Teens Who Hurt: Clinical Interventions to Break the Cycle of Adolescent Violence

Teens Who Hurt: Clinical Interventions to Break the Cycle of Adolescent Violence

Hardy, Kenneth V.; Laszloffy, Tracey A.

Hardy, K. V., & Laszloffy, T. A. (2013).  Teens Who Hurt. Guilford Publications, Inc..  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781462512423

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Chapter 3 Disruption of Community

The dark circles under Carmen’s eyes reflected her recent ordeal. She had passed out in the elevator of her dormitory, the result of massive consumption of alcohol mixed with prescription drugs. She was rushed to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. Several days later, she sat in our office looking frail and forlorn.

“I don’t think I was trying to kill myself, but I think it would be better if I had died.”

Carmen’s sense of hopelessness and despair filled the small therapy room. By most measures, her life was full of potential and hope. She possessed intelligence, beauty, charm, and came from a loving and secure family. It was hard to understand why a girl who had so much to live for would feel better off if she were dead.

Carmen’s physical beauty was captivating. Even in spite of the trauma she had recently endured, her smooth brown skin, sculpted cheekbones, and chocolate brown eyes were striking. But there was more to Carmen than her radiant physical beauty. She was gentle, authentic, and a bright student with a near perfect academic record. She had a loving family who adored her. Both her parents and her older sister seemed devastated by Carmen’s overdose. They had vowed to do whatever they could to support Carmen and help her recover.

Despite the many positive things that Carmen had in her favor, she was plagued by an inner pain that was driving her to self-destruction. We needed to peel back the layers and see the suffering that hid just beyond the pretty picture that the outside world saw. Once we did this, we discovered that Carmen was haunted by a profound disruption to her sense of community.

DEFINING COMMUNITY

Our work with violent adolescents has helped us to appreciate how the disruption of community is a key aggravating factor underpinning adolescent violence. Before describing the impact of the disruption of community on teens, we think it’s important to spend some time clarifying what we mean when we use the term “community.”

Defining the concept of community is difficult because everyone has an idea of what the term means, yet a clear, concrete definition remains somewhat elusive. Whenever we ask people to share with us their image of what community is, the responses we get are often general and vague. Typical responses include “a group of people united by a common interest,” “a group of people who live in a specific area,” “a group of people who share a common racial, ethnic, or religious identity and are bonded together on this basis,” and “a physical place, like a community center, where people can come together and just hang out.” These definitions touch upon important aspects of what community is, and yet they fail to reflect the emotional, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of community. These definitions do not represent the part of community that involves feelings—feelings of belonging, rootedness, identity, connection, safety, security, familiarity, caring, and hope.

Through our work with violent adolescents, we have developed a view of community that emphasizes both its physical, tangible dimensions and its emotional, psychological, and spiritual ones. In short, we believe community is a “place” where adolescents feel a sense of belonging and connection with others in a special way. It’s a place where they learn about who they are. It’s where they begin to develop a sense of identity and a vision of how they “fit” in the world around them. Community is a place where adolescents can find answers to life’s many difficult and complicated questions. It is a place where adolescents find comfort when they are overcome with despair, a place where they feel accepted. It is a community that provides adolescents with a sense of safety, security, and meaningful relatedness with others. It is “in community” that teens derive the comfort and familiarity that comes from being surrounded and protected by others who care about them. Community provides a buffer against the trials and tribulations of life. It can foster tremendous resiliency in the face of enormous adversity. It nurtures pro-social development by acting as an incubator for the cultivation of qualities such as compassion, caring, cooperation, collaboration, and conscience. Community is “home.”

When teens have a strong sense of community, it serves as a buffer against devaluation. Conversely, where there is an absence or a disruption in community, adolescents are more vulnerable to the trauma of devaluation. In fact, the disruption or erosion of community in the lives of young people can, in and of itself, constitute a form of devaluation.

DISRUPTION OF COMMUNITY

Among adolescents who become violent, the disruption of community is almost always evident. To the extent that community is a synonym for home, violent teens suffer from a chronic state of “psychological homelessness” (Hardy, 1997). Their existence is ravaged by an existential alienation that cuts deep into the core of their being, wounding every dimension of their person. The disruption of community in the lives of adolescents robs them of the security, connectedness, acceptance, and identity that they desperately need. When their sense of community is disrupted, something basic to their humanity is deeply wounded.

