When Worlds Collide: Confessions from the Liberal Environmentalist Subculture

I run in some pretty leftist circles. Yeah, that's right. I'm that hippie tree-hugging chick, wondering why you're poisoning your body with diet soda and conventionally grown vegetables. I'm that crazy lady surrounded by dogs (not all my own) who's excited about growing her own food. I'm that pain in the butt who keeps writing to her congressional representatives, the ones who are supposed to represent her views, her wishes, her hopes for our nation, and demanding that they actually do so. I'm also that odd girl who aspires to go to church during all of Holy Week (and all of Bright Week as well) if it wasn't for the fact that gas is just so darned expensive and she's too new to the community to know anyone to carpool with. Oh, right, and I'm that annoying girl on Facebook who keeps getting on the soapbox about how terrified she is about the bees dying, the possibility of food shortages, the criminal abuses of government agencies like the FDA, and wondering how in the world we're going to have a peaceful revolution.

I'm kind of active in these circles, and I believe in the changes we all want to make, both on a large scale within the culture, and in small doses in our individual lives. But there's something most of them don't know about me. It's my dirty little secret.

I... am a gamer.

Yes, that's right. A gamer. I play Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy/science fiction role-playing games, using my imagination and a handful of dice. I also play computer games and console games, although without a console system, I limit those games to when I visit friends. I have played MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games; my game of choice was Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning) with people I've never met, typing in my comments or coordinating with other players using Ventrilo, a voice-over internet protocol software widely used by gamers. I like board games and card games too, especially when they have a science fiction theme.

I have heard gaming vilified in my more hippie-type communities (think all the social change without the drugs and the indiscriminate sex), and I usually end up keeping my mouth shut. I'm new in my community, and alienating people right off the bat is not my intention. But I just feel like they are speaking out of turn, not out of experience but from the outside looking in.

So I want to set some things straight about gaming, about the myths surrounding it, and also about its benefits.

Gaming, both tabletop (D&D) and video, does not simply attract introverted nerds lacking in social graces. While some people meeting this description also happen to game, they also happen to practice law and medicine and run businesses, perhaps even run for political office. Gamers are actually quite often open, fun people who also happen to be creative and intelligent, who enjoy engaging in play-based problem solving sessions.

Gaming also does not lead to violence. While some people who become violent may game, it is not necessarily a causal relationship. It's kind of like saying "All these violent people ate pickles, therefore pickles must make people violent." The pickle isn't the culprit, and the explanation of course doesn't explain the millions of pickle-eaters (and gamers) who don't turn out to be violent.

(What is far more frightening is that a lot of the teens and young adults who have become violent in public places like schools have been on psychotropic medications such as antidepressants, which are known to change brain chemistry, but which were not tested on adolescent patients to determine their effect. Interestingly, those medications have been subsequently found to make young subjects more violent to themselves and others. But Heaven forbid we anger the monstrosity that is Big Pharma by calling attention to these side effects they think should remain in obscurity.)

What I propose is that gaming is more of a psychological exercise that allows people to explore patterns of behavior in a safe context. Tabletop RPGs (role-playing games) are particularly good at this. One plays a character and behaves as that character would in all sorts of situations, from diplomatic discussion to combat. Does this character have loyalty as a core value, and in that case, how will she behave in a combat situation where one of her comrades falls? Because actual people inhabit and play the characters, it permits the player to experience these ethical situations in proxy. In D&D, a chaotic neutral character will act only in his own interest and will only take others into consideration if he profits from it. Lawful evil characters will work toward destruction, domination, and oppression, but they will at least follow a code of conduct. (Chaotic evil will not - think Blackwater, or the Bush administration). From a Jungian psychological standpoint, it is an excellent time to encounter and familiarize ourselves with aspects of our psyche that may be hidden or suppressed, or that may be just beginning to grow and develop. It would even be a good chance to explore some of the dynamics of a very familiar archetypal pattern, and to maybe play out and bring to light the reasons why this pattern so attracts us.

