Yours Rhetorically, Cold Blue Monster (eBook)

A Criminal Counseling Text-Moir

Alix McMurray (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
204 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3178-0965-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Providing therapy to clients who are involved in the criminal justice system can be a mind-altering experience. Especially when the stories told contain characters and adventures worthy of classic myth, yet they take place on the meanest of streets and in the darkest of alleys. These are the dark fairy tales of clients involved in crime and addiction, and just like in any fairy tale, they teach us how to be more human.

Alix McMurray believes that being an outsider is something that is chosen for you-not something you choose. Whether she is channeling her inner swamp witch or empathizing with her disenfranchised clients, Alix is familiar with being on the outside looking in and the fresh perspective that provides. She was born in Los Angeles, where she first honed her empathy skills by trying to understand her talented but tortured parents and then, later, her equally talented and tortured clients. Working in mental health centers, hospitals, inpatient rehabs, halfway houses, jails, and in her own private practice, Alix has empathized with thousands of clients struggling to find meaning and significance. Since 2010, Alix has worked exclusively with justice-involved clients and has developed her own unorthodox therapy style based on hearing thousands of life stories. When not conducting therapy, Alix finds solace in her gardens and occasionally writes short/flash fiction, speculative fiction, and poetry. 'Yours Rhetorically, Cold Blue Monster' is her debut book.

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Providing therapy to clients who are involved in the criminal justice system can be a mind-altering experience. A therapist must sit in a middle space between remorse and reparation. In that middle space, if judgment is suspended and the therapist is willing to allow reality to be bent, magical stories can be told. These stories contain characters and adventures worthy of classic myth, yet they take place on the meanest of streets and in the darkest of alleys. These are the dark fairy tales of clients involved in crime and addiction, and just like in any fairy tale, they teach us how to be more human. This book is for those treated with psychotherapy, a person ready to embark on a self-therapy journey, and anyone curious about the therapy process especially when the person seeking therapy is someone who already has the deck stacked against them.

Textauszug

1 Collapse of the Gold Mine

An Arid Steppe

My first year in criminal justice was a tilt-a-whirl. The previous 25 years of psychological knowledge vanished like a chimera, and there I was, a case manager at a halfway house, mind wiped clean. Befuddled, I remarked to my supervisor at the time, “Man, I have to learn a whole new playbook!” He just grinned and nodded his head.

But novelty brings an exhilarating grace. To be reborn as a novice and embark on a journey of initiation is one of the greatest thrills in life. And when you buy a ticket for the immersive experience, there is no charge for being humbled.

For six-and-a-half years—March 2016 to October 2022—I was invited out to a rural jail in the northeastern plains of Colorado to conduct therapy groups inside a jail pod. Both environments—the plains and the pod—are harsh. This part of Colorado qualifies as an arid steppe: more rainfall than a desert, but with scorching heat, bitter cold, mineral-rich soil and some of the toughest vegetation on earth.

The jail pod has some of the same physical and psychological conditions. Temperature extremes fluctuate inside unforgiving cinderblock rooms with concrete floors and metal doors. Angry, sorrowful people tough it out there because they cannot leave. Compassion is as scarce as the rain, but there is still that mineral-rich soil to be mined—human imagination and creativity.

A gold rush of legislative windfalls starting in 2011 had set the stage for my involvement in this thing called jail-based treatment that changed my life. The state of Colorado initiated a cash fund allowing jails to partner with them to create jail-based treatment services. By 2014, forty jails had begun such services, and by 2015, all sorts of data were being collected—inmates’ suicidal behavior, traumatic brain injury, and the effects of medication while in jail.

In 2018, a senate bill allocated $5.1 million to address gaps in mental health services in twenty-one rural jails. Another senate bill in 2019 funded a separate treatment program to restore inmates to mental competency to stand trial. At the height of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, $547,000 was allocated to twenty-eight rural jails so that inmates could still receive treatment during the covid19 pandemic via video telehealth. By 2022, a total of $15 million had been allocated for these projects.4

Inside the pod where I conducted therapy were up to twelve angry, dispirited people who were to be my clients. Many of them were as brilliant as they were desperate. Most of them were highly suspicious of anyone who would willingly come to such an environment. Under these conditions, I was tasked with conducting twenty hours of therapy delivered within two weeks or less.

We did try for one experimental eight-month period to compress the twenty hours into three days. That ended up more of a shamanic out-of-body experience for me and my clients than it was therapy, so we settled on two weeks.

The urban myth was that this jail-based treatment was the clients’ get-out-of-jail-free card, but it didn’t always work that way. Nearly all clients had been sent to the jail as a sanction for having violated one or more stipulations of parole. While some clients were curious about treatment and even volunteered, the vast majority were mandated to be there. Sometimes the foregone conclusion was that an offender had used up their second chances and was well aware of it. Throwing a little therapy at them seemed like a good idea. People variously called it class, group or treatment, but as time went on, I became so sure of what I was trying to accomplish that it didn’t matter to me what people called it.

