by Nigel Latta
Placebo or expectancy effect 15%
Therapeutic technique 15%
Internal client factors 40%
Therapist—client relationship 30%
What this means is that the relationship between you and your client is the strongest thing you have going for you. It’s not as simple as the fact that a good relationship alone will produce the desired change, but rather that the relationship is the vehicle that drives home whatever messages you’re trying to give. In essence it’s the quality of the relationship that determines how much the person you’re working with actually listens to what you are saying.
Geoff just looked at me blankly. We were never going to get anywhere. He didn’t really want to know my views, he just wanted to vent his spleen. That wasn’t really Geoff’s fault. For him this was all just stuff he’d seen on the telly. It was no more real to him than The Sopranos or The Simpsons.
Time to go, I thought to myself.
‘You want to know what the real answer is Geoff? Hug a sex offender. That’s the way forward, a big manly hug.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Oh come on, come to work with me on Monday and I’ll let you hug a couple. You never know, you might even develop a taste for it.’
‘Yeah, right.’
I shrugged. ‘I gotta get another beer, catch you later,’ I said and made my way to the kitchen. Sometimes you just have to run.
As I was opening the fridge to get another stubbie, a friendly-looking bloke introduced himself as Tim. He said he was in marketing and asked what I did.
‘Chartered accountant,’ I replied without missing a beat.
ON BEING NICE
MY NICE AND YOUR NICE are probably not the same thing. My nice comes with sharp edges and jagged little hooks. My nice hurts more often than not.
John had served 20 months for sexually violating his 11-year-old stepdaughter over a two-year period. He’d been released quite some time ago and, because of staff shortages, was only just being seen, shortly before his parole period was to end. He’d served his time and been no trouble, and he hadn’t been in any further trouble in the time he’d been out, but he’d never admitted to having abused the girl, despite pleading guilty at his trial. This is one of the great farces of our legal system—bad guys plead guilty to get a lighter sentence, and straight after the trial they go back to saying they didn’t do it but instead selflessly pleaded guilty to spare their young accuser a trial. Such self-sacrifice is truly heart-warming.
John had taken that line, and added in a whole new slippery twist of his own.
When I went out to meet him my first impression was that he seemed like a nice enough guy. This might seem like an odd thing to say about a man who’d sexually violated an 11-year-old, but it’s important to understand that otherwise nice people can do the most appalling things. John had no previous criminal convictions. This was the first time he’d been charged with anything. Before he went to jail he’d had a job and, apart from the fact he was raping his stepdaughter most nights, he’d lived a pretty normal life.
First impressions count with me. I’ll adjust my thinking as I’m going along, but mostly I find my initial judgements are pretty much on the money. If I think a guy is creepy at the beginning, I’ll probably still think that at the end. If my first gut feeling as I walk out to meet him is that he’s weird, he usually ends up being weird. Maybe I just filter other stuff out, but really I think that if you do this stuff for long enough, if you talk to enough people, you can recognise the signs very quickly. I have rooms full of filing cabinets in my head jammed with mental notes from interviews of all kinds of offenders, and so I think the sorting process happens very quickly, and mostly unconsciously. The result simply gets spat out the end as ‘Oh, he’s one of those…’
When I walked out to the waiting room to meet John it quickly became apparent who I was dealing with. As I said, he was a nice enough man: quiet, polite and eager to cooperate. He was very respectful but at the same time visibly anxious. I knew what he was scared of, and it wasn’t me.
We did the usual introductory bits and chatted for a few minutes. I kept this fairly light and warm because I wanted to establish with him right from the start that I wasn’t attacking him, it was just two guys talking. This was important given where I wanted to take him. Actually it was quite pleasant talking with John, because he was a genuinely likeable guy. But he was also a child rapist.
Most of all, I knew that John was scared of John.
‘So,’ I finally say, getting down to business, ‘it says here you saw a psychologist inside.’
He nods. ‘Yeah, he was really helpful.’
‘How so?’
‘He helped me with a lot of stuff.’
‘What did you work out about your offending?’
He looked down. ‘Well, that one was hard because I don’t remember doing it.’
‘You don’t remember?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘And why is that?’
‘I was asleep.’
‘Excuse me?’
He nods. ‘I was asleep when it happened.’
‘You were asleep? So it was some kind of sexual-offending version of sleepwalking?’
‘I guess.’
At this point, I’m thinking a bunch of things. Part of me is pleasantly surprised. It’s always nice to come across an excuse you’ve never heard before. Sex offenders are like the people who make toothbrushes; just when you think they’ve come up with every feature they could possibly put on a toothbrush, they come up with something new. Whether it’s angled heads, different lengths of bristles, antibacterial bristles or flexible handles, they always have some new marketing spin. Two days ago I saw an ad for a toothbrush that whitens your teeth. The humble toothbrush is a testament to our lateral-thinking abilities.
Sex offenders are exactly the same. Just when you think you’ve heard it all someone comes up with a new one.
‘What did your psychologist in prison say about that?’