(Incidentally, I know few people who have played an evil character in D&D, except for DMs - dungeon masters - who had evil characters interacting with the players in his/her game. People are generally pretty decent and want to play decent, if flawed, characters.)

Even video games can help us experience things we would not have encountered in our daily lives. Console games (and their PC versions) give us visceral feelings of empathy and involvement in the worlds they create for us. Jane McGonigal gave a TEDtalk recently where she talked about gamers being a huge human resource for problem-solving skills. The problem, and McGonigal seems to agree, is that gamers (and not just gamers but lots of other people too) find this world rather meaningless.

See, we are completely alienated from any feeling of agency in our world. We can work our buns off, go into debt, pay off some debt (maybe), go to school, have families, and still not feel as if our lives have had an impact on the world. No matter how hard we work, most of us still see our politicians ignoring our needs, our government becoming ever more corrupt, and the social fabric of our lives deteriorate. And where many would try to find solace, in their religious institutions, they so often find more corruption, and hateful rhetoric that discourages us from hope, from connection with others, from love. (I am grateful that my Church does not do this, but I have been in churches where hateful speech is used frequently, and the news is full of the transgressions of religious leaders.) Is it any wonder that people retreat into gaming worlds?

Gamers are amazing in that they will engage in, and even create, worlds that have meaning for them. I am happily one of them. I am happy to play a character who, like myself, wants to change his or her world but, unlike myself, has a particular skill set which allows him or her to actually do so.

As Jane McGonigal suggests, what we need to do now, is reintroduce all that talent, hope, creativity, innovation, and meaning back into the "real" world.

In other posts, I may talk about specific games I play and enjoy, because I want people to understand the possibilities of gaming. But for right now, I'm just going to disclose this dirty little secret of mine. I love gaming, and I'm proud of it. I have the ability to use my imagination to inhabit characters who can positively impact their worlds. I have the motivation to remain with a quest that might help the world and the people around me, as long as I have the hope that I can have an impact.

Wouldn't anyone do the same?

Change Begins in the Imagination

I am watching something amazing happening in American society.

Wednesday night, there was a protest at the Washington State Capitol Building. Thousands of protesters peacefully occupied the rotunda, demanding that we no longer kow-tow to corporate interests, and that corporations be taxed according to their income, just as we regular citizens are.

In Wisconsin, thousands protested when unionized teachers' ability to negotiate with the state was threatened. And finally, one brave judge signed an order for the legislation, which was passed without the state's Democrats present, to be stopped because it was unconstitutional. Unthinkably, the governor of that state went ahead anyway, until the judge finally had to say, "No means NO!"

After decades of passive complacency and blind trust in our government, the people are standing up once again to tell the government - this time their own and not one located across the ocean - that we are not going to have corporate interests usurp our own rights.

The actions of multinational corporations have ticked us off since before we were even a country! The original Boston Tea Party was about the colonists protesting the British government's tax subsidies to the British East India Company, while regular citizens were taxed mercilessly. (Thank you to Thom Hartmann's show for a beautiful explanation of this.) And here we are again, with a government (this time our own) bowing down to the whims of multinational corps while we lose public services like Medicare and veteran's assistance. I mean, is it not enough that some people dedicate their entire lives to our economy (our elders) and that some even put themselves in harm's way for our nation's security agenda (our veterans)? Now they're going to get screwed as well?

This particular budget crisis has been brought to you by the Republican Party (the politicians my parents vote for - I hope my folks are re-thinking THAT decision). But really, this isn't about one party being better then the other. This is about both parties being really corrupt, and the corruption of one being highlighted on this occasion. I don't think for a moment that Democratic Party politicians don't take bribes or turn their noses up at corporate lobbyists. The reality of the situation is that the system itself is rotten.

This political process, this entire system, is a meat grinder. People love to tell us how Obama has failed this and failed that. My Republican friends (and family) like to tell me that he was a bad egg from the beginning, and my Democratic friends wring their hands in disappointment and despair at this man. For what it's worth, here's what I think:

I think Barack Obama had big dreams for reforming this nation. The Bush administration did their level best to end any goodwill Americans might experience elsewhere in the world by behaving like an overgrown teenaged bully on the global playground. Bush wrote NO legislation while in office, and sat back while corporate interests had a field day getting tax cuts and subsidies, while our economy plummeted. A budget surplus left by Bill Clinton was immediately obliterated by Bush and his cronies. And this brave man, Barack Obama, thought he might be able to bring some hope.

