The Life Beyond the Internship
The child and adolescent placement had caused me to question myself, but it was not the only evidence available.
Before graduate school became a full-time commitment, I had already been responsible for people whose well-being depended partly upon my judgment. Those experiences did not yet make me a therapist, but they had required me to become reliable, observant, and responsive to needs that were not always expressed in words.
Robert and James
My direct-care work had begun after the Corning contract ended in October 1992.
Through an agency connected with the Southeastern Center for Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities, and Substance Abuse Services, I began working with people who had developmental disabilities.
Robert had autism and an intellectual disability. He did not communicate through speech, so I learned enough sign language to interact with him. Our days involved routines, meals, walks, and goals established in his treatment plan. When we walked outside, I positioned myself between Robert and the street.
The work required attention rather than performance. Robert could not reassure me verbally that I was doing well. Trust appeared through repetition: his willingness to walk beside me, follow a routine, and accept my presence.
Later, I worked with James, who had cerebral palsy, an intellectual disability, and intermittent explosive disorder. James lived in a home with continuous staffing and needed help navigating the community without crossing other people’s boundaries.
He was the opposite of shy. He greeted everyone, touched people impulsively, and sometimes tried to hug strangers.
“James, you can say hello,” I would remind him, “but you cannot hug everyone.”
He loved seeing Lynn when we stopped by our home. I never left them alone, and I made sure Lynn was comfortable with the visits. If James moved too close or reached toward her in a way she did not welcome, she would say his name firmly.
“James.”
He would look at me and give a low, uncomfortable laugh.
“Uh-oh. He’s mad now.”
“We need to go,” I would tell him.
Lynn might reassure him that everything was okay, but I understood that the boundary had to mean something. Helping James participate in the community required more than affection. It required teaching him that another person’s comfort and bodily autonomy mattered.
These jobs were considered paraprofessional work. They did not yet make me a therapist. But they demanded qualities no degree could manufacture: patience, vigilance, reliability, and respect.
Christmas 1994 — Returning with Lynn
Between the two semesters, Lynn and I drove to visit my parents for Christmas.
Whether to go was my decision. Lynn could not decide for me whether I should return to the house where so much of the emotional and physical harm had occurred. She would not control my relationship with my family or tell me that I had to cut them out of my life. That would have repeated something too familiar—the assumption that someone else had the right to determine what I should feel and what choices I should make.
She could, however, go with me.
On the drive, I was calm. That was what being with Lynn did for me. Whatever anxiety might have accompanied the thought of returning to my parents remained quiet while we were together in the car. I was not entering the house as the isolated child who had lived there. I was arriving as an independent and empowered adult with the woman I loved.
For a while after we entered, everything appeared ordinary.
I stood near the kitchen table talking with my father and my brother. Lynn was twenty or thirty feet away on the other side of the room, speaking with my mother. The conversations continued independently until something inside me shifted.
I do not remember what was said immediately before it happened. There may not have been a particular remark. The room itself held memories. The table, the arrangement of the furniture, the voices, and the physical sensation of standing in that house seemed to reach beneath conscious thought.
My body recognized something before my mind could name it.
The conversation with my father and brother paused.
I looked across the room and saw Lynn.
Then I moved.
I crossed the space quickly, went behind her, and slid my body against hers. She did not startle or move away. She rested back into me as if she understood immediately what I needed. I wrapped myself around her and placed my head against her shoulder.
The room became quiet.
Lynn and my mother stopped speaking. My father and brother had already fallen silent. Everyone seemed aware that something had happened, though no one named it.
I looked up from Lynn’s shoulder and made eye contact with my mother.
I did not have words for what I wanted to communicate. Perhaps there were too many words compressed into the look:
This is what safety feels like.
This is what I needed.
This is the person I can turn to when being near you brings something back into my body.
Or perhaps I was simply looking at her, waiting to see whether she understood what she was witnessing.
I do not remember anyone asking what had happened.
Lynn remained where she was, allowing the weight of my body to rest against hers. She did not speak for me or interpret the moment to my family. She did not need to. Her body answered mine. She gave me somewhere to go without taking over the decision to be there.
Eventually, conversation resumed.
