an argument could have been made that serious mental health intervention was in perfect order when we decided to start collection kids like there were baseball cards, but that’s a different discussion. However, in my fervor to appear as sane and as not crazy as possible I may have gone overboard in my answer.
“Hah! Of course not! Do I look crazy? Hah, hah. I’m the normalist person you’ll ever meet and I wouldn’t ever go to a shrink because I don’t need one! I’m a man, dammit!”
I’m not sure those were my exact words, but you get the idea. The social worker interviewing me pinched her lips, narrowed her eyes and made a growling kind of noise. Then she reached across the table and ripped my face off. Which is only partly true – she helped my wife rip my face off.
Turns out, DSS wants me to have a favorable view of counseling and therapy because, duh, the kids would undoubtedly need some kind of therapy. Despite my miserable failure on that question, we still managed to talk them into placing us with some children after I promised to be nice and keep an open mind about therapy.
Getting into therapy wasn’t as easy as it sounds – for one thing, as psychology major, I’ve seen some of the people who make it through school to become therapists, particularly licensed independent clinical social workers (LICSW) who have a masters in social work and a few years supervised experience in counseling. I’ve taken classes with people who wouldn’t have been competent to advise someone how to butter toast, much less guide them through repairing the psychological damage done by years of neglect.
I started by asking the social workers for recommendations as to where to get a competent therapist who specialized in adoptions. They recommended a place called Center For Family Connections. I asked on an e-mail list server in our area and received multiple recommendations for CFFC. A woman I met with two adopted children recommended CFFC. After reading about CFFC’s services, they seemed to be the clear choice for parents in our situation.
Except the fact that they didn’t take the state insurance the kids had.
It was like being a Red Sox fan – you get so close to your goal you’re pretty much settled into the idea of winning, then something drastic and irreversible happens and you have to start from scratch.
The rest of us have Stacy’s HMO from work, but we weren’t allowed to add the kids until the petition for adoption was filed and there was a six month wait period on that (like a Brady Bill for adoption). And paying for it out of pocket was right out because it would have been about $100 a week, at the minimum. I’m sure some of your are wrinkling up your noses and saying, “You should have just paid it because it’s for the welfare of the children, blah, blah, blah, I’m a rich smart-ass without any children or experience of my own blah blah blah.” But you know what else is good for the welfare of the children? Grocery shopping. And paying the rent on time to avoid eviction. So, just shut it.
We had to settle on our second choice, which shall remain unnamed because I’m going to try to avoid a lawsuit here. Let’s call them the Center For Uselessness (CFU). Even though this was our second choice and no one had recommended them specifically, they still had impressive background working with families and, they claimed, adopted children. Sounded good to us, so we made an appointment.
The first appointment was for Stacy and I only to discuss our objectives. We explained, rather explicitly I think, that we felt Edward and the Duchess needed individual therapy and perhaps some time in therapy together. For the most part they had been making good, albeit slow, progress during their transition, so this was mainly to just ensure that things continued to progress as they were.
For some reason, though, this therapist – Odd Out Of Touch Hippie Person, or Lori for short – insisted on seeing the whole family at once. Why, you might ask? I have absolutely no duck-strangling idea. Then why did you agree, you follow-up with? I don’t know. Why can I never remember to get the garbage out to the curb until I hear the truck coming down the street? I know which day is garbage day – it never changes. And I actually remember five or six times during the day to bring the garbage out, but I’m so wound up cleaning ground up Cheerios out of the rug that it zips out of my brain as soon as it gets in there. It’s similar to trying to remember a phone number when 38 people are standing in the same room shouting random numbers.
What were we talking about? Oh yes, I was obfuscating on the question of why we agreed to a family therapy session rather than individuals like we wanted. Answer: we screwed up. In hindsight, we probably wanted the individual sessions, but didn’t realize just how important it was to us until after the fiasco that was the group session.
And trust me, fiasco is the best way to describe the session.
First of all, because the therapists are normal people and not vampires, they work during the day. Which means Stacy has to leave work for a couple of hours to get there, have the hour session and get back to work. Given that the last thing her boss needs is more excuses to find fault with her lifestyle, this is a problem right off the bat.
