Hope in Small Things, Wise Therapy Spotlight Essay by Julietta Cerin

We asked our online therapist training community a simple yet profound question last year:

“How do you sustain hope and resilience?”

We published a collection of thought-provoking and supportive answers in essay, poetry, and visual art in our third annual Therapy Wisdom Spotlight. 

Below we share a moving account by Julietta Cerin reflecting on her work supporting incarcerated men to find hope and healing. You are warmly invited to download the full PDF publication here (it’s free):  Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2022 Issue

The Space In It 

Julietta Cerin

I find hope in the unexpected.

To put it another way: my hope is sustained by what I don’t know.

I didn’t know, when I started this job, that eighty percent of my clients would be men in prison. I’d never been to a prison. I didn’t know how it would go, for me or for them. Would I hate it? Would I cope? Could I relate to these people whose lives – the world, the culture they know – are so different to mine? Would they give me the time of day? 

I call a man in jail. Let’s call him Phil. I’ve spoken to Phil three or four times in eight months, always briefly. He’s a ‘man of few words’ – the type who speak little in any conversation, avoid personal topics at all costs, and would never put their hand up for therapy.

In these cases, I don’t push it, I respect the client’s way of coping. Prison is not a safe place, and in the absence of other resources, people figure out their own way to survive. Most arrive at a kind of homeostasis that I don’t hazard to touch, to disrupt; to do so would be both presumptuous and unsafe.

Australia’s National Redress Scheme offers financial and personal acknowledgement, by institutions, to people who were harmed by sexual abuse as children in their care. My job is to help people apply to the Scheme, completing the lengthy form (including a detailed account of the abuse) as safely as possible, while keeping a holistic eye on other needs as well.

It’s a muddled job: partly clerical, fitting messy stories of trauma onto the bureaucratic template; partly practical, concrete help within limits, only no-one is sure what the limits are; and slightly therapeutic, packing a little counseling around the work like cotton wool on a wound, only no-one knows how much.

The Redress Scheme offers monetary payments, so it draws in folk who’d never otherwise come for therapy. It’s an uncommon opportunity to reach this substantial group of people. On the other hand, it invites a clash of agendas: workers see our role as therapeutic, while clients might just want their application done. At the start I thought I’d simply ask my clients if they want therapeutic input. I discovered that asking is not simple, when people have no concept of what therapy is, how it works, or what it could offer them.

Phil has avoided talking about abuse, but this morning he says he’s psyched up and wants to “get it off his chest”. I listen intently and type feverishly as he speaks of being groomed and abused in foster care, of the confusion and terrible shame he’s carried secretly all these years. 

I later can’t recall what prompted the intuition [intuition = compassion + knowledge + experience + attunement to the client in the moment], but I ask if Phil has a mental picture of himself at that age. “Yes”. I ask, “Where is little Phil in the picture? Still in that house?” Again he answers “Yes”. Before I know it, I find myself improvising a brief introduction to ‘parts’ work – bits of our personality can remain ‘stuck’ at the time of the trauma, believing it’s happening now.

I ask if there’s anything he’d like to tell Little Phil. He answers surprisingly readily: it’s not your fault, you’ve done nothing wrong, and I’m getting justice for you now with this application. We agree, again briefly (he remains a man of few words), that the aim is for Little Phil to understand that it’s now 2022, and a grown-up Phil is in charge. We discuss how grown-up Phil might be able to take the little one to a safer place.

It’s not textbook. No-one would recommend doing internal family systems work this way – in a single conversation, a brief snatch, with no preamble and likely no follow-up. I’m very aware that I may never again discuss this with Phil. Prison work is unpredictable and discontinuous; visits get cancelled, people get moved or released. The system is as oblivious to my plans as to the prisoners’ wishes and needs.

But sometimes the moment arrives, the door opens and therapy happens. Those moments are as precious as they are unpredictable. It’s a single idea – and the road to recovery is paved with a thousand ideas – but it’s a gleaming idea that might just bring a shift. Sometimes a snippet of information is all a person needs to take it and run with it.

I suggest: “Just play with this. If it’s helpful, keep doing it – if it gets you upset, chuck it.” I warn: “If it takes you into any dark places, stop.” And I get the sense that Phil is entirely capable of this – of choosing whether it’s safe and useful for him. He has a strong sense of both his capacity and his vulnerability. He has to; he’s survived alone for a very long time.

For the rest of the conversation, he repeatedly mentions ‘Little Phil’, of his own volition, when I’ve already changed topic. This has really struck a chord in the man; one I would never have guessed was in him.

I love it when clients surprise me, when they show me they’re capable of more than I knew. A client, let’s call him Reuben, enters my room on a hot summer’s day in a tshirt and pants, but wearing woolly gloves. I don’t know what that’s about and don’t get a chance to ask. Weeping, he tells me he needs to murder a police officer. Those are the words he uses – again and again. I’m struggling with this, where to take it, what to say, when he says “I have to go”. Still weeping, he walks out. 

I think hard, confer with a colleague, and call the police. I’m afraid it will shatter the fragile filament of trust – or as near to ‘trust’ as a person with Reuben’s history can come – but I know I’m obliged.

