The Dubya Warrior

I've found a potential therapist for Dubya. The first couple of people I called, both psychiatrists (i.e., Minor Dieties), apparently are really just glorified, board-sanctioned drug dealers who appeared to have no interest whatsoever in my son as a person or in behavioral approaches to his problems. In fact, the secretary of one of the MDs informed me that Dr. Dopedealer "doesn't 'do' behavioral therapies. Her main focus is med management." If someone on a street corner on the East Side had this as their main focus, they'd call it possession with intent to distribute. But if an MD does it for a child she has no intention whatsoever of actually getting to know, it's called "med management."

Sorry to scathe and let me just say here that I have more doctors on my sh!t list than on my all-praise-them-list I have many friends who are doctors. Really, I do. But they're the good doctors, of course.

I gave up on the MD world for my son, however, and moved back to the therapist world, as in PhD, MSW, etc. We've got a cold tie for success with this group of practitioners. Our children's caregiver in San Francisco was an MSW who basically worked with them eight hours a day, five days a week. She was like magic with them. But we also tried a psychologist for TH when he was ideating suicide a lot at age 4, and we didn't find that so successful. And I forgot until this moment about the utterly worthless guy who "helped" us with "suggestions" over six $150 sessions about how to apply behavioral approaches with Dubya's ADHD diagnosis. That was the biggest waste of $900 I've ever known.

The therapist we've chosen is an MSW. I meet with her this week, and based on recent events, it's not a moment too soon. Dubya's "confessionals" have been coming non-stop. He gets in the car after school and starts in, sometimes confessing about intrusive thoughts of recent vintage, sometimes resurrecting old "transgressions" that can reach as far back as age three or four. He confesses all through homework, dinner, bath, leisure time...any time one of his parents is around to lend a priestly ear. It's a fine line, dealing with these. On the one hand, you don't want to dismiss his concern and anxiety, which is quite real for him. On the other, you don't want to validate these worries about ephemera by giving them too much weight. Accompanying the hyperconfessional tone around our house is a snort-tic that would wake Rip van Winkle, one Dubya fires off at a fairly consistent per-second rate.

What goes on in that obsessive, tic-ing, worried mind of his? We're not entirely sure, but we do know a bit about what comes out. Over on our family art blog, I've posted a recent picture Dubya made, depicting a battle scene. Was he in WWII in a past life? Where does he see these things? How does he know what it all looks like?

It's going to take time, it seems, to wander the labyrinth and discover the secrets that are the mind of Dubya. We're hoping that this therapist will prove an able navigator. At the very least, she's no knee-jerk, deity-from-a-distance "med manager."