Let me back up, though. I forgot to mention the kids’ reaction to being told we were going to attend therapy together. Mab and Achilles reacted in a way one would expect a person to act who had been informed of the death of a loved one, completely with wailing, gnashing of teeth, throwing themselves prostrate at my feet and begging. Edward and the Duchess, who had previously attended therapy and had been fairly agreeable about starting again, decided that Mad and Achilles’ reaction looked like so much more fun that they joined in the dramatics.
On the day of the session, we all piled into the van and drove to the CFU office in Somerville. At this point, problems start compounding upon themselves. Taking a car ride of more than 30 seconds with everyone gets annoying because the kids are forced to sit right next to each other in the back seat – three across. Therefore, there is always an argument about who gets to be the one person to sit in the van’s middle seat next to Lucy in her car seat. This argument takes place despite the fact that I have taken the preventive measure of setting up a system wherein a different person sits in the seat each ride – it’s a simple rotation based on age. But then you’ve got to argue about who sat there last, and whether or not it was actually their turn or did they sit there because they traded with someone else and does that constitute a turn or was it simply a trade and finally I have to yell as loud as I can that I DON’T REALLY CARE WHO SITS THERE BUT SOMEONE’S ASS BETTER BE IN THAT SEAT BY THE TIME I COUNT TO FIVE – ONE, TWO, FIVE!
Anyway, because the kids have to sit three across in the back, they are forced to sit in a manner which causes parts of their bodies to touch each other. You might assume that means their legs are touching or their shoulders, but it doesn’t stop there. Anyone who has spent any time around children knows that if kids are required to touch each other, even for a benign reason like sitting in a car, they will eventually fight because one of them will be hitting, another pinching and another licking and before you know it the van is rocking back and forth at each stop light because the three children in the back will be fighting and screaming so loud that even with the radio turned up all the way I cannot hear the right wing nutjobs on the talk station so I have to shout again for everyone to please use their indoor voices.
That’s just paraphrasing, of course. And by “paraphrasing” I mean leaving out the swear words.
We finally get to the office and there is mass confusion about what insurance is going to cover this and is it our Harvard Pilgrim or the MassHealth and for the love of Pete I though I straightened this out with you people on the phone before but apparently this is now different because we have everyone which is precisely what I didn’t want in the first place.
Here’s a quiz for you to see how well you’re getting to know us. While Stacy and I are filling out the paperwork and arguing with the receptionist, the children see this as an appropriate time to:
Play tag and scream
Climb a book shelf
Throw toys across the room
All of the above
If you answered D, you’ve been paying attention.
Since we were in public – at the therapist’s office, no less – I couldn’t really raise my voice and had to settle for my Stern Voice. The Stern Voice is when I grit my teeth and whisper that they had Better Behave. Right Now. Frankly, I wasn’t real sure what to use as a consequence – normally I can threaten to take them home and they won’t get to participate in whatever we’re doing and that works well. But none of them want to be at the therapist’s office in the first place, so threatening them with going home won’t be terribly effective.
Which, it occurs to me now, might be what they were trying to accomplish with the behavior.
Anyway, as if things weren’t off to a bad enough start, Lori hippies her way out to us and brings us into one of the therapy rooms. I have no idea what I thought the therapy room was going to look like – I guess I assumed it would be rather sparsely decorated if it was decorated at all, maybe have sort of a sanitarium look about it – I don’t know. But this room ended up being more like a hotel room without beds. It had a kitchen suite, couches and chairs, etc. There were toys for the kids to play with, cookies and soda laid out to snack on. It was all very nice if someone was stopping by with their children for a little visit.
Except that this was the worst possible environment for my children to work. Worst. Possible. Environment.
First, there was the soda. What the fuck? Soda? Who gives kids soda, anyway? I don’t give my kids soda except on rare occasions. I certainly don’t give them soda and cookies and expect them to behave and participate in a therapy session. And the toys might be nice for one or two kids who want to play while you talk kind of indirectly to them. But these are four children who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can actually, you know, engage in play with the toys and completely block out everything else.
