My office was my car, a briefcase, a pager, and a cell phone, and I worked twelve-hour shifts on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and twenty-four hour shifts starting on Friday night. This was in the days before everyone had cell phones, and ours were old then - the old three-pound-brick style phones, which, by then, only held enough charge for 15-35 minutes of conversation. I routinely warned my clients that the phone might cut out while we were talking, extremely frustrating when doing crisis counseling!
When I started working CIS, I myself was in crisis. Everything in my life had changed suddenly, even if it was at my behest, and the friends my girlfriend and I had had pretty much stayed her friends and not mine. I was lonely, confused, angry, sad, lost, et cetera et cetera. But every evening I worked I clipped on my pager and figuratively put on my Crisis Intervention costume. It didn't feel like Clark Kent in a phone booth; it felt like Wonder Woman's bracelets.
Eventually I put the Wonder Woman figurine in my car, taping her to the dash, since most of the physical part of my job was driving to the Harry's Mother office or to the shelter, to juvenile hall, or to pick up a youth who had run away or been thrown away. My favorite thing to do was stroll into juvenile hall and spring a youth, but I also had great conversations with teenagers trying to sort out their relationships with their parents and stepparents, schools, and boyfriends or girlfriends. I'd had enough training to listen reflectively and provide solution-focused therapy, and if necessary I got kids into the program and families into HM family counseling. I knew that I was helping some people.
There's a lot you can do by listening. I learned how to cope with my own catastrophes - with Wonder Woman's help.
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