Episode 14: Erica
A teacher who works with the most difficult students tells us how she does it.
TRANSCRIPT
BB: Today is an interview day! I had the great pleasure of talking with someone I met through an award-winning article that I happened to read a few months ago. The article is called “The Restorative Classroom: A Psychoanalytic Playground in a Public School.” I have it right here. And it won the Schillinger Prize from Division 39, which is the psychoanalytic arm of the American Psychological Association and was published in the fall issue of Division Review. After I read and marveled at this article, I was amazed by this article, I decided to contact its author, Erica Young, and she is my guest today on the Teachers’ Lounge podcast. Before I turn it over to Erica, I just want to say that this article hit me like a long-lost friend emerging from the gloom. First of all, it's rare to read about education in any psychoanalytic journal, but the psychoanalytic perspective is a perspective I've been pushing for over a decade. So this was like, “Oh my God, there's someone out there who knows what I'm talking about!” It can be quite lonely to take this perspective in the field of education, but Erica is doing it, and so are some other people that she'll tell us about. Second of all, the story you told, Erica, was brilliant. It was stunning and a really striking example of the power of relationships between teachers and students. I can't wait to talk more about it. So thank you for taking the time to talk with me.
EY: You're welcome. Thank you.
BB: I'm going to share a few vital statistics about you. You work in the Hartford School District in Vermont as a special educator in a therapeutic classroom in a public school. You're pursuing an M.A. in clinical psychology. You have been teaching in public schools for six years, and prior to that, you were a preschool teacher in a private, Montessori based preschool, which is great. So can you just briefly tell us what your Psychoanalytic Playground article was about?
EY: I'm happy to and thank you so much for that very kind introduction. I really appreciate it. And it was such an honor to have you reach out to me. I truly appreciate it. So, yeah, I'm happy to talk about the article and what it's about and how it came to be, even. So the APA Division 39, they do this contest every two years. But they have a theme. And the theme last year was Freud's idea of a psychoanalytic playground. I saw the invitation to submit papers and I thought, this is a great way to think about what I do in a class, in a very specialized classroom every day. So I wrote about it and was pleased that the division honored me with the award. So what I wrote about was the Restorative Classroom where I used to work, that’s a therapeutic classroom that was designed specifically to support students with severe social emotional needs. These are the kids for whom the typical supports in a classroom just are not working because always the goal is the Least Restrictive Environment. So the child can stay in their classroom with interventions and supports there, that's what we want. And I work in Vermont. Vermont is a state that prides itself on its focus on inclusion, and many other states do, too. But Vermont certainly does. So the goal is to have kids in the classroom. So these are kids for whom X, Y, Z, well really A through Z have been tried in the classroom and just have not worked. Typical supports in a public school classroom, you know, imagining educators listening to this interview will well know that supports in a classroom for a kid with severe social emotional needs tend to be pretty behaviorist. There's a reward system, a consequence system, understanding what comes first, what the behavior is and what comes after, and that can help some students. But for students who, you know, if their behavior is coming from a place of deep, deep suffering, then the behavioral stuff just falls apart. It just doesn't work, which is what I saw as a classroom teacher. So before I came to the Restorative Classroom, I was a general ed classroom teacher, and then I started working with kids in this specialized way.
So what I wrote about was one student named Helen, who was a second grader at the time in my classroom. I won't go into all the details of the article here, but she was a child who needed an incredible amount of support from our team. So it was myself and two mental health clinicians, essentially, and we were supervised by a clinical psychologist and part of a bigger team. So it was my team in my classroom and then there were two other classrooms. We had the youngest students, kindergarten through second grade. And there was a third through fifth grade program and a sixth through eighth grade program. And we worked together as a big team, but my small team worked really closely together to support all of our students but this student in particular, Helen. So what I wrote about for the Division 39 essay was how Helen – we had Helen for a year. She responded really well to what we did in the classroom and what we do in the classroom I'll probably talk about more in more detail as we go through this interview, but she responded really well to the services we provided, from a psychodynamic psychoanalytic perspective, particularly self psychology, and she did really well that first year. Long story short, she had a really tough summer. We didn't see her all summer, even though we provide services over the summer. And she moved away and we didn't know that, until the school started the next year and there was no Helen and she just wasn't there. The school system where she moved to, the town where she moved to and enrolled in school there, within a few days of the start of the school year, they called us and said, “Hey, this is not working. Helen's aggressive, she’s tearing apart the classroom, she’s hurting people. And the only thing we can do with Helen is put her on an iPad in a room with one staff member. And that's not education, and we don't feel good about it! And you got to help us out or if you can help us out.” So she ended up re-enrolling with us. But when she started she was in a nearly catatonic state. Wouldn't talk, wouldn't look at us, certainly wouldn't interact with peers, nothing like that. She was in a really tough, really tough place. And what it took to support Helen through that was our team. The three of us. And then beyond that, the entire team of the three of us really intensively working together from a psychodynamic perspective where we were relying on parallel process, reverie, and counter transference in a manner that allowed us to be there for Helen and be present with Helen, just sit with her through these really, really tough feelings. We did not make – we don't make interpretations. It’s not one-on-one counseling. It's nothing like that. It's not you know, I'm not a therapist. Yet! I will be! I was her teacher. And the essay details exactly how we went through that. But essentially the three of us working together, taking turns sitting with her and being able to sit with her incredibly strong feelings. And they were incredibly strong, even though she was silent. Incredibly overwhelming, overwhelming feelings. By being able to sit with those feelings, having the time to process them with each other, having the training so that we could understand what it was we were going through with her and what she was going through. That training and that theoretical understanding was essential to helping her and supporting her and to us, the team surviving her intense feelings and affect.
