Therapist Reacts to Adolescence, Episode 3

do you work here um I'm a visitor right so right there in the elevator she's a woman there's a man in the elevator they don't know each other they walk in door closes she's in a confined space and he asks her "Do you work here?" Uh she's obviously allowed to be there she has a badge so it's not like um he's trying to protect this space from a potential intruder it's framed as "Oh do you work here?" uh male interest and it could be utterly innocuous on the other hand what's it like for her statistically most likely um being on the receiving end of many many inquiries and bids uh from men what's that like for her does she really want it does she you know in the construction of the moment she's compelled unless she's going to be very rude to respond in a civil and polite way maybe she doesn't feel particularly friendly or civil or polite in that moment but she's you know got to respond to the implicit demand for a response in that seemingly innocuous question do you work here um this is an illustration to me of some of the many themes that we're working with in this show including she's in a confined space with someone who's a lot bigger than she is what's that like and the ways in which seemingly small innocuous elements in the culture medium um that we live in affect us and we carry them with us and we have to take them into account i suspect that the man there did not he thought he was being friendly he thought it was flattering in a way to show some kind of interest oh do you work here maybe we'll have coffee sometime soon perhaps he thinks it's like that and yet how it lands on her whatever his intent is impact is often separate from intent the impact on her you know was not particularly wanted then she you know shrugs it off and and moves on there's no tomatoes there's no salad it's just cheese and pickle do you want it i'll save it for later no no i love it i I don't know about pickle though but I love it she is coming in not as someone who's meeting him for the first time of course but as part of an ongoing assessment which is her defined role here she's assessing him i've done a lot of um psychological assessments never in a forensic setting though which is what this is a legal setting i can't tell yet if he's been convicted and this is now uh he's been sentenced and he's in some kind of locked juvenile facility uh which there are guards who run around if need be i can't quite tell maybe she's assessing him for purposes of sentencing uh and even you know relevant to establishing whether he's guilty or not don't know uh in a situation like this as a professional you often have dual loyalties that you have to juggle you have a kind of ethical duty to the person and that's a particularly strong ethical duty if the person you're interacting with is a minor a child in effect a young teenager in this case you also have a duty to your system you're hired to make determinations that uh may have consequences that this person you have duties to will not like how do you juggle and balance that uh this is a very complex role here and and we're seeing her already coming in as as a strong person who can stand up including stand up to the the male um corrections officer there who's not not being initially that helpful and definitely not uh treating her probably with the respect I suspect he might to potentially a male psychologist coming in so we'll see let's see how this unfolds jamie here initially seems friendly even almost a little flirty with her uh in terms of a few facial expressions so we'll see he's aware of the fact that she's female and attractive woman and he's a a young a young man probably maybe now edging into 14 if it makes you happy that I am Jamie then your granddad you call him grandpa i do not i bet you don't i call him pop what do you One thing that therapists do often skillfully is be aware of the inherent power dynamic which is extremely accentuated in the setting due to both age she's the adult he's the child and the setting you know she works for and with the people that have locked him up and she has a lot of power over him and skillful therapists are often aware of that and they'll do things that are authentic uh and skillful to go one down to help level the field to encourage a healthy process in the service of whatever their goals are here so I'm listening to her you know reveal with self-disclosure which is a vulnerable thing to do in terms of power dynamics to be self-disclosed uh particularly by something related to her own family her own childhood and and the the silly name for her own grandfather Pup Pup and you can see that for him it it actually has the skillful effect of softening him a bit and he gets more open and and more in rapport with her as a result would masculine be an okay word to use you used it when I hear the word masculine I think they can mend things they like to make things they like sports so obviously she's flagging uh masculinity femininity male female gender here and she starts out interestingly with masculine and and how Jaime sees his father and his father's father and his own sense of identity uh and she deliberately focuses on positive attributes uh of masculine um because there are pos positive attributes and also though she's highlighting those why is she choosing those first to mend to make uh sports pub socialize maybe alcohol but uh you know neutral so far uh and she's highlighting