‘He said maybe I could have some kind of sleep disorder or something.’
‘Uh huh.’
I never believe what the bad guy tells me about another professional. It’s possible that happened, but I’m not going to assume it did unless I can check it out myself. Besides, it’s irrelevant to where I’m going.
‘Look, John,’ I say, putting my paper and pen down on the desk, ‘there’s two ways we can do this. I can play the polite shrink and ask you all these polite little shrink questions, or I can tell you what I really think. If we go the polite way it’ll be easier on you, but it won’t help you. If you want me to be really honest it’ll be a lot harder, because I’m not going to be gentle, but you might actually get something out of it.’
Now, there are two main reasons I’m doing this. Firstly, I want to signal to him that we’re going to have a different conversation than he might have had with his last shrink. Whatever they talked about, John is still very distorted in his thinking, and thus still very dangerous. If I simply repeat what was probably a very polite and ‘professional’ conversation, we won’t get anywhere either. Secondly, I want John to bring himself into the conversation by choice. He’ll listen more if he’s asked me to be honest. As the saying goes, it ain’t the sausage, it’s the sizzle.
‘I want you to be honest,’ he says without hesitation.
‘Are you sure, because it ain’t gonna be pretty.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sure.’
‘OK then.’ I sit forward in my chair, just ever so slightly. ‘John, has anyone ever told you they think you’re lying?’
‘No.’
‘I see.’ I pause again. ‘John?’
‘Yeah?’
‘You’re lying.’ I don’t say it in an aggressive way, just quiet and matter of fact.
He blinks and sits back. ‘Oh.’
I shrug. ‘Yup.’
‘Is that what you really think?’
I nod. ‘Y
up. And the psychologist in jail probably thought exactly the same thing too. He just didn’t tell you because he was too polite.’
‘Oh.’
We sit there in silence for a few moments. ‘Why do you think that?’ he asks, and he isn’t defensive or upset, he really wants to know. His reactions are confirming my initial impressions.
‘Because you’re not a bad man.’
He frowns. ‘You think I’m lying because I’m not a bad guy?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘I’ve been doing this a long time, John, and I’ve talked to lots of people who’ve hurt children like you have. There are basically two kinds: the bad ones who do bad things and don’t give a damn, and the good ones who do bad things and it eats them up inside. None of us like to face the bad things we do. None of us. I think this thing is eating you up inside.’
‘I still don’t get it,’ he says, and he’s sweating big time. John is scared because he knows he’s about to go somewhere he doesn’t want to go.
‘Shall I tell you what happens inside your head?’ I ask.
He swallows, and to his credit, he says, ‘OK’.
‘When you think about it, when you really think about what you did, it makes you sick. You wonder how you could have done such a thing. It confuses you, because you know that isn’t who you are, not who you really are. Except the thing you can never escape is that it is. That is who you really are, because you did those things to that poor little girl.
‘And you stood up and pleaded guilty in court because your lawyer told you that was the smart thing to do, that you’d get a lesser sentence. But then when that was all done you couldn’t bring yourself to admit it, not out loud. You couldn’t bring yourself to say the words because that would make it true, and you don’t want it to be true, so you came up with this stupid story. And you repeated it. And you told yourself it was true even though you knew it was a lie.’
He’s sitting there, dead still, listening to every word.
‘But it hasn’t helped, because you feel worse now than before. You’ve done your time but inside you still feel like shit because you’ve never owned up. You pleaded guilty in court but you’ve never said it to yourself. And it’s even worse than that because there are still times when you think about what you did with her and it turns you on. You remember what it felt like when you were raping her. And that’s the thing that makes you feel the sickest of all, that’s the thing that makes you feel like such a shit. The fact that it still happens in your head. Just like all those times afterwards, when you’d lie in bed feeling sick with guilt and fear, telling yourself you’d never do it again, and at the same time knowing you would.’
I pause, and the silence feels huge.
‘I can’t help you if you won’t take the first step, John. I can’t do anything if you won’t face up to this thing. I can’t, but the truth is that even if I could, I wouldn’t. You don’t get to come here for free, stuff that. This shit costs. You have to give something up if you want to see me.’
He swallows again. ‘What?’
If I’d asked him for money at that moment he would have happily written out a cheque. But of course I don’t want his money—I want something much more than that.
‘Give up this dirty lie, John.’
‘I…’ he starts to say, but I cut in.
‘Have a care, John. Think carefully about what you say next because this is a one-time-only offer. You’re about to choose who you want to be from here on, you’re about to make the most important decision of your life. These are big stakes so whatever you do, have a care.’
He pauses for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is more measured, but there are tears in his eyes. ‘What do I do?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘Tell me about the first time.’
And this is the point; this is where I hold my breath and hope. After the longest time he drops his head and starts to speak. ‘It was in my bedroom,’ he says. ‘Her mum was out…’
‘John?’ I cut in.
He looks up.
‘Don’t look down, that shit is for liars. What you’re doing now is hard, and it’s some pretty awful stuff we need to talk about, but don’t look down. The truth is something men do face to face.’
