A young woman with a crying baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her hand tentatively opened the door of the social service agency where I was employed many years ago. "My husband's outside in the car," she said. "We can't find a place to park, so he's double parked. I'm sure he's going to get a ticket, and we can't pay for that! We're on our way to my family in New Jersey. They're going to help us out. My dad says he might be able to get my husband a job. But we got lost and we're almost out of gas and completely out of money. My babies are hungry..." She started to cry, but still managed to say, "and we're out of diapers..."
My first job as a social worker was in an agency called The Traveler's Aid Society. Established in Missouri in the 1850's to assist pioneers traveling across the United States, it had become, by the time I worked there, in the late 1970's, a major source of assistance to men, women and children who were traveling, stranded, re-locating and in need of concrete and/or emotional support. The world at the time was very different from today - no internet, personal computers or laptops, cell phones or ATM's. A young couple often could not afford the cost of a long distance phone call to family to ask for help and were too humiliated to make a collect call, which would require the person they were calling to pay the phone charges. And even if they had a family who could send money, the only way they could get it was through a wire to Western Union, which was a complicated and time-consuming process.
The urgency of these cases was compelling and the need distressing. We had a little bit of discretionary money, and it would have been relatively easy to hand this young woman a few dollars to buy gas and food and send her and her family on their way. But we were encouraged to do something quite different. My supervisor, who ran the New York office at the time, encouraged all of us working there to see if we could "stop the action" long enough to find out more about what was happening, to understand how the crisis had occurred, and to see if we could do anything to help our clients move forward in even a slightly different direction. "Otherwise," he would say, "you may just be perpetuating a never-ending cycle."
His theory was that while some crises had to be dealt with immediately - you couldn't, for example, encourage a man bleeding from a gunshot wound to wait a few minutes while you found out more about what had happened - many could be contained and slowed down. "You want time to sleep on it," he would say. Not literally, but figuratively - time for the brain to calm down so that both the clients and the worker could think clearly.
Today we know that there are physiological factors that make it hard for the brain to process information during a crisis. Many of my colleagues on the PT website write about different aspects of this difficulty - here are a couple of examples, but take a look at the website for others. A wonderful book that looks closely at the interplay of psychology and physiology when trauma occurs in adulthood is Ghislaine Boulanger's Wounded by Reality. To put it in my non-scientific brain's language, the fight-or-flight response, "alexithymia"(the inability to use words to manage emotions), and various other forms of brain-freeze lead to a response like deer in a car's headlight. Decisions we make in those panic-filled moments are not always the best solutions in the long run.
What I learned from my boss at Traveler's Aid was that the natural freezing of the brain that occurs during a crisis is not a permanent condition. Again, obviously, some crises had to be dealt with without time to reflect, but in many situations we learned that we could manage the crisis in a way that allowed us time to find a better solution. With the pressure of a client's needs and our anxiety, this was not always easy, but we learned that if we could find some time to calm everyone down, we could start to think. And when we could think, we could problem-solve.
To return to my young woman: the receptionist buzzed me - I was the worker on call at the time. I came out, heard her story, and told her that her husband should park the car in the local garage, for which I could give her a voucher, and then come back so that we could talk about what to do. We had the facilities for providing a snack for the children and the parents, and diapers for the baby, which solved the immediate problems. And then, when everyone was feeling more comfortable and less anxious, I began to ask for details about their situation.
As was often true, there was more to their story than Leila* had originally told me. Her husband, Cedrik*, had a temper and after exploding one time too had been fired from his job as an unskilled laborer. He had been unable to get another job, and they were traveling to Leila's home to live with her parents. Not surprisingly, her parents were willing to take in Leila and the children, but they had set firm rules about Cedrik, including that he get work right away and that he stop all alcohol intake while he lived with them. Oh yes, they acknowledged, Cedrik had a "small" drinking problem.
As a young and idealistic social worker, I would have loved to have helped this young couple turn their lives around, but even then I knew that that was asking for a lot. But if I had responded to the sense of crisis and simply given Leila the money she was asking for, it would not have been used to buy food or gas. After we talked for a while, Cedrik acknowledged that he had planned to stop off at a bar as soon as they left my office. I was able to make fairly certain that he was not abusing Leila or the children, but it became clear that this extremely young couple was overwhelmed by the responsibilities of raising a family and dealing with the realities of life.
I did what we could do in those days - made arrangements with Leila's parents to expect their daughter and her family within five hours, bought them a tank of gas and provided food and diapers for the trip. I also found an AA program for Cedrik in the town where they would be living, and encouraged them to go immediately to a local social service agency for family counseling. They agreed, but I sadly told my supervisor, after they left, that all I had done was postpone the inevitable. "Maybe," he said. "But you never know. Sometimes just stopping a pattern and offering time for something else to happen can lead to change."
I don't know what happened with Leila and Cedrik (although I did check with her parents and learned, to my relief, that they had arrived within the five hours, safe, sound and sober). But my supervisor's words come back to me over and over again, in both my professional and my personal life. Sometimes just stopping for a beat - counting to ten, or literally or figuratively sleeping on a decision - can stop a pattern, give us a moment to reflect, and make room for change.
*names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy
