The Heretic's Guide to Working With Kids: Installment #5

l  Missionaries, Mystics, Mentors,  Mavericks and Masters

Missionaries

I have been involved in the alcohol, tobacco and other drug prevention field for nearly 14 years. Like many in my field I am a 'recovering alcoholic.' With over 20 years of sobriety I can now view my present with the disdain of hindsight. I started out as a missionary like most other folks in this field. I wanted to save every single student that came my way from the ravages of the disease of addiction....

Missionaries start out with a set of cultural assumptions. They assume that their way is right, that the way of others is inferior and that their God Given task is to convert all the ignorant heathens to the true and right path. Missionaries begin and end with dogma. Never wavering in their task, they have a frightening certainty that they are right and everybody else is wrong.

The missionary stance begins with the peculiar Western position of Good and Evil. In this cosmic epi-tragic comedy, they represent the forces of light and Good. Drugs, the people who use them and everything associated with it is Evil. Bearing the sword of righteousness, they bring their programs, techniques and media to bear down upon the infidel. Notions such as the medical use of marijuana do not fit easily into this duality and are thus dismissed as bad science.

Data, research, measurement and evaluation are the hallmarks of the true believers. Any approach which cannot be quantified and distilled into a curriculum that all must use is suspect. This path, of course, creates enormous bureaucracies and institutions. The weight and enormity of all that data, the books, pamphlets, videos and surveys needs buildings to be housed in, cocky young data heads, managers, their supervisors and of course...forms.

Outreach is fundamental in the roots of America's approach to alcoholism. The curious dichotomy of Alcoholics Anonymous which states on one hand “attraction rather than promotion” and sends an army of simple minded zealots into the heather through the 12^th step creates a subcultural schizophrenia in the recovering community. They must convert everybody they can but not tell anybody. They have to remain anonymous.

Prevention missionaries initially started with the belief that if they just told everybody their truth, then of course all would see and everybody would be saved. They felt no need to pay attention to simple developmental psychology, Maslow or even the casual observations of teachers who tried to tell them that giving middle schoolers information about anything just made them curious. The missionary model, beginning with the cultural assumptions of good and evil, created albatrosses like DARE. DARE relied not only on the information model and scare tactics. They also created a police state situation in which students were encouraged and rewarded if they turned in their parents.

The incredible acceptance and funding which this program received testified to its alignment with Western modes of thinking. It ignored such possibilities as dirty cops and denied mountains of research which generally indicated that DARE generally only resulted in “better informed users.”

Anomaly and Hypocrisy are the twin flags of the missionary. “If you use drugs (tobacco, alcohol, etc) then someday you're going to die” becomes easily interchangeable with “if you don't believe like we do then someday you will go to hell.” “Someday” is not a concept that most kids will ever understand. What is worse, in the case of those who begin abusing substances early in life and so never reach developmental milestones, “someday” is just another abstraction.

The missionary philosophy manifests itself through campaigns (crusades}, task forces, local advisory boards and in the school system through “prevention clubs.” The end goal of course is to create more missionaries and ultimately a body of believers who have been saved...........

I have a fat bias. I admit it. I own it. I joke with people that while some girls have a biological clock which logically results in teenage pregnancy, my family has a fat clock in which we can only press the snooze button. With this knowledge, I religiously exercise, watch my diet and do an internal cleanse twice a year.

With this baggage in mind I sat dumbfounded through an all day presentation about the evils of tobacco from a presenter who was easily pushing 400 pounds. She was a walking heart attack warning kids about health issues. Prevention missionaries love data but they also select their data carefully. America's court jester Mark Twain warned us over 100 years ago that: “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” Cruising with tunnel vision down the war on drugs highway with the warning of “someday” and “death.” we are often just part of the background chatter in a noisy information world.

Mystics

Mystics are often full of shit but it is entertaining shit. Mystics by nature are searchers, questioners and heretics. You will only rarely find them at the top of the large bureaucracies created by the counseling industry. Heretics love to point out such discrepancies as the obesity created by the junk food industry and use the system's numbers against them. There are some 450,000 deaths from tobacco, 360,000 deaths from obesity and over 100,000 deaths from what the Harvard Medical Review calls “medical misadventure.” Heretics like me love to point these things out. I have suggested that if we are going to use punishment, interdiction and incarceration as primary approaches then all addictions should be punished equally. This would put the obese donut eating cop in the same cell as the heroin junkie and  the person who consumes resources than the planet can sustain. Move over tweaker, you're bunking with Bill Gates tonight!

  They like to ask questions about the role of sugar and nutrition in behavior. Perhaps we should do yoga, jog or do tai-chi before we medicate that client...

The immature mystic is full of answers, solutions and anecdotes. “Mrs Dawson, if your class would do 7 sun salutations per day you would have no behavior problems all day long.” As my good friend and veteran Bill Smith knows, “shit is what happens when plans hit the light of day.” Fuzzy logic based mostly on personal but not universal experience..... Mystics in their personal search for truth often find it. With a missionary ethos buried in their subconscious they assume that their truth will work for everybody ....