those aspects hopefully as again skillful means deliberate from the very start if an adult guinea pig eats one of its kids is that normal or weird now you're what do you call bread come on it just feels like a trick trick trick into what but my dad's okay this is so well made so what you're seeing what I'm seeing um is for one he's friendly and I won't say flirty but there's a playfulness which then uh shifts really quickly and even in the playfulness uh there's a fair amount of what appears to be hostility he teases her he pokes at her uh and she's you know dealing with what's coming at her here but you can see the intensity and the intelligence in him as he's really tracking uh that she's not his best friend she's not his best buddy she's there to peer into places inside him that he doesn't want anyone knowing about or looking into and in addition to that general defendedness not not understandable in that setting but still that general defendedness and his capacity to move into sharp reactivity that we're tracking here there's the particular protection of his own father and his very shrewd um recognition that the therapist here or I should actually say more like the courtappointed assessor here is um who's not trying to do therapy with him she's there for assessment it's a very different purpose um she's trying to get into his relationship with his father and his gender identification and if his father was perhaps somewhat in the mix of the factors that led Jaime to commit that brutal murder dylan learning the other lawyers said "You work for us." That's not what they say Jamie and I know that because I asked them the last time you said that to me you talked to them i've explained this i've been employed by your team but I don't work for you why do you tell them so two things here uh one is that he clearly is trying to peer through the BS factor and get to what is this ostensibly so nice person really up to who has tremendous power over him and is going to be writing an independent report that will affect we now understand his sentencing uh for the crime that he has been convicted of very very very consequential and so understandably he's being um rude even to figure out and get to the bottom of why is she asking him these questions and he clearly has gotten under her skin and in a way that would be a yellow flag she's lost her cool at least for a moment there maybe this is a preview of things to come but uh he's gotten under her skin this 14-year-old at the at the oldest and has been um able to get her to kind of lose her professionalism if only for a moment and of course it's understandable i've lost my professionalism I'm sure for more than a moment probably but it's it's worth noting yes I've asked some straightforward questions but I think am I boring you no okay and here he's smiling yeah he did get under her skin he did make her lose her cool and you can see in the portrayal here of this brilliant young actor uh a kind of predatory gleam in his eyes a coolness a calculating in his way he's a force to be reckoned with i wanted to talk to you about what being a man feels like you want a balls dear you can see how provocative he's being and adolescence can be this way in uh you know treatment environments deliberately very provocative uh and he's dropping in sexualized language here and uh just seeing if he can you know keep her at bay get under her skin she rolls with it good and he's not a uh you know happy in this setting obviously the other boys just scream all the time and they rock backwards and forwards and they shout at Coronation Street all the way from Curry one kid goes nuts every time you see Steve McDonald so previously she has established the structure where she basically says you're not in charge here and I don't have to answer your questions i'm definitely not going to show you my notes and so forth and here now even in that context he's talking over her he's yelling at her and she's interrupting him she's you know getting activated herself uh in a situation in which obviously he can't hear anything she's saying so anything she says will be unproductive and yet she's still talking uh I think about uh the acronym of a friend of mine weight w ai t why am I talking very useful as a therapist to keep in mind that acronym or waste as in why am I still talking uh so we're seeing her you know get increasingly activated her herself here in all of this even with this is I think just apparently the second conversation um he's also basically you know trying to assess uh what are you how can you help me and we can be reminded maybe of Maslo's hierarchy as it were and when you're in a situation like this he's really clear about his very concrete and immediate self-interest he doesn't really care about the nicities of getting along with an adult or being polite or being a nice boy uh he you know he sees her as posh uh and he's going to be much more real uh because in part you know his his survival is being threatened here he's down at the lower levels of Maslo's hierarchy understandably uh in the situation he's in that said there are opportunities for her to be more or less skillful uh with uh with what's in front of her moment to moment and basically raising your voice and yelling back or you know speaking intensely to someone who's speaking intensely to you is is not particularly skillful as a therapist you do not control what I do in my life get that in that little