MY LIFE AS AN ADOLESCENT COUNSELOR…

“You don’t get it Mom and you never will. I hate you, I fucking hate you!” Jenna* screams in my office. She kicks the garbage can, tissues and papers flying everywhere, and runs outside. Mom, exhales loudly releasing expletives of her own and starts after her. I reach Mom’s arm and gently say, “It’s ok, let her go. We made a deal. She needs a minute. She’ll be back. She needs to work this out.”

I told Jenna, the 16-year-old recovering heroin addict, before the family session with her Mom, that if she got too heated she could take a time-out but the deal is she has to come back in after she cools down. It’s a risk I take. One patient agreed with me and then left and kept walking.

Five minutes later she is at my office door looking like a 7-year-old little girl and asks to come back in. She sits down. Tears streaking her face. She looks, well she looks as tired as an old woman, and she is just a kid.

I know that look.

I know exactly how she feels.

It’s the one thing I have along with my degree that some of the other counselors don’t. I have walked in these kids shoes and am now on the other side. When I say, ‘I understand,’ I fucking do. Being a young recovering addict myself holds a lot of street cred in my line of work. As they say: you can’t con a con.

I look beyond the fact that everyone says: “She is ‘only 16-years-old she doesn’t know how she feels,’ and stare into the haunting eyes of a young woman who has lived more in her short time on this planet than most people do in their whole lives.

Eyes that are searching and tired. Begging for some kind of light and hope and giving up fast. I know if she can’t find other coping skills, she will return to heroin and end up as another statistic in this Opioid Epidemic.

This kid has been running her whole life.

It’s all she knows.

It keeps her ‘safe.’

And yet, she comes back.

She sits down.

Mom is quiet.

Jenna is breathing with tiny hiccups breaking the silence.

She is pissed but she is here. She kept her side of the deal.

I sit still, take my own deep breath and then….

the session begins.

*All names have been changed to protect anonymity.