Footprints on the borders of reality

Thom Garfat

Everywhere we walk we leave footprints. They may be marks deep like those we leave in the snow of a Canadian winter, or clear like the mud prints we tracked across our mother’s freshly waxed floor when we were too young to know that such things were important. They may be blurred and temporary like those we leave in the shifting wet sands of an Oregon beach in late October. But visible or not, they are always there behind us: following in our path like a stranger lurking just one step behind in the shadow of our passage. They leave their mark upon the terrain we travel: not always obvious, sometimes impermanent, frequently unnoticed. But sometimes ... sometimes they remain fixed forever like the footsteps of children in fresh cement on the first days of spring.

As Child and Youth Care workers we leave our footprints on the lives of the children with whom we work. We traverse their minds, their bodies, their hearts and sometimes their very souls in our daily interactions with them. This is the terrain we wander; this is the grass we sometimes trample in our journey.

As Child and Youth Care workers we also leave our footprints around them as we dance at our “oh so professional” distance from them and from their reality. It is these footprints “the ones we leave on the borders of their reality “that interest me most. For it is on these borders that we whirl in our most furious dances.

Daily in our work with troubled children we walk on the edges of the real and the not-so-real. We balance precariously on the line between the world we believe to be real and the world we think the children inhabit. Often, in our frantic rush to protect ourselves we manage to convince ourselves that their world and ours are not the same. Surely that world of chaos and madness which I see before me when I look into those tortured eyes is not the same world I see when I gaze fondly into the eyes of a new lover.

Surely it is not the same reality I experience when I watch non-tortured children laughing in the streets on a Sunday outing.
Surely the madness and pain that I feel lurking there like a dark shadow does not lurk within us all. Surely it is their reality and theirs alone. Surely this thing I feel when I am with these children is a reflection of their world, their history ... not mine. “

“My world is a world unlike theirs,” I screamed at the supervisor who would have had me explore my reaction to the alienating adolescent who strutted his way untouched through my array of strategies and techniques, like water through a gravel bed.

"It’s not that I need for her to need me; it’s that she needs to need somebody so that her life will be more meaningful and she can experience trusting another without fear of rejection," I explained patiently to the team members who questioned my motives.

"You can’t let yourself get too close to the children," I cautioned the new student who wanted to enter into a personal relationship with the group. “Remember, soon you'll have to leave and they’re going to move on. Another significant loss would just cause more pain and we should avoid that at all costs, so make sure to maintain an appropriate professional distance."

Now, years later, I listen to the hollow echoes of my own self-delusion, embarrassed. I listen to the echoes of my fear and stupidity. For I have finally relearned that these children are people. But more important, I have learned that I am one too.
For years I believed that what I had learned was real and true. Now, when the room is quiet and I have no choice but to listen to the voices, I try to keep silent, I hear one of them whispering that it was all part of an “accidental conspiracy”, a conspiracy of self-protection that exists in most fields where people work with others while trying to avoid being with them.
For make no mistake, there has been a movement afoot to keep us distant from these things we fear: the children's pain, their sadness, their madness, their reality ... and how it triggers our own. So, like a pride of hesitant lions we have circled these two-footed creatures suspiciously and with deep caution. We sniff but keep our distance: we surround them but are hesitant to move too close to these strange creatures we call “troubled children.

We wander near their territory, but it is not their territory we traverse; it is our own. It is not their madness that drives us back from them; it is our own. It is our fear, and it is time we owned it. We are not alone in this fear. The very basis of the institutional confinement of troubled children was based on our fear of their disturbance, their expression of their reality and how it threatened to make us confront our own. Thus, we labelled them behaviorally disturbed because their behavior disturbed us. We labelled them emotionally disturbed because their emotions disturbed us. The labels kept us distant from them. It kept their disturbance from disturbing us.

Now we call them troubled children because we believe they trouble us. But is it not they who trouble us. It is our imagination about what it must be like inside of them, and our fear “old and ancient “that if we touch (or are touched by) madness we will lose our tenuous footing in our own tenuous reality.

This is an old fear: a fear as old as man's consciousness itself. It is not just your fear or my fear; it is the fear of our society, and it permeates our fabric like rain permeates the garden outside your window.

Is it any wonder then that Child and Youth Care workers find their work so stressful? They spend their days in the conflict between their desire to be in contact with the children, and the ancient messages, buried deep in the subconscious, that they should not touch, or be touched by, the madness of another reality. For, if it touches you, surely you will be lost forever.

Like all the ancient messages, this one has contained just the right blend of truth and deception necessary to seduce us into thinking that it was true. Like all the ancient messages it has led us to walk ever so slightly beside the pathway of knowing. Not on the path ... just a little to the side. For there is some truth in the fear that if you allow yourself to enter the reality of these children you may be touched by madness.

But if you are touched by madness it will not be theirs: it will be your own.

It is not their fear that will overwhelm you: it is your own. When you work with troubled children, it is not their reality that you wander: it is your own. Those footprints that you see around you are on the border of your own reality, not theirs. Tread gently and with caution, but do not be led by your fear. For in the territory of the children's reality, just where it borders with your own, lies the opportunity for change: for them and for you.

Editorial in the Journal of Child and Youth Care, Volume 5 Number 1, 1990