of yours hell is everything okay there isn't a problem jimmy shall we i'm sorry do you want him to take it out for a date uh I'll get a cup of tea though if that's okay can I have another hot chocolate please so he loses it of course he's really intense he doesn't hit her he stands above her she stays seated uh he's really mad and he doesn't want to be told what to do and he's mad at her for telling him what to do could wonder about complex implications of that or just take it at face value that's really straightforward and then she looks at him with this look of uh kind of horror and shock and dismay like "Okay I can see the rage here i can see you losing it you know knocking over the hot chocolate and and all the rest of it and um she wonders as well how much of it is a manipulation to get her to go away okay but she is also seeing the intensity in him and then he settles down a little bit takes off his jacket he's now more vulnerable looks even more like a kind of a young boy and asks her if she can get him hot chocolate toggling back and forth between being you know raging aggressive uh you know physically dominant um person in that situation to asking her if she could you know do him a favor and get him a hot chocolate and maybe some kind of maternal way or just again taking his face value so for as a therapist she's lost control of the situation she's lost the sense of rapport with him that she needs to have to maintain a flow of disclosure she's trying to assess you can't assess someone who's yelling at you or you know very plugged in except observing yeah they could get very reactive enraged physical you know and um you know yelling okay okay that tells you they can do that but the why of that um and the possibilities around that which are relevant to sentencing what is the capacity of this person Jamie to to grow to learn to have remorse uh and to develop greater capacities inside so he'll never ever ever hurt another person um certainly violently again um she needs to know more about his inner world and she's not getting at his inner world uh he's obviously super alert very defended around the father um a lot of other ways to get at that material and in roundabout ways we're not seeing efforts made to establish rapport maybe in the interest of dramatic tension and moving the plot forward but in in a skillful um kind of assessment you definitely want to establish rapport first and foremost because when that goes out the window so does your assessment so let's see what happens next i mean what was it you're looking for is it body language stuff just I'm reading a book on that at the moment my sister gave it to me maybe I've grown sensitized to gender uh in this show and maybe I'm you know seeing things that are not really there but I find it helpful sometimes to imagine flipping the gender of the people involved so what if it was a um you know a male psychologist and a female correction officer in that same setting everything's the same uh would that female have stood that close uh to the male psychologist looking at the screen would that person have spoken up and interrupted to the point of startling the psychologist when they're focused on the screen i don't know and definitely I really wonder if that would have happened if uh it was the same corrections officer and a male psychologist uh just body language and being willing to be that close physically uh to another person in ways that might be read potentially as intimidating or threatening um and a certain pushiness a certain pushiness on the part of the corrections officer when it is clearly unwanted she's trying to focus she's trying to do her job she doesn't want to hear about the book he got about body language uh and you know so again thinking about expectations like on the one side maybe some expectations of entitlement that due to being male uh in this culture I get to do certain things that I'm allowed to do or or are normative that are they don't cause much attention if I do them as a male and yet as a woman if a woman were to do them it would cause attention and and flip the other way as a woman I need to kind of accept or put up with that that kind of behavior coming at me even if it's not ill he's not thinking of assaulting her obviously the corrections officer but even so you know do you really want that and I remember a different kind of conversation I had uh with a friend of mine who happened to be um an African-American woman and I said something unskillful um and I came to her later and apologized and it was just I blurted it it wasn't overtly racist or anything it was just unskillful in terms of its impact on her and she said essentially Rick it's okay i know your heart and so forth but you know if I reacted to every time something like that happened in a day it would just make me crazy um the death of a thousand paper cuts and that's something to take into account you know what it's like u for what people feel they sort of have to put up with uh just to kind of get through a day that you don't have to put up with perhaps the second thing here is that uh I'm watching her approach and you know second guessing Monday morning quarterbacking and you know what we're seeing she's taking a very cognitive approach this is a kid who's a kid who is also a wash in emotion and clearly not that well reggulated emotion just bursting through and she's trying to get him to talk about you know masculinity as an abstraction