BB: When you did this work together. Basically, the way I see it is – and you might have said it this way in your article – metabolizing her feelings for her. What happened? What happened in her? How did she change or respond?
EY: Yeah. So at the end of each day, we, the team, had built in time to process – actually the beginning and end of each day. But my memory is that it was really the end of the days we would talk about Helen. And we were absolutely metabolizing her feelings. Together, we had to do it together. Together, together, together. There was no way we were going to do that by ourselves. Because, whereas a therapist might sit with a patient for an hour a day, even if it's five days a week, this is from 8 to 2 or 3 all day long. Every day! That's a long time. She did not want to – she was just sitting. She wasn't able to engage in anything we offered her. Snack? you know, recess? Nothing. She just was not engaged. So after metabolizing, processing, thinking about the feelings and the stuff that was coming up for us, she started to emerge. And within two or three weeks, when she came in in the morning, she wanted to eat breakfast with us. That was the first step. And then she wanted to chat with us a little bit. Then she just came – well the way I think I write it in the article and the way it felt was she came back to life. That’s what it felt like. It felt like: “There you are, Helen! There you are! You’re back.” We wouldn't have said it like this to her, but what it felt like was “You're back from wherever you came from, and we're so glad you're back.”
BB: Wow. I want to know, you know, your background and how you came to or how you are coming to an expertise in this psychodynamic approach to teaching. And I wonder if you can explain, first of all, if you can explain why you think what you did worked.
EY: Oh, interesting question. So I think it worked because what we were offering Helen was – this is where like, I'm like mindful of the fact that if it’s mostly educators listening, this is just not training that comes in for educators. I know this because that's what my original training was in, right? What we were doing for Helen, we conceptualized with the support of supervisors who have doctoral level training in this stuff – that's what I’d like to emphasize. It's not like we were like, you know, child whisperers, it wasn’t magical. Like we had the training and the support.
BB: And there are theories underlying your work.
EY: And there are theories. Strong, strong theories, evidence based theory, like it's time tested theory that allowed us to do this work, it’s not magic. So we were able to offer for Helen a container and containment. So in sitting with her what we did was we took turns sitting with her and I wrote about it in the article. We had to do it on schedule because you would feel like, “Oh, I’m cool, I’m fine, it’s fine sitting with this child.” In our classroom we had a couple of break rooms and we had windows, and we had beanbags and pillows and whatever, stuffed animals. She didn’t usually want any of that stuff in there. She’d just push it out. But she was welcome to have any of those things in there. But sometimes she wanted the bean bag to sit on. But after sitting with her for a while, any one of us would just feel absolutely overwhelmed with sadness or despair or grief. I mean, it was just intense! And it was like, okay, this is just coming off of her in waves and waves. I won't go into her trauma history, but just suffice it to say that she had an extensive trauma history. So we hypothesized what she was holding was just really, really hard, hard feelings from her life and you don't know what her summer was like other than pretty isolated, very, very isolated prior to coming to us. So in that space with one adult at a time and then contact with all of us throughout the day, she was held, meaning not physically held, but we were able to hold her feelings. We weren't afraid of feeling the feelings. She didn't have to be or do anything different than she was. We weren’t like, “Helen, you really got to take off your jacket and come to your desk or you don't get to go outside.” There was none of that because we could see she wasn't. There's times to say that to children, certainly! But she was pre- pre- pre- pre-those kinds of interventions. She was really withdrawn, deeply, deeply withdrawn and inside of herself. Yeah. So there was very little language, very little conversation between the adult and the child who was sitting with Helen. Maybe we would try at different times to say things to her, but she rarely responded and sometimes would just go further into her jacket. And when she's doing that it’s like, “Okay, no. She doesn't want to hear anymore.” So it’s holding her very, very strong feelings, not being afraid of them, and just allowing her to survive them.
BB: By surviving them yourselves.
EY: By surviving them ourselves. Exactly. So she was surviving her own feelings in the presence of us and we were surviving them. It was like, “You know what Helen?” We would never say this, this is all internal. It was like, “You know what, Helen? Your strong feelings aren't going to hurt me, and it's going to be okay.”