The mature mystic may have discovered many truths in her search. The truth searcher surfing the noosphere may have gone through multiple cycles of questing; each truth and samadhi in a spiral to the center of the truth. She recognizes that each path has is its joys and foibles. The modern archetype for the mystic is the character of Socrates in “The Way of The Peaceful Warrior.” He has attained some degree of wisdom and remains at a certain level to help others stumbling the path.

That each person must find their own truth and their own path remains central to the mystic. Missionaries find this approach heresy. When this approach comes to the visceral level is becomes painful. In the addictions field it is unfortunate but true that some people never quit using. The missionary will beat his head against the wall and stoop so low as to become severely codependent with such clients. The mystic mourns quietly and prays that this sufferer will sort things out but also recognizes that each has his path in this world with lessons he cannot steal from them.

Like Socrates, the mystic is demanding, elusive, cranky and paradoxical. In the white savior motif movie “The Last Samurai” Tom Cruise, the typical cocky American approaches the master Samurai with his boken assured that enough energy and confidence will see him through. After being knocked to the ground multiple times, he looks quizzically at the master who tells him “You! Have too many minds.”

In Post Mall America, the mystic's task is doubly difficult. Today's average adolescent is so disconnected from themselves and has so much misinformation clogging their brain stems that the first task is not just to unplug the pipe but to destroy the pipeline entirely.

When I think of mentors, I think of grandpas and grandmas, kind sweet faces no longer worried about wrinkles or accomplishments. Every place you have been they have been there before. Every struggle you struggle they have walked through. They will listen with kindness to your challenges and assure at the end of the conversation that everything you are experiencing is normal, that you are okay and you will emerge intact.

Mentors listen with kindness to your new diet, all about your latest romance, your recent discovery of an age old truth. Acceptance of the searcher exactly where he is at is the code of the mentor. There are some along the path who pose as mentors. In truth they are “tormentors.” Tormentors are interested mainly in their own power. They enjoy one up/one down relationships. Their delight comes from feeling that there is at least one person in the world who is less than them....

Mavericks are the loose cannons of the counseling world. In their ideal state they are pure flow. They may dip into mystic posturing but never rest there. If the mood strikes, they may feel the need to preach and convert the masses to the new agenda, curriculum, program or thought but this rarely lasts. When they make a personal connection with a student, they become a mentor. Mavericks do not attach themselves to any approach but the approach that works at the time.

On their shadow side, immature mavericks become cynical and bitter. They reject all philosophies and so do nothing. They sit in their office and surf the net. They died but forgot to tell anybody....

  MASTERS

Lynn Duus is a master. She does everything I would never do. She helps whatever class she is advising sell donuts and hot chocolate in the mornings as a fund raiser in a school and town with an incredible obesity problem. There is a jar on her desk full of Hershey's chocolate kisses that brings a steady stream of sugar junkies to her office between classes. She is the only Republican in a school full of Democrats and she is an unapologetic Roman Catholic faithful church goer who accepts people of all faiths.

She has taken the time to learn the ropes course and some fun activities but she would not be considered a master of any of these disciplines. She crosses multiple lines of counseling professionalism. She buys clothes and shoes for students who seem to have none. She also has a small stash of granola and energy bars stashed in her desk for students who don't get breakfast. She has even taken students home to live with her. She is by many counseling standards “unprofessional.” She is a Zen master who could not even tell you what that means.

She may or may not say it but she teaches love and she has become wise. Despite her conservative politics and world view, she falls short when it comes to rules, discipline and organization. She would much rather talk a student through an agitated state  than send him to the office to face detention and suspension. She believes that such states of mind are opportunity for breakthrough rather than the time to restore order.

Like most counselors, she has a star pupil. Lorenzo is by any stretch of the imagination, an orphan. His story is familiar to those in my field. His mother was incapacitated by her disease of addiction. His father due to police state views of immigration had to stay in Mexico, his only crime being his nationality, place of birth and perhaps being poor and brown. Lorenzo's older brother John took on the task of parenting. He made sure Lorenzo woke up, arrived at school on time fed and ready to learn. When Lorenzo was in the sixth grade, the river took John's physical form forever. He drowned on a bright sunny day in July during a low water run tubing run.

The odds were against John's death. The river was the lowest it had been in years. Tubing was a daily activity that nobody thought much about. John's tube, however, drifted into a log on a tight bend and he became trapped underneath that log and drowned. Lorenzo shut down not long afterward. A kid who used to be goofy, squirrelly and mischievous began to harden. It was a slow process but by the time he was in middle school Lorenzo was smoking and beginning to experiment with alcohol and other drugs.

As such things go he was soon on probation and the legal system had their talons in him. He went through all the usual stuff; anger management, moral recognition therapy, reality therapy and of course medication. He was a wonderfully resistant client. Nothing seemed to take hold.

Until Lynn came along.