Episode 8: Penelope

A teacher turns intense dislike for a student into an effective, connected relationship.

Transcript

“I am in survival mode,” Penelope told her Teacher Support Group one dreary winter day.

Penelope is a very talented and effective second grade teacher. She is creative with her curriculum and caring with her students. She seems to have endless good humor. But on this day her face was stony and her mouth fixed in a firm flat line.

What happened?

Penelope told us that, about a week ago, she had arrived at school to find her desk ransacked. Someone had found the granola bars she kept in a drawer and eaten them, leaving crumbs and wrappers all over the desk and floor. Same with her stash of hard candy. On top of that, the invader had pulled out Penelope’s felt-tip pens and drawn all over her desk blotter and the papers she had piled on a nearby table. “If I had entered my home and it had looked like that,” she told us, “I would have called the police.”

As it turned out, though, the student – let’s call him Freddy – confessed to his parents. Who then told Penelope.

“I was beyond angry,” Penelope said. “I felt violated and disrespected and so sour and hurt.” And, while she accepted the parents’ heartfelt apology, she knew she had some difficult work to do with their child.

Here’s the thing about Freddy: This was not the first time Penelope had felt angry at him. Penelope’s relationship with Freddy had been rocky from the start of the school year. Because he was fixated on his friends and seemed unaware of the adults in his life, including her, and because he acted out in the most irritating ways all the time, and because he never apologized or seemed contrite, Penelope had not been able to establish positive rapport with him. Haha! Cut the euphemisms: She didn’t like him.

But Penelope is a professional. Despite her anger at this latest and quite serious offense, she made time to talk to Freddy, to hear his side of the story. This is where it got tricky, though. Freddy was not talkative, especially with adults, under the best of circumstances. Under the worst of circumstances, like these, he totally clammed up. Which made Penelope even angrier.

So she did the best she could. Because Penelope strongly believes that “students need to see adults feel,” she described for him in no uncertain terms what it was like for her to discover the theft. She told him she no longer trusted him and that she wasn’t going to be able to forgive him for a while because she was so upset.

Freddy didn’t seem to mind. He expressed no regret. He didn’t apologize. All Penelope got was silence.

Which made it all the more easy for Penelope’s anger at Freddy to blossom. Hence her “survival mode.” She was having a really hard time holding that anger in.

[break]

Seems to me that Penelope handled this debacle really well. I love it that she allowed herself to feel angry, hurt, disrespected, violated, sour. As she knows, it is normal and natural for adults to have emotions about the inconsiderate things children do. And she knows that children can – actually, must – hear what impacts they have on others. How else are they supposed to develop empathy? Or the ability to mentalize, that is, to imagine accurately what might be going on inside someone else’s head? How else will they develop a sense of responsibility for their own actions? Or a reliable relationship with reality?

Empathy. Mentalization. Personal responsibility. Reliable relationship to reality. Crucial skills for healthy human beings. All fostered by Penelope’s measured and honest response to Freddy.

I also love it that Penelope communicated all this to Freddy in what I (and my hero Donald Winnicott) would call a “good-enough” way. She did not rage at Freddy and scare the pants off him. She did not collapse into kindness and tell him (and his parents) that it was OK – when it wasn’t. She told it like it was with firmness but also with fairness. With complete respect for her own reality and without any hint of retaliation towards Freddy. As far as I could tell, she described her emotions without acting them out on Freddy, without spewing on him or making him suffer. This is such admirable adult behavior.

But Penelope’s difficulty wasn’t just with this episode of theft. It was with her entire relationship with Freddy – that is, with her sense of total disconnect from him. Which prevented her from being able to process this latest wave of outrage and shock. As she put it, she could neither “forgive” Freddy nor escape her deep anger at him. She was emotionally stuck. And exhausted. And furious. “Survival mode.” 

How to understand this stuckness, this bind Penelope found herself in? Her inability to forgive and her inability to forget?