Anyway, Lori starts off the session by talking – blathering on about something. The kids are completely ignoring her. Some of the children are playing and wouldn’t notice if Kool-Aid crashed through the wall and yelled “Hey, Kool-Aid!” and others are actively ignoring, by which I mean mentally transporting themselves away from the entire picture and, I don’t know, basking in the sun on a beach in Tahiti. I can’t understand what Lori is saying because I’m too busy trying to get the kids to pay attention, which is about as fruitful as ordering your coffee mug to complete an action item at work (I don’t really know what I’m saying there, either – work with me here).
Finally, I have to take the toys away from the kids and make everyone sit on the couch and chairs. Lori continues to attempt to engage the children in conversation.
“What do you like to do?”
“What kinds of things do you do as a family?”
“Do you like living together?”
To Queen Mab: “How did you feel about having to share a room?”
”Do you think your parents love you?”
These are just a sampling of questions that were silly and pointless for several reasons. First, it’s hard to get a serious answer out of people who are literally climbing on a curtain and standing in the chairs. Second, there is a room full of people, including the parents – you think the kids are just going to blurt out something negative about the situation even if that’s the way they feel? I’m no psychologist (yet), but I’m pretty sure there needs to be a long period where the patients build up trust with the therapist and the rest of the members of the group in this setting before they might want to share some feeling of a deep and personal nature, particularly if those feelings might be negative. Also, it is probably not that easy to get deep and personal thoughts out of a kid who is jumping off the heat register like Superman.
It was a mess. A big mess from start to finish. What is it that I’m trying to think of to compare the children to?
Monkeys. Drunken monkeys. Drunken monkeys with bad attitudes.
Suffice it to say, the first session didn’t go too well. Unless you’re scale of “well” starts at “useless” and gets steadily worse.
The next session was scheduled for just Mab, the Duchess and I. Why? Because I was desperately trying to pare down the number of people sitting in on these useless sessions and the best I could do was to convince Lori that it would be best to see only two kids at a time for a couple sessions. So I left Achilles and Edward with a babysitter and we went to see Lori again.
This session was unproductive on about 30 different levels for entirely different reasons than last time. At the time, Mab was so against the therapy in general that Lori could have offered her a driver’ license and a new car and she would have complained. Also at that time, the Duchess was still learning to come out of her shell and even talk to people in a “normal” manner – she didn’t have the tools to share anything even if she wanted to.
It was about 5 minutes into this hour that I mentally fired Lori – this was just not going to work. That made me feel a little better about sitting there for the rest of the session, but it still seemed to take forever as Lori asked question after question after question that one girl wouldn’t answer and the other couldn’t. It was a nightmare.
I didn’t officially fire Lori right there in person – I made the next appointment which I planned to cancel over the phone. And then a funny thing happened. She fired us.
When I called to tell her we wouldn’t be needing her services, she tells me she doesn’t think we really need group therapy and that we seem to be doing a pretty good job. I was as confused as you probably are. But it made things easier for me, so I went with it.
We actually took some time off from the therapy in general to let the kids all get the bad taste out of their mouths – a bad taste like licking an ashtray. I can’t say I blame the kids for any of their attitudes toward therapy. I was trying to think of three things I’d rather do than go back to therapy with Lori.
1. Kiss a live alligator.
2. Chew my leg off at the knee.
3. Eat a broken glass pie.
But the therapy is important, so we’ve gotten Edward and the Duchess into a new therapist and maybe someday we’ll try the group thing again. Maybe. Someday. But it’s just such an awful thought to go back to that group – like the ashtray licking I mentioned – that I’m beginning to think it would just be easier to let the kids grow up to resent me.
The process of adoption is littered with booby traps. Actually, that isn’t really the right way to describe it, but I bet I got a chuckle out of some of you just be saying “booby.” I know it got me giggling.
Anyway, we did encounter a few tricks when dealing with DSS, mostly during the one-million-questions-which-will-make-my-head-asplode phase. Most of the questions are fairly loaded and require careful thought so as to phrase things in a way that won’t make you seem unfit for parenting.