BB: Wow. So fantastic. And so, I mean, it is theory based. It is reliably reasonable. It's logical, actually, what you did. But it does feel like magic because this is not the kind of thing that we think about. There's nothing tangible about emotions. It's weird to think that this child's feelings are now implanted in me. “How could I possibly be feeling this?” This is what you mean by countertransference. You were saying the things that you guys worked on. Countertransference is how we as human beings can actually induce in other people the feelings that we are having. It's crazy, but it happens. This happens in classrooms all the time. Teachers are always at risk of having countertransferential responses to students. What you guys did that took it beyond was to recognize or somehow learn – it sounded almost like you stumbled into the realization – that by sitting together and processing the feelings that she induced in you, talking about them, scouring them out, getting them out on the table, normalizing them or understanding them or theorizing about them and supporting each other in feeling them, you were doing that work for her.
EY: Right. That parallel process.
BB: Right? And it's not like you’re giving her something like, “Here's the map that I drew or here's…” You did it. Therefore she could do it.
EY: Exactly.
BB: This is just magnificent. And it’s a super extreme example of the kind of work that I think teachers can do.
EY: Right. With the right training. So it’s not so much that we stumbled upon processing cuz that's really built into the day. Like that was built into the program specifically to do this. And well, the way it came up with Helen was it became, as happens, there was no way not to process our feelings about Helen. Like she, not in words, but demanded that of us by giving us her feelings so strongly. Again, this is not, you know, it’s not through words like, “Hey, take my feelings I can't handle them!”
BB: And it’s not even conscious.
EY: Not even conscious.
BB: She wasn’t even doing anything in particular. She was just being.
EY: She was just yeah. And my heart goes out to the other school system who does not have a program like this cuz very few schools do. And they're doing their best with her and they're thinking like “How –” you know, she's falling apart, she’s being wild. “How do we calm her down?” And nothing was working. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing was working. And then, you know, it's interesting that by the time – she was never aggressive with us, which is interesting, either the first year or the second year we had her. That was not her presentation with us. It was in other classrooms before she came to us and then again. But I think, I wonder if that's because she knew she could actually just be with us. So it's actually, in a way, growth that she was able to just be as sad as she was.
BB: It's fantastic. And I totally – I just want to underline, you were a container, she recognized you guys as containing her.
EY: Yes. Yeah.
BB: She was contained. She was held very tightly. And the holding that you did was to allow her to be. Whereas in the other school, she was breaking the walls, she was throwing furniture, she was attacking people. She was basically, through her behavior, conveying to her caretakers that there was no holding happening.
EY: Yes, yeah. “Help me!”
BB: “Hold me! Stop me.”
EY: Right. Yeah, right. And you know, these teachers, of course, are doing their best to just keep their other students safe. Themselves safe. And I know this because having been in the classroom, you've got 15 or more other kids in the classroom and you've got to hold the line and find a way to get through it. And so we had the privilege of having fewer students, more staff, this training, and then this built-in processing time where we could really work through her feelings. And this is without her, right? We’re not talking to her about her feelings. We're talking to each other. And the other, you know, I would think of also countertransference, definitely. And then projective identification where she's just injecting us with these really dark, dark feelings because they've got to have somewhere to go so she can get through it.
BB: Say more about projective identification. What is it?
EY: Yeah. So this comes from my training. So one of the articles we read was called “On Projective Identification” by Thomas Ogden. And so he writes about, I think Melanie Klein may have been the first person to introduce projective identification. And so the idea is that you really are injecting your big, bad feeling into the other person. Like “I am so angry. Here is my anger. You feel it now, you do something with it and you make sense of it because it's too much for me.” So the way I was first trained in that was this really simple thing, which is: turns out feelings are contagious! Which makes sense, like, “Oh, why do I suddenly feel so sad? Like with Helen I was actually sad. Why do I feel so sad around Helen? Oh, because Helen's incredibly sad!” It would seem. So she was really passing that on to us. And, you know, we can think of examples in our own lives. If we do that with our spouses, or maybe our children do it with us, or anyone who's close to us, you know, maybe you have a friend who’s really anxious about something and suddenly now you're anxious and nervous. You know, “I was feeling fine 5 minutes ago!” It's just what we do as humans. We tend to spread the feelings around because we need each other to manage them. And a phrase that will be very familiar to teachers is we need each other to co-regulate. We need each other to help each other get through – like we're designed, humans are designed to do that. Neuroscience has shown that to us now. Like we get that now, right? We know that we have to get through this stuff together. Yeah.