you know cognitively it just doesn't get there and uh as a therapist all too often I've approached things through a more cognitive level that just wasn't helpful and was much more effective often takes longer but it's pays off more in the long run is to just kind of stay with the feeling level explore more neutral topics even more positive topics and see what happens between the two of them i mean in a way he's demonstrating what he really thinks about being a man he's demonstrating it and he he would demonstrate it a lot more if she got out of the head level and moved more into the heart and the body in her interactions with him you know he could tell her his beliefs his cognitions whatever about men women and bananas but is that really is that consequential what's really consequential is the deep down hardly conscious fundamental attitudes that he may not even be aware of so trying to ask him rationally with a lot of complicated language about abstractions like masculinity is just not a very effective approach how did your dad treat your mom are you trying to get on my dad again no here too critical tone about his father obviously a sore subject he's obviously already very protective of that father and her tone around that is um is is is harsh you know it's it's got a lot of velocity in it and she's leaning forward in her body language you know it's it's kind of uh almost accusatory it's prosecutorial it's the kind of question you'd ask a hostile witness on the on the stand and not effective he's not going to get any more pictures is he no she's dead i didn't mean from her i meant from other girls no one will send him any of her pictures because he wasn't careful with the one he got this is really an amazing way to for me to watch a show that's so powerful in which I'm allowing myself to pause from time to time just to let it really land let it really sink in of course this is fiction and um it helps to imagine our way into that which is real here and let ourselves be affected by it so I'm just really reflecting on adolescent sexuality freud caused quite a scandal when he talked about infantile sexuality or the sexuality of certainly some young kids who would pleasure themselves and and potentially have fantasies of various kinds that would be uncovered in psychoanalysis that was quite a scandal we also have a culture that's hypersexualized and with technologies like in this case Snapchat um imagery can be widely circulated just one phone internet uploaded you have no control over that image whatever happens to it then you think about what was it like to be Kate you know the pressures of various kinds for a you know 13-year-old girl to do something that's fairly taboo what led her to do that what was in the mix how voluitional was that how much pressure was there on her perhaps to do that like what was that like for her and then to be exposed in that way you know with other people passing around the picture of her and then him what a complex mix i wonder how much here for him was being actually drawn to Katie um in even innocent simple ways like having a crush on her and really liking her or how much of it was that he thought he should have a response to her you know his initial statement to the therapist or rather the psychologist the assessor here uh is he lies about his sexual experiences of course he might be lying about lying but he's lying about his he lies initially to you know brag about them in a fact or to act like he's had them but he hasn't had them seemingly so far so maybe he just thought he ought to uh approach her on the other hand why did he bring a knife and why did he ask um his friend to give him a knife his knife uh who's now in trouble too um just to scare her why did he want to make her feel fear maybe he felt some fear or shame related to her but why why is he trying to scare her so we'll keep finding out here but what a what a mess what I'm seeing in his behavior toward her it's more around fear and anger and shame than anything else you can see his vulnerability to shame in the account of his father you know watching him and turning away with disappointment uh when Jaime as a younger boy even messed up playing football and it could well be that in this case it's not so much about sexual desire and it's often it's sometimes said that rape is really about aggression and violence and anger and domination much more than it is around sexuality sexuality is maybe a means to the end of establishing dominance and being violent and it could be that uh motivations of that kind that are not particularly eroticized that are about shame and retribution and um deeply buried and repressed rage boiling out uh in the worst um dozen seconds of his entire life so far maybe that's much more of what's in play here you don't think you're pretty you You do think I'm all good i haven't passed judgment on either of those things if you think about it for very good reason oh for very good here he is getting emotional he's counterattacking very cleverly uh in his case and she's getting more and more rational more and more cognitive with increasingly complicated language uh rather than um letting him express himself letting him vent and then in that way in so doing you know settle back down again i also have a lot of empathy for her and her role what a role uh it's one that I personally avoided partly because it's so challenging and there people who are very very very good