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Define ‘arrested.’ Are we talking about being brought down town for questioning, or formally charged? Look, a duck!”
Every once in a while they would catch me off guard and I’d answer too quickly.
“Have you ever been in therapy or counseling?”
This seemed like a straightforward and easy question because I hadn’t been in therapy or counseling and neither had my wife – an argument could have been made that serious mental health intervention was in perfect order when we decided to start collection kids like there were baseball cards, but that’s a different discussion. However, in my fervor to appear as sane and as not crazy as possible I may have gone overboard in my answer.
“Hah! Of course not! Do I look crazy? Hah, hah. I’m the normalist person you’ll ever meet and I wouldn’t ever go to a shrink because I don’t need one! I’m a man, dammit!”
I’m not sure those were my exact words, but you get the idea. The social worker interviewing me pinched her lips, narrowed her eyes and made a growling kind of noise. Then she reached across the table and ripped my face off. Which is only partly true – she helped my wife rip my face off.
Turns out, DSS wants me to have a favorable view of counseling and therapy because, duh, the kids would undoubtedly need some kind of therapy. Despite my miserable failure on that question, we still managed to talk them into placing us with some children after I promised to be nice and keep an open mind about therapy.
Getting into therapy wasn’t as easy as it sounds – for one thing, as psychology major, I’ve seen some of the people who make it through school to become therapists, particularly licensed independent clinical social workers (LICSW) who have a masters in social work and a few years supervised experience in counseling. I’ve taken classes with people who wouldn’t have been competent to advise someone how to butter toast, much less guide them through repairing the psychological damage done by years of neglect.
I started by asking the social workers for recommendations as to where to get a competent therapist who specialized in adoptions. They recommended a place called Center For Family Connections. I asked on an e-mail list server in our area and received multiple recommendations for CFFC. A woman I met with two adopted children recommended CFFC. After reading about CFFC’s services, they seemed to be the clear choice for parents in our situation.
Except the fact that they didn’t take the state insurance the kids had.
It was like being a Red Sox fan – you get so close to your goal you’re pretty much settled into the idea of winning, then something drastic and irreversible happens and you have to start from scratch.
The rest of us have Stacy’s HMO from work, but we weren’t allowed to add the kids until the petition for adoption was filed and there was a six month wait period on that (like a Brady Bill for adoption). And paying for it out of pocket was right out because it would have been about $100 a week, at the minimum. I’m sure some of your are wrinkling up your noses and saying, “You should have just paid it because it’s for the welfare of the children, blah, blah, blah, I’m a rich smart-ass without any children or experience of my own blah blah blah.” But you know what else is good for the welfare of the children? Grocery shopping. And paying the rent on time to avoid eviction. So, just shut it.
We had to settle on our second choice, which shall remain unnamed because I’m going to try to avoid a lawsuit here. Let’s call them the Center For Uselessness (CFU). Even though this was our second choice and no one had recommended them specifically, they still had impressive background working with families and, they claimed, adopted children. Sounded good to us, so we made an appointment.
The first appointment was for Stacy and I only to discuss our objectives. We explained, rather explicitly I think, that we felt Edward and the Duchess needed individual therapy and perhaps some time in therapy together. For the most part they had been making good, albeit slow, progress during their transition, so this was mainly to just ensure that things continued to progress as they were.
For some reason, though, this therapist – Odd Out Of Touch Hippie Person, or Lori for short – insisted on seeing the whole family at once. Why, you might ask? I have absolutely no duck-strangling idea. Then why did you agree, you follow-up with? I don’t know. Why can I never remember to get the garbage out to the curb until I hear the truck coming down the street? I know which day is garbage day – it never changes. And I actually remember five or six times during the day to bring the garbage out, but I’m so wound up cleaning ground up Cheerios out of the rug that it zips out of my brain as soon as it gets in there. It’s similar to trying to remember a phone number when 38 people are standing in the same room shouting random numbers.
What were we talking about? Oh yes, I was obfuscating on the question of why we agreed to a family therapy session rather than individuals like we wanted. Answer: we screwed up. In hindsight, we probably wanted the individual sessions, but didn’t realize just how important it was to us until after the fiasco that was the group session.
