By the summer of 1994, Lynn and I had spent nearly all our available time together for two years.
From our first date in July 1992 onward, our relationship had not developed through occasional formal dates separated by long stretches apart. We became part of one another’s daily lives. We talked, read, listened to music, made love, went to poetry readings, and planned what would come next. By then, I no longer thought of myself as visiting Lynn or taking her somewhere. We were creating a life.
That summer marked another transition. We were preparing to live together as husband and wife, and I was preparing to begin the more demanding portion of graduate school. Classes would begin in late August. My education would no longer be limited to courses I could fit around the rest of my life. There would be internships, supervisors, clients, written evaluations, and expectations I could not satisfy merely by studying hard.
Before that new semester began, some of Lynn’s family came to Wilmington for several days.
The Cousins Come to Wilmington
They arranged the visit around a weekend, as they usually did, extending it into four or five days. It allowed us to spend meaningful time together without requiring anyone to take an entire week away from work and other responsibilities.
The adults could have spent the visit talking among themselves while the children stayed close to their parents. That was not what happened.
The children sought me out.
At the beach, they wanted me to go into the ocean with them. One of the younger girls raised her arms and said, “Pick me up.”
I lifted her and looked toward her mother.
“How far out can we go?”
“As far as you want,” she answered.
The response communicated more than permission. She trusted me. She knew I would not take her daughter somewhere unsafe or allow anything to happen to her.
We walked into the surf together. The older girl stayed near us, independent enough not to need to be carried but close enough to reach for me if a wave became too strong. The younger one remained in my arms, launching herself at each swell. Sometimes she pushed down against my legs just as I tried to rise above a wave, sending salt water into my mouth.
I tried not to let it bother me as I kept riding the waves with this little girl.
Before long, they wanted to go out again.
The adults remained on the beach talking. I was technically one of the adults, but I occupied a different position. I became the big brother, uncle, playmate, and protector. I did not resent being separated from the grown-up conversation. I loved the energy of it.
The children did not need me to impress them. They wanted someone willing to enter their world without remaining at a distance.
I could do that naturally.
I could be playful without ceasing to be responsible. I could follow their excitement while remaining aware of the water, the waves, and how far we had gone. Their parents could relax because they knew I was paying attention.
The arrangement seemed to satisfy everyone. Lynn had time with her cousin. The other adults could talk. The children had someone who genuinely enjoyed being with them. And I felt something I had known before with my own younger cousins: the freedom of being wanted without having to prove that I deserved a place.
Those several days also widened my understanding of the life Lynn and I were making. Her family was not treating me as a temporary boyfriend who might disappear before the next visit. I belonged beside her. No one required an explanation of our commitment before recognizing it.
I was becoming part of a family.
A Different Kind of Beginning
By late August, the visit was over and classes began.
Graduate school was now becoming something larger than evening courses and papers. I would have to translate what I knew intellectually into work with actual people. That was the point of social-work education. A person could not become a therapist simply by attending classes, memorizing theories, and passing examinations.
There were field placements to complete. There were hours that had to be documented. There were supervisors whose evaluations could determine whether I continued. I would be expected to enter unfamiliar settings and understand what was required of me.
That challenge should be seen in the context of who I had once been.
When I began at Georgia Tech, ordinary social interaction could feel overwhelming. I had been painfully shy for so long that I sometimes seemed to disappear in the presence of other people. I had not merely changed academic interests when I chose social work. I had chosen a profession built almost entirely from the capacities that had once been most difficult for me: speaking, listening, responding, tolerating attention, leading groups, and being emotionally present while another person revealed something painful.
I had already done a great deal to prepare myself.
Before moving to Wilmington, I had volunteered at Georgia Regional Hospital. After arriving in Wilmington, I volunteered at The Oaks with Chris Hauge. When the Corning contract ended in October 1992, I found direct-care work with people who had developmental disabilities. I learned to communicate with a man who could not rely upon spoken language. I worked in homes and community settings where another person’s well-being partly depended upon my judgment.
These experiences mattered. I was not entering graduate school with nothing but an abstract wish to help people.
Still, an internship introduced a different pressure. I would not merely be helping someone. I would be observed helping them. Someone would be deciding whether I was doing it correctly.
Sherwood Village
Around this period, I began working weekends at Sherwood Village, a supportive independent-living apartment community for people with severe and persistent mental illnesses.
Sherwood Village was not a hospital. The residents had their own apartments and considerable independence. Some drove cars. They went into the community. There was no institutional curfew controlling their lives. The purpose of the program was to provide support without taking adulthood away from them.
My shift ran across the weekend. I carried a pager so residents could contact me if they needed assistance. Sometimes I remained on the property. At other times, I could return home to Lynn as long as I stayed available and could come back quickly.
That arrangement mattered to me. Work did not require me to disappear from the life we were building together. I could accept responsibility for the residents and still come home to Lynn.
