A MESS = Treatment instead of punishment for Sophie
MASTERY
Sophie is particularly vulnerable to exploitation, given her low self-esteem and fears of abandonment. These so called friends that she will not abandon have used her for money, rides, and sex. And when the police showed up they abandoned her. If Sophie is going to take a fall for “friends” like this, what can be done?
An intervention designed to improve self-esteem and build healthier trustworthy relationships takes time. And as long as she is involved with this “bad crowd”, healthy growth will be limited.
Self-esteem is developed through gaining mastery or competence. Obsequious behavior is not a competency we want to promote any further. A plan for Sophie will need to identify areas of competence she can develop to feel better about herself and it will need to be done apart from her old after-school crowd.
Given these needs and Sophie’s stubborn loyalty to these kids, whatever plan folks devised for Sophie had to keep these bad influences at bay, while providing her with a setting and a set of relationships that promoted healthy growth and attachment.
Fortunately for Sophie, the Public Defender and Kristen were able to convince the State’s Attorney and the Judge to be creative with Sophie’s sentencing. In other words, they asked for a shift from a focus on punishment to one of treatment. Since Sophie would not give up the names, she was placed on twelve months probation and assigned five hundred hours of community service. In her case, community service was to be two-hours-a-day after school, five-days-a-week in the role of tutor for kids needing help with reading skills. Her driving privileges were withheld and gradually restored as she made progress with her community service commitment. Although the suspension of her license was a natural consequence for her offense, it also made her a less attractive target for exploitation and provided her with a legitimate excuse for saying, “No” until she could do it on her own. Her probation also included a strict curfew that limited her engagement with the old crowd at times she could be vulnerable. That too was subject to change as she made progress with her community service.
To accomplish this newly assigned role, Sophie needed to learn how to tutor. Specifically, she had to focus on some of the same things she needed to work on: mastery, engagement, and self-soothing. Working to master the skills of tutoring, and reading in particular, quickly became a goal she wanted for herself. She felt good about helping younger kids and she took pride in their progress. And in the process, her interest in reading took hold. Sophie was gaining mastery in tutoring, reading comprehension, vocabulary, and writing. She also became more organized and focused in her tutoring role. At the end of one semester, it was obvious that the role was having an effect on her self-esteem. She shifted from describing her after school activities from “doing (jail) time” to “tutoring”.
ENGAGEMENT
Sustained engagement is essential to achieving mastery. In this case, the engagement was “encouraged” via the court ordered community service. If she did not cooperate, that would violate her probation and she would be subject to punishment for the drug possession charges. This court ordered after school assignment also forced a (dis)engagement from the kids who used her and abandoned her.
Although the court order initiated the engagement, and assured it would be sustained, Sophie quickly chose to be engaged with her new responsible role. The (I can) x (I want) formula quickly took hold and she was motivated to continue, independent of the probation requirement. But those requirements came in handy when she was pressured by the old crowd to “just ditch” the tutoring thing.
Besides the mastery that came of this new role, Sophie also had access to a “new and improved” set of potential friends. Many of the other tutors were her age and they had sought out this helping role. In one fell swoop, she went from hanging out with kids who were aimless to a group that was quite purposeful in their choice of activities and roles. Or, as Sophie would put it, “I’m hanging with a better crowd these days”.
Instead of abandonment issues leading her to anxiously cling to unhealthy relationships, those urges were redirected to a desire to sustain her relationships with her students and the tutoring cadre that she was a part of every day. Over the course of the year, she developed friendships with others through their shared interests in tutoring, sense of humor, or mutual attraction – the way relationships should form.
SELF-SOOTHING
In the A MESS model, self-soothing is required to sustain necessary engagement en route to acquiring mastery. Self-soothing was not a strength of Sophie’s and when threatened with loss or abandonment, she had no ability to soothe herself. Doing whatever it took to stay connected was her source of soothing. Accommodating others’ demands was hardly self-soothing or a road to mastery.
The court intervention was structured to limit her connection to these unhealthy “friends” who used her and got her in trouble. Without this structure or limits, Sophie would remain vulnerable to the urge to hold on to these old relationships, regardless of how unhealthy they were. In essence, the court provided a safe set of boundaries to give her a chance to develop healthier relationships and sources of self-esteem.
A basic assumption was made that the more attached she became to the people involved in tutoring, the less she would feel lonely, desperate, and vulnerable to exploitation. Rather than expecting Sophie to “soothe” emotions that were powerful and overwhelming, the structure of the intervention prevented her from acting on those urges as she found healthier relationships, which provided the “soothing” she needed. In this context, feeling good about her tutoring and getting closer to her tutoring peers provided the seeds for learning to self-soothe.
This intervention was not going to “cure” Sophie of her abandonment issues. That issue will continue to affect her for much of her life. However, that does not mean that she is doomed to a life of unhealthy, abusive relationships. With a healthier self-esteem and a healthier set of friends, her trajectory could be quite different than the one she was on when the policeman pulled her over.
The court intervention was designed to target relationships and self-esteem. As she gains skill as a tutor, she will have something to be proud of and she will be valued and admired by her students. She will have a common purposeful activity that she shares with her peers. This setting will also allow her the possibility of relationships forming around healthy shared interests, as well as others’ genuine interest in her.
When Sophie felt lonely and desperate, self-soothing was not a skill she could draw upon. She desperately clung to relationships to avoid those feelings. In this new role and setting, she has healthier opportunities for relating that won’t pose the same Self vs. Relatedness Bind, where she sacrificed her self to stay connected. She can make progress with self-soothing, but it will require a greater sense of security in her relationships first. As she makes gains in her self-esteem, she will also assert her needs within those relationships, which will make them more satisfying. The road from drug bust to grade school teacher would be a happy ending. Who knows? But before the police stop, Sophie was on the wrong road heading in the wrong direction.