And trust me, fiasco is the best way to describe the session.
First of all, because the therapists are normal people and not vampires, they work during the day. Which means Stacy has to leave work for a couple of hours to get there, have the hour session and get back to work. Given that the last thing her boss needs is more excuses to find fault with her lifestyle, this is a problem right off the bat.
Let me back up, though. I forgot to mention the kids’ reaction to being told we were going to attend therapy together. Mab and Achilles reacted in a way one would expect a person to act who had been informed of the death of a loved one, completely with wailing, gnashing of teeth, throwing themselves prostrate at my feet and begging. Edward and the Duchess, who had previously attended therapy and had been fairly agreeable about starting again, decided that Mad and Achilles’ reaction looked like so much more fun that they joined in the dramatics.
On the day of the session, we all piled into the van and drove to the CFU office in Somerville. At this point, problems start compounding upon themselves. Taking a car ride of more than 30 seconds with everyone gets annoying because the kids are forced to sit right next to each other in the back seat – three across. Therefore, there is always an argument about who gets to be the one person to sit in the van’s middle seat next to Lucy in her car seat. This argument takes place despite the fact that I have taken the preventive measure of setting up a system wherein a different person sits in the seat each ride – it’s a simple rotation based on age. But then you’ve got to argue about who sat there last, and whether or not it was actually their turn or did they sit there because they traded with someone else and does that constitute a turn or was it simply a trade and finally I have to yell as loud as I can that I DON’T REALLY CARE WHO SITS THERE BUT SOMEONE’S ASS BETTER BE IN THAT SEAT BY THE TIME I COUNT TO FIVE – ONE, TWO, FIVE!
Anyway, because the kids have to sit three across in the back, they are forced to sit in a manner which causes parts of their bodies to touch each other. You might assume that means their legs are touching or their shoulders, but it doesn’t stop there. Anyone who has spent any time around children knows that if kids are required to touch each other, even for a benign reason like sitting in a car, they will eventually fight because one of them will be hitting, another pinching and another licking and before you know it the van is rocking back and forth at each stop light because the three children in the back will be fighting and screaming so loud that even with the radio turned up all the way I cannot hear the right wing nutjobs on the talk station so I have to shout again for everyone to please use their indoor voices.
That’s just paraphrasing, of course. And by “paraphrasing” I mean leaving out the swear words.
We finally get to the office and there is mass confusion about what insurance is going to cover this and is it our Harvard Pilgrim or the MassHealth and for the love of Pete I though I straightened this out with you people on the phone before but apparently this is now different because we have everyone which is precisely what I didn’t want in the first place.
Here’s a quiz for you to see how well you’re getting to know us. While Stacy and I are filling out the paperwork and arguing with the receptionist, the children see this as an appropriate time to:
Play tag and scream
Climb a book shelf
Throw toys across the room
All of the above
If you answered D, you’ve been paying attention.
Since we were in public – at the therapist’s office, no less – I couldn’t really raise my voice and had to settle for my Stern Voice. The Stern Voice is when I grit my teeth and whisper that they had Better Behave. Right Now. Frankly, I wasn’t real sure what to use as a consequence – normally I can threaten to take them home and they won’t get to participate in whatever we’re doing and that works well. But none of them want to be at the therapist’s office in the first place, so threatening them with going home won’t be terribly effective.
Which, it occurs to me now, might be what they were trying to accomplish with the behavior.
Anyway, as if things weren’t off to a bad enough start, Lori hippies her way out to us and brings us into one of the therapy rooms. I have no idea what I thought the therapy room was going to look like – I guess I assumed it would be rather sparsely decorated if it was decorated at all, maybe have sort of a sanitarium look about it – I don’t know. But this room ended up being more like a hotel room without beds. It had a kitchen suite, couches and chairs, etc. There were toys for the kids to play with, cookies and soda laid out to snack on. It was all very nice if someone was stopping by with their children for a little visit.
Except that this was the worst possible environment for my children to work. Worst. Possible. Environment.