On the promise of that hope, he was elected into office. And as if the meat grinder of a corrupt election process wasn't enough, Obama then entered office and discovered the miasma of degeneration, corruption, and greed that currently masquerades as our government. I think that anyone that hopeful, and that able to inspire others, will be met with the vilest of attacks on his character because that's all the opposition (the system) really has as a weapon. And boy did they attack.

Some are saying that he's a foreign national, others that he's not a Christian (what First Amendment?), and others even go so far as to say he's the Antichrist. I have heard this from the mouths of people I love dearly and it only proves to me the corruption of the beast that is our political system. Barack Obama is the Antichrist ONLY if Jesus is a rich, white CEO filthying up our oceans, air and land, robbing the poorest and bravest of us, poisoning our food, and tossing the elderly overboard. I'm sorry, but that's not the Jesus I worship.

Bottom line: I think poor Barack got into the Oval Office and saw that it was a rabbit hole that went way deeper than anyone realized.

But now, things are turning. We the People have not forgotten about Obama's promise of hope and change. And now, after a budget proposal that pretty much craps on regular citizens and coddles the very wealthy, people are beginning to remember that promise. They are taking it to state capitols right now, this very minute, and they are demanding change. I am so proud of my nation right now. I am so proud of the people of this nation, who are writing letters to their congresspeople, praying to whomever they pray that this will actually do some good. They are forming communities and gathering to find out how they can change the very system that threatens their well-being. One group tried this and ended up being co-opted into the very system they said they wanted to fight. Now another is trying. Let's get this one right. But even if we don't, we'll keep trying.

I have to remember, however, that revolution must happen inside each of us before it can happen outside of us. Robert Ohotto, a brilliant intuitive life strategist and excellent public speaker, recently did a radio show in which he outlined the difference between rebellion and revolution. As Ohotto explains, rebellion always exists in opposition to an adversary, but revolution takes us out of the equation of that polar opposition and forms a new system altogether. Revolutionaries are able to say, "This isn't working. Let's try something else." (Thank you, Robert. I just listened to that download TODAY and it was perfect for this post.)

That revolutionary change begins within us, as soon as we are able to imagine, as individuals and as a culture, that we can have leadership that is honest, strong, wise, and full of integrity. And we have done this. There have been movies and television shows for decades now, that have described this revolution (they're tough to find amongst some of the mind-numbing garbage we usually see). As we watch these imaginal heroes create a better world, we take some of that in, and make it a part of ourselves.

One such television series was a science fiction show called Babylon 5. Written by J. Michael Straczynski, it is almost prophetic with its story arc of movement from rebellion to revolution. I will end with a quote that Straczynski used in a Season One episode ("Mind War") about a revolutionary named Jason Ironheart. Ironheart quotes a Sioux poem as he faces the old regime:

"You cannot harm me.

You cannot harm one who has dreamed a dream like mine."

~Sioux Shaman song

Let us dream dreams of freedom, integrity, and a life lived in compassion and wisdom. Let us dream dreams of hope and unity, and a future that is bright and healthy.

Viva la Revolution!!

New Beginnings

Wow, it's been a year and a half since I published here. Bad Tanya....

So, to anyone who follows this and doesn't already know, I have moved to Woodinville, Washington, where I rent a room in a log cabin that sits on 5 lovely acres of land. The cabin's owner is my new business partner, Stephanie. We have formed a company called Into the Wild Dog Food, and we make raw, organic dog food.

I am currently waiting to hear about a medical buyout for my work injury, and hopefully that will help provide seed money for the company, plus allow me to live while the business takes off.

We will also be raising bees, which is something we want to do for the planet. We have big plans for the land, and we want to make this an organic haven for our dogs and for ourselves.

