Vicarious Therapy

After spending most of my day in therapy sessions with various clients, I started to have this strange feeling that the therapists were talking to me.  Maybe it's because I wasn't talking much while taking notes and feeling especially receptive to good advice.  This might not sound weird as anyone can overhear a quote or receive some inspiration through an unexpected conversation.  What is strange about my experience, though, is that every client I met with today was under the age of 15.
   
I've long held a belief in the wisdom of children.  Their worldview has yet to be skewed by religion, politics, or beliefs, and they tend to take everything at face value, which is a very practical approach to life.  As adults, I think we often read too much into things and have a tendency to completely blow things out of proportion.  Watching cable news will illustrate this perfectly. 

What's so nice about kids, then, is that they're approach to problems and conflict often tends to be very black and white.  Only with age do we start to see morality in shades of grey, leading to a mess of moral and existential crises.  If only we could get back to basics and understand the mind of child, we might be able to better understand the world and our place in it.

Case in point:  Client #1 today is 8 years old.  I was telling his therapist that he recently got into some trouble at school when he refused to use the grey calculator instead of the more familiar blue one.  The kiddo argued with his teacher and refused to do his work, leading to a trip to the office.  To me, and the teacher, the client was wrong because he was defiant towards his teacher and didn't follow directions.  Pretty obvious, right?

What the therapist pointed out, though, is that "Why should the client have to use the grey calculator?"  I couldn't come up with a reason, and I don't think the teacher would have been able to either.  We just took for granted that those were the rules, and rules are not meant to be broken. 

But a kid doesn't see things this way.  If he wanted to use the blue calculator, and no one else would be hurt by it, why shouldn't he be able to?  In the end, the conflict was the result of a power struggle, not a real issue.  The teacher wanted to assert his authority over the client, and the client was having none of it. When we start acting like "grown ups" and just submit to authority without any room for questioning or compromise, we're choosing to be forced into using the grey calculator when what we really want is the blue. 

More thoughts on this later.