With the disruption of community, many of the positive qualities that community nurtures are disrupted as well, such as a sense of compassion and caring for others. It is through community that people learn how to care for others, how to cooperate and collaborate, and how to negotiate the complications that accompany being connected to others in a meaningful way. When teens suffer from a disruption of community, their acquisition of these important relational skills is assaulted. Is it any wonder then that so many adolescents struggle with forming caring attachments? Is it a surprise that some of them seem to lack altogether a sense of conscience? After all, when a person suffers from an absence of community, he or she also suffers from an absence of conscience. The two go hand in hand. In the case of Timothy Ryan, for example, the disruptions in his sense of community created corresponding cracks in his capacity to relate empathetically to others. Because he felt as if he had been abandoned and betrayed within his family, he experienced the world as a rejecting place. He did not perceive others as recognizing or responding in caring ways to his feelings and needs. As a result, he not only became narcissistically consumed with his own needs, but he also did not learn how to recognize and respond with caring or compassion to others’ feelings or needs. Had he had a more secure sense of community growing up, he would have felt the comfort of his parents nurturing him. Because that was not his reality, his capacity for empathy was not cultivated, leading to the type of absence of conscience that enabled him to look into the eyes of his victims and beat them mercilessly. It was the absence of conscience that made it possible for him to feel the breath of the girl on his face, and feel her heartbeat pressed against his body, to hear her cries echoing in his ear while he raped her remorselessly. It was the absence of conscience that made all of this possible. To be alienated from community is to be alienated from one’s humanity, and when this occurs, the potential for violence increases dramatically.

Adolescents who suffer from disruptions of their sense of community also experience the most deadly consequence of all—a loss of hope. It is through community that a sense of hope is created. Community provides adolescents with a sense of their past as well as a vision for their future. James Garbarino (1999) talks about the “lack of a future orientation,” which is common among violent teens. We believe that chronic massive disruptions in one’s sense of community assault one’s capacity to have a future orientation. Those who don’t feel connected to others lack a sense of rootedness and, hence, a feeling of relatedness to their historical ties. Without this, they also lack a meaningful identification with a future. A future orientation requires a connection to one’s past, which feeds a vision for one’s future. Our roots—both the bitter and the sweet ones—give birth to our dreams, and ultimately ignite a sense of purpose. They inspire us to have something for which to strive, hope, and aspire. All of these “essentials to our being” are provided and nurtured in community. Adolescents who have suffered profound disruptions to their sense of community suffer from a deprivation of hope and vision regarding their future.

LEVELS OF COMMUNITY

There are three levels of community that adolescents participate in that are vital to their growth and development. We have noted, among adolescents who become violent, that they suffer from the disruption of community on at least two, and usually all three, levels. It seems to be this cumulative impact of disruption at more than one level that puts teens most at risk for violence.

At the first level are primary communities, which refer to families, however one defines family. We realize that calling a family a community defies popular notions of the term “community.” Few people think of families when they use the term community, and yet all of the properties that are typically associated with community apply to families. For example, families are groups of people who are united in a special way and who share a common interest. It is in families that individuals experience their first sense of belonging to something that is greater than themselves. It is in families where people get their first sense of rootedness and connection. This is where one’s initial identity is established. Families—at least when they are healthy—are places that individuals can turn to find comfort, acceptance, and a feeling of “home.” So, while it may be unconventional, we believe that families are the first community, the “primary community.”

Just beyond the level of primary communities are extended communities, which include neighborhoods, schools, churches, synagogues, temples, civic groups, community centers, and so forth. Extended communities most closely approximate conventional views of what community represents. Hence, it is fairly easy to relate to this level of community. Within extended communities people experience a sense of themselves as connected to a clearly defined group that exists beyond their families. Such groups exist at the local level, in the sense that the borders of the community are clearly identifiable. The other distinguishing characteristic of extended communities is that they are usually connected to physical locations (e.g., schools, houses of worship, community centers).

The third level consists of cultural communities. This refers to the communities that adolescents have membership in on the basis of their race, ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, and religion. Like extended communities, cultural communities also extend an individual’s identity beyond his or her family. However, unlike the situation with extended communities, cultural communities have intangible borders. It is within the cultural community that boys and girls, for example, learn what it means, at least according to society, to be a “boy” or “girl.” Obviously, some of this socialization occurs within primary and extended communities, but it has been our experience that the larger portion of this get refined within the cultural community. We don’t wish to imply here that the dynamics of the cultural community are limited to gender socialization. The scope and impact of the cultural community are broad. It is through this level of community, for example, that we, as human beings, get acutely acquainted with ourselves through the prisms of class, race, ethnicity, and so forth.