at it um so I feel for being in this this situation with the demand on her to form some kind of professional conclusion that she'll be judged by still in the process here you're seeing her do things that disrupt her aims which is to try to peel back the onion and you know get take layers of lids off the cans and get down deeper and more and more deeply into who this kid really is and also in particular in terms of sentencing uh the forces in him making who he will become and she's not getting there with these kind of uh ways of acting unless he just is trying to provoke him uh into um you know another reenactment of the kind of rage we saw in his murder and um but that's not very informative reason I want to understand you to understand my understanding of mine understand he's very clever he's getting it he's naming it you know you the therapist want to understand my understanding of my understanding of my understanding of my understanding Cognitive cognitive cognitive beliefs beliefs beliefs all the way down bs he knows it's BS and he wonders what's really behind it all of course and if she has any sincere interest in getting to know him as a being unlike anyone else in his world has ever really been equipped or sustained an attempt to really get to know him underneath it the the defenses and the anger and and the hurt and the shame um if she's really wanting to do that she wouldn't be approaching him in the way that she is and at some level he knows that she wrote this no so she's sitting close to him here and he's shown that he could be physically aggressive in ways that could really be pretty intense you know the previous scene uh in which she's remaining seated in the chair and he's getting really close to her uh so close he could hit her easily if he wanted to and then he you know startles her by yelling at her she's you know shocked and some fear takes a lot of courage to be in her role there in her position um I'm thinking that you know she's had this job she's worked in correctional facilities with violent people and here she's with someone who in a rage was repeatedly stabbed with some intent you know he brought a weapon with intent not necessarily to stab her but he he brought it to the encounter and um she's being willing to remain physically vulnerable to see what he does to see what he does and sometimes as a therapist certainly you need to do that and you need to let the intensity come and see what's there while both you know protecting yourself ultimately and keeping your professional hat on you're there to do a job you have a duty to this other person and to their ultimate welfare uh in her case as well she also has a duty to society how does she manage that so it's interesting to me that she kind of toggles back and forth uh in her way of being uh between being fairly prosecutorial rat tat uh trying to get to the bottom of things and then shifting into uh being kind of jokey a little relaxed uh getting him a cup of hot chocolate and uh that may be effective technique i don't do forensic assessments but in I have a hunch it's not very effective technique including with a 13 or 14 year old kid and definitely uh in ordinary therapeutic environments that oscillation back and forth is just not very good technique and generally speaking being pro prosecutorial at all is not good technique wrote this on your Facebook feed facebook instagram are you all right you look a bit red did I scare you when I showered so Jaime's asking her first he teases her about using you know Facebook like a grownup term for that's at odds with his actual lived experience as a younger person so he's he's caught her out there and he's teasing her and he's also poking at her about being um a little red in the face and then he is challenging her about her real response to him did it did I scare you when I shouted at you and so much about being um a therapist and often in other helping professions uh is you're constantly making choices how do I go you have different options here again and again and again and you know people who are skillful at this keep making choices that tend to be best odds choices they're not guaranteed but again and again and again it's the best play they've got given the cards they're holding in that moment and including which when someone who's being aggressive he's aggressive he's mad and he's trying to reestablish his own power in the situation uh which would be in the service of his own disclosure as long as she keeps him in a one-down position or reminds him of that in what is already a one-own position that's going to intensify his defenses and so he's going to be less uh revealed and open probably and so here he is being aggressive which actually in a certain kind of way establishes more of an equivalence in power which if she could be more spacious around it in her role here and make more room for it um might actually lead him to being increasingly open um she hasn't formed any kind of we could say alliance with him in which they have a shared purpose she's not saying to him in effect uh I'm here to help you have the best possible outcome from this whole legalistic process in ways that are grounded in the real truth of things uh I'm not here to harm you i'm here to find what would be really beneficial for you and society as a whole can we do this together there's no sense of together here there's no sense of alliance as we say with with clients and um maybe she's not