First, her inability to forget. That is, her anger. It’s not hard to understand it: I mean, Freddy robbed her and vandalized her desk! Penelope rightly felt violated, and that’s one way I understand anger: as a sign that a boundary has been breached. Freddy definitely breached a boundary. The physical boundary of Penelope’s space, her possessions. But also her emotional boundary, her sense of trust and safety. Her sense of order, her sense that all was right in the world. Freddy’s invasion of Penelope’s desk was actually traumatizing. Not big-T, like sexual assault or physical attack by a full-grown man. But little-t. The kind of trauma that a confusing 7-year-old can inflict when he behaves in a shocking way that turns the world temporarily upside-down.

This is important. Remember this idea of trauma, of a topsy-turvy world.

Even though she was livid at Freddy, Penelope desperately wanted to forgive him. As I see it, short of just granting Freddy clemency and sweeping the whole unpleasant affair under the rug – which Penelope could not do because she was too angry to let it go! – Penelope had just two choices: Either accept a reality she could not change and make peace with her powerlessness, or engage in a process of reconciliation, of repair, with the person who had done her wrong. Acceptance or engagement.

For Penelope, neither was possible.

On the one hand, accepting Freddy’s reality – his astonishing acting out, his complete detachment from her – would have meant abdicating her responsibility as a teacher. If she accepted his theft and their non-functional relationship, how could she teach him?

On the other hand, engagement by definition requires cooperation from the offending party. Freddy would have to acknowledge his act and feel contrite about it. He’d have to want to make reparations. And, from Penelope’s point of view, he simply did not. He did not feel contrite and he did not want to make reparations. I mean, he didn’t even apologize to her!

So Penelope was stuck between her legitimate anger and her need for an apology. Which did not happen and looked like it never would happen. How was she going to be able to move on?

[break]

Can I just say? While Penelope told her story, I was thinking to myself, “Holy cow. I have no idea how to help with this. I do not have anything to offer.” The other teachers in the group were understandably horrified and shared their experiences with Freddy, showing their loving solidarity with Penelope, but the overall feeling was one of outraged resignation, not clarifying understanding. And it’s clarifying understanding that I’m supposed to foster. So I was stumped and nervous, caught up in Penelope’s terrible feelings of shock and powerlessness.

But then Penelope started describing Freddy’s everyday behaviors, the ways he acted out in school, and things started crystallizing.

Penelope said that Freddy had a hard time respecting other kids’ needs. If a friend told Freddy to leave him alone, for example, Freddy would as soon push him down than respect his request. It seemed that Freddy’s preferred mode of communication was not words but actions.

Which reminded me of a wonderful article I read a few years ago by a school counselor who had run a therapy group for boys just a year older than Freddy who shared Freddy’s apparent attitude towards words: that “words held no real meaning.” That is, talking wouldn’t change anything. What would change things? Action. Especially violent action.

Could it be that Freddy communicated via action rather than words? Penelope thought that sounded accurate.

This made me wonder about the particular action Freddy had taken that had so traumatized Penelope. I mean, stealing from a teacher? And leaving all the remains, making no effort to hide the act? All this by a 2nd grader? If Freddy communicates through action, what the heck was this action communicating?

“I’m going to try something that’s a little out there,” I told Penelope and the other teachers in her Support Group. “It’s from my main man Donald Winnicott.”

I told the group about something I had read somewhere in Winnicott’s works about stealing. Winnicott’s hypothesis was that a child who steals has experienced a number of years of on-target development that was suddenly disrupted in some major way. After the disruption, Winnicott suggested, the child feels bereft, betrayed, and entitled to what they know from experience they deserve – that is, having their emotional and physical needs met – but they can no longer get because of the disruption.

So they take it. They steal what they deserve. In Freddy’s case, treats. Food. Nourishment. Care and comfort. Maybe?

I pause here for a public service announcement. If you’re thinking right now, “Psychobabble much? Really? Stealing is a sign of traumatic developmental disruption?” I hear ya. But consider: Who knows what goes on in the murky depths of unconscious motivation? No one does. That’s why it’s called “unconscious.” My belief – heck, my experience – is that making good guesses about those murky depths can really pan out. Spoiler alert!: They did in Penelope’s case. Which we now return to.

So I had just suggested that Freddy had stolen what he felt – what he knew – he deserved. 

“That’s interesting,” Penelope said. “Because Freddy has experienced a major disruption in his life. His baby sister. Born with a serious illness this past spring.”