FORCES THAT DISRUPT COMMUNITY

There are many different forces that can disrupt community at all levels. Some of these influences are discussed below for each level of community.

Disruption of Primary Communities

The basic building block of a sense of community at the primary level consists of parent–child relationships. There are several ways in which parent–child relationships are disrupted.

Abuse

Parental abuse of children and adolescents profoundly disrupts the parent–child bond. One of the serious dangers of abuse is that it teaches young people directly that violence is acceptable. Abusive parents convey the message that it is okay to use force, domination, and aggression to solve problems, to control others, and to express feelings like anger and frustration. While not all abused children and adolescents are doomed to become abusers themselves, or to utilize tactics of aggression to handle everyday living, the risk of these tendencies is higher among those who are victims of violence and aggression.

In some perverse way, many children and adolescents “prefer” abuse to neglect because at least, with abuse, there is a form of acknowledgment that they exist. This was personified for us by a boy who told us, “I know he hits me [referring to his father], but he don’t really mean any harm . . . It’s just who he is, and I know he hits me ’cause he cares.” While the abuse was obviously painful and destructive, at least it was a form of acknowledgment to this boy that his father noticed him. With neglect, no such acknowledgment exists. Such parents wound their children by denying them altogether.

Of course, the “acknowledgment” that comes with abuse is dysfunctional. It’s more akin to how a person might recognize a chair rather than recognizing another human being. It’s possible to see and recognize a chair, to even devote some energy toward interacting with it (i.e., sitting in it), but there is nothing inherent in the interaction that acknowledges that the chair has feelings, rights, or needs. The chair is simply an object, a thing that is there to serve. So, while abusive parents provide some cursory acknowledgment of their children’s existence, the acknowledgment occurs through aggression and trauma, which translates into a deeper level of emotional and psychological neglect and abandonment.

Neglect

Neglect consists of ignoring children and adolescents and, therefore, failing to provide them with essential physical, emotional, and/or psychological sustenance. This can occur overtly, as with parents who physically abandon and thus neglect their kids in every way possible. It also can occur covertly, as in the case of parents who remain physically present but still neglect their children’s emotional, psychological, and physical needs to varying degrees. When parents neglect their kids, they are in effect denying their children’s very existence. As one severely neglected 12-year-old client told us during a therapy session, “My mom doesn’t notice me at all. I could be dead and she wouldn’t notice.” When kids experience this level of rejection, not only do they suffer from a disruption of their primary-level community, but they also suffer from devaluation. Another example of neglect was depicted in the movie Harold and Maude. The film portrays a young boy who is virtually ignored by his mother. In his desperation to get his mother to notice him, he goes to absurd lengths, including an attempt to hang himself in her presence. Because his mother is incapable of acknowledging her son’s existence, even this extreme act fails to capture her attention. Even in the face of his obvious attempt at asphyxiation, she speaks to him about something irrelevant and superficial. Clearly, his mother does not actually see him. The casual, nonaffected comment she utters is grossly inappropriate in light of Harold’s behavior. The message within the message is “You, Harold, are totally invisible to me. I don’t see you at all. You don’t exist in my world.” Harold is a classic child of neglect, and it requires little effort to see the ways in which this neglect is highly devaluing.

The topic of neglect is complicated because the neglect can be manifested in different ways and to varying degrees. The reality is that a large majority of parents have direct contact with their children, either in terms of living in the same household or speaking with and having their children visit with them on a regular basis. Most parents have a physical presence in their kids’ lives. Similarly, most parents also attend to their child’s basic physical needs. Yet, there are more subtle forms of neglect that can have damaging consequences for young people, such as emotional neglect. Fathers in particular are prone to being emotionally neglectful. For example, parents who work extended hours may provide for their kids, but by virtue of their demanding work schedules, fail to be emotionally available. This may have been a dynamic that affected both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. While both boys lived within “intact” two-parent family households where their parents were attentive to their physical needs, they may have been emotionally neglected. The fact that there seemed to be little parental awareness of the warning signs (e.g., extended isolated hours spent in their basements constructing bombs, the rage and alienation they experienced at school) that both boys emitted prior to their killing spree suggests a lack of meaningful connection between them and their parents.