allowed to do anything like that maybe she's really constrained in that i suspect per dramatic effect um that she's not doing much of that all that said here he is asking her for her real reaction and in effect did I have power here did I scare you not in the best way not just defending it but did I have power and what can she do and I think one skillful option which she doesn't take she goes down a different road um one skillful option would be to take a breath and go "Yeah I did feel scared." Long pause and then maybe maintain the silence which she's not doing either to make room for him to speak um and she could also potentially then say after that uh yeah I felt scared and I felt sad actually at the whole situation here and that you're in this situation and um and yeah you scared me in that moment Jamie you were scary pause how does he react to that does he like being scary is there a glint of pleasure in his eyes that yeah I'm scary and is there maybe an opening based on her being real yeah you I felt scared which he obviously did at least momentarily um and then is there an opening evening even to follow up with something like and knowing that you scared me how does it feel to know that you did scare me and could potentially scare me again how is that for you she really wants to find out right because she really is trying to establish risk for the future related to sentencing and guidelines how at risk is this kid how much does he really like scaring people particularly female people you know she would learn a lot right if she went down that road with him and in the moment here I am right watching the the play of the game freeze framing well you could always do this or do that it's tough in the moment i've rewound so many sessions and gone back and thought "Oh Rick what in the world were you thinking?" Um Freud called it the impossible profession for a reason maybe although I think it's it's a heroic and noble profession and very often a very helpful one for other people uh you know it reminds me of the line from a a Zen master very successful accomplished teacher toward the end of his life and he was asked what he what he made of his life and he kind of chuckled and said one mistake after another so that's probably been a lot of my own career so you wrote this on your I'm only 13 i don't think I look that scary so here he is asserting that he's not that scary and therefore deserves to be let out soon maybe he's also in effect shaming her he's counterattacking to say "Hey I'm not that scary you must be particularly weak or something wrong with you that you would let just a little 13-year-old like me scare you and um we often see that in certain situations people who've been on the receiving end of domination i talked about this a bit in the um second episode with regard to the um the son of the police inspector who's you know being u shamed and also other people in that situation in the social hierarchy being put down anyway people who are you know in the subordinate one down position sometimes reverse and really look for anything that will put them in that top dog position um there's a proverb that some people are either at your feet or at your throat and it's that toggling back and forth as a kind of reaction to you know being put down so much we're kind of seeing Jamie here assert his strength his position visav this uh psychologist could you tell me what these emojis virus is so you see her refusing to step into the script or frame that he's trying to draw her into uh and she is maintaining her professionalism and continuing to go after uh the particular question on the table rather than get into her own personal material out loud with him and sometimes that's the right way to do it uh just to get into your own material is just inappropriate you know in a psychological framework from time to time that said you know I keep wanting her to bring it into the room as it were it's in the room right now as I said earlier his behavior is saying so much more than the words the abstractions coming out of his mouth and his behavior is demonstrating his reactions to being put down or being subject to female power and you think about his reactivity to being subject to Kate's power through a female body she shoved him he fell down it flipped into a rage right afterward here he is demonstrating uh his own psychology his own reactivity his own learned behaviors and and uh sense of how it's okay for him to be uh with regard to this um this woman here who's you know being strong and he's demonstrating how he feels about that and as a psychologist I would tend to or I would wish that she would go with that and she'd learn a lot more about him if she would do that rather than going back to these emojis which she knows must be very shaming and triggering for him maybe that's what she's trying to see what he does you know when he really gets at the whole incel humiliating accusation or characterization of him maybe that's what she's doing um a lot she seems in her head herself well intended of course but in her head herself and how do you connect with a young teenager you know when you're when you're coming at them from this very heady place not usually very very effective look at you all hopeful like I'm going to say something important so at this point the whole incel manosphere topic is on the table 8020 and him being um really shamed in this particular way maybe in other times people