The police aren’t much interested. They know Reuben well. “Does he have a weapon?” they ask. I tell them I don’t think so, and they hang up.

I go home with a heavy helpless feeling and an image of Reuben slipping down into deep, dark water.

I’m a person easily discouraged. Strength in the face of blows – that’s not me. I crumble at the first knock. I grew up with adults in chaos, who didn’t know how to self-regulate. I never learned to think, “this will pass” or “things will get better” – they never did. They got worse.

But if resilience is defined as ‘bouncing back’ from blows, perhaps my own recovery taught me a bit about that. What-I-don’t-know had been my nemesis, the thorn in my side, the shadow at my back, and at a certain point became the defining element in my life, threatening to crush my future in its annihilating grip. 

And it failed. And I learned to love the space in that. I learned that despair is a form of arrogance – how presumptuous it was, imagining I could predict every outcome and rule out every possibility! I learned also to pay attention to little things and to savour their value – in themselves, and as markers of the richness of what-I-don’t-know. 

Just when I think I’ve got them figured out, that I know them deep and truly, clients come up with something I didn’t expect. Reuben calls a week later from the hospital. He went to the police station, made threats, and they kindly drove him straight to the ward.

Reuben leaves hospital with more support, more treatment, weekly home visits, monthly injections to manage his mental health. Turns out I underestimated him. Turns out he knows how to signal for help when he needs it – and that the police know him well enough (and care enough) to read his cipher.

I welcome this reminder of the limits of my feeble little scaffold of despair.

Until I went to the high security prison, several months into the job, I didn’t know the men who spoke to me on the phone were in a tiny booth, one metre square, with walls of glass. They’re on display to all the men in both wings of the division, and to the guards – who can listen in to the call. When first confronted with this, I didn’t know if it was safe or possible to discuss abuse at all in these conditions. If we did, I imagined the conversations could have no therapeutic potential or impact. How could they?

I visit a man in jail. Let’s call him Dave. The first time I met Dave, he had someone’s initials burned into his face. That red weal has haunted me ever since.

Since that first visit, I’ve talked to Dave on the phone a few of times, written down his account of abuse. He was always cagey, remote. The next time I tried to book a call they said he’d been released. I had no more news of him for a month, when I heard he was back in jail. 

Like Dave, most of the men I work with were sexually abused in juvenile detention, aged eleven, twelve, thirteen, and have been in and out of prison ever since. Prison is all they know, their only experience, their single milieu, their one set of skills for survival. When trouble has hold of a life so thoroughly, from so far back, I really struggle to hold out hope for change.

Dave didn’t contact me while he was out; I’m convinced no useful work can happen here, apart from the application.

With that in mind, I meet with him to get the application signed. My approach is: let’s get this done, with minimum fuss. Dave tells me he was released on parole. On the first morning, as required, he turned up at the parole office. He was given a list of conditions and requirements he found unexpected, overwhelming and unmanageable. As Dave listened he knew he could never comply – they were setting him up to fail.

Overnight his anxiety escalated to uncontainable. He cut off the tracking bracelet and absconded. On the run for a month, he says he tried to contact me a couple of times, but didn’t leave a message. I now understand why. 

Dave tells me he does want help – he wants to work on his anxiety, and also get help for his drug habit (which he uses to mask the anxiety). But he says he wants to do it in his own time, in his own way, not with someone breathing down his neck and commanding every move. “Maybe that sounds piss-weak,” he adds. 

I tell him, not at all, and offer the idea of “getting back in the driver’s seat” – how the core of trauma is powerlessness, a terrifying experience over which one has no control, and as long as Dave’s trauma responses and his attempts to soothe them (with drugs) dictate his choices, the abuser has still been driving Dave’s life all this time. Regaining a sense of agency is key to trauma recovery, yet one of the hardest concepts for clients to grasp. But Dave is right with me on this.

Dave then says he’s been thinking a lot about the link between his abuse, his drug use, and why he keeps coming to prison. He says he can see now how he got on this path, and that he wants to leave it. He articulates this with perhaps the most striking metaphor I’ve ever heard from a client: “I want to step out, and look back at this person I’ve been.”

Like Phil, Dave has never spoken to anyone before me about the sexual abuse. He tells me today he nearly didn’t go through with it. He also explains it’s terribly embarrassing to take my calls – after every stint in that glass booth, other men quiz him on who he talked to. Mortifying.

And yet he persisted. He tells me today, “I’ve been thinking a lot about this – I think of it all the time. I lie awake at night thinking about it. I never understood before – the link between the abuse and where I am now. It’s only since I started talking to you, that I understand.”

So much weight on the small word ‘you’. And here I was thinking I couldn’t reach him.

Dave’s journey won’t be easy. There’s no easy way to switch paths. The obstacles are daunting, and countless. And yet without knowing it at the time, blinkered perhaps by my own despair and discouragement, I have offered this man a chance, a window onto a different life.

I don’t know what Dave will do with his new insight. Right there, in the not-knowing, is space for hope.

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We invited you to read the Wise Therapy Spotlight December 2022 Issue in its entirety. Download the PDF now.