The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions

A Teaching Casebook

Jessica K Heriot, Eileen J Polinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780789009180
• eBook ISBN: 9781317789284
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Use these fascinating first-person accounts to bring real-world problems into the classroom!The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions: A Teaching Casebook is a collection of personal narratives, short stories, and poetry about mental illness and other life-affecting problems, mostly in the context of family life. Each selection is accompanied by questions for discussion; selected reading lists are provided with each chapter. Beginning with problems related to childhood, the stories range through adolescence, adulthood, and old age. This unique book provides students and educators in psychology, social work, and counseling with an in-depth understanding of various mental illnesses and psychosocial problems through the life cycle. Its stories and narratives give students the unique opportunity to experience "from the inside" what it is like to live with an eating disorder or struggle with a compulsion phobia. The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions is more than a teaching tool. These stories are more than thought provoking, more than simply insightful. They are truly fascinating--each a candid, no-holds-barred glimpse into the personal reality of its narrator--and will inspire the kind of discussions that the best courses and instructors are remembered for. Your students will most likely have finished the book before the class has finished discussing the first chapter! With The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions, your students will explore:

• family relationships under various types of stress
• how families cope with physical illness
• what happens to the family when a loved one struggles with mental illness
• the impact of racial issues
• the effects of sexual abuse and domestic violence
• the process of healing from childhood trauma . . . and much more!

The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions provides first-hand knowledge of what the loss of a parent to death, mental illness, or alcoholism feels like to the child; of how "coming out" as a lesbian affects one's life; of the love and frustration of having a mentally handicapped sibling; of what it's like to lose one's memory in old age. No academic description can convey the feelings, meaning, and effects on the individual or family of mental illness or other psychosocial stressors. Only narratives and stories based on direct experience--exactly what you'll find in The Use of Personal Narratives in the Helping Professions--can offer this perspective.

Part I:

Childhood

The Killing Jar

Jim Lucas

It is higher than he can reach: his father’s glass case of butterflies. Sam pulls up a desk chair, stands on the seat, gazes into the compartments one at a time, and traces the impaled specimens. His damp fingers streak over the gallery of colorful wings. “Fly,” he says. Sam is three. Beyond the case and through the summer screen, he sees Paul, his older brother, and a friend run through the coming twilight catching fireflies. Sam slides to the floor, goes downstairs to the kitchen cabinet where empty containers are kept. His dimpled hand hardly reaches around the jar. He grasps a lid in the other hand, runs outside, and collides with Paul.

“Look, would you just look, Sam? Four fireflies! One’s in the grass on the bottom. The other three are … there … did you see it? Did you see it? Did you see his bottom light up? That one right under the lid,” he says.

Sam stands on tiptoe, and the two boys huddle around Paul as he holds the glowing trap. All four fireflies light up in unison, and a bright shimmer washes over the boys’ faces with their full, almost-ripe cheeks and eyes still large enough to accommodate wonder.

Sam is in awe. This seems like some kind of secret ceremony. His jaw drops, and drool forms on his lower lip as he gives the shining insects his full attention. Well, almost his full attention. Over his brother’s shoulder, Sam sees a butterfly glide down in the last warm rays of sun on this mid-July evening, and land on the bottom porch step.

He breaks away from the other two boys and heads toward his quarry. It’s a stare-down between Sam and the butterfly. Finally, Sam lunges with the jar in his right hand above his head. The butterfly tries for open air but sails into the jar, stunning itself as it hits the bottom of the jar. With his left hand, Sam claps the lid on unevenly, catching a wing tip under the edge. Pinned down, his captive flutters against the inside of the jar semaphoring for help.

Sam kneels on the ground holding his prize. By the time Paul and his friend join Sam, the flutter has slowed and the creature is barely alive. Sam sits on the grass with his nose pressed against the jar, watching. A transparent wall separates him from the fight for life going on inside. He begins to cry.

“What are you trying to do Sam, kill it?” Paul asks. “You don’t have an air hole punched in the lid… don’t you know about that? He’s suffocating!”