BB: So I want to ask you – I mean, we can return to the story. It's just such an amazing story. But can you talk about your background and how you – I mean, you told us a little bit about the background of how you got to Helen and started working with her. But I know that you've been working with a specific person and a program and…
EY: Yeah, yeah, happy to talk about that. So when I was working in a different public school with really young kids, I had – and I wonder how familiar this will sound to many teachers – you have a lot of kids who are really, really dysregulated and really aggressive in the classroom. And it was my job to somehow both keep everybody safe and teach them to read! And add and subtract! Become friends! And, you know, my experience of working with them was my first priority is safety. I'm going to keep these kids safe. This is a group of kids who it just so happened that a number of them had a pretty significant trauma history and they acted out really aggressive behavior in the classroom. And for many of them, this was their first time in a public school. So I started consulting with psychologist William Ketterer, and he trained me in his model that we then used in the Restorative Classrooms. The Restorative Classroom was up and running and then eventually I was hired on to develop the Restorative Classroom for the little kids, for the K-2 program. They didn't have a program for students who were quite that young. So my introduction to it was consultation to support the students in my classroom, and it was incredibly effective in the general ed setting. The students I work with in the therapeutic classroom setting, they, again, like they don't respond in a separate setting because they haven't responded to interventions in a general classroom. But there are many, many children who can, you know, who can with enough of the right kind of support, who can stay in their classroom. And again, that is the goal! We want them to be with their peers. We want them in the classroom. So that's how I started. And so we call him Dr. K, Dr. Ketterer, Dr. K, he trained me in his model, which is called Healing the Self, which I talk about in the article. And it's a self psychology based model of development and intervention, meaning looking at student suffering as a developmental deficit. So these kids, you know, didn't get their early needs met. And this again relates – like a lot of educators are very, very familiar with attachment theory. And so attachment theory, if you're missing your early attachment needs, that's going to come up later in your life. And you can draw a lot of parallels to attachment theory and the work that we do. It's not the same, but lots of parallels. So self psychology says this is a theory developed by Heinz Kohut. Self psychology says that children need, from the very beginning, from infancy, caregivers who can be empathic to their child, so offer empathic attunement, offer a sense of belonging, which he called twinship. Like, “Hey, you're part of the family. You belong with me. We're together.” And then also what Kohut called “an idealizing transference” and what Dr. K calls idealization. So when it comes to teaching, it's like, can this kid look up to me to take care of them? And for the infant, it's can my parent or parent figure, caregiver, can I rely on them to consistently care for me emotionally, physically, the whole nine yards? So those three things, empathy, a sense of belonging, and idealization are essential developmental needs. And if they're not provided for adequately enough, then the child is left not feeling quite so whole and quite so complete. Something is missing. And then we talk about the feelings of fragmentation. So you may feel like you're falling apart. You can't hold it together when things get tough, you fall apart really easily when there are big feelings. You don't have that core sense of, “I got this.” So I was trained in Healing the Self, which takes these ideas, which are psychoanalytic ideas, and it takes these ideas and what Dr. K did was, well, I would say metabolize them actually, metabolize them in a way that can be brought into a school and into a classroom that non therapists can use. And it's not providing therapy to a child to provide these needs. It's not therapy. It's fundamental needs – the way Dr. K writes about it, and the way Kohut wrote about it, too, is to help the child with a sense of self-esteem and self-worth. So these fundamental aspects allow us to feel good-enough. And I think teachers do a lot of these things naturally, just like parents do a lot of these things naturally without having to be trained or coached or taught how to do them. But having a deeper understanding and a more nuanced understanding and a more sophisticated understanding helps us with those kids who need that much more of those things. And the average student, it's hard to say what an average student is, but like if we're thinking socially and emotionally, you know, a teacher can pretty easily be someone that a kid can look up to, someone that the child feels understood by. Teachers are really good at creating the little classroom cultures, whether it's through rituals or just things that are unique to their classroom. And for many, many, many kids that works. But it doesn't work for everyone. So Dr. K trained me in that model, I came over to the Restorative Classroom and developed the K-2 program along with my team not by myself, along with my team. And I continued to be – we all were – continued to be trained by Dr. K, read a lot of articles, attended conferences, Zoom conferences, in-person conferences where we thought a lot about the theory that underlies what we do every day in the classroom. I had never heard the words “countertransference,” “projective identification.” I didn't know “parallel process,” none of these things when I first started working with Dr. K.
BB: So I just want to say what you're describing, the transformation that you experienced when you started working with Dr. K, was to excavate or at least come in contact with the bedrock underlying the behaviors that you were seeing.
EY: Yes.
BB: As a teacher, we're trained to be focusing on the behaviors; they were what you were supposed to be focusing on.
EY: Right. Right.
BB: As opposed to the magma that erupts into those behaviors. And Dr. K helps you actually work with the magma.