At Sherwood Village, people approached me easily.
They talked to me about practical problems, emotional concerns, disagreements, symptoms, and whatever else was happening in their lives. Occasionally there was an emergency. One resident experienced a seizure, and I remained in contact with emergency services until help arrived. Most of the work was less dramatic. It involved being present, paying attention, and treating people with respect.
I also led resident meetings.
That fact deserves more attention than I gave it at the time. The young man who had once struggled to speak in ordinary social situations was now sitting before a room of adults who expected him to lead. I did not need to force myself into a performance of confidence. I knew why I was there. I understood that the residents deserved to be heard, and that gave me something more important than self-consciousness to focus upon.
They told me they liked having me there.
I could feel it when I arrived. People came toward me. They wanted to talk. I was not trying to convince myself that I had empathy; their behavior showed me that they experienced me as approachable.
Sherwood Village taught me something no classroom could have established so clearly: when I understood my role and could respond to real people rather than an evaluator’s expectations, I could form strong and trustworthy relationships.
The Child and Adolescent Unit
My first internship placement was on the child and adolescent unit at the New Hanover County mental health center.
I expected that my recent experiences with Lynn’s cousins—and my earlier experiences with younger children in my extended family— would matter. I liked children. Children generally liked me. Only weeks earlier, I had spent days being followed from one activity to another by children who wanted me to play with them, take them into the ocean, and remain near them.
But the unit felt entirely different.
I did not know what I was supposed to do.
The difficulty was not being in the room with children. If someone had asked me to spend time with them, listen to them, play a game, or help them feel less frightened, I could have done that. What unsettled me was the expectation that the interaction had to become a recognizable clinical intervention.
I had heard the term play therapy, but I had not yet been trained to provide it. Play therapy sounded simple until I imagined being evaluated while attempting it. Was I supposed to interpret the child’s choice of toys? Direct the play toward a therapeutic goal? Remain silent and observe? Ask questions? Document what the child’s behavior meant?
No one gave me sufficient guidance.
I did not think they wanted me to enter the room and “just play” with the children. Yet no one adequately explained what should replace that natural response. I felt as if I were expected to perform a role without being given the script.
That pressure reached directly into my oldest vulnerabilities. When I knew what another person needed, I could concentrate on them. When I did not know what was expected and believed someone was measuring my performance, my attention turned inward.
Am I doing this correctly?
Should I say something?
Am I missing what everyone else understands?
Do they expect me to know this already?
The more I monitored myself, the less natural I became.
That is the strange part. Outside the unit, children did not make me self-conscious. They freed something in me. I could be playful, protective, attentive, and fully present. Inside the unit, I became preoccupied with whether I looked like someone conducting therapy.
I confused the absence of instruction with a defect in myself.
If I were truly suited for social work, I thought, shouldn’t I be able to figure this out? Shouldn’t someone who wanted to become a therapist instinctively know what to do?
I was asking too much of myself. Graduate education existed because these skills had to be taught. Play therapy was not ordinary play conducted by a person with good intentions. It was a clinical method requiring training, supervision, and an understanding of how to use play without imposing adult meanings upon it.
My uncertainty did not prove that I was incapable of working with children.
The recent visit from Lynn’s cousins offered evidence of the opposite. So did my childhood memories of entertaining younger cousins while the adults talked. So would later experiences in which parents and children trusted me.
The problem was not the children.
The problem was that I had entered an evaluative setting without enough direction, and my history made it easy to conclude that any uncertainty represented personal failure.
What Came Naturally and What Had to Be Learned
At Sherwood Village, I was trusted with adults who had serious mental illnesses. I led meetings, responded to crises, and became someone residents actively sought out.
With Lynn’s cousins, I became the person children wanted beside them in the ocean.
On the child and adolescent unit, I felt lost.
All three things were true.
At the time, the discouraging experience carried more weight than the other evidence. Criticism had always entered me more deeply than affirmation. A single uncertain placement could make me question abilities that numerous people had already experienced directly.
I had not yet learned to ask the more accurate question:
What conditions allow my abilities to become available?
With Lynn, I felt secure enough to grow. With the children at the beach, affection and play emerged naturally because no one required me to demonstrate competence. At Sherwood Village, responsibility gave my attention a clear direction. On the unit, ambiguity and evaluation pulled me back toward self-consciousness.
That did not mean I belonged only in places where everything felt easy. It meant I still needed teaching, supervision, and experience. It also meant that my capacities were relational. Safety did not create abilities that were otherwise absent. It allowed abilities I had worked hard to develop to remain accessible.
The semester had begun with more than an internship.
It had begun with a home, a woman I loved, children who reached for me, residents who trusted me, and a professional future that was becoming real.
One difficult placement could not erase all of that, though for a while I allowed it to make me wonder.
I was still learning how to become a therapist.
I was also learning not to mistake being unsupported for being incapable.