But today...today I feel a little anxious. My feelers are out in many different directions and it's time to focus. Also, it's the second day of Lent, and this also is a time for focus and meditation. There is so much out of my hands right now, and I need to concentrate of the little slice of the pie that I can do something about.

All I can do is just extend my faith - in God, in myself, in my community and my family - and know that I will get the support and resources I need.

I will write more about the journey of the last year and a half later. Thanks to all five of my followers who have stayed with me up until now.

In the meantime, have a most excellent day!

Burning

I've been running a low-grade fever for a week now.

I have no other symptoms except for the general achy crankiness that fever brings, along with exhaustion. A low-grade fever for someone who generally has a low body temperature means that doctors and nurses tend to sneer at claims of feeling bad, because even with a low-grade fever, my temperature is about 98.6 degrees. So, no doctor's note. No time off work (as if I could afford it). Just waking up exhausted, coming home from work schwacked, nap, wake up, maybe eat, feed and walk my dog, and then listlessly hang around my house.

In the absence of other physical symptoms, I have determined that there must be something else my body is doing or saying through this. It could just be my body telling me to sit down and simply relax, something which, a friend pointed out to me recently, is something I'm really bad at. I'm not good at seeking the still point. I do tend to run around and try to fix the things I think are causing this, rather than being patient with the situation - and myself - and letting it all fall into place.

My life went in the blender two or three months ago, throwing me into an existential crisis about where my path in life really is, and what I'm supposed to be doing in this world. People I thought I could depend on are gone, just like that. Emotional ties (mainly to clients) that did feed my soul have been cut, often without closure. I have asked God this whole time what He wants from me, why He has ripped so much from me right now. I can't take much more. It's these pieces I'm trying to put back together, but I might have lost the glue.

I have been trying, through whatever means possible, to just shut it off. If there was a piece of my heart that I could cut out to help me lock down this vortex, it would have been gone by now. But there is no such thing. (Believe me, I have prayed for this for two months now. It's still there.) I used to have such disdain for people who had shut down like this. I couldn't imagine wanting to stop feeling. That's the whole problem with our culture, isn't it? We feel lightly, if we choose to feel at all. We deaden our emotions until they are comfortable for ourselves and others, until our joy and laughter no longer threatens another's quiet, until our pain just gets channeled into angry music, until our love no longer generates fear, until our grief fades away into numbness.

Sometimes, I really want that numbness. I want that dumbed down version of me. Tanya 2.0 - less scary, less intense, less angry, less grief-stricken, less loving, less joyful, just...even.

Instead I have this inexplicable fever. The intensity and heat will come out one way or another. So I asked myself last night, what burns in me? What burns in me that hasn't come out through my writing thus far? What burns in me that has no other expression than to slowly simmer my body until I collapse each night?

I am alive and intense and real and dancing and feeling so deeply that I wonder if I really have a place in this world. And something in me cries for expression but I don't know what.

A Soulful Game: Watching Giants Baseball

In my last post, I talked about Freud and the roots of psychology. I talked about how the soul was ripped from psychology to placate the greed of an industry that should be devoted to healing.

I will return to why I'm a depth psychologist in a later post, but for now, I want to talk about baseball.

I grew up with baseball, so I suppose at some level, I like it by default. My dad is a former minor league pitcher, who then pitched his way through the Vietnam War for the Marines. He coached Pony League when I was a kid, and baseball season was pretty big for my entire extended family. I have several awesome childhood memories that center around my dad, but one of them is playing a game of softball at some work-related picnic, and both of us coming home to nurse our injuries. I recall looking up at him as he poured hydrogen peroxide over my skinned knee, acquired during a slide into home plate that I'm reasonably sure was unnecessarily dramatic, although at the age of ten or twelve, it was pretty important. It hurt like hell but I smiled through the pain, trying to be brave for my dad. When I was all grown up, I traveled to Toronto with him, and we took in a Blue Jays game while we were up there. I don't recall the score or even who won, but what I do remember is hanging out with him, sharing something that had been his passion in his own youth over a couple of hot dogs and Coke. There are several memories like that, all contributing to my love of this game.

