Opening: Returning to The Oaks

My second internship year was different from the first almost immediately.

I returned to The Oaks, where I had volunteered after moving to Wilmington. Chris Hauge had known me before graduate school and had agreed years earlier that I could complete my advanced internship under his supervision.

The placement matched the work I hoped to do after graduation: direct clinical services in a psychiatric setting.

I was no longer trying to prove that I could decipher an undefined role. Chris gave me responsibility, instruction, and room to grow.

The difference was not that I had suddenly become capable. I had entered a setting where my abilities could be recognized and developed.

Learning from Chris

Chris’s therapy groups did not reproduce the ordinary hierarchy of a psychiatric hospital. Nurses, technicians, students, interns, and other staff did not sit outside the circle as detached observers. They participated.

That changed the atmosphere. Patients were not being examined by a row of emotionally protected professionals. Everyone in the room was being asked to become present.

Chris used experiential methods, guided imagery, relaxation, and carefully chosen self-disclosure. In groups for survivors of trauma, he might invite participants to imagine a younger version of themselves sitting nearby. No one was forced to reveal anything. The exercise allowed each person to discover what emerged.

I watched how he made emotional safety possible without becoming distant or impersonal.

Before long, I began leading groups myself.

Chris was often present, but his presence no longer made me freeze. It steadied me. I led relaxation exercises and guided imagery. I spoke with patients about anxiety, trauma, and the ways painful experiences remain active within us.

At Sherwood Village, I had learned that people would turn to me. At The Oaks, I began learning how to use that trust therapeutically.

The classroom and the past

During the second year, my coursework concentrated on direct clinical practice with individuals, couples, families, and groups.

I wrote extensively about treatment methods. For one course, I completed a long paper examining treatment for people living with both mental illness and substance-use disorders. I questioned approaches that treated abstinence as the only meaningful goal while overlooking the suffering that made substances appealing in the first place.

In an abnormal psychology course, we studied personality disorders.

For the first time, narcissistic personality disorder gave me a possible framework for understanding my mother’s behavior: the inability to accept another perspective, the absence of meaningful accountability, the judgment of others, and the need to preserve a superior position.

The recognition did not make me angry so much as clarify an old confusion. There might be language for what I had experienced.

Yet my life was no longer organized around my mother.

It was organized around Lynn.

Word Salad

In 1995, Lynn and I created Word Salad, when literary publishing on the internet was still new.

The magazine joined my technical abilities with our shared love of poetry. I could construct the website and organize submissions, but Lynn brought an instinctive understanding of what made a poem alive.

I printed submissions so that we could read them together. Sometimes I placed a poem in a doubtful pile, and she challenged me. At other times, she confirmed what I had sensed but could not explain.

She was not standing outside my work, merely encouraging me. This was something we created together.

The name drew upon my interest in mental health, but the magazine belonged equally to our creative life. It eventually became visible enough for Ben Steelman at the Star-News to notice.

While I was learning to help people speak inside a psychiatric hospital, Lynn and I were creating another place where voices could be received.

Love in public and private

Our affection had not faded into the background because we now shared a home and daily responsibilities.

At poetry events and gatherings with Lynn’s friends, I remained aware of her presence. If I felt uncertain among people I did not know well, I was not alone. She was nearby.

At one pottery gathering, she sat on my lap while continuing a conversation. Every so often, she turned her attention back toward me.

“Are you doing okay, sweetie?”

“I’m fine.”

My hand rested on her leg. The gesture was intimate without removing us from the gathering. That was characteristic of our life: public belonging and private knowledge existing together.

On Valentine’s Day in 1996, Lynn surprised me with something deliberately sexy from Victoria’s Secret. She enjoyed my reaction— the speed with which the clothing she had selected became secondary to my desire for her.

Afterward, we showered and returned to bed, our bodies still touching as we fell asleep.

Years into our relationship, closeness had not become merely routine. Familiarity did not drain it of significance. I still experienced the current that had begun with our first handclasp in 1992.

The world outside our home was expanding. I was becoming a clinician. We were publishing a literary magazine. Lynn was writing poetry and creating pottery. But at the center was still the simplest fact:

We wanted to be close to one another.

May 1996

In May 1996, I received my Master of Social Work degree from the University of South Carolina.

The degree represented more than an academic credential. The young man who had entered Georgia Tech painfully shy and uncertain how to occupy social space had now been trusted by residents, clients, patients, professors, and an experienced clinician who had watched him grow.

Lynn had witnessed the transformation.

She had known me before full-time graduate school, lived beside me throughout it, read what I wrote, listened when I doubted myself, and welcomed me home after the drives to Columbia, internships, classes, and weekend shifts.

The contrast with engineering was immediate.

I had tried to find work as an engineer. I submitted applications and went to interviews. I had not deliberately rejected the degree or sabotaged opportunities so that I could later claim engineering had failed me. But I could not sell myself in that field. During interviews, I was attempting to persuade employers that I belonged in work that had never matched who I was.

Social work was different.

Before I had much time to wonder what would follow graduation, Brynn Marr Psychiatric Hospital offered me a position. I would not be entering through a technical, clerical, or paraprofessional role while waiting for someone to recognize my potential.

My job title was therapist.

After years of preparation, the field I had deliberately chosen opened a door almost immediately.

The life I had imagined was no longer waiting somewhere in the future.

I had reached it.