Psych Adaptations: Finding a Place to Be Yourself

• Psychological Adaptations: A Model and It's Relevance by James Brody, 4/24/97
  
  

We have had a "bucket of mush" model about learning and social performance. The hollow challenge from JB (not the play) still echos, "Give me any child ..." I never believed it; I once studied piano and quit because notes rather than melody came from the large black box with the cold white keys. There is no amount of training that would put me with Rubinstein. I don't have those skills; I am developmentally delayed.

I worked for a dozen years in a state residential institution with a good friend. I used my skills in the Psychology Department for organizing forms, treatment plans, and goals into task analyses.(1) My friend used his skills to repair teeth. He also had useful, powerful Adaptations for roaming halls, telling jokes, organizing football pools, and making friends with all the female staff. He was gentle, funny, lively, and never too busy to be helpful.

I later moved to another institution and my friend's son joined the staff in my new meadow. He often worked alone, in a darkened hall, part of Housekeeping. Federal surveys were incessant; the halls had to glisten as did our records at that time. Housekeeping was a hostile, dangerous setting. I tried to help but used ineffective behavioral strategies. His output lessened, he slid into a confused, helpless, depression and left.

I next met him some years later, but at the mall. He paces the length of it, talking to female clerks, telling jokes, and helping anyone he passes with one chore or another. He smiles, he's popular, he's doing about what his father did. The son even periodically has a small group of handicapped people with him. He's found a niche where he excels in comparison with the rest of us. After all, I still can't tell jokes to strangers and rarely initiate conversations with them. He clearly outperforms me in that environment; his Adaptations are superior to mine.

Dad retired and most recently travels the mall with his son twice a week, sometimes to different shops, still telling jokes, being helpful, sharing small talk, and spending time. Both of them seem happy. Watching the two of them is like looking at faded negative held up to the light. At one angle, the darks and lights are backward from life; shift the angle a bit and the darks and lights reverse, the negative becomes a visual positive. In watching the son, I have the sense that I've seen him before but 15 years earlier in an older frame. I think I like what I see but I'm not sure that I ought to be seeing it. I also wish I'd understood about Brian Goodwin's quote much earlier and protected my friend's son from a lot of embarrassment and pain.

Note:

1) I even published training materials through a committee process just as my father later did in Viet Nam; and like him, I was junior in rank to an array of other staff but chaired the committee and did much of the writing.

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