Self Survival of a Counselor in a Correctional Therapeutic Community

I worked in a prison for 6 months as a counselor of inmates who were identified as having high need areas in violence and substance abuse. The program was a startup of a therapeutic community (TC) model that had historical roots as a successful mode of treatment for addiction. The success rate of the model had a lot to do with the philosophy of peer accountability and empowerment. It was, as one can imagine, a particularly tough assignment to create circumstances and define safety zones in which prison inmates would agree to submit themselves to the TC’s nonviolent, confrontational peer leadership style, which challenged them and held them accountable for their behaviors. One ingredient necessary for the effective development of the TC was the divestiture of some of the power to which counselors and staff in general in a correctional environment are apt to feel entitled. TC counselors, while maintaining adequate distance and power for the purpose of physical and institutional safety, must submit themselves to a high degree of accountability by members of the community, or risk never earning the trust of the clientele needed for therapeutic progress. The resulting challenges to counselors’ self organizing structures are often threatening to their sanity and vitality, leading to high burnout rates and employee retention problems for providers. Remedies for counselors’ job-related stress and psychological impingement are suggested in this examination of my personal experience, from a self-psychological point of view.

There were many energetic forces working within me during my prison counseling experience. There were times I felt variously excited, enthusiastic, hopeful, and compassionate. These “up” times were associated with feedback that I was being helpful to individuals, a sense of being a part of a noble and worthy community effort, praise from the program director, recognition by fellow workers when they indicated a desire for my opinions, a sense that the work was spiritually valuable, and self-discoveries about my own history during the process of aiding TC members’ in uncovering theirs. These were experiences that felt as though they enhanced my physical, mental, and spiritual energies. While the rest of this paper will focus on problems and negative encounters of counseling work in prison, I wish to assert that the overall experience of working with the inmate population weighed in on the rewarding side, and could engender the writing of a separate paper on the subject.

Prison counseling experiences that drained my vitality were associated with my feeling fatigue, self-doubt, emptiness, grief, and oppression. There were times when my counseling relationships with inmates in the TC challenged my self-organizing structures with respect to my self-regard as a counselor or as a caring human being. Sometimes, I felt grief for the unbearable suffering of some inmates who had made choices in their lives that darkened any hope of their recovery and release.  Another challenge to my self was unfavorable exchanges with fellow counselors; for example, I encountered one who had unconcealed distaste for some of my theoretical assumptions and practical techniques. Finally, there was the challenge of institutional values that could not be changed, and which imposed an every day presence of state-legitimized, instrumental violence against the inmate population, sanctions embedded in the system by the politically-informed agenda of retribution. I’ll now examine each of these potential energy drains using self-psychology language, and then suggest counselor self care which may offer alternatives to burnout and compassion fatigue.

I do not expect there to ever be a one-hundred percent success rate of therapy in prisons. There are those inmates who entered our program for the purpose of looking good to parole boards, or because they expect special treatment. These ulterior motives had to be gotten out of the way before there was therapeutic progress, and we were by no means perfect in the endeavor. There was a high rate of antisocial personality-related thinking and behaviors, as one would expect. Empathy can teach clever, antisocial inmates how to empathically approach and set up victims, when the therapists’ intention is providing self sustaining experiences. This is one good reason why empathic methods are favored less than cognitive-behavioral methods when treating offenders. My suggestions here about the application of self psychology principles are thus restricted to the self care of counselors and not intended to be generalized in application to therapy of offenders.

Physical fatigue

My fatigue during the job was probably an inextricable relationship between psychological and physiological causes. When fatigue can be explained psychologically, self psychologists refer to a depressive state that is due to deficiencies on both sides of the bipolar self. This was congruent with the knowledge of my own biography which was marked by periods of depression, and treatment for depression. I was in a relatively healthy state, having achieved through my own therapy a level of balance that had allowed me to accomplish a graduate degree and rapidly adapt to the leadership position in the TC. However, my history probably left me with vulnerabilities which, in the milieu of the unusually stressful environment, became activated.