It also is common for loving, devoted parents to inadvertently hurt their kids by failing to recognize and encourage their strengths, by failing to display affection, or by making comments or statements that, while intended to be corrective and helpful, have the consequence of disturbing or disrupting their fragile sense of self-esteem. For example, we recently had a parent in therapy who told her 13-year-old daughter, “I’d better not find you snacking on those cookies. Your weight is getting totally out of control.” While the comment was motivated by concern for the daughter, it had a devastating impact on the girl’s already low sense of self-regard.

Despite the fact that we live in a increasingly diverse society, most people still think of a “normal family” as “the 1950s image of a white, affluent, nuclear family headed by a breadwinner/father and supported by a full-time homemaker/mother” (Walsh, 1998, p. 15). Therefore, when we see families that match this image, we tend to assume that these families are “normal” and “healthy.” We give these families the benefit of the doubt. Rarely if ever do we look beneath the surface to see what’s really happening on the inside of the family. For the most part, we are deceived by the structure of the family, and fail to consider the emotional quality of the family relationships. As a result, it is sometimes hard to recognize how these families might be failing to provide children and adolescents with a strong, stable primary community. This became clear for us when we were presenting a workshop on violent adolescents to a group of therapists. In the middle of our presentation we were interrupted by a woman from the audience who was visibly irritated with our ideas. She said to us:

“I’m having a hard time with what you’re saying. I don’t think that all kids who become problem kids are suffering from a disruption of community. I work in a school, and I’m thinking of the family of a boy in our school. He’s a troubled boy, to say the least, but there isn’t really any good reason for it. He has community all around him. Our school is one of the best in the county. And he comes from a good family. He’s got his mother and father and his grandparents living with him. He is surrounded by people who are committed to raising him well. But in spite of all that he acts up all the time. I think it’s just who he is. Sometimes, kids are just trouble. That’s it.”

As we continued to seek more information from this woman, she eventually disclosed that she thought this little boy probably had a hearing disability, but she could not find out for sure because his parents would not authorize hearing tests. She explained that the father was a “fire-and-brimstone” preacher who did not believe in interfering with God’s plan. If his son had difficulty in hearing, so be it. The boy’s mother had been treated for depression, which was so severe that on one occasion she had to be hospitalized when this boy was only 4 years old. We cite this example because it illustrates nicely how our biases about what a “good” family looks like can sometimes make it hard to see when a family is failing to provide a stable community for a child. As was the case with this little boy, while his parents were physically present, they seemed to be completely absent emotionally, which no doubt disrupted his sense of primary community.

Sometimes the disruption of primary community can be subtle and hard to detect outright. There is ample evidence to suggest, for example, that Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) was a man who suffered from severe disruption of community beginning at infancy; however, some of the disruptions were not readily obvious at first glance. To begin with, after only a few weeks of life, little Ted became ill and was hospitalized for several months. In accordance with standard hospital protocol during the 1950s, he was placed in an isolation unit, where he was deprived of all contact with his family. This severely undermined the development of a stable sense of community at the primary level. In fact, the only human contact Ted had during his months of hospitalization was via the sterile and perfunctory tasks that were administered by nurses who changed his diapers, fed him, and performed various medical procedures. The months during his illness and hospitalization disrupted Ted’s primary community during a critical period of his development. Extensive bonding and attachment studies have since demonstrated how vital it is to have consistent physical and emotional nurturance from a primary caretaker during the early stages of life. These early experiences provide the template upon which all future connections and relationships are based. Infants who are deprived of consistent, loving contact with a primary caretaker fail to develop the secure attachments that are a prerequisite for healthy relationship formation and development in later life.

In Ted’s case, it seemed that the early disruption of his primary community had taken its toll. His mother reported that the child she had known prior to the illness was vastly different from the child who returned home after many months in the hospital. A once happy and smiley baby had become distant, introverted, and withdrawn. There was a newfound distance and disconnection between mother and son that had not existed prior to Ted’s illness and subsequent hospitalization. Moreover, the strains that now existed between Ted and his family never really improved with time. It seemed that Ted had suffered tragic effects of the disruption of his primary community in infancy, which may have disrupted bonding and attachment during a critical period of development, thereby contributing to future patterns of isolation and disconnection.