EY: Yeah, that's a great metaphor. I like it. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, when I first started working with the students in my general ed classroom in a different school I had you know, I was watching these kids tear the place apart, hurt each other, hurt me, and thinking like “This is not good.” And so I called in, of course, I talked to my principal we called in the guidance counselor and the behavior specialist. We tried a million things before Dr. K was introduced to me. And those things were all behavioral. Track behaviors on a chart, give this a number of stickers, all well-intentioned things. Like how can we help Timmy stop hitting? How can we help this little girl not hide under the table anymore? Like, what? You know, it's all well-intentioned. We want the behaviors to stop so this child can get an education. Everyone's trying to do the right thing. And it's just we were working with the best information that we had, which was identify the behavior, you identify what’s coming before the behavior, and what’s coming after the behavior, analyze that and think about – you’re just looking at the behavior. With trauma-informed practice, there's a little bit more of looking underneath the behavior, but it still leaves a lot of question marks I think.
BB: What Dr. K does by tapping into this kind of universal theory, a theory that applies across the board, whether you're traumatized or not or whether or not a trauma can be identified or not. Because let's just say, if you're not securely attached, that one can argue that you have been traumatized. But, you know, trauma is used so much that getting theory that actually helps you address the emotions, the presentation of a child who's somehow not getting or hasn't gotten what he or she needs, it matters less that there's trauma or what the trauma is and more that there's a need and that there's a way of determining what the need is and what an attuned intervention might look like if you actually start thinking in terms of that underlying magma or bedrock, as I call it, the emotional life.
EY: Yeah. And sometimes we talk about that, the very idea that we don't necessarily even need to know the child's history. And sometimes it's way too intrusive to know the child's history. I didn't – we never asked Helen what happened this summer, you know. And certainly if a child discloses something to us and we need to make reports. Of course, of course, of course. All that mandated report stuff we want our children, these students to be safe and all of those things. We approach them – one of the phrases Dr. K has taught me and my team is “by invitation only.” Yeah. Meaning we ask Helen, “May I sit with you?” Or we ask Helen, “Is it okay if I talk?” Like we’ll say that to students. “Is it okay if I talk right now?” And if they say “no,” no means no. We don't talk. It's by invitation, meaning at their pace. I don't need to dig into Helen's experience if she's not ready to share it. She's sharing it with me anyway, just by being and feeling. That's enough. That is enough. Her inner world is precious. And it is hers. And what I have to ask myself, “What right do I have to go into that world without her inviting me?” And I think, again, adults really mean well when they ask kids to talk, to say something about their experience. I think sometimes it can be so frustrating as a teacher or a different or a parent or another caring adult in a child's life. It’s like, “What's going on? I want to help you!” I understand that impulse. Completely. It's just not always the approach that's going to feel good to the child.
BB: So I want to ask. I don't know if you want to tell another story, but it might be really great to get another example of the kind of work you do and maybe a story that is not as extreme as a Helen story, but is maybe more relatable.
EY: Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy to. And I think that's something you said just a few minutes ago, that we sort of try to figure out what the need is. So we know that fundamentally kids need – well really humans, but we need it from a really young age – empathic attunement, belonging, and people we can look up to to care for us. You know, someone might be missing one of those things more than another, or they might need one of those things more than another in the moment. I mean, I think about that for myself or any person. At times in your life, when you need something a little more than you need something else. Or at a particular point in time, if something is hard, you really need your friends to be empathic in that moment versus trying to fix you. So I sometimes think of that group of students who was with Helen, and I think about how they all needed something a little bit differently than each other at different times. And the way Dr. K talks about it is those what he calls relational ingredients are fluid, and it depends on the child, it depends on the moment, and you sort of sense into what is it that will serve the child best and what do we do? We make a hypothesis and we test it. It's not that we have to know because we’ll drive ourselves crazy if we think we have to know. And again, I'm thinking of teachers. Like, teachers are really hard on themselves when it comes to knowing what the child needs. We think academically and socially, emotionally and attrition. Teachers are really invested in giving their students what they need. And from my experience, they really want to do that. And there's a lot of pressure to do that. And I think one of the takeaways for me from working this way is (1) make a hypothesis based on theory, based on evidence-based practice, based on training, and (2) you test it out. And if it doesn't work, okay. The hypothesis is wrong. Now you got to try something else.
BB: Exactly. Exactly.
EY: So there’s a group of students I had alongside Helen that particular year. One of them was a student – so I can think of one student who very much needed us to be empathic to him. And he relied on one of the staff members to engage in play with him, puppet play, in particular stuffed animals. And through that play she was really able to sense into him and his world. And he just felt, I think, very cared for by her and very understood by her in the way that she played with him. And having those play breaks allowed him to do his academics.
BB: To regulate.