Another aside: See what I’m sayin’? I. am. not. making. this. up. (Except for the identifying specifics.)

OK. So Freddy had to deal with a new kid in the family, which can be difficult for older siblings under the best of circumstances. But this new kid, perhaps, took up all his parents’ attention for a while. Maybe still did. And Freddy might be feeling that loss. And he might be feeling outraged and helpless. The way Penelope did.

Hunh. This made sense to Penelope. 

So how to put all this together?

I know this is going to sound weird, but people like Freddy – the kids who act out, who get our negative attention, who shock and appall us – are great gifts to us teachers. Because, at some unconscious level, these students seem to suspect that we might be different. We might be able to figure them out and do what’s right by them. If they didn’t have this faith in us, they wouldn’t act out, in my view. They would just sit silently, let us wash over them, and get away from us as soon as possible.

Of course, students aren’t necessarily aware of any of this. They just invite the world to treat them the way they have come to expect to be treated. With anger. Or hopelessness. Or contempt. Or lowered expectations. Or disappointment. Or resignation. The great good news for us teachers is that, when students reveal their own negative expectations through their “bad” behavior, we have a chance to do something different. To see them differently from how they see themselves. To address their emotional and developmental needs – which are always legitimate, no matter how gracelessly the students telegraph those needs – with attunement. To treat them the way they do deserve to be treated: with care and understanding and compassion and developmentally informed firmness and respect.

So what I suggested to Penelope was that Freddy might be testing her – unconsciously, to be sure! – by acting out on her. I mean, he did choose Penelope to steal from; he did leave ample evidence behind; and he did, for heaven’s sake, confess to his parents! Would Penelope, he seemed to be wondering, be able to decode his behavior and figure out what he needed? Or would she treat him the way he expected to be treated these days, like a “bad boy” who wouldn’t get the love and attention he needed?

This “bad boy” thing: I’m talking here about a possible unconscious belief about himself that Freddy might have conjured after his sister was born. His parents loved him and had not stopped loving him, Penelope assured us; but they had been quite preoccupied since the spring with helping their new baby survive. As young children – heck, even adults! – tend to do, Freddy, it seems, came up with a naïve, self-centered explanation for his parents’ change in demeanor after his sister’s birth. My guess is it went something like this: “Mommy and Daddy don’t attend to me anymore; they must not love me; that must be because I’m a bad boy.”

Would Penelope see him as a bad boy, too?

Just to tie up a bow here: Remember the bit a little earlier about trauma? About Freddy’s turning Penelope’s world upside-down? Another way of seeing Freddy’s theft is that he traumatized Penelope in a parallel way to how he himself felt traumatized. He took something nourishing (that would be food) from her. He turned her world upside-down the way his sister’s birth turned his world upside-down.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But it’s interesting to consider the possibility that people’s acts unconsciously and very precisely teach others what’s going on inside them. The murky depths and all that.

Back to Penelope: It seemed to me that Penelope, brilliant teacher that she was, did not take the bait. She did not treat Freddy the way he expected to be treated. She shared her feelings but did not punish or withdraw from him. She remained available as his teacher even as she owned her feelings about his actions. She did not abandon him despite the serious shove his theft dealt her. She was surviving this trauma that he had invited her into. But just barely (like him?). Fortunately, she brought her struggle to a group that could help her.

This I told Penelope.

And this Penelope then told us:

Over the past three days, Freddy’s behavior in class had earned him three stickers – a reward system Penelope had instituted at the beginning of the school year that Freddy routinely blew off. I repeat: Every day for the previous three days – starting just a couple school days after the theft – Freddy had earned three stickers, one for each positive act in class.

Penelope called home to let Freddy’s parents know. The first time she called, Freddy’s mom said, “You’re kidding me!” The second time Penelope called, Freddy’s mom cried. The third time, Penelope received a text from Freddy’s mom’s phone that said, “Hi, Mrs. A. This is Freddy. Thank you for calling my mom. It made me smile.” (It was clear, Penelope said, that Freddy’s mom had been involved in the texting because all the words were spelled correctly!)