Throughout childhood, Ted’s intellect was indisputable, as was his lack of social engagement. Having few friends, he spent most of his time alone reading scientific magazines, studying math, and exploring the outdoors. When there is an absence of community early in life, one is deprived of critical opportunities to acquire and refine basic life skills, which then becomes a detriment to the establishment and maintenance of community later in life. In Ted’s case, as an undergraduate at Harvard his patterns toward social isolation persisted. Stemming from the absence of community during his earlier years, he had failed to develop basic life skills, including how to connect and relate to others socially. Hence, he had few, if any, friends and was regarded by his peers as a loner. Despite his obvious intellectual brilliance he remained socially awkward and disconnected throughout his life, which was exemplified by his frequent retreats to his wilderness cabin in Montana. Ted lived a quiet, rugged, back-to-the-basics existence for months at a time, completely isolated from other human beings.

Although Ted Kaczynski’s 18-year-long spree of violence did not begin during his adolescence, his life provides an excellent illustration of the relationship that often exists between the disruption of community (for even its absence) and violence. Ted’s capacity to commit cold, calculated acts of violence against his fellow human beings was inevitably facilitated by his general alienation from and lack of meaningful connections with others. In light of the socioemotional vacuum that Ted lived in, it requires minimal effort to see how he was able to hurt other living beings with so little regard for the suffering he caused.

Separation/Divorce

Parental separation and divorce are other common ways in which children experience the disruption of their primary community. Depending upon how parents handle their separation or divorce, the experience can contribute greatly to the children’s feeling neglected, abandoned, and/or abused. The fact that 75% of children rarely see the noncustodial parent after their parents’ divorce equates to neglect and abandonment in the minds of many children. Moreover, when couples undergo bitter, vicious divorces, children often are caught in the crossfire between warring parties, which is abusive. Their unfortunate position in the middle of their parents’ hostility means that children hear one or both parents say ugly things about the other. Some parents also use their children as pawns and bargaining chips in their battles. When this occurs, it is devastating to children because it reduces them to objects and neglects their needs.

Death

Finally, the death of a parent is another way in which community at the primary level can be disrupted. Following the death of a parent, children and adolescents often feel abandoned. Except in the case of suicide, parents who die do not intentionally leave their children. But for those kids who no longer have their parents around to nurture and guide them, they often feel as if they have been abandoned.

It was during our third session with Carmen that we learned the story of her childhood and how she had lost both of her birth parents in a brutal attack. Carmen was born to José and Maya Santiago, a young couple who lived in a small village in Peru. When Carmen was 6 years old, her parents were killed by guerrillas of the Shining Path. “I don’t remember my parents dying. I just remember being in an orphanage and crying for my mother. I remember feeling so lonely.” The death of Carmen’s parents disrupted her primary community beyond repair. While her parents were not responsible for their death, to 6-year-old Carmen, their loss was experienced as abandonment. According to Carmen, the next year that she spent living in an orphanage “was the loneliest, most empty year of my life. I felt abandoned in a cold, ugly world without anyone to love and comfort me.”

Disruption of Extended Communities

Extended communities can be disrupted by external factors, such as harsh economic conditions, or by internal factors that undermine the solidarity and direction of a group. Many urban schools, for example, are disrupted by a lack of access to economic resources, which undermines their capacity to create nurturing, healthy, progressive environments for students (Kozol, 1991). In other cases, an organization like a church or community center might experience a disruption of community rooted in destructive internal politics that leads to struggles for power and sabotages a strong sense of cohesiveness, positive spirit, and community among the congregation or staff.

When the guerrillas of the Shining Path attacked the village that Carmen had been born and raised in, not only was her primary community brutally destroyed, but also her extended one as well. When she was placed within the orphanage that was miles from her village, she mourned for her parents and for the many people who had loved and cared for her. She was robbed of the hugs she used to look forward to from the women who sat with her mother. She was robbed of the laughter she enjoyed during the large communal celebrations. She was robbed of a sense of connection to a collective who was not her family but whom she loved and relied upon nonetheless.

Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes, are another way in which extended communities can be disrupted. When hurricane Andrew hit south Florida in 1991, it wiped out entire neighborhoods. Nature’s wrath did not distinguish between the mansions inhabited by the wealthy and the trailers that were home to the poor. The force of nature leveled extended communities, irrespective of socioeconomic standing, and left everyone with the painful task of having to rebuild from the rumble.

Outcast Status as Disruption of Community at the Extended Level

The previous examples have all considered how entire extended communities can be disrupted, which clearly has a damaging effect upon adolescents who have membership in these communities. It also is possible for a teen to experience a much more personal sense of disruption of community at the extended level. Before Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold waged their brutal atta

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