Author: murrayof

Adolescence – School Episode – Take it Personally

murrayof

I watched episode two of the Netflix series Adolescence last night. 

It’s the episode that takes place at school, and it’s easy to see what’s wrong with the school depicted. It’s something I’ve often seen in real life.

The problem is that the school staff is not taking it personally. 

Many illustrative examples of this follow throughout the episode as they roam the hallways and classes, but the first time it got my attention was early. One student steps into another student’s personal space, aggressively backing him against a wall, and demanding money. A teacher walks by and tells him to stop. The bully stops. The teacher continues on to their destination. 

The teacher has achieved something close to nothing with this interaction, because the teacher didn’t take it personally.

It’s not nearly enough for teachers and school staff to simply tell students to follow rules in a technocratic and impersonal manner. While it is necessary to maintain basic rules, that is a very low bar for what we can expect from school staff. It cannot, on its own, engender a healthy and safe school culture.

Now, there is a certain way in which I encourage school staff to take it personally, and it is not in the I/ego sense. When it comes to their own personal ego and vulnerabilities, school staff often need help with not taking it personally. Not taking things personally, in this ego-based sense, is one of the greatest gifts one develops when becoming a mental health professional, and I strongly encourage teachers to develop this.

What we must take seriously and personally is the authority vested in us as school staff. In an effort to remain safe and secure, the students have a narrow range of options and no authority. School staff, on the other hand, have many options and are part of a whole network of adult authority.

The students are counting on us to keep their school environment safe. What you should take personally is any assumption that you might abdicate such a responsibility. -That you would look away, whether they are acting out, or in danger.

The bully demanding money is taking their aggression out on their target, which is very personal to both the bully and their target. (And to be clear, the interaction is not about money, it’s about dominance.) That personal aggression is intense and will not simply evaporate. The school staffer’s job is to get the bully to transfer their sense of conflict to the school staffer, who is standing in for the expectations of the entire school institution. You transform the conflict from existing between the bully and the target (who has no or limited options in protecting themselves), to the conflict existing between the bully and the institution of school (which has many options and a network of supporting adults).

When you are a school staffer, the authority vested in you means you are “on watch”, and the vibe about behavior that threatens a safe learning environment should be “not on my watch.”

I also encourage teachers and school staff to pay attention to not just the obvious incidents, but also to the sense of threat in the environment. This is something teachers should largely trust their personal sense about, maintaining classes that are safe-enough and also feel safe-enough. Sometimes, I see the bar set so low that nothing is considered an offense or worthy of concern unless a student is getting injured. This is a desperately low bar, and we must aim much higher than that. We can’t have a real learning environment otherwise.

More teachers and school staffers should add incredulity to their mix of available responses to school behavior. Violence is both terrible and absurd. It is an absolutely horrible way, and an absolutely ridiculous way, to address a need or challenge. I find it helpful to respond with incredulity to students who are threatening violence. In doing so, I am projecting onto them the basic requirements of civilization. Your response to threatening language may be as simple as “No, you’re not.” The vibe, which usually goes unsaid, is: The idea that you would act out violently on my watch, in the school where I work, is absurd. I take it personally that you would imagine I would stand for such a thing. 

In addition to shutting down the idea of violence, we must have empathy for our students and be prepared to work with them in developing and accessing non-violent ways to address their needs and challenges.

Student-centered Group Counseling Webinar – Sponsored by the American Group Pscychotherapy Association

murrayof

Registration is open for my webinar on May 4th through AGPA: Student-centered group counseling.

Are you a counselor working in a school? Do your groups sometimes feel stuck? Do you get the feeling that they could be richer and more effective?

This webinar will be fun, very relevant to your work, and brings fresh perspective to school counseling.

You will also earn 1.5 CEs over an engaging 90 minutes.

I’ve developed student-centered group counseling over my career while leading thousands of groups with children and adolescents in schools. Student-centered counseling blends the richness of a process-orientation with the imperatives and opportunities of the school environment.

I’ve also written about the topic in my book The Therapeutic Inclusion Program.

Join me for a fun and interesting 90 minutes about what’s possible with counseling groups in schools.

https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=kxLysGHVsEag3MjOKx-2dXTJc1VYMRtFrDfjp0PmF_9UMlVCQjFOQUE1UFJTQU9BMzAxQ1cxRTUzRy4u&route=shorturl

Higher Ed: Your Students are Being Abducted and We All Need to Hear From You!

murrayof

I’ve spent a lot of time in schools -between attending plenty of school, working in schools K-12, and teaching graduate students. Also, I have a lot of friends and social media connections in education and higher education. Like many professionals, especially those working directly with patients in therapy, I’ve mostly kept my politics out of my professional public presence. 

My game changer was Rumeysa Ozturk being swept off the sidewalk by government thugs. For me, it marked the difference between living under a wanna-be authoritarian regime and an actual authoritarian regime. People are being disappeared. (Here’s a United States Disappeared Tracker, made by data and public policy expert Danielle Harlow.) While there is no fine-line distinction between government and politics, I feel my concerns are more governmental than political. Some of the government’s main authoritarian efforts are directly impacting my professional community. Not talking about it doesn’t seem like an option to me.

