Believing in People
I believe in the power of children.
As a psychotherapist for children in a small rural county I have watched, for ten years, children overcome some of the worst types of abuse and neglect one can imagine. I have watched children carry Sesame Street–character lunchboxes into my tiny office, sit in a chair twice the size of their tiny bodies, and tell me how they are surviving while their daddies cook meth in the bathtub to make money so they can have electricity the next month. I have sat with teenagers of alcoholic parents as they try to figure out a way to help their parents get better. I have visited homes where the walls appear to move as cockroaches take over the house of a five-year-old boy.
Children can and do survive. Recently, a young woman I had treated in the beginning of my career saw me in a local grocery store. She was an angry, aggressive sixteen-year-old when I first met her. She’d been sexually molested, beaten, abandoned, and placed into foster care before I knew her. She’d seen scores of mental health professionals and had no use for the lot of us. She had scowled at me, called me names, and told me I had no business talking to her. And she’d been right. I was young, inexperienced, and knew nothing that would take away the grief she knew. So, when I saw her ten years later, my stomach lurched with regrets about all of the things I knew then that I couldn’t give her when we first met.
I wanted to disappear, to get lost in a shelf full of potato chips. But she came straight to me and shoved a clean, soft hand my way, and a smile spread across her wide lips.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?” It was all I could say, as I knew I had done nothing for this girl-woman.
“For believing in me.”
And she was right, I had believed more in her than I had in myself.
She went on to tell me about how much this belief had bothered her, haunted her, angered her, and healed her. And how she couldn’t get away from it. She had finished high school, late she told me, but she’d finished. She was working part-time and taking classes to become a massage therapist. She had one child. And this was what she said she felt I’d helped her with the most: believing in this child, her child, as her parents had not believed in her.
I believe that believing in a person can help them believe in themselves. I believe we must, must keep believing even when we want to stop, to turn away in disgust and despair. Because, even when we think there is no hope for a child, they might show up next to the Pop-Tarts in a local store and remind you of their power.
At the time this essay was written, Rebecca Klott was working in a community mental health setting. Since that time, she has returned to school and is working on her doctoral degree. Ms. Klott lives with her husband and daughter in Michigan.