The Tree of Thanks

The Tree of Thanks

My daughter came home for the Thanksgiving holiday, and we had some very interesting family times together.

Specifically, we talked about family and times, in short bursts and in extended sessions.

I have no clue about what prompted this, but part of it came from my reflections about a little boy who is currently ‘in treatment’ at my place of work.

I don’t usually discuss people at the hospital with family or friends…it seems like a violation of one kind or another. But this little boy had kind of hit me where I live, and I wanted to share this with someone that I knew would consider this from a loving perspective, rather than discount the story as more eccentric blitherings from the strange mind of  Minerva Jones.

The little boy in question is a child who ended up in a group home following a time of chaos in his family…his parents were getting divorced, and he was caught in the crossfires of their battle. He became angry, and began to ‘act out’. His acting out took the form of writing long stories with violent themes. When he went to the group home, this behavior did not stop. In fact, after some time in there, he started writing stories about the group home. He was sent to the psychiatric hospital after a staff member found a seven page story about his ‘plan’ to kill his ‘enemies’ at the group home by turning on the gas stove and letting the residence fill with gas. At the end of the story that he wrote, everyone perished in the resulting explosion.

People are taking this sort of ‘early warning’ very seriously these days. When this boy arrived on our doorstep, the lessons from the Colombine school shooting came to the fore. Staff speculated about this boy’s "sociopathy".

The Demon Seed 

The boy seemed like a regular kid, but unusually intelligent. He is extraordinarily creative. He developed a daily newspaper on the ward, and he started a ‘lottery’ …..putting a winning symbol on a piece of paper in pencil, then colouring over it with a crayon…he’d pass these out to the other kids, and they would scratch off the crayon, revealing a ‘winner’. There were no prizes involved. Kids liked the idea of being ‘winners’, and he’d post the results on his bedroom door, with the daily ‘winner’ acknowledged. He made a ‘Jeopardy’ type game. When I saw this, I asked for" Animals…for $300.00".

 The question? What animal has eyes bigger than it’s brain?  Answer : See below.

I started to tell my daughter about this kid, because he had done a funny and interesting thing. The Rec Therapist had made a construction paper tree for the unit, entitled, ‘The Tree of Thanks’. The therapeutic task put to the children was to cut leaves from various coloured paper, and then write something they were thankful for on each leaf. I saw the finished product when I came to work in the evening.

These kids were thankful for so many things…their moms, pets, grandparents,  and toys. One kid was even thankful for me, which was nice. But buried in the leaves of this ‘Tree of Thanks’, was a kid who was thankful for "[his] evilness". Jagged writing in purple crayon, on a peaceful green background.

I had to laugh….."What a little beauty!" I thought.

I knew this had to be the work of my creative/’sociopathic’ boy. So many people were telling him that he was having "bad thoughts". In fact, earlier in the week, during a treatment meeting, one of the social workers had gone on  and on about "His attempt to blow up his group home" after I recommended that we test this boy’s IQ. I had to remind the social worker that the boy had not "tried to kill" anyone….he had only written about it. He did not fight with his peers physically, but he did occasionally have disputes. For the most part, he adapted to his environment, and dealt with his episodic anger through written expression. For example, he became angry at a certain staff member when she wouldn’t allow him to use the phone to call his mother. He wrote on the floor of his room "Mrs S is a mean bitch".

This seemed like a natural response to powerlessness, to my way of thinking.

And he was congenial with his peers. and had moments of generousity and compassion with them.

I told my daughter about this boy, in the same general terms as I have here…no names, no identifying details. No loss of confidentiality, no betrayal. But I wanted to tell someone how glad I was , after all the trials of this young boys life, after the break up of his family, and the involuntary commitments, that he was still able to retain a sense of himself, and the integrity to be thankful for the "evilness" that allowed him to explore and display his anger without causing harm to anyone else.

I’m hoping one day we’ll all catch up to this kid.

 PS: Answer to Sociopathic Kid Jeopardy question? Ostrich. My first instinctive response was "people", but then I remembered that, generally, our brains are bigger than our eyes. This may not be a good thing.