"All behavior makes sense when you see it from the right perspective." 
"All of us are much more human than otherwise." (Harry Stack Sullivan) 

When I received my shiny new Master's in Social Work degree I felt the kind of idealism that is appropriate to a beginner in any field. I was full of hope and energy, believed most of what my professors had taught me, and could hardly wait to be given a chance to change a small part of the world. My first "real" case, however, taught me more valuable lessons than I had yet learned.

I went to work at an inner-city mental health center in Chicago that I felt would be a great learning experience. This agency served an area that was very poor, was an ethnic mix of black, white, Hispanic, Native American and Southeast Asian, and in addition was a dumping ground for patients from the state mental hospital who had no place else to go. Drugs and guns abounded. The staff who worked there felt, justifiably, that they had already seen it all. James, my first client, was carefully selected by my supervisor to temper my idealism with a healthy dose of reality.

To begin with, my client was in jail for the first six months. He was facing arson charges after setting a fire in the apartment he shared with his wife, who was pregnant, and their one year old daughter. I was told that my client was mildly retarded, with an IQ of about 75, and that his wife was schizophrenic. It was a mixed race marriage; James was black, Mary white, from the hills in Tennessee. Their relationship was regularly violent; both had shown up at the agency battered and bruised from their fights. Mary was unable to take psychotropic medication due to her pregnancy, and there was great concern about the safety of the child and the fetus. The therapist who worked with the wife told me all this with an air of hopeless resignation. Her goal was to help the wife get away from her husband, establish a stable living arrangement elsewhere, and make plans on how to care for the children.

Before this could take place, however, James was out of jail due to some mysterious workings of the Cook County court system and back home with his wife. I hardly knew what to expect at my first interview, but I got to know James as a big, limited man who could not understand his wife's condition. He seemed determined, however, to care for his babies and frustrated that he and his wife could never agree.

Before long, Mary had her second baby. The strain of caring for two was too much for her, and she abandoned James and the children. He tried to care for both singlehandedly for a few weeks, but we quickly agreed they needed to be in foster care. For the next two years James visited his children weekly, traveling an hour each way by bus. Meanwhile, he and I talked about his plans for the future while he grieved the loss of his wife. He made it clear that he had really loved her. He admitted to setting the fire; it was because he was so frustrated that she wouldn't listen to him that he set a small fire in a garbage can to get her attention. 

James eventually acceded to the request of the foster care agency to release the children for adoption, not before asking me what I thought he should do. On the principle that he should make his own decisions I tried to duck the question, but I think he knew what I thought. Anyway I felt responsible enough that I went to court with him the day he formally relinquished guardianship. It was hard for him
to understand how what he was doing was different from what Mary had done, and from what his own mother had done to him. James had grown up on the streets from the time he was 12. He was frightened and confused by lawyers and judges, and he loved his children and really enjoyed their weekly visits, but he did what he thought was best. 

Not long after this I got James into a sheltered workshop, where he would receive training in job skills and be paid for simple assembly work. I thought our work together was just about done, but James began complaining to me about his treatment at the workshop; they treated him like a child, he said. For instance, they would dock his pay if he kept his cap on or talked to his fellow workers. They wouldn't do that at a real job, he said; a real job might fire him if he didn't work hard enough, but they wouldn't dock his pay for what he considered childish infractions. While I privately agreed with him, I encouraged James to hang in there. 

Next thing I knew, I got an angry call from the workshop. James had robbed them, they said; the place had been broken into and James had been apprehended riding the bus at 3:00 in the morning with two of their adding machines under his arms. After James spent a couple of more weeks in jail, I convinced the workshop not to prosecute. When I saw James again, I was angrier at myself than I was at him. I hadn't listened to him; all he had wanted was to be treated like a man. His anger found a self-destructive expression when I didn't help him find an appropriate outlet.

It wasn't long after this that I moved on to another job, leaving someone else to try to work with James. It was hard for me to say goodby. James got me a card that said "To My Godfather." He was completely illiterate, and I don't know why or how he picked that out. As I look back on it now, I learned two very important lessons from James. The first is that all behavior makes sense when you
see it from the right perspective. His setting fires, his stealing from his workshop, all his actions were understandable when you consider his feelings and his limited means of expression. When you try hard enough to understand the other person's perspective, you can always see why people choose actions that on the surface seem foolish or self-destructive. 

The second lesson is that everyone has the same basic set of feelings. Since James I've worked with doctors, lawyers, and millionaires. All their problems come down to the same things; loving, and wanting to be loved; anger and frustration when rejected or hurt; shame and embarrassment when the anger or hurt is exposed; grief or depression when hope is lost. As Harry Stack Sullivan said, "All of us are much more human than otherwise."