I was required to make speeches and announcements to the community, and exhibit model behaviors. Archaic self needs were possibly activated in the role, social anxiety which at times I unconsciously defended with a somewhat  artificially energized presentation. This robbed available energy from my entire system, resulting in hours of bone-numbing tiredness, feelings of depression, and depressed immune system which probably contributed to my getting ill several times. Unconsciously, I sought sources of compensatory vitality to defend my vulnerabilities in both ideal and grandiose poles. The success I experienced as a public speaker and community leader were involved in filling the energy need. Indeed, the period following giving an impassioned motivational speech provided an exhilarating glow of energy, albeit brief. My lethargy also contributed to my love for coffee, a relatively benign but persistent addiction.

I have, through careful self-observation, succeeded in differentiating compensatory, or what some self psychologists call “false” vitality from “true” vitality within my self. Quite simply, the compensatory variety, in my case, tends to be brief, and always ends in a swing to an equal and opposite experience of lassitude. Perhaps others would experience their false vitality in the forms of thrill-seeking, drug highs, or social narcissism, and the swings to lethargy would involve idiosyncratic time frames.

But there were sometimes demands for energy from the highly invested and centralized activity needed to sustain the ambitious project of starting a TC in a prison. The needs of the community sometimes appeared to take precedence over my personal needs, even to the point of threatening physical, emotional, and mental health. The result was fragmentation of my self. When I experienced fragmentation, it included emotional flatness, feelings of weakness, self-doubt, social fear, heart palpitations, worry over whether I was doing the right thing, and lack of motivation. Grandiose selfobject need being met in startup of ambitious public project

Institutional threats to counselor self-organizing structures

Prisons that contain criminals are an attempt to contain violence through force, and as such require a level of vigilant awareness by everyone within their walls. Although I was never personally threatened or touched by inmates, the ever-presence of potential violence was driven home by the razor wire atop the fences and by the slam of the manlock doors behind me as I entered my workplace. The entire place was designed as a defense against the ambience of potential violence. The prison I worked in was a small, modern facility that was considered the showpiece of the state’s progressivism, so I imagine the atmosphere in other facilities must be oppressive to the extreme.

After entry, I would walk down the concrete steps onto the large courtyard amid catcalls and hoots from inmates who were not in our “rat” TC program. My office was an empty cell in the corner of the lower floor of the unit. The cell had a bare concrete floor and cement block walls. The system did not have the resources to provide for a telephone in the cell/office.

These were the daily facts of existence that were common to the counselors and the inmates alike. The objective difference between inmates and counselors was the fact that the counselors had the option of quitting, and always went home at night. The inclusion of a counseling office in the ground floor of the inmates’ quarters had the conscious purpose of diffusing defenses on both sides. This intention was guided by the TC imperative to approach the inmates with humility and firmness based on self integrity.

The impact on a counselor’s self due to environmental conditions, care provider policy, and institutional culture are easy to discount. After a few months of accommodation in the prison workplace, what many would describe as being extraordinary circumstances become relegated to peripheral awareness and unconsciousness. However, the circumstances do not in fact go away; they are self object experiences that can grind away vital energy and corrode self-regard to the point of exhaustion.

Inmate client challenges to Counselors’ self

I mentioned above one of the environmental factors in the prison TC was the intentioned placement of the counselors’ office in a cell alongside inmates. This was just one way the counselors in the TC were invited to immerse themselves in the life of the community. We were also expected to attend morning meetings and be held accountable to the community. The TC members regarded this as a gesture of trust and genuineness, and some community members went so far as to take protective and nurturing stances regarding staff. These alliances were used therapeutically, and for the benefit of developing leadership, structure, and cohesion within the community.

However, the cost of this diffusion of the counselors’ roles was that it risked identity and role confusion that may not arise in traditional counseling offices and hospital settings. The TC ideal is to train individuals to open themselves to scrutiny and helpful confrontation, and counselors are not exempt. The tension between the differentiation boundaries of the counselor on one side, and the authentic participation as a community member on the other were sometimes stressed to the breaking point, resulting in examples of therapeutic failures amongst the many successes. Some of the failures I observed in my case load had to do with either being fooled by the shows of compliance and apparent cooperation, or being caught up in my own defensiveness when inmates overtly attacked my efficacy as a counselor. In either case, in the light of self psychology, my own unmet self needs could be implicated.