might have shamed him calling him a or he's not into sports or uh you know he has a funny way of speaking kids shame and put down other kids this is a particularly uh intense one really gets at emerging identity as as as a a sexual being as as becoming a man so that's going on and then in this moment I keep seeing Jamie moving back and forth between being an upset boy who is understandably in a tough situation a terrible situation really rattled wants this hot chocolate and yet like right here the look he's giving her the way he's switching uh how he's catching her out how he's turning the tables on her it starts to feel kind of sociopathic that cleverness even a sometimes called a reptilian quality a coldness and it's kind of spooky it's extraordinarily difficult of course to make these kind of recommendations as a forensic psychologist and then a judge who has to make decisions and then other people down the road who is this person who is this person becoming and what here is sociopathic or what is the seed of sociopathy that unfortunately being in prison can fertilize in water and grow into full-blown um sociopathic uh personality disorder slag you know or flat or whatever so I thought when she was like that weak she might she might like me when she was that weak she might like me you see the softness in his face here and the longing what a mess and his sense that she would have to be weakened made weak or put into a weak position and then a low status subordinated incel like him um would be acceptable to her if she this notion that she'd have to sink down to his level he presumes he's at this level that's the incel structure he's in the 80% that most girls would not like so she's got to sink down to his social standing his degree of attractiveness and then and then he might have a chance it's a real terrible doctrine obviously and it's prevalent in in the world today especially of young men it's completely untrue it's ridiculous and justifies all kinds of terrible behavior um and it's it's terrible it's toxic in the minds of the people that are on the receiving end of that dogma that some people are you know putting out there i could have touched her but I didn't i just I had a knife she was scared but I didn't do that we don't know of course what the psychologist is feeling here exactly i mean what I see in her face is a sadness and one that as her lips part slightly uh feels very personal as she maybe identifies with Katie maybe her own history has included sexual assault or the threat of it or unwanted erotic attention and she's she's seeing here and she's also seeing Jamie she's seen the video of him lying and denying and not really coming clean about what he did which has implications for his prognosis as it were including his movement or not into real sociopathy she's seeing that and we feel the weight of it on her and in some ways I think we're seeing her see a lot of Jaime's fate jaime's going to be in the system now for I don't know what the duration would be certainly through his you know 18th birthday and probably beyond his life is forever changed u many lives have been forever changed by what happened there that night um certainly his as well and you know she's seeing that she's feeling that um and still she has to make a judgment she has to make a decision here so Jamie here has just described or has gotten as close to a description as he has so far of a horrific event and then kind of shrugs turns reaches for the sandwich and yeah he's a kid and still there's something pretty cold about all that jamie do you understand what death is well so here she goes to an abstraction maybe she has to do it for mental competency on a judgment here it seems she's concluded that he basically needs to understand that he's murdered someone and she's trying to get at does he have the cognitive capab capability to understand that i I imagine he does he's he's a clever kid jamie this is our last session what but what I would encourage you to whatever happens next is take advantage of any mental health services that I think you'll I know she's not a therapist i know or that's not her function there and wow i mean my hunch is that inside her understandably you know you're you're a mental health professional you still have your reactions and it could well be that inside her she's she's angry at Jamie maybe she's disgusted with him she's had it with his stories and his weaving and um maybe that's in the mix here and still to just this is our last session which completely startles him and reveals that he actually in some ways experiences a kind of a relationship with her and he he doesn't want it to end and also I suspect he he knows that if it ends it means she's formed a judgment about him which she won't reveal but it's a judgment that will be consequential and certainly her her tone and energy toward him is very cold uh sometimes uh neutrality reads negatively when you're on the receiving end of it the impact of it even if the intent is neutral and she clearly here is just very crisp very cold in her demeanor um as she is cutting off and ending this relationship which of course is having a big impact on him and is is certainly not um kind uh in the managing of the ending was we therapist will use a term termination not like the CIA is terminating you but just termin rimination she's this is not being handled in a in a way that has the best interest of the child in mind don't even let