EY: To regulate. Yeah, to regulate. He often started his morning playing with her and then he'd be like, “Okay, I'm ready for math.” And he would say that. “I'm ready for math now.” Okay, let's go to math! So he was really relying on her empathic attunement and I'm sure belonging too. He felt really close to her in those moments. And another student who came to us initially – it's fluid. It changes over time – but initially, I think he was really asking us to be idealizable. So he came in, didn't want to listen to any rules. He would try to – he’d like sort of look at us and then go to pinch someone else or do something a little bit – but he’d always be looking at us. And I think what he was asking us to do was “No, we got you, you're not gonna pinch anyone. You're not gonna –" You know, a couple times he tried to run away and we were able to contain that really easily. And I think what he was saying was like, “Hey, can you do this or not? Can you keep me safe or not?” And we just made it very clear “We got you, we’re gonna keep you safe.” But he sort of kept testing that. And I think what he was asking was “How idealizable are you really? Are you going to let me down or can you do this?” And once he seemed like he started to rely on our capacity to keep him safe and help him learn to follow the rules, then he learned to read really, really quickly. He learned to add and subtract really, really quickly. And this was a child who their previous classroom, you know, he wasn't accessing any instruction because he was just really out of control in the classroom. And then with us he was able to buckle down and do his schoolwork! and learn to be a student! And it felt like we did very few interventions with him at all, like very, very few. But I think what we really were doing was just being – it was also containment, but different than Helen's. It wasn’t that same super intensive emotional containment. It was more like boundaries, rules and expectations, “we got this,” you know.
BB: How did you do it? When he was looking at you like, “Yeah, I'm going to pinch her.” What did you do?
EY: Yeah, well, I would say to him, “I can see you're going to do that, and you need to stop.” Just like very direct, very simple. “Can’t pinch her.” And he would stop. If I didn't see it in time, or if he didn't stop, he would be asked to do a timeout at his desk. When we do timeouts, it's like sit with the child, show them a timer and be like, “We can do this. We're not going to talk for 2 minutes” with him. So he's not alone and isolated. We’d do it together. And he would do his right at his desk and he would do it for 2 minutes. And I would stop the timer or the timer would stop and I would say, “Okay! Are you ready to be safe?” And he’d be like “Yeah.” You know, and then he would go on. And it was – with him we could really use language very clearly. He was articulate. He was able to just follow the verbal directions. And again, for him, I think the difference between his other setting and us was we had a smaller number of students. And, you know, I think the other big, big, big piece for him was because of our training, because we as a team felt so rock solid in each other, we weren't afraid of him or his behaviors or his feelings. Like we know we can handle it. We know we have the capacity to do that so we don't have to – you know, we just we weren't afraid of him. I think that's what he was really asking us is, “Can you do this or is this too hard for you? Am I too much for you?”
BB: Yes. It's just another beautiful example of how emotions are contagious. And this is an example of how your emotion is contagious for him. That is, for you and the teachers to be absolutely confident that he will do the right thing, that is, to actually embody trust. If he gets that you trust him.
EY: Yes.
BB: As opposed to embodying distrust, expecting the worst, seeing him as a bad boy or being afraid of him, as you say, or fearing that you don't have the power, that you don't have the authority. It just this again, it feels magical because to get to that point, to get to the point where you can trust a child who is teaching you that he's untrustworthy, at least that's what it looks like. Right? “Here I go. I'm going to pinch.” No, to reframe it as “he's testing us to see whether or not we can hold him.” And I totally agree that holding comes in different forms. But this one is there are limits and there are consequences. And the consequence, I just want to say importantly, is not punishment. It is not isolation. It's sitting you down. “Yes. You have to calm down. You have to reregulate. But you're going to do it in my presence. We're going to do it together and I'm going to treat you with respect. Are you ready? If you're ready, let's go. If you're not ready, we can stay.” It's just so packed. That one example, so packed with wisdom that you and your team embodied. You just did it. Because of the theory, because of the training. But it's not actually rocket science. You know, any teacher hearing this can be thinking, “Huh, I could try this.”
EY: Right. And that's what I get from your work, too, and from reading your book and in your website, in the podcast, it's exactly like: Teachers can do this once given access to it. And I like to – I know I keep saying this, but I think it's important to emphasize that I started doing this in a regular classroom. So it's possible. Cuz I know people will be hearing like, “Oh, of course you have a small number of students and more staff!” And that's for sure true for the kids with super high intensity needs. Yes.
BB: And you have a bunch of them in the same classroom.
EY: Yes. Right. And that's the other thing is then you have everyone in the classroom struggles with many of the same things, but it can can can work in a regular classroom. And I feel so passionate about it because it supports the students but also supports the teachers. And it helps the teachers feel less burned out if they realize, “Oh, there's a way to think about this,” and if they have a team to think about it with, or at least one other person, one other staff person to think about it with. So like with this child who we really conceptualize as needing to idealize us. And we talked about him at the end of the day, like especially when he was first, they're like, “What? What is the looking at us and about to pinch about? What is that?” It's like we didn't actually instantaneously know, but “What is he asking us?” But that's often the question. “What is he asking us to do? Or what is he looking for from us?”
BB: And I would say, what is he teaching us about himself?
EY: Mm hmm. Right, right, right!
BB: What is he teaching us about his expectations of the world? Right? So he's expecting you to yell at him. Right?
EY: Yeah. Or some big response.