Paul grabs the jar, removes the lid, and the limp butterfly slides down into Sam’s hand. The air revives the butterfly, but not much. The wing that was caught in the lid seems to drop as the insect tries to take off. Sam cups his hands around the butterfly and carries it over to a low tree branch. It hesitates for a moment on an oak leaf.

“Go! Go! Go!” Sam calls out, and suddenly, the butterfly is gone.

The next afternoon, Sam returns to his father’s specimen case and struggles to pull it off the shelf. The case is large, and his outstretched arms barely make the span of the box, but he slowly slides it down along the shelved books until it sits safely on the thick, hand-tied rug below. Silver latches at each end of the lid give way easily, and Sam lifts back the hinged glass cover, resting it against a row of books.

From the case, Sam carefully takes the butterflies outside one by one and places them at random on the boxwood hedges framing the front walk. He places a Compton Tortoiseshell low near the sidewalk, a Satyr Anglewing in among some leaves. A Resale Skipper, Falcate Orange-tip, Red-bordered Metalmark, and a Gulf Fritillary find resting places all up and down the hedges. Standing on his coaster wagon, Sam arrays a nearly perfect Kawasaki’s Beauty, a Mountain Emperor, a West Indian Buckeye, and a Sonorant Blue along the top of each boxwood hedge.

When he has finished, Sam, hands on hips, regards his project from the front door. Then, while there is still plenty of warm sun for flying, he steps to each winged beauty and blows his trusting breath under their bodies. “Go! Go—ohhh!” he whispers over and over.

Questions for Discussion

1. At what age do children understand the concept of death?
2. Young children are magical thinkers. Their capacity for cause-and-effect reasoning has not yet developed. How would you explain to Sam why the butterflies in the case do not fly?

My Tenth Year

Jessica K. Heriot

Polio is everywhere. Polio is the reason I am still at summer camp, or so I’m told. The camp season is extended for two more weeks so children don’t have to be in the city where it is easier to get polio. I only have to stay for one of the two weeks and am very relieved about this.

Camp feels empty, the row of green and white cabins silent and deserted, and those of us left behind cannot fill the space. We are marooned in a ghost town. The remaining girls are all bunked in the senior lodge, which is kind of fun. But I am thrown in with a bunch of girls I don’t know, and they are not my age. I have just turned ten.

The days pass slowly. I am very anxious to go home. I have a feeling that something bad is happening at home and I desperately want to find out what it is. Finally, my week of captivity ends. I feel like a bird freed from a cage.

I am home at last. The problem is, Mommy is still sick. Her bedroom door is always closed, and she is in bed all the time. Dad tells me Mom is still sick and as soon as she feels a little better I can see her. I worry, but I am glad I am home, near her.

Mommy has been sick for a long time. She couldn’t visit on parents’ day in July. Dad came up alone and told me that Mommy was sick. She was still sick in August, and my aunt and uncle came up instead. We had fun. My uncle took lots of pictures, but I wondered why Mommy was still sick.

Daddy says I can see Mommy today. I am so happy. I open the door to her bedroom. She is lying in bed propped up on several pillows. She is a ghost person, a shadow of herself, gaunt, gray, and thin. Who is this person? Where is my mommy, strong and sturdy, the mommy with the big bosom and the long brown hair? Where did she go?

I want to scream out, “Mommy, what’s happened to you? What’s wrong with you?”

But I don’t. Instead I start crying and run to her bed, “Mommy, Mommy.”

She talks to me, asks me about camp. Her eyes are the same, but her voice is weak. She says she loves me and that I should go out and play now. She doesn’t want me to stay. I know now that she is very sick.

I ask my father, “What’s wrong with Mommy?”

I don’t really know what he says, but I feel reassured and go to Gail’s house to play.

The end of the summer drags on, hot and boring. I can’t do anything because of polio. I can’t go to the movies or swimming, or even visit friends. The only place I can go is Gail’s house, next door. And then I can only stay for lunch.

Today, Gail’s mother tells me that my father called to say that I can stay for a while after lunch. This is good because we are playing a game, and it is a treat to stay at Gail’s house after lunch. By midafternoon my father has not called. I start to feel uneasy. Something may be wrong. I tell Gail’s mother that I have to go home. She says that it is OK, I can stay. I tell her I want to go home, but she tries to get me to stay. Now I know for sure something is wrong. I run from Gail’s bedroom, down the stairs, out the back door, across the side yard, through the big bushes onto our gravel driveway, up the steps past the lilac bushes, which my mother loves, arrive at our back door in a panic, and swing open the screen door.

