PART 1 of A Short History on a Special Practice: How The Center KSQ Came to Be
This year marks an important date. The seed that was the start of The Center KSQ completes ten years and begins its way into its eleventh. This is truly unimaginable given everything that this little change-driven place has been through. It started out as a lot of naysaying and then turned into something much bigger than was ever really intended. Or thought possible.
I graduated from Thomas Jefferson's trauma counseling program in 2015 with no real idea what I was going to do. I was caught somewhere between continuing to work in a detox unit, helping patients transition from (mostly) heroin to clean and sober living, and secondary work in longer-term rehabilitation. This was important work to me, and given my own lived experiences, deeply meaningful. I met such wonderful people there from all walks of life. Every color of the rainbow, every imaginable and unimaginable story. And so. much. trauma. So much.
But the weird thing about that place was that trauma wasn't really something we talked about. We talked about addiction. We talked about coping. We talked about med management. We talked about 90 in 90. But we didn't really ever talk too much about the essential question that was the foundation of everything I was learning in graduate school: "What happened to this person?" or maybe even, "What did NOT happen for this person?"
This was hard for me as someone who was fully immersed in trauma work and trauma education. What happens to people when we get hurt? How do we find ways to give ourselves a sense of relief, a sense of short-term safety, even if we can't outwardly understand why we need it? How do we even define trauma? Was the trauma that my loved-ones who deployed the only real trauma there is? What about my friends who kept their sexual assaults quiet? Or those that I knew who were hit and screamed at as kids? Or my gay friends who spent their whole lives pretending to be someone they're not? How do these pains then maybe become friends with addiction? How is there maybe a link between the two?
To me, trauma comes in all shapes, sizes, and responses. Addiction certainly started to make a ton of sense to me. People I loved were sick or dying or dead... or lost from their addictions. Traditional mental health rhetoric told me it was an allergy. It told me that mental health was just... DNA. That addiction and mental health were just a bad stroke of luck. But was that true? Was that enough?
I was a passionate student, and when I was not with my kids, I was in the books. I was in the research. I was in the library night after night seeing more and more to the contrary. Neuro-sensitive people are more prone to addiction. Adults who were abused or neglected as children were more prone to addiction. But what about my loved ones, some of them with wealth beyond imagination, following a dangerous path of life-risking drugs with no capacity to stop? How did that make sense? I mean, after all, perceptively by American standards, they had EVERYthing. But did they?
Trauma made it make sense for me. I ate, drank, slept, and breathed everything I could between full-time school, full-time work, full-time kids, and full-time clinicals to understand this phenomenon. And then one day, I finally did:
Trauma is the same in its most fundamental ways: what it can do to our nervous systems, to our behaviors, to the way we see ourselves, and to the way that we see the world.
I just happened to come from a community where the trauma here sometimes drives a BMW. Simple as that.
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I hated having to make the choice to leave working in rehab. When I was there, every day was a devotion through my clinical work to teach my patients about things the 12-step rooms and the recovery guides were not teaching them. I would teach them about the brain, about the nervous system, about everything I was learning in graduate school. But in a way the average person would understand. I loved that intersection of time in my life. I grew so much there over those several years. And all thanks to the patients that trusted me, and to my clinical friends who were open to a different point of view.
In hindsight, and to no surprise, one of my best friends there became one of my mentors: Jim Phalan (1945-2021), a Vietnam veteran, former DE State Police, and a sober person and counselor who helped other addicts find their way to recovery. He called me Sparky, and I called him awesome.
He was a very skeptical person when it came to me at the jump, but that quickly changed as he listened to my lectures to a room full of 150 people fighting for their lives. I taught them the science of why it can be so hard to stop... the mechanisms that perpetuate these dangers. Yes, God can help. And there is also science, and medicine, and research. This recovery thing... it can be a both-and.
I knew I had made it when, years later, I stopped in to see Jim. He showed me that he kept Sparky's card in the top drawer of his desk. Forever friends, and one of the most respectable men I know from my time there. With an extra soft spot in my heart for our combat veterans, when I learned a few years later that Jim had died, it was one of my harder days. But if anything, I knew that he was redeemed, and that who he called his Higher Power was ready to bring him home. There is no doubt in my mind that Jim did the work of angels, and his legacy lives on in offices like mine, and in the homes of sober and healthy people across this state and beyond.
But despite loving being there, I did have to go. Community mental health does not tend to take good care of therapists. Most places, unless they are very intentionally designed, become puppy mills for clinicians. Very, very low pay, student loan debt, the cost of living, and caseloads that hardly the average human could tolerate make for often unlivable wages and work environments. Despite the desire to provide quality access to mental health, clinicians are often lambs walked to slaughter in our field. If you know a friend who has worked in a large-scale agency, just ask them about their work conditions. It's BRUTAL. And there is much work to be done in this sector of healthcare. Sadly, regardless of how long I have been in this role or who sits in Washington, our country continues to fall prey to many promises but little follow-through regarding our wellness. Maybe one day I will live to see a different world.
Between my own lived experience and the lives I witnessed in those rooms, healthcare delivery resembled a tourniquet when these people needed and deserved the highest calibre surgical team.
Again, I hated to. But I left. I had two children at home counting on me and only me. This place, and what it offered for post-graduate life, could not make our ends meet. I had to put my family first.
So, in the summer of 2015, I set out to start a practice of my own. One that would support Kennett Square, Unionville, West Grove, Chadds Ford, and all communities beyond. I wanted them to have a place to go for help, to get the same information that my patients were getting, and to start to create a ripple of change here in the places I called home.
And more than anything, because of our own experiences with addiction, I wanted to make sure that I would follow through on my commitment to care for my children to the best of my ability. I wanted to make sure that my boys didn't have to live through another generational cycle unbroken.
And so, in April of 2015, just a month away from graduating, a colleague and I found an office in Kennett Square to share. No part of me in my wildest imagination ever thought that little space could become what this place is today.
Stay tuned for more! And welcome to The Center KSQ!