BB: Exactly.
EY: Really a big response. And, you know, I really would just say like “Hey. You can’t pinch.” And he’d be like, “Okay.” But it really – it was amazingly not a big deal asking him not to do that. And I think that was a relief to him. Like, “Oh, I actually can just not pinch her.” But had I or my colleagues yelled or in some way –
BB: Sent him out of the room.
EY: Right. And in some way had a big response that to him was like, “Oh, you know, this is very disorganizing” – not the language he would use, but – “this is very disorganizing to my teacher.” It would have been a really different outcome.
BB: Yes. And I would say that when a student tests or a child tests the authority figure and discovers that they can disorganize that authority figure, what they realize is that they are not safe, that they are not held. So this place isn't a safe place and it almost compels more testing because theoretically what they want is “No, this is a safe place.” But if they expect the world to be unsafe, that is when they expect to have – when they discover that they have the power to disorient and dysregulate adults? To me it's like sniffing a bad smell over and over again. Like, “Is it really that bad? Yes. It’s really that bad.” It’s like testing reality over and over again. Is it really this bad? Yes, it is. And then they become filled up with emotion and then it becomes just a way of life that they cannot regulate themselves because they do not see that the adults in their lives are regulating themselves either. And we're back to this model where we model metabolism and if we can metabolize, as you really just so beautifully do, Erica, so calmly with a slight sense of humor and a sense of confidence in yourself, we are teaching our children, our students, “This is how it can be. This is how it can be. This is how you can be, this is how I can be. You are trusted.”
EY: Yeah. Mm hmm.
BB: It’s such beautiful work. And as you say, actually fairly simple. But it requires so much, so much, I think, personal work on the part of teachers who don't see their students this way.
EY: Yeah. And I think for me, what allowed me to sort of transform this way as a teacher was having the people, the professional colleagues in my life to do this with. So first Dr. K and then the team. So being able to make sense of the feelings the students bring up in me or just the feelings I have about it and the theory, right? It's both. It's both the intellectual piece and the emotional piece. They’re both very, very present in the work. And again, teachers are just not trained in it – and teachers sign up to teach content, you know, and certainly develop relationships with students. But when you're in your teacher training, I think that developing relationships with students and not necessarily thinking about kids who are so depleted in their developmental needs that they're trying to hurt you or other kids. And sadly, there's so much more certainly in Vermont schools of that happening in regular classrooms.
BB: I'm hearing those stories.
EY: And to my mind, it's like we've got to do something differently because of violence and aggression in the classrooms, including really young preschool and elementary classrooms. It’s so pervasive. How do we turn this tide so we can get back to the work of teaching and so these children can have successful experiences in school and feel good about themselves and be on the soccer team and do all those regular kid things that we want them very much so to be able to do?
BB: You know, you're making me think when you were talking about your team and the space that meeting with your team provided for you to have your feelings, get them out there, be honest about them, and I would say organize your feelings and the data that you've collected about the students using theory.
EY: Yes.
BB: That is precisely what – I have to put a plug in here – what a Teacher Support Group is, which is the work that I do with regular teachers –
EY: Yes, yes.
BB: Like teachers anywhere, everywhere, administrators, teachers – an opportunity to get together weekly and talk about what the hell is going on with you, like how you're feeling and the worst feelings that you can possibly have that you want to hide and you don't want to admit. No. Put them out on the table because they're meaningful. And as a group, we can normalize them. We can empathize with each other. And then we can get down to work and figure out what those feelings that we have and the behaviors we're seeing in our students are teaching us about the students, are teaching us about their needs –
EY: Because our feelings are data!
BB: Exactly. Our feelings are data. Our behaviors are data. And the idea is to formulate them into – I call it a guess, you call it a hypothesis, right?
EY: Right.
BB: Same thing. We make a guess because we can never know. And I also have to say one other thing that I love that you made me think of. For teachers not to know actually should be okay. We have to not know. We have to make guesses. But I think teachers and the whole education field believe that they have to know. And so their approach to students is, “I know what's wrong with you or I know what you need.” And that actually just aggravates the situation. Going into a situation, going into a relationship, going into a group where you're talking about students and not knowing is the worst thing in the world for some teachers, but it’s the best thing in the world for the students and for the teachers. But they need to be contained as they experience that, too. And that's what these Teacher Support Groups or your debriefing groups do.