The moment could easily have been dismissed as an ordinary embrace between two people in love. From the outside, perhaps that was all anyone saw. But I had crossed the room with the urgency of someone seeking shelter.
And Lynn had made shelter of herself.
Separate Beds
Later, the question arose of where we would sleep.
Lynn suggested that while we were under my parents’ roof, we should sleep in separate beds. I do not believe she wanted distance from me. She was trying to respect what she understood to be their rules and avoid creating conflict in their home.
But the suggestion felt wrong.
We were engaged. We had made a life together. We understood ourselves as husband and wife even though we could not legally marry without endangering the medical coverage she needed for cystic fibrosis. Sleeping separately made our relationship seem conditional—as though the life we shared became less real when we entered my parents’ house.
It also meant losing the closeness that helped me feel safe in that house.
I did not say what I wish I had said:
Then we can leave. We can drive home. We can get a room somewhere.
If staying here requires us to pretend that we are not the couple we are, we do not have to stay.
At the time, I did not understand that those were legitimate options. My parents’ house still carried an authority larger than the actual authority they possessed. “Under their roof” sounded like an absolute principle rather than a condition I was free to decline.
Lynn could not establish that boundary for me. It was my family, my history, and ultimately my decision. Had I said that sleeping separately was unacceptable, I believe she would have understood. We could have left together.
Instead, I remained caught between two realities. In one, I was an adult building a home and future with the woman I loved. In the other, I had returned to the house where my parents’ expectations could still make me feel that I had no right to define the terms of my own life.
The scene near the kitchen table revealed how much had changed. When the past rose inside me, I no longer had to face it alone. I could cross the room and reach for Lynn.
The sleeping arrangements revealed what I had not yet learned.
I knew how to seek safety in her arms.
I did not yet know that I was allowed to take that safety and leave.
The Second Semester
In spring 1995, my first-year internship moved away from the child and adolescent unit.
During part of the day, I worked with a program serving people with chronic and persistent mental illnesses. Some of the people I encountered there were also residents of Sherwood Village. The supposedly separate parts of my training began to overlap.
In the afternoon, I worked with the homeless program.
The placement was not always satisfying. I wanted to contribute, but I often felt that there was not enough for me to do. I was still sensitive to uncertainty and eager to prove that I belonged in the field.
Once, I corrected someone about something in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I was attempting to demonstrate knowledge in a setting where demonstrating knowledge was not the point. My supervisor corrected me.
Other criticisms followed. I no longer remember each one, but I remember the cumulative discouragement. At one point, my supervisor questioned whether I had the potential to become a social worker.
It was the first and only time anyone in my professional life posed that question so directly.
The judgment was difficult to reconcile with the rest of my experience. At Sherwood Village, residents approached me constantly. Robert and James had depended upon me. At The Oaks, Chris Hauge had already treated me as a clinician in development. Yet one supervisor’s doubt entered more deeply than all that evidence.
I had not yet learned how easily authority could make me doubt what other people had already shown me to be true.
The Street Sheet
The homeless placement did give me an opportunity to create something useful.
People in crisis were expected to locate shelters, meals, transportation, mental health care, and other services while already overwhelmed. Information existed, but existing somewhere was not the same as being accessible to the person who needed it.
Using our computer at home, Wilmington bus maps, and information about local services, I designed a street sheet.
On one side, I placed a map showing where resources could be found. On the other, I described the available programs and services. I organized it so that someone under stress would not have to hold a complicated system in mind.
At home, Lynn was nearby while I worked. Graduate school, the internship, Sherwood Village, and our relationship did not occupy separate lives. I brought books and assignments into our home. I used our computer to create the street sheet. I returned to her after working with people whose lives were much less secure than ours.
I could not know what the document would someday mean.
Eight years later, in December 2003, I would be released into Wilmington without a stable home. A police officer would hand me a resource sheet intended for people who were homeless and in crisis.
I would recognize the design.
It would be mine.
But in spring 1995, I was not the person receiving the street sheet. I was the graduate student creating it. I had a home, a life with Lynn, employment at Sherwood Village, and a future I was steadily approaching.
My supervisor’s doubts did not define me.
The people who turned toward me offered a different evaluation.