I saw that my clients varied considerably in how aware they were of their own core issues and the option to see things differently. Any one group would be composed of clients everywhere along the continuum of these states. Over the years, group enrollment also varied greatly, but often held steady at twelve for the men’s groups and six for the women’s groups. The average enrollment for video sessions during the covid-19 pandemic was about six, due to more limited movement of parolees between facilities to reduce communication of the disease.

Some would consider this population tough and most responsive to a very direct, no-nonsense approach. However, in an incarcerated population it is potentially overexposing for a client to be overtly challenged by a therapist. That inmate then has to go back to the residence pods amid the potential jeers of fellow inmates. Part of the balancing act was to push as much as possible on denial without inflicting some sort of collateral damage. I weighed challenge with kindness and tact.

In March 2020, in response to the pandemic, the jail and I mutually decided that it was safest for me to conduct the groups solely by video. The biggest loss with this, according to the clients, was, “No more treats?!” On treatment graduation days for years I had brought such goodies as red velvet cupcakes and honey smoked ham. Hearing about what used to be part of the pre-pandemic groups, many video clients delightfully asked me how I planned on teleporting coffee and donuts during our sessions.

With telehealth came a certain loss of richness, but I felt an increased richness in other areas. Since it was a security risk to have Internet access in the pods, I wasn’t able to stream any music in my in-person groups, and had to bring a finite number of CDs that could not suit all tastes.

When the groups were done by video, I could stream music at my clients’ request, and often did so. This came in handy with clients who were either shy or distrustful. Instead of doing a lot of talking, they would suggest I play a piece of music that reflected their thoughts and feelings. This developed into the hugely popular intervention of making an impromptu soundtrack of a client’s life.

But, no gold rush lasts forever. Either the gold runs out, the prospectors burn out, or the gold mine collapses. By October, 2022 for administrative reasons, the jail where I had conducted treatment with a couple thousand clients phased out the program. The magic carpet ride I had been on was over. Crash.

Left crumpled and bruised at the exit of a collapsed gold mine, I pondered my experience at the jail and how it fit in to the rest of my professional and personal life. Like a metamorphic rock, the emotional heat and pressure of that program had changed me into a different sort of therapist with a different therapeutic approach. I had worked with a couple thousand people in these circumstances within a relatively short period of time, and there were robust themes that seemed to play out in many of their lives. My immersive experience in the pods had left me with strong convictions about how to do therapy with justice-involved clients.

In a recent remake of the James Bond film, Casino Royale,5 many of the exchanges between Judi Dench’s “M” and Daniel Craig’s Bond contain an undercurrent of insurrection. While “M” is supposed to be the authority figure, she is frequently anything but, to Bond himself. He flouts the rules, follows leads and exacts revenge behind her back. At one point she reprimands him, “Quite a body count you’re stacking up!” He has no particular response, but the tone of the moment is clear—he has gotten his way and is immune to her reprimand.

This dynamic between rogue free agent and orthodox authority figure is exactly what often sabotages therapy for people in the criminal justice system. The power struggle between the one who has made the mistake and the one who is correcting the mistake detracts from the therapeutic objective of the client finding their authentic self. Since my clients see through every ruse and false moment, I have no other choice than to commit to complete authenticity, and to model it for them. Over the years, I have seen how this commitment has reconfigured my whole personality, outlook, and the way I live.

Magic Tools

Before the gold mine collapsed, I managed to mine a number of nuggets that I smelted to make into tools useful in working with a justice-involved clientele. I started to call my approach, “episodic psychotherapy,” because I saw that therapy, however abruptly ended, could build over time with each successive episode. I also came up with a visual model (the “egg-and-boot”) for understanding the social construction of a personality, and how settling on an identity—as well as reinventing one—was a balancing act between stasis and change, with risks inherent to both.

I also saw that the search for life themes was everlasting, and could benefit from mapping out general areas of exploration. That led to what I narrowed down to the “four fertile fields of inquiry,” which led in turn, to my developing curricula to teach these to clients, to make them more familiar with psychological territory. The organizing principle around the territory I came to call the “core beliefs compass.” Lastly, I noted that my clients seemed compelled to enact the roles of characters in a well scripted drama. Often, I saw deep fissures between aspects of their personalities, whereby they were never able to mobilize the entirety of those personalities in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. If they were indeed enacting a preordained drama, then certainly the power of archetypes was making itself felt, and I found four that robustly occur in the lives of the clients I work with. I came to call these the “four core archetypes of fracture.”

I call these...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.12.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3178-0965-2 / 9798317809652