I am a fairly recent transplant to the San Francisco Bay Area, and so for about a year I simply spent my time getting to know my way around. This year, I have had the pleasure of further entrenchment into the culture of the Bay Area, and I've done so in part by watching (as much as possible) the Giants play this game that is so dear to me.

They have not disappointed me. I watched on television as Jonathan Sanchez pitched a near-perfect game while his own father watched from the stands. I've watched our Gigantes sabotaged by some of the most ridiculous calls ever made by a refereeing authority (using THAT term loosely). And I've had the pleasure of seeing The Freak and The Big Unit throw some glorious pitches past batters, and felt the thrill of a watching a home run soar across the field launched by Aaron Rowand or our Kung Fu Panda, Pablo Sandoval. In a certain sense, all of it - the thrills and the frustrations - have led to my feeling that finally, since moving to the West Coast in 2001, I have come home.

From the perspective of soul, home is not about owning property or even having a stable address for a year or more. It has nothing to do with DMV listings, utility payments, or mortgage rates. Home, in a soulful sense, is about having a sense of belonging. The closest I had come on the West Coast was working at a runaway shelter in Santa Barbara. But even then, that was someplace I left every day to go to my domicile, which was only sometimes where I felt I truly belonged. This is not to say I did not make lifelong friends in SoCal, but simply that I always felt just a little...unsettled.

Here in the Bay Area, my sense of belonging is linked to the very landscape of this place. It includes natural sources of wonder that I've always found compelling, like redwood trees, mountains, and the huge and awesome Pacific Ocean. But it includes other sources of wonder that are embedded in the landscape - museums, places I've gone swing dancing, the fascinating city of San Francisco - in which I've found myself hopelessly lost and then gloriously at ease. But really, at the core of it, what makes me feel so wonderfully at home here is people.

Having a sense of "home" is deeply important to the psyche. We all need a place to which we can retreat - a place that is comfortable and secure, a place that feeds us and replenishes us. Our wellness, in a holistic sense, depends on this, and yet so many people live without this sense of home, this sense of belonging and acceptance and simple relaxation.

I have made friends easily here. The Bay Area is full of subcultures into which I can assimilate with surprisingly little effort - music, dance, gaming, academics, to name a few. Many of the friends I've made here are multi-dimensional, abundantly creative, wildly intelligent and passionate folk who seem like they're as enamored of this place as I am, whether they were born here or not.

And, I've met a lot of Giants fans. This season, I've discovered that rooting for the home team is a thread that weaves in and out of several of the Bay Area's subcultures. It is not the main source of connectedness between people and groups, but it is a reminder that there IS a connection. Even the name - The Giants - is a clue to the archetypal resonance of this team, the sport it plays, and its effect on the inhabitants of this region: titanic, larger-than-life, resounding, awe-inspiring.... In the regional psyche of the Bay Area, the team looms as large as its name, and perhaps as they slowly relax into that resonance, they will continue to play really incredible (and occasionally deeply disappointing) baseball, giving those of us who are watching stunning highs and heartbreaking lows, but always keeping us enthralled.

It's as if I've come full circle. From the home in which I was raised, to my new home by the Bay, this sport carries with it reminders, flavors, resonances of loving and wonderful people in my life - the kind of people that turn a place to live into a place I belong, into Home.

Why I Am A Depth Psychologist, Part 1: A Tougher But More Satisfying Lens

The conversation usually goes like this:

Random Human: "What brought you to California?"

Me: "A juicy Ph.D. program."

RH: "Oh really? What were you studying?"

Me: "Depth psychology."

RH: "Huh?..."

Since it's the lens through which I view many, if not most, things, I thought I might offer up an explanation of what depth psychology is (and isn't), how I hope to integrate it into my current and future endeavors, and why I think it can change the world in a positive way.