First, there was the soda. What the fuck? Soda? Who gives kids soda, anyway? I don’t give my kids soda except on rare occasions. I certainly don’t give them soda and cookies and expect them to behave and participate in a therapy session. And the toys might be nice for one or two kids who want to play while you talk kind of indirectly to them. But these are four children who don’t watch a lot of TV, so they can actually, you know, engage in play with the toys and completely block out everything else.
Anyway, Lori starts off the session by talking – blathering on about something. The kids are completely ignoring her. Some of the children are playing and wouldn’t notice if Kool-Aid crashed through the wall and yelled “Hey, Kool-Aid!” and others are actively ignoring, by which I mean mentally transporting themselves away from the entire picture and, I don’t know, basking in the sun on a beach in Tahiti. I can’t understand what Lori is saying because I’m too busy trying to get the kids to pay attention, which is about as fruitful as ordering your coffee mug to complete an action item at work (I don’t really know what I’m saying there, either – work with me here).
Finally, I have to take the toys away from the kids and make everyone sit on the couch and chairs. Lori continues to attempt to engage the children in conversation.
“What do you like to do?”
“What kinds of things do you do as a family?”
“Do you like living together?”
To Queen Mab: “How did you feel about having to share a room?”
”Do you think your parents love you?”
These are just a sampling of questions that were silly and pointless for several reasons. First, it’s hard to get a serious answer out of people who are literally climbing on a curtain and standing in the chairs. Second, there is a room full of people, including the parents – you think the kids are just going to blurt out something negative about the situation even if that’s the way they feel? I’m no psychologist (yet), but I’m pretty sure there needs to be a long period where the patients build up trust with the therapist and the rest of the members of the group in this setting before they might want to share some feeling of a deep and personal nature, particularly if those feelings might be negative. Also, it is probably not that easy to get deep and personal thoughts out of a kid who is jumping off the heat register like Superman.
It was a mess. A big mess from start to finish. What is it that I’m trying to think of to compare the children to?
Monkeys. Drunken monkeys. Drunken monkeys with bad attitudes.
Suffice it to say, the first session didn’t go too well. Unless you’re scale of “well” starts at “useless” and gets steadily worse.
The next session was scheduled for just Mab, the Duchess and I. Why? Because I was desperately trying to pare down the number of people sitting in on these useless sessions and the best I could do was to convince Lori that it would be best to see only two kids at a time for a couple sessions. So I left Achilles and Edward with a babysitter and we went to see Lori again.
This session was unproductive on about 30 different levels for entirely different reasons than last time. At the time, Mab was so against the therapy in general that Lori could have offered her a driver’ license and a new car and she would have complained. Also at that time, the Duchess was still learning to come out of her shell and even talk to people in a “normal” manner – she didn’t have the tools to share anything even if she wanted to.
It was about 5 minutes into this hour that I mentally fired Lori – this was just not going to work. That made me feel a little better about sitting there for the rest of the session, but it still seemed to take forever as Lori asked question after question after question that one girl wouldn’t answer and the other couldn’t. It was a nightmare.
I didn’t officially fire Lori right there in person – I made the next appointment which I planned to cancel over the phone. And then a funny thing happened. She fired us.
When I called to tell her we wouldn’t be needing her services, she tells me she doesn’t think we really need group therapy and that we seem to be doing a pretty good job. I was as confused as you probably are. But it made things easier for me, so I went with it.
We actually took some time off from the therapy in general to let the kids all get the bad taste out of their mouths – a bad taste like licking an ashtray. I can’t say I blame the kids for any of their attitudes toward therapy. I was trying to think of three things I’d rather do than go back to therapy with Lori.
1. Kiss a live alligator.
2. Chew my leg off at the knee.
3. Eat a broken glass pie.
But the therapy is important, so we’ve gotten Edward and the Duchess into a new therapist and maybe someday we’ll try the group thing again. Maybe. Someday. But it’s just such an awful thought to go back to that group – like the ashtray licking I mentioned – that I’m beginning to think it would just be easier to let the kids grow up to resent me.
posted by Strange Biller at 9:49 AM
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