People who are incarcerated naturally face grievous circumstances. Imprisonment is experienced as a global catastrophe that affects family, social relationships, sexual identity, and vocation. The men I sat with in sessions reported losses that were incalculably sad. For example, there was a man whose 7 year old son was left with a family who had a history of alcoholism, abandonment and neglect, but for whom the social services system in the state had no resources to place him. Another man thought he was going to be released in six months was hit with the news that he was being charged for the death of a drug user who may have overdosed on drugs supplied by him, and was facing life. Every one of the men had stories of loss and helplessness as they saw family and connection with the world drift away. The only greater conceivable loss would be death itself.

The daily grief took its toll. On one occasion, I overstepped my empathic boundaries and wept in the presence of a client. I realized later that his story had struck a chord in my own experience of family loss due to a divorce in my own life that had taken place several years before. Fortunately, I was able to come back from this and re-establish therapeutic rapport. Eventually, he was able to reach into his own feelings and express his own affect appropriately. Perhaps I had inadvertently supplied him with a model of emotional response that was effective for him; in any case he has since been released and as far as I know continues to remain drug and violence free.

The significance of that encounter in self psychology terms is that at the moment I injected a response in the intersubjective field, the relationship became unbalanced in favor of my own unmet mirroring needs. This would have been an ideal time in my own therapy to process that need so I could re-balance the counseling relationship in a conscious way; instead, the re-balancing happened fortuitously.

In another case whose outcome was less fortunate, I was fooled by a client who was good at gratifying my selfobject need for being recognized as an effective group facilitator. He presented a degree of motivation and workability that group leaders dream of. He was my ally in the group process, helping peers understand group process and encouraging others’ honesty and forthrightness in disclosures. It could be said he was mirroring my idealized client selfobject. He was so good at winning allies that I was not the only one he fooled; he succeeded in getting released early from the program by the Department of Corrections. He was returned within several weeks to another prison in the state that did not have therapeutic program resources because of his rapid return to drug seeking and criminal behaviors.

Failures may be inevitable in a population that is regarded as so hopeless that they have been removed from society for society’s protection. The question is, what interventions might be helpful in a counselor’s behalf that would increase the efficacy of the counselor, the counselor’s overall enjoyment of the rich rewards of the work, and at the same time increase the likelihood of successful return of inmates’ freedom?

Challenges of peers to a counselor’s self organizing structures

Conflict between counselors is probably as inevitable as therapeutic failures. In the TC, much of my personality and idiosyncratic laid exposed to scrutiny, much more than would be true in a traditional therapy office. Vulnerability to criticism was up; defenses were down; the potential for being hurt in transactions with workers was increased. Fortunately, the director of this particular TC was a natural genius at group process and effectively steered us through the most difficult periods.

My self concept contains the idea that I am noncompetitive, nonjudgmental, and allow lots of room for others’ philosophies and interpretations. My selfobject need is met when noncompetitive, nonjudgmental tolerance is mirrored and congruent with what I observe in co-workers. If I present behaviors I believe are in the interest of nonjudgment, I become threatened in the presence of one who I perceive as being competitive for power or influence. I was confronted by a co-worker on several occasions in the areas of theoretical bias as well as technique. My responses were what I thought were appropriate eye contact and polite acknowledgment, but because I was not ready to agree with her, and did not feel the need for her to agree with me, I did not put any energy into it, and maintained a neutral stance. In retrospect, this probably infuriated her, without my intention to do so. Her confrontation then culminated in roundly scolding me during a client therapy group, accusing me of  being “inappropriate”  and of “psychobabble” when I responded to a question about my intention behind an intervention I had just made.

This uncomfortable exchange between co-facilitators in that particular group was made into a positive in that it modeled conflict and even anger, and did not result in our abandoning the group members, or in violence. But even after processing the exchange in supervision later, it left me believing I was misunderstood and that my co-facilitator had made an unnecessary powerplay.

I believe the culture of regard between co-workers in therapeutic settings is widely ignored, under-studied and under-estimated. In a prison setting, where the selves of counselors are virtually under a state of siege, conscientious self care may be considered a prerequisite for authentic treatment. A system that fails to sustain the caregivers, and thus compromise effective treatment, is a system that fails ethically. This was echoed by the director of the TC, who said, “If one is in this line of work and is unwilling to seek their own therapy, they should probably get out of the business.”