Depth psychology is, simply put, a return to the original translation of the word psychology. Psychology is the study of psyche, the soul (NOT, as is often presumed, noie, the mind). When Freud wrote about psychology, he wrote about Seele (the German word for soul). A wonderful little book by Bruno Bettelheim called "Freud and Man's Soul" describes in great detail how the translation of Freud's opus was coopted by the medical industry, and subsequently translated to fit a more objective, business-like, detached model. By the time you make it through the preface, you have a taste of how brutally the English translations of Freud's works butcher Freud's actual ideas, and what he hoped to accomplish with them. In fact, it is an odd irony that in one of Freud's essays, "The Question of Lay Analysis" (1926), he actually states that medical doctors are not adequately trained in psychology and, by virtue (I use that term very loosely) of their medical education, have been indoctrinated with a bias towards objective science, a bias that also dismisses somatic symptoms of psychological distress as "unreal." According to Freud, this bias makes medical professionals some of the worst candidates for performing psychoanalysis because if the client's symptomatology is dismissed as not real, then most of the work of dismissing the cause of the distress has already occurred. The irony is that, until recently, one could only receive training in psychoanalysis in the U.S. if one held an M.D.

Unfortunately, by the time Freud's essay was published in English (1948), the medical profession had already translated a good portion of his Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Bettelheim tells us that, "Psychoanalysis becomes in
English translation something that refers and applies to others as a system of intellectual constructs. Therefore, students of psychoanalysis ... are not moved to gain access to their own unconscious and everything else within them that is most human but is nevertheless most acceptable to them" (Bettelheim, p. 6). That is to say, students educated with this distanced, detached English translation are not moved to view psychological conditions as the cries of the soul, but as the misfiring of a defective or malfunctioning brain. To read Freud in German, say those who have read his original work, is to understand that Freud was poetic, soulful, and deeply moved by his fellow humans and how we struggle to live meaningful lives.

Psychology as a discipline is beginning the work of reintroducing Soul into the study of soul. And that is where depth psychology comes in. Depth psychology not only returns to Freud's original work and a less medicalized view of the terms he used, but also in fact refers to one of Freud's analogies of the human psyche - the iceberg. Imagine traveling by ship and coming across an iceberg. Above the water you can see a certain amount of ice. That's the conscious mind. Just below the surface of the water you can see that the ice is not floating on top of the water, but that it extends downward into the water. It is not above the surface, but still accessible. Freud called that the preconscious material.

But beyond that few feet of ice that you can see just below the surface of the water lies the other 90% of the iceberg. That portion is what Freud called the subconscious. That portion is deep and vast and, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. Consider depth psychologists deep sea divers who excavate (Freud was also extremely interested in archaeology - go figure) the cracks and crevasses of these great cities of ice, of which we can actually see so little.

It is awesome and intimidating in its power, which is most likely why this perspective was captured and squished so completely by the medical establishment. If it ain't broke, as the saying goes, don't fix it. And an industry built on the premise of fixing people cannot abide that kind of competition.

And so, I find myself in a service profession with autistic children (ironically, a population with which Bettelheim worked, and for which he received a great deal of criticism). The autism industry is dominated by the very field and perspective that sucked the soul out of psychology with the (mis)translation of Freud's work in the 1930s. I hear professionals in my field dismiss, time and again, the emotional undulations of our clients as "not real." I see them disrespect a client's emotional needs with the reasoning that it is inappropriate or does not fit the behavior plan. And have rarely, if ever, seen a professional in this field, try to plumb the depths of an autistic child's soul, nor even acknowledge a well-developed soul in the first place.

I want to bring a depth perspective to this industry. There are little souls here, struggling to be heard and seen and engaged! Do I have it in me to shake the foundations of this industry the way Bettelheim's teeny little book rocked my understanding of psychology?

I am amused by the fact that the song running through my head at the moment is The Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble.
If I stay there will be double....

References

Bettelheim, Bruno (1982) Freud and man's soul. New York: Random House/Vintage Books.

Freud, Sigmund (1990) The question of lay analysis (Standard edition) (originally published in 1926). New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Whitman, Walt (1965) "Song of myself" in Leaves of grass (originally published in 1855). New York: Airmont Publishing Company, Inc.

Grief and Bananas

It is a time of good-byes and transitions.

