My friend and I have a radio show here in the metro Detroit area. It's been going on now for close to three years and is called "Sunday Sessions". We're on every Sunday evening from 9-10PM on WJR 760AM...and we're all about "edu-taining" our listeners on a variety of issues as two licensed psychotherapists.
Dr. Gail, my co-host, is a fully-licensed psychologist; I am a limited license psychologist. The difference between us is that she's been at this for MUCH longer than I have (psychotherapy) and she is a much kinder, gentler therapist (I believe!) than I know I am.
Maybe I'm being a bit rough on myself by saying that. I mean, I know how to be appropriately appropriate with my clients....but I also know how to rumble in the jungle when I have to. Maybe it is due in part to my training when I got to work both inside a womens' prison in our area...as well as in an in-house psychiatric unit at an area hospital. I witnessed quite a bit which taught me more than quite a bit. I remember the time one of the very low-functioning inmates had wrapped a paper clip so tightly around her ring finger, she cut off the circulation to that finger. I was assigned to escort her to the prison infirmary for treatment. On the way out of our unit and into the infirmary, this inmate suddenly started gesturing to someone she saw across the yard. I didn't fall off the turnip truck yesterday, but her behavior completely mystified me. She was someone who couldn't adequately manage her own personal hygiene on the unit each day (we call that ADL in psychology lingo...Activities of Daily Living)...but here she was signaling someone outside like her life depended on it. Turned out she wanted a cigarette...and got it...by the time we got inside the infirmary.
After she got that cigarette, I asked her something I had never asked her before. What I said was this: "If you can get a cigarette for yourself within 30 seconds of being let out of the unit, how is it that you can't wipe your own a** anytime you go to the bathroom?" She smiled. And she looked at me straight in the eye and replied, "Because I don't have to make it easy for anyone if I don't want to."
No sh** Sherlock. (That pun was intended there by the way!) So I learned something very valuable that day...as well as on all the other days when I was able to confront what I confronted head-on and without sugar-coating it too much.
I don't know where our radio show will lead us down the road; I'm hoping we will one day be able to help lots and lots of people to heal, change, and grow. And for the ones who enjoy raising hell because they can, I hope I can get to them. Outside of the prison or psych. unit setting of course....