me be come on man okay what do you think about me okay okay so important to him to be liked and so human he wonders does she like him even a little bit uh just independent even of you know gender and all the rest of that and just makes you really wonder what has happened in the life of this kid uh whose parents seem in their way loving and caring and you know kind uh he's got a big sister she's seems kind in her own way and it highlights for me a little bit here uh research findings that speak to the uh impact of peer groups such as there's so much in the mix here you know at school and elsewhere peers uh begin to start having even more influence than parents uh over the psychological development of kids uh including starting at a fairly early age i know for myself that um you know my relationships with kids in school in which I felt very much like an outsider and kind of shy and dorky and you know like an ugly duckling definitely the runt of the litter uh as someone might say yeah that had a lot of impact on me and does have a lot of impact and sometimes we underestimate in the developmental story or trajectory of a person the influence of friendships peer groups and experience es in that territory starting even pre-adolescent and then certainly continuing through adolescence into adulthood and I just so feel for Jamie and I also feel for the the psychologist there who could say essentially I do like you but I suspect she doesn't like him and she's maintaining her demeanor but she's He's horrified by what he did and still horrified by his unwillingness to express uh or seem to show any remorse of whatsoever or even sorrow he hasn't expressed one bit of sorrow even if he holds on to his defense that somebody else did it um he could be sorrowful about the loss of this girl that he wanted to take to the fair and hoped that by her dropping in her status she'd be willing to say yes so I suspect the psychologist doesn't like him that much and by the way it goes to a broader thing as well i know for myself working with people that I always had to find what there was to like about them otherwise I couldn't do my job it did not mean I was missing the rest of it but if you're working with people in a mental health kind of way it's uh you know it's it's counterindicated uh for you to continue in a role if you can't find a way to like someone and maybe the best you can do is then to refer them on to somebody else who could find something likable in them and beyond all that uh one time I had a client who said to me quite vulnerably and sweetly "But do you like me you know I want you to like me." And I said I looked inside i said "Yeah I do like you i do like you." And even more important than liking you is duty you know liking can rise and fall depending on situations duty moral duty professional duty uh code of conduct as a professional psychologist prevails you know so that's in the mix as well and then here we have poor Jamie being hustled out of the room he's had this contact even with a fair amount of um intensity and critique and disruption and coldness coming at him from the psychologist still it's a real relationship and in that real relationship he is asking that question that often hovers invisibly in the space between people do you like me um will you come out and play it's it's very haunting and and deep and sometimes I think it's really helpful to try to bring your own unspoken thought bubbles actually out and to be strong enough and appropriate enough in the setting to be able to do that such as I hope you like me do you like me is there anything I could do that would help you to like me or like me even more or like me in a particular way you know to have the capacity to do that and also to be aware of that unspoken longing in question uh in the thought balloons over other people's heads u you know do you like me will you hurt me am I safe with you do you respect me are you on my side and these are these are very haunting and deep and poignant questions that are really useful to be aware of and that we find our way in how to respond to them [Music] god please and here as well is the father that he's clearly most connected to of his parents and that he he wants her to tell him that he's okay even as he is so clearly banging on the window not at all okay and now here she is i've had sessions like this i probably have wept after a particularly wrenching session and to just feel it you know you're when you're in mental health helping profession it's not like you're a carpenter working with a particular board that has no feelings and the board doesn't um hit you when you're trying to you know nail it down and and all the rest of that and with people you get affected you get really affected i read somewhere that uh a commentary about this uh show in this scene here where she's you know tearful and obviously really affected and upset by this that somehow was to portray the boy as an aggressor or somehow try to play on our sympathy i don't read that at all she seems like really quite an experienced and even tough professional and still it's gotten to me and I'm not even in the room with Jamie uh and here she is you know obviously affected by it of course if you were the kind of person who could do that process with him and conclude as I imagine she has uh that he really needs to be held in custody for quite some time uh if you're not affected by that you don't belong in that profession