He nods, sighing. It is a very sad sound. ‘OK.’
‘Start again,’ I say.
And he does.
I only got to see John that one time because his parole period ended a couple of weeks later. He wanted to come back and see me, and tried to pressure the system into letting him come back but it didn’t work. Once you’re out, you’re out. The last time I spoke to him he said he was thinking about writing a letter to his MP.
I’m sure there will be some who think my calling him a liar wasn’t very nice. They will probably say it was disrespectful. Perhaps not surprisingly, I disagree. I think that it would be more disrespectful to think that and not say it, or to say it in such a convoluted and ‘polite’ way that he wouldn’t have heard. John was trapped in his lie, and he needed a way out. He’d had months of counselling and nothing had shifted. Not a thing.
All I did was tell him the truth. I respected him enough to tell him what I really thought. I don’t fake nice. I say it as I see it. My guys will always know where they stand with me. If I want John to be honest with me, I figure I owe him the same in return. Down here that’s the only kind of respect that counts.
And, as far as I could tell, he seemed to value that. If he didn’t, I can’t imagine why he would have pushed so hard to come back.
Like I said, my nice and your nice are probably not the same thing.
NECK PAIN
MOST OF MY WORKING days are strange, but some are far stranger than others.
It’s just after two and I wander out into the waiting room, looking for some idle chatter from the person who runs the reception desk at my consulting rooms. There’s a clean-cut young man sitting there and he looks up as I walk in.
‘Nigel?’ he asks.
I frown slightly, because as far as I knew I had a free space. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m Gerard,’ he says, standing.
‘Hi Gerard.’
Now, not being the most organised soul, it’s not unheard of for me to occasionally double-book appointments, or have people turn up when I’m not there. I’ve learned over the years to think quickly and cover the gaps. Clearly Gerard knew who I was and was expecting to see me. I had a free space, so no worries.
‘Come through,’ I say, faking seamless competence.
We go through and sit down. I notice he’s looking about at some of the weird toys and masks I have lying around, but that’s nothing new. Most people do.
I have quite a weird little collection of bits and pieces I’ve acquired over the years. It’s amazing the weird stuff you’ll find lying around if you take the time to look. One of my most prized possessions is a spiky rubber ball made of pointing fingers. It looks and feels awful. It’s also just the thing for bad guys who try and tell me it was just touching when referring to their sexual offending.
‘Really?’ I say, reaching for my little rubber ball of pointing fingers. ‘Hold out your hand.’
They often look at me nervously at this point. ‘Pardon?’
‘Hold out your hand,’ I repeat.
Invariably they do, looking a little uncomfortable, which is good. Uncomfortable is exactly where we want to be. If the guy is feeling comfortable, he isn’t working hard enough.
At this point I hold up my little rubber ball of fingers. ‘It’s good you just touched her,’ I say. ‘It could have been so much worse. You could, for instance,’ I continue as I slowly lean forward holding out my spiky ball of fingers, ‘have done something much worse. Touching isn’t so bad, is it?’ I ask, suspending it over his open palm, just letting it dangle there. ‘It’s not as if touching is as bad as the other things you could have done. Is it? And it’s not like it hurts them? Right
? I mean, there’s no bruises, no blood. Just a little skin on skin, right?’
At this point he usually swallows, or shakes his head, or smiles self-consciously.
‘In just a minute,’ I continue, ‘I’m going to do something, and when I do, I want you to try to keep believing that you just touched her. Try to keep believing that it wasn’t so bad. That it didn’t really hurt her.’
I pause, letting the moment drag out. Then I let the ball drop gently onto his outstretched sweaty palm. Kapow.
I suppose I could tell him that when he says just, he’s minimising what he did to make it easier on himself; that just touching hurts kids as much as anything else, but I figure my way he gets the message in a whole different way. I don’t want him to ‘just’ understand the content, I want him to feel it.
Another goody that no self-respecting psychologist should be without is rubber vomit. This is particularly useful when dealing with angry adolescents who don’t want to talk. The best thing is to sit there in silence for about five minutes, then casually pick up the rubber vomit hidden under your chair and throw it at the wall where—because of its particular adhesive qualities—it sticks like a limpet.
You then look back at your slightly stunned teenager: ‘Cool, huh?’ you say. More times than not it at least gets a conversation going.
Or plastic dog poo. You just gotta have plastic dog poo. I use mine with guys who are playing the ‘I know it was wrong but I really cared about her/him’ excuse for sexually abusing kids. These guys will talk at length about how nice they really are and all the nice things they did for the kid. In that situation you just put the dog poo in the middle of the floor and ask him what it is.
‘Well…it’s dog shit.’
‘Uh huh,’ I usually nod. ‘And if I stuck some flowers in it?’
He pauses, as if it’s a trick question. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It’d be dog shit with flowers in it.’
‘OK.’
‘And if I sprinkled glitter and perfume on top? What would it be then?’