My father is standing there. He looks defeated. I am crying hard. My father says, “She knows. How does she know?”

He is right, I know. But I say, “I want to see Mommy.”

“Mommy is dead,” my dad says. “Mommy is dead.”

There is a party at our house. People are milling around our backyard on a cool sunny day. They are laughing, talking, and eating. Even my aunt Dora, whom I never see and whom my mother does not like, is there smiling and having fun. I think something is wrong. Why is a party going on? People should be sad; my mommy just died. After a while, my father comes over to me and says that all the people are going to the funeral, and I should go to Gail’s house to play. I tell him that I want to go. He says I can’t. I ask why, but his answer does not satisfy me. I feel angry. It is my mother who died, so I want to go to her funeral and I don’t want all these people having a good time at my house.

No one talks about Mommy anymore. I want to talk about her, but none of the adults around me want to do this.

School starts. I am in the fifth grade. I do not say that my mother is dead, and no one mentions it.

A big fat woman named Sue watches me. When I come home from school, she is sitting in the living room listening to the races. The autumn sun streams through the front window illuminating a Milky Way of dust. The house is dirty.

My father does not come home after work like he used to. I wait up for him. The clock says 3 a.m. when I hear the front door open. This happens a lot. I beg him not to come home so late.

Daddy never talks about Mommy. I think he is glad she died because he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. Mommy was trouble. She screamed and cried and was unhappy. I don’t want to say this to him, because he will be mad at me and maybe he will leave me too. I feel scared a lot now, worried about what will happen now that Mommy is dead.

One day, I meet a nice lady named Hannah. She has pretty yellow hair and dresses in soft wool clothes. She is very attentive to me and smiles a lot. I like her.

Sitting on the landing, my feet on the top step of the stairs leading to the kitchen, I hear my father talking on the telephone in the dining room. He does not know I am there.

He says. “I don’t care what she thinks; I deserve a little happiness in my life.”

I know that “she” means me and that he is talking about Hannah. He doesn’t care how I feel. I know now that I am right. He is glad Mommy is dead. He wants to forget her. I know I cannot talk about Mommy again and I should forget her too. I feel cut loose, a little speck, floating in space.

One winter weekend, shortly after Christmas, I visit my friend Valerie on Long Island. Her parents are friends of my father’s. Valerie and I have fun and get to stay up late because her parents go to a party and leave us alone. The next morning, Valerie’s father calls us into their bedroom. They are still in bed. Her father tells me that, like me, his mother died when he was a little boy. His dad remarried, and he really came to love his stepmother. “Stepmother.” I hate that word. I know that he is telling me that it may not be so bad if my father married Hannah, and I guess that may be right, but I am a little puzzled. Why he is telling me this now? Then he tells me that my father and Hannah were married over the weekend and went to Bear Mountain for a honeymoon. When I get home, I will have a new mother. I am numb. I have no reaction or response. My mother has been dead for five months.

I hate this woman. She is taking my mother’s place, sleeps with my father in my mother’s bedroom, in my mother’s bed. He sees her naked. I don’t want them to close their bedroom door at night. She is getting rid of the furniture and rearranging the living room. They ask for my opinion. I tell them I hate it. I am mad all the time. Hannah tries to be nice to me, but I don’t want her. She wants me to do things around the house. I tell her that she can’t make me do anything. She is not my mother.

I am wild and unruly, sullen and nasty, indifferent and cold. One late June day, Hannah decides she has had enough. She tells my father that she can’t take...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: Childhood
• Part II: Adolescence
• Part III: Family Relationships in Adulthood
• Part IV: Other Issues of Adulthood
• Part V: Physical Illness
• Part VI: Surviving and Healing Childhood Trauma
• Part VII: Mental Disorders
• Part VIII: Families Coping with Mental Illness
• Part IX: Practice in an Imperfect System
• Part X: Old Age