I have felt transition coming for some time now. I could feel it in my bones, in my restless breathing, and in the way my muscles tensed up when I seemed to be going in the wrong direction, even if that direction was the one I'd been moving in before.

Today I said good-bye to a client of mine, a 9 year old autistic boy whose family is moving to southern California. I have known this young man for 19 months; he and his family are very dear to me.

Carl Jung said that the therapeutic relationship is, by its very nature, a relationship of love. Our medicalized mental health paradigm denies this relationship, denies its loving nature. The paradigm comes from an outdated objectivist wave that overtook the sciences with the beginning of the industrial revolution. Everything became mechanized and we seemed to believe as a culture that the best way to get anything done was to break it down into its component parts and subject it to detached analysis. Emotion was completely ignored, and emotional involvement discouraged.

And yet, I work with children, special needs children who require tenderness and play and loving but firm boundaries. They do not fit into the mold of our regimented culture, although in their symptomatology, they seem to try. Yet, the autism field is so steeped in business and research models that I have simply resorted to calling it the "autism industry." It is exactly that, a needs-based industry driven by an ever-expanding market as more and more children are diagnosed with this condition.

As a behavior therapist, I am confronted daily with the paradox of loving the children I work with and trying to work that love into the corners and cracks of an industry built on a business model. While my superiors speak of play and encourage our sacrifice, they often don't honor the sense of play that a child needs, nor do they honor the sacrifices therapists often make in order to serve these amazing kids. Instead, they demand more - more data, more hours, more sacrifice.

I have been taken off several cases so far this year for various reasons. Sometimes, teams are just shifted around with little or no explanation as to why. With all of them, legal and business models prevailed and unless I or the parents demanded it, no effort was made to give these clients closure. Please bear in mind that one of the significant challenges of people with autism is social functioning. People with autism have varying degrees of difficulty in reading and responding to social situations, which limits their abililty to form relationships with others. Trust is difficult to build and even more difficult to maintain, as often these kids have trouble recognizing the signs and subtle signals that most of us take for granted in our relationships. So, once a therapist builds rapport and creates a therapeutic relationship with a client, that relationship should be treated with care.

I hear a lot of talk in this industry about consistency for the sake of the child. Specifically, I have heard this word a lot in the context of my being taken off a case. But I really doubt that this consistency is really for the sake of the child's development. I think it's really for the convenience of scheduling sessions and meeting quotas and deadlines. While that is certainly a part of the industry, what happens is that the therapeutic relationship gets sacrificed. A therapist will get cut from a team with no opportunity for the therapist or the child (not to mention his/her family) to have closure. And that hurts the child. With all of this industry's emphasis on developing social skills in clients, what we teach them in this sort of experience is that their service providers are really only that: service providers, not trusted mentors, not friends, not even therapists, in the Jungian sense of the word. And they learn to not put a lot of trust in us. The lesson we teach them in this experience is that therapists just go away, and that they should NOT actually form close relationships with the people who help them. In the language of this industry, we are asking for one response, while reinforcing the opposite response.

As the result of a work-related injury, I was taken off the last of my cases a few days ago. I had been with this child for over a year, and we'd formed a very close relationship. Our sessions were fun, integrating programs into activities he loved doing, and they were characterized by laughter as well as hard work. One minute I was on my way to his house for a session, and then, after a phone call to the office, I discovered all my sessions were being covered by other therapists.

My grief was devastating, so much so that I became dehydrated, losing so much salt and water that my legs cramped up. I was grateful that I'd had the remarkable foresight to buy bananas to replenish some of the essential minerals I'd lost in wave after wave of grief. The destruction of trust can happen in many ways and not just from the perspective of the child.

I would like to work toward a redefined autism field, one that is characterized by love and playfulness and healthy boundaries. We can still collect data, but I'd rather meet the child where he or she is and then take things from there. I want to find out their fears and then, instead of denying those fear, work with them, transform them, and help these kids learn to love and trust the people in their lives, and behave in a way that is worthy of that trust.

Either that, or we all invest in expensive therapy and lots of bananas.