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.

Spring on Penikese, Part II: They're Back!

Of the many birds on Penikese, my favorites are the guinea fowl and the Leach's storm petrel. The guinea hen were introduced by the school for entertainment and tick control decades ago and live on the island year round. They climb down from their nighttime roost above the chicken coop each morning to squawk and scurry around pecking the ground for grain and small insects. In keeping with the season the guinea hen are now chasing each other around in amorous prelude to making adorable baby guinea hens that will be immediately devoured by the gulls once they hatch. Fortunately, they also mate and lay in the fall, too, a better time to raise their chicks with fewer gulls around.

The Leach's storm petrels couldn't be any different than the guinea fowl: migratory, nocturnal and elusive, they slip down the coast to Penikese from northern climes in late April and early May and then into their burrows between the cracks of the ancient rock wall near the leper gateposts. They mate and lay an egg or two before one of the mated pair will slip out at night to feed and fish while the other bird stays behind in the burrow, awaiting its chance to swap places. Only on moonless nights when the darkness provides perfect cover for these sooty, bat-like birds do we find out they have arrived this way: those awaiting their mates in the wall will emit their burrow call, a ghostly flutter and coo to attract each mate back to its proper nest, a sound that that has spooked more than a few students wandering around unawares in the dark of night.

The petrels used to be much more numerous on Penikese but gull predation almost eradicated them back in the 1970's. The presence of the school, built in 1973, helped shoo away the human-averse gulls from the petrel's vicinity and, along with other efforts, preserved the scant remaining petrels, the ancestral thread of which somehow manages to make it back to the island every year, barely. Over my tenure, the petrels have become representative of renewal and affirmation, for the island and, especially, the school itself, also small and always working so hard to survive. Every year about this time I start worrying whether they make it back, whether this will be the year we don't hear them, and if so what that will mean. Each week I ask the staff returning from the island whether anybody has heard the petrels, and when I spend nights on the island I always make sure to get up in the wee hours to walk outside, to strain and listen for them as if by doing so I can will them back.

Last week one of our students, Anthony, got up and left the house to take a pee outside. It was pitch black, a new moon whose fingernail crescent had gone down hours ago, and as he walked outside and into the darkness to do his business he heard a strange noise coming from almost under his feet. "What the heck is that?" he asked himself. Then he thought, "The petrels! I've heard about those."

They are back, and we are good for another year.