Name: Nancy
Location: Springford
I guess you could say I was troubled as a teenager myself, though, really, trouble just found me.
I’m an inpatient counselor at a hospital which primarily treats youth patients. Most of my patients struggle with the things you might expect young people to struggle with, depression and anxiety. Being a young person has always been hard, but it feels like it’s gotten much harder now with so much school pressure, anxiety about social media, and how difficult it can be to just hang out with your friends, and I feel grateful that I’m able to help my patients learn healthy strategies for coping with all of these pressures.
I guess you could say I was troubled as a teenager myself, though, really, trouble just found me. My dad was actually a police officer in the town where I grew up, but I hung around with a pretty wild crew from my school, which isn’t really that uncommon for kids who grow up with parents who work in law enforcement. I didn’t have a great home life, which also isn’t uncommon for those kids, unfortunately. I hung out with a few kids who did some partying, and while I was never a partier like them, we’d stay up late together a lot. Something we had in common was that we all had terrible nightmares, so we’d take over the counter amphetamines to stay up really late and try to keep from falling asleep. Nothing too extreme, this was a small town, and we were just kids, so we’re talking about No-Doz or Stay Awake, if you can remember those. That was really it for me, though, I was never much of a risk taker. This probably doesn’t seem related to my professional work, but I had some really traumatic experiences as a result of my dreams, and understanding what nightmares are, and helping my patients to control them has really been a singular focus in my counseling career.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sleep disorder, but they can manifest in all kinds of different ways. For me, I’d have pattern nightmares that always followed a similar trajectory, which isn’t uncommon at all, especially with younger adults. It’s so funny, as an adult, you can kind of forget what being a teenager can feel like, but kids feel things in such an intense way, like, if you have repetitive nightmares about someone chasing you, or someone trying to hurt you, well, those things can feel intensely real to you, even though the adults around you tell you that they’re just dreams. I think — or, at least I hope — that one of the ways I can connect with my patients is by trying to put myself in the same frame of mind that they are, and try to show them that I treat their feelings and their fears as legitimate. If a patient tells me that her dreams feel real, that someone’s trying to hurt them in their dreams, I treat those fears as just as legitimate as I would if someone were trying to hurt them in real life.
I don’t know if you’ve ever had a sleep disorder, but they can manifest in all kinds of different ways.
As you can probably imagine, the day-to-day job in a treatment facility can change a lot, depending on how many patients we have and what’s going on with them. Group sessions are probably one of the most consistent day-to-day experiences. I find that being able to get our patients together and open up to us and one another about what they’re experiencing really helps them to understand that they’re not alone, and that they’re in it together. We have a special group for the kids with sleep disorders, where we all talk about what kinds of dreams we’re having, and it really helps all of them to hear from each other that they have shared experiences. The details are always different, of course, but there are enough similarities that they can easily relate to one another. This is one of the areas where I feel like I’m most successful and do the most good, because I can relate to them in a way they often feel other adults can’t. I still have terrible nightmares of my own, but I’ve learned how to control them and try to help these kids understand that they can learn to do that, too.
I mean, like any job, I have complaints. I think facility administration is always a little too conservative about being willing to try unconventional treatment approaches, and, like every administration, it’s very male dominated. Just in general, I think men too frequently brush off concerns that our patients have, and, as you can probably guess, this is much worse for our female patients. Many of the young women in our facility have been told, so many times, that they’re making it up, or that what they’re experiencing isn’t real, all of this is probably the part of my job that frustrates me the most, because it takes much more time to build trust with my patients if they feel like they haven’t been heard in the past. That’s what it was like for me when I was younger, too, so many of the male authority figures in my life would just tell me that I was crazy, or that I was making things up, but I had real problems, and I would have really appreciated their support rather than their dismissals. Fortunately, for me, I learned how to solve my problems for myself.
I mentioned earlier that I grew up with a kind of wild bunch. All of them had real problems, but no one would listen to them, and all of them had very tragic endings. I’m the final survivor of that cohort, and one thing I’ve really dedicated myself to is trying to help as many kids as I can learn how to avoid those same fates. My peers and my coworkers don’t always agree with my methods, but they’ve been able to show really encouraging results. It’s funny that we’re talking about work now, because I’m starting a new role next week at a new facility. I’ve spoken with a psychologist there and he thinks I can really help a group of his patients who sound like they’ve had very similar experiences to ones I’ve had in the past, and I think I know how to help them.
GOLIKEHELLMACHINE 