SPEAKING FROM THE HEART

AHA! Teaches Teens to Share Their Feelings

October, 2005

by MARTHA SADLER, The Santa Barbara Independent

I made it through the latter half of the 20th century cagily avoiding participation in a single encounter group. During the same era I was also evicted from a couple of therapists’ offices for refusing or, more accurately, failing, to open my mouth and speak. I was far too insecure for therapy.

So you can imagine my sweaty-palmed horror as I recently took a seat among a dozen or so teenagers who were sharing their feelings. It was called “council,” meant to develop “the art of listening and speaking from the heart.” I had come as a journalist, to do a story on the Academy of Healing Arts, or AHA!, co-directed by family therapists Jennifer Freed and Rendy Freedman. Out of respect for therapeutic privacy, however, I could not take notes. Thus shorn of my protective pencil and notebook, I was then urged to participate.

I couldn’t just clam up because, of course, one must set an example for the young. Yet while I blushed and blurted, it was the teenagers who set an example, conversing about their inner lives with precision, trust, and self-confidence. The therapists were unstintingly loving toward all the people in the circle, and the teenagers followed suit, showing each other and the counselors, who participated as near-equals, respect and affection. Freedman assured me that some of these teens had initially felt just as awkward as I did.

They went around the circle naming something they felt good about and something they felt badly about—roses and thorns. One teenager felt she should leave her parents’ home but wasn’t sure where to go. In response, other members of the group shared experiences they had had staying at shelters, at friends’ homes, and also as hosts to friends in need. Another person’s thorn was that somebody lied to her about something, though she didn’t want to elaborate. One girl’s ex-boyfriend had just gotten a new girlfriend. Many of them had time-management issues familiar to most adults: not enough hours in the day for job, homework, and relationships. Nevertheless several of them told the group that their rose that day was “being here with you.”

We played a number of psychodrama games during council, my favorite being one in which we acted out one way we have tended to approach goals, then stood and imagined looking at ourselves from the vantage point of a present goal and deciding what we would need to get there. (My goal “said” I would need to be more organized and aggressive to achieve it.) Also, we wrote our names in the air with our elbows, pure silliness as a way of “tapping into the joy” that has been buried—reads the program’s literature—by demands, depression, and trying to act cool.

Freed and Freedman’s motto is, “No teenager left alone,” and they have been developing this program since the Columbine tragedy of 1998, though they have worked with teenagers for their entire careers as therapists. They focus on developing “emotional intelligence”—a term popularized by author Daniel Goleman—which they consider at least as important as academic or financial success. Signs of emotional intelligence include the abilities to persist in the face of frustration, empathize with others, and regulate one’s own mood.

The AHA! directors consider promotion of social conscience to be a critical aspect of their work. I was surprised. Some of the teens with whom they work appear to be privileged in practically every way, but many in the circle were teenagers who had tried to kill themselves; who had been badly abused; who are dealing with sex, drugs, disability, or poverty in their own lives. Don’t they have enough on their plates without having to worry about saving the world?

But Freed and Freedman speak shamelessly about the often taboo and neglected subject of the teenagers’ souls. Caring about others can take one’s mind off one’s own problems, they noted, though the formula is not as simple as it looks: Everybody knows people who are crazy for social justice—transported with compassion for the abstract underdog—but who don’t get along with actual people. That’s when solidarity with the marginalized—oneself included, often enough—remains theoretical. AHA! tries to make it real. Their position is that good relationships are the missing link, both to psychological health and to a better world for all. So they do “Eracism” exercises such as talking about times they felt different. They do a non-hierarchical “Theater of the Oppressed” in which there is no dichotomy between glamorous narcissistic celebrities on the one hand and passive lumpen audience on the other. Everybody’s a star.

Parents are included, too. A year ago a school counselor referred a boy we’ll call Luis, then 13, to AHA! because his grades were bad and he was hanging out with gang kids. At first he was shy. Then, he said, “I saw that each one of the other kids was participating and communicating with each other. I said, ‘Whoa, I need that too. I want to be part of that too.’ Because I was at that age when I feel like nothing if I’m not part of something.”

His mother said that the parents’ group helped her recall what it was like to be a teenager and strengthened her connection to her son. She had worried about Luis but would minimize her fears. “Sometimes I’d say, ‘Aw, he’s okay,’ until an obvious problem came up, and then sometimes we’d fight.” Meanwhile, he said, he felt “kind of left out of the family” because of his bad grades, especially because his brother was an excellent student. “I told my friends I was disappointing my parents. They would say, ‘Oh, don’t worry dude, sometimes our parents disappoint us, too.’ My parents would tell me, ‘Try to get better grades, keep trying.’ They were trying to help but I switched it in my mind to an idea that they were trying to attack me.” Does he feel left out of the family now? “No,” Luis said. “Of course not.” Also, Luis is now taking college prep classes in the Visual and Dramatic Arts Academy at Santa Barbara High.

AHA! has other several activities besides council meetings, and has received funding to conduct more frequent classes than it has in the past. This semester, there are activities four days a week at Jefferson Hall, 1535 Santa Barbara Street. These include council from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays, and a writing and performance group on Wednesdays, led by Maggie Mixsell of Speaking of Stories. A parent group meets Thursday evenings at 6 p.m. A singing workshop started mid-September and its graduates will be performing with professional musicians at SOhO restaurant and nightclub on October 30. To sign up for AHA!, contact the Family Therapy Institute or Isis Castaneda at 448-0920, email isiscasta@yahoo.com, or visit ahasb.com. Or just show up. School credits may be available to eligible participants.