EY: Yeah, to do it alone. I don't know if that would work. To do it alone. And it makes sense that teachers would want to know because it's education. You know, it's like the whole idea is that we can learn things and we know and to sit with uncertainty is hard. And it's very different than teaching math, which is, again, teachers sign up to do a different thing. This is what's being demanded of them by the behaviorist in the classroom. Yeah. And I can offer one very short example that I have – helping with teacher trainings, which I've done a little bit of here and there – I've used this example a couple times. So empathy itself can be data collection. That's how Heinz Kohut thought about it. If we can sense into a person's experience, we can start to understand them and start to know maybe a little bit of their – in the service of how do we help them grow or, you know, bear witness to their growth and so on. So I had a student who one day – I had probably been working with them for a few months and he was working on a math paper. And he just – I could see him – I was sitting a little bit away from him – I could see him start to go inward and shut down a little bit. I could read him pretty well at this point. And so I moved a little closer and then he picked up his math paper and was about to tear it in half, you know, it's a classic move! Just tear it up! Right? And I just looked at him and said, “Mad?” And he was like, “Yeah!” And he didn’t keep tearing it. And then I said, “Can I sit closer?” “Yeah.” And then I just sat down next to him and I was quiet. And he set the paper down. And then I just said, “You know, you don't have to do this alone. We can do it together.” And he was like, “Okay.” And then we did it. We did the math. He just didn't have the words to say, “I need help” or “This is too hard” or, you know. So I just – you can hear that at first I wasn't even using complete sentences because it would have been too much. And again, I work with really young kids, so they get to a pre-verbal stage very, very quickly. And so he was getting dysregulated, so fewer words were better. And then it was very brief, but it was just me – and what I was doing was thinking, I was thinking but also feeling, “What might he be feeling?” By just asking myself that question it occurred to me, “I wonder if this feels really hard to do by himself.” And then the test was asking him and he said “Yes.” Does it always work out perfectly? No. But if it hadn't worked, that would have meant my hypothesis was wrong. It wasn't about doing it alone, it was about something else. And then we would have, you know, I would have tried something else.
BB: Exactly right. The hypothesis is not the end all. It is the probe that then either solves the problem or generates more data. And then you fold the data back in. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's so beautiful. And I just want to say again, this is why I perceived you as a kindred spirit when I read your article. You're doing this work out there, you and Bill Ketterer and others are doing that work out there. I didn't even know about it! I'm doing this work here. It's the same work. The theories – I’m not specifically using self psychology. I use a lot of theories, and so do you.
EY: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BB: Right? And it's so fantastic. You are confirming my own experience and the experiences of teachers that I've worked with where if you think this way you can crack these nuts that seem so, so hard that you can't move this child. They crack open almost like butter. It’s a totally mixed metaphor.
EY: I got ya!
BB: Right? You get it! This is what's so exciting about talking to you. If you get it right, it yields. Children yield in that they get ready to do the learning that you're there to help them do. And if you don't figure out how to crack the nut, then they're going to be teaching you every day, all day, how you're failing them, what they need that you're not giving them. And they're not going to be able to learn. And they're not going to try to learn because the most important message is “See me, see me, mirror me, know me and solve this, hold me. You know, give me what I'm not exactly sure I need. Figure this out. Make a good guess. Work with me, connect with me.” Which is also what your story just brought up in me, that you connected with that kid just like that, and that's what – he needed connection too.
EY: Which we were able to do with him. Yeah. Because of this relationship we had built with him.
BB: Exactly. He knew exactly how to read you.
EY: Yeah. Yeah.
BB: Well I just wonder if there's anything else we didn't cover that you would like to mention before we close.
EY: Hmm. I mean, I think I've been saying it, but for me, the mission of this work that I'm doing – so I'm in another therapeutic classroom. I have a wonderful colleague and I'm really proud of the work we're doing. It's hard work, but I'm really proud of it. You know, I want to see this move beyond – I want it in every classroom. I want teachers to know that this is accessible to them. And I think one thing that was helpful to me to pass on was it did not – when I first started working with Dr. K, it did not feel like I was being asked to do more. The last thing a teacher needs is like, “Do more stuff!” No. That's not what it felt like. It actually felt like, if I do this, it might sound a little strange but, it's more efficient. It's moving slower to get somewhere quicker.
BB: Yeah. Oh!
EY: So that would be one of the things I’d like to say. It's not actually more and eventually it becomes second nature.
BB: Yes.
EY: With training. And with support. And it sounds like the work you're doing with teachers allows them that. And that's – it's a gift to teachers that many teachers just don't have access to yet. And my hope is that it will become much, much, much more accessible. And that’s the other thing I would say is you have a book and then Dr. K also has a book. So there are – you guys are trying to get it out there! And his book, the one that we use is called Reducing Anger and Violence in Schools. So your work and his work is a place for teachers to start.
BB: Yes. So just to close, I want to say there will be a transcript of this interview on my website, and I will include links to Dr. K, to his book –
EY: Oh wonderful!
BB: And to your article. So people can try to get – if they're interested, they can look these things up. So, yeah, that's there. Please check it out. Erica, I just want to thank you so much. I want to thank you for responding to my email about your article. I mean, I was so thrilled that you did. And we've had many meetings between then and now, and I'm so excited about the work that you're doing and the training that you're getting and the way you think about teaching and the world. And I just hope we stay in touch.
EY: All right. Well, thank you so much. I'm so glad you reached out.