As I look at professional conversations online, especially toward empowered individuals in higher education, I don’t see much talk about the government’s authoritarian efforts. This is disheartening. I must be looking toward academic elites for the same reason the Trump administration seeks to compromise them – because they have status and power in our culture. Their choices set an example for other institutions, organizations, and individuals. 

To the lack of vigorous protest from academic elites: On one hand, I’m happy to see that we are not all abandoning our posts, so to speak. Academics are still posting about their areas of specialty. This is one element of a healthy response. We have to keep doing the things we do well –  we have to maintain them. It keeps us grounded. Our knowledge and skill are the nuts and bolts that hold the structure and purpose of academia together. Otherwise, we are prone to becoming just another gust of wind in a chaotic storm, just another reaction for someone else to react to.

We also need to speak up loud and clear for fundamental, constitutional rights, and in defense of academic employees, especially students! 

It is going to be a tough four years. Take a moment to accept that. Let it sink in. Yes, it’s awful. But it’s also finite. And as Trump increasingly talks seriously about a third term, keeping it to four rough years depends on us standing up together.

On top of students being abducted, professors are losing their jobs. More will lose their jobs. We will have to take care of each other, and find our way through it. The alternative is complicity in undermining and degrading our institutions, our students, this nation, and ourselves. 

The Trump administration’s playbook is to invite you down the road of degradation with the most inviting baby-steps, which they will try to frame as reasonable. But once you start down that path, it becomes increasingly difficult to turn around. 

The degrading challenge sounds like this to me: 

I hear you value democracy, free thinking, internationalism, diversity, equity, inclusion, and the free exchange of ideas? How nice. People think we are so different! But I know better, we have so much in common. The important stuff. You and I… we have status and wealth. That’s the real team we are on. -The rich, the important, the successful. And, with the power of the US government, when I force you to choose between your democratic principles or staying with our team, on the side of status and wealth – I know you, and I know what you will choose. 

And the degradation begins.

I support anyone who wants to speak up and act up in support of any of our brothers and sisters who have been abducted, assaulted, and disappeared. For me, it makes sense to respond locally. I am speaking up for Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University child study and human development doctoral student abducted by government thugs for contributing to a thoughtful opinion piece published in the university newspaper.

Furthermore, speaking of degradation, the Trump administration is using the genocide of Palestinians to degrade all Americans. That is part of the reason they are choosing this wedge issue to attack University campuses. -To stoke division, confusion, and distress. If we won’t speak up clearly against the murder, displacement, and starvation of Palestinians – the death toll now greater than 50,000 – they will know they have degraded us sufficiently to not speak up for anyone.

“End DEI” – What Part of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Do You Have a Problem With?

murrayof

The Trump administration unveiled its “End DEI” portal about a week ago. 

I encourage you – teachers, school counselors, and administrators – do not let this obvious scare tactic shake your resolve to stand by your values

The portal asks for reporting of “illegal discriminatory practices”, and then references several long-standing civil rights statutes in fine print. Nothing has changed about what is illegal and what is not illegal. The Trump administration is throwing around the word “illegal” to frighten people, but the administration does not make the law, and the relevant laws have not changed. The administration is counting on educators and administrators being frightened, not reading the fine print, and not thinking critically. So, this is where we can defy their low expectations for us. Reach out to like-minded people for support, and lend heart to your wavering colleagues.

These issues will work their way through the courts over time. I don’t know what directions those cases will go, but I do know that is a process that takes time. In the meantime, carry on and stand up for your values. For me, those include truth, connection, engagement, and freedom of speech and expression.

And what is the point of “end DEI”? What part of diversity, equity, and inclusion does the Trump administration have a problem with? They might say that they have no problem with diversity per se and that they support equity, and that they support some types of inclusion. They would say they take issue with the conversations and approaches popular within the DEI movement. 

But the administration’s remedy is not engaging in the conversation, it is to “end DEI”. They would like us to just not talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. They want us to be afraid of talking about these issues. But there is no way to avoid issues of diversity and equity in our diverse nation, which is struggling under the weight of historically large income inequality. And there is no way to avoid the topic of inclusion within public institutions meant to serve a public of diverse abilities and resources. 

Because these issues are inescapable, avoiding them is just another means of grappling with diversity, equity, and inclusion. But, instead of engaging in dialogue, they seek to ban speech and frighten educators. We who choose to stand by our values and talk about the issues we confront daily in American life: the law is on our side, and the Bill of Rights is on our side. Basic reason is on our side  -that as a nation we grow and develop through dialogue, not through bullying and banning and trying to frighten people. 

So, I encourage you to take courage, while we wait and see how the courts process the administration’s bizarre proclamations and actions. But, it’s important that you stand up for your values while we wait, otherwise, it doesn’t matter what the courts rule, the Trump administration will have already won.

Student-centered Group Counseling in K-12 Schools – An Online Learning Session

murrayof

On Sunday, May 4th I’ll be providing an online learning session where you can earn CEs, through the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Groups are a very popular form of providing counseling in schools.

Groups also can be a source of frustration for school counselors, with a sense of missed opportunity.

In this session, I will share about effective group counseling in schools.
-Groups where students will develop self-regulation and build social ability, while remaining organized around the concerns of the students. Student-centered.

I’m excited to share what I’ve learned and developed with school educators, counselors, and other specialists who run groups in schools.

Registration link: https://portal.agpa.org/commerce/store?productId=commerce-merchandise%23AGPA-AU20250504CE