I've had a bit of a realization as I have tried to write these blogs: I am not a particularly good writer. There are so many things I really ought to write about, but when I start trying to put them on paper, they sound trivial or boring. The good news, though, is that I looked at the "stats" on this blog, and found that not many people are reading it ... so at least I'm not worried about lots of people thinking I'm boring, just some. But whatever.
Shortly after I came to Albany, I had 5 days of Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) training. I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of what was going on throughout the training, and when I started working with the kids, I felt like I was pretty effectively utilizing it. It's interesting how perspective changes over time, though. There was a minor incident with a frequently problematic student tonight. I was running a Spades tournament for the evening activity and he was losing at his table. He was dealt a very poor hand and, in an attempt to force a re-deal, dropped a card under the table and tried to claim he hadn't been dealt the proper number. Well, a staff member saw the whole thing and called him out on it, which set him off. "He's cheating! He misdealt and now he's trying to blame it on me! I picked that card up off the floor! I'm not cheating! It should be a re-deal!" etc. I was working on de-escalating the situation (an effort the other staff sadly made no effort to aid) even as the other kids in the room were working as hard as they could to escalate it. The student who was caught cheating frequently gets in fights, and they seemed to think it would be sporting to edge him into violence tonight. Well, with great difficulty I got him to go outside with me to remove him from the situation, and he calmed down a little bit. But then he decided he should go back inside. And then he quit the game. But then he wanted back in the game. And then he was back to arguing about whether or not he had cheated. In the end, I managed to bring him down far enough toward his baseline behavior that I was able to get him to leave and go back to his division (where the students live).
Ideally, I would have been able to get him and his peers to a place where he could stay and finish the game, but I'm just not there yet. I think I handled the situation alright, but I also realize how overconfident I was 2 months ago, and how overconfident I probably still am. There are a lot of times when I find that I can't de-escalate a situation, or worse, that I am sometimes the cause of the situation, and I'm still growing in my ability to deal with these kids very fragile emotional states. It is so easy to bounce some of these boys from baseline to near-crisis, but so impossible to bring them back down. There are nights, especially when we play 5 on 5 basketball, that I have to step away from the situation for a couple minutes to calm myself down before I can even dream of being effective at helping them. The TCI process always starts with "What am I feeling right now?" because if we as child care workers enter into a situation with anything other than the welfare of the student in the forefront of our mind, we are almost guaranteed to fail. The most common mistake I've seen anybody make (and I don't excuse myself from the list of culprits) is failing to ask this question before engaging with a student, and the outcome can be grim if the staff fails to deal with him/her-self before dealing with a boy whose emotional coping capabilities are nearly nonexistent.
