Check your expectations at the door

Authentic connections are the beating heart of the Penikese treatment model, but it is not so simple building these with people who don’t know how (or much less want) to do closeness and connection. Even more challenging, most of our boys have already been in programs emphasizing external control and been judged and lectured to fair-thee-well. By the time they reach the shores of Penikese, many have internalized a rather negative and monolithic view of authority and those who hold it in any form, a secondary trauma that deeply colors their expectations of everything.

This is a difficult starting point from which to initiate an internally driven process of change, so what to do? The most important place to start is to adopt and maintain a non-judgmental tone that respects our students’ collective experience, and allow them to make their own choices about what they want from treatment. In other words, we need to do the counterintuitive thing and let go of institutional or role-based power and authority in hopes that we might later legitimately earn it via the connection. Once negotiated and established, often on the student’s terms, the relationship becomes a form of universal currency from which to draw and move mountains of change.

Keeping this proper tone is not so easy to maintain over the long term and in crunch times. This is especially true in that students will forever attempt to draw you into power struggles, the adolescent terra firma from which they operate with comfort, assurance and facility, in effect making you into the bad guy they knew you were all along. But no mistaking, we are not talking about letting kids run the show. Instead, we are talking about a subtle shift in attitude and perception that can be described as doing treatment “with” rather than “to” our students, and it starts with checking our judgments and expectations at the door.

Some might see this approach as mollycoddling ungrateful stinkers, but the goal here is not to prove a point or bend another’s will to our own (good luck doing that!) but to encourage these boys to choose a different path and change their life. It can be done, but only if they choose it for themselves first. Of course, there are ways, some quasi-Machiavellian, to frame those choices, but that is a post for another time.