And there’s more. Penelope also reported that Freddy had recently said to her, “I’m going to make you proud of me.” Penelope had responded, “Make yourself proud of yourself.” A tiny little shove from Penelope, a tiny disconnect from a boy who was saying pretty baldly, “I want you to be proud of me.” And, importantly, “I think I can make it so.”

Which makes sense. The little shove from Penelope, I mean. Because she had gotten into a groove that made it impossible for her to see what Freddy was communicating. All she saw was his failure to fulfill her own expectation of him, which was, plain and simple, a verbal apology. Her need to hear words caused her to miss his actions, which were unquestionably aimed at heartfelt reparation. With a teacher that Freddy actually felt connected to! Not disconnected, as Penelope had felt.

And there’s more. Is it possible that Freddy didn’t apologize to Penelope because he actually wasn’t sorry? Is it possible that he was relieved that he had gotten her attention and kept it? That he was getting from her what he needed? Attention. Connection (even if only through her anger). Devotion despite her emotional struggle (which Freddy’s parents couldn’t give him right now). Heck, emotions at all! He had an impact on Penelope and she was responding to him in understandable ways that set the world right again.

In short, I’m guessing that Freddy did not want to apologize. He wanted to attach. He wanted to be seen and valued and held tightly by someone he cared about and trusted. He wanted to be known as lovely and deserving, not as a “bad boy.”

This I said to Penelope.

And it blew Penelope’s mind. To be honest, it blew my mind, too. This little boy was telling it like it is, loudly and clearly – only not with words. With actions. And intentions about actions.

“I had never thought of it that way!” Penelope exclaimed. I could tell this was true, because her face was back – her twinkling eyes, her radiance, her happy, humorous energy. 

“You’ve softened towards him, haven’t you?” I asked. “Yes!” Penelope answered. “I don’t feel bad anymore!!”

A month has passed since that meeting. Penelope has reported weekly that things with Freddy continue to go smoothly. She’s having a great time in class. No more disconnect. No more anger. No more need to forgive. No more bind.

This story gives me chills.

[break]

It turns out that this story is pretty complicated. I mean, Penelope did everything right. But she still felt terrible. Teasing out what went wrong proved kind of tricky. At least, for me.

 If I can summarize it quasi-succinctly:

Penelope had a student from whom she felt completely alienated. That student took the alienation to an unprecedented level by stealing from her.

Penelope responded brilliantly. She represented herself accurately and forthrightly; she did not retaliate; she contained her ongoing fury at her alienating student and behaved responsibly toward him.

But Penelope was in a bind because she could neither stop her anger nor forgive the student. And she had to keep teaching him. 

Penelope brought her bind to her Teacher Support Group. I, her facilitator, made a bunch of crazy guesses about what her student might have been telling her through his egregious act. 

These guesses, because they made sense to Penelope, relieved her. And they opened up a whole different perspective for her. Now Penelope could see the ways in which her student was in fact making reparation, earning her forgiveness. She hadn’t even considered these acts as conciliatory before because she hadn’t been looking for them. 

All she needed was a nudge to see her student differently. She had already done the hard work of responding to his heinous act with self-respect and self-restraint. Now she was able to see the work he was doing to attach healthily and productively to her. They were no longer alienated. We know this made a huge difference for Penelope, because she told us it did. But imagine what a difference it made for Freddy.

So today’s axiom: Careful what you look for – because you’ll find it. Meaning your expectations of the world – or of a student – actually determine what you perceive. And once you’ve gathered your perceptions, which are already biased by your expectations, you will interpret those perceptions in ways that are also biased by your expectations. So now you’re doubly removed from reality.

It’s not that there is an objective reality out there that you are supposed to somehow discern. It’s that we are all biased by our expectations and negative beliefs. Negative beliefs about ourselves. Negative beliefs about others. Uninterrogated assumptions and expectations of ourselves and others. So, if we just do our thing, perceiving and interpreting without restraint, we are likely to reinforce and deepen our maladaptive expectations and negative beliefs.

But if we stop and reframe, try out a new lens, as Penelope did, behold!! Everything looks completely different!! Now you can see something you need to see but couldn’t before. And, even better, you start working to fulfill your new beliefs and expectations. You feel different so you act differently. And other people act differently in response to you. Win-win. Win-win-win!! It’s so exciting. And good for everyone.