May 2007

(Unfortunately, due to technical issues, we are unable to reprint the newsletter as it was originally published. The following is the main article featured in this edition. We apologize for any inconvenience.)

Experiencing Emerge: An Intern's Perspective

By Tarshe Derival, Emerge Intern

As a Lesley University Counseling Psychology Graduate student interning at Emerge, I questioned if my formal education and training thus far prepared me for working with this particular population.

My expectations of what I was about to dive into were overwhelming beyond belief. I questioned my desire to work with such a challenging population.

I started at Emerge in the fall of 2006. One of my roles was to co-lead a batterer's intervention group with an experienced male group leader. The batterer's intervention groups I co-lead with Ted German at times were intense.

I must be frank; identity was a huge factor for me. I am a Haitian-American woman of color. My experiences would of course be different from someone else. The group dynamic could change drastically depending on the identity of the people involved.

I thought at times that many of the participants of the group were not willing to hear me out about certain situations. The groups were constantly changing members because men transitioned over to the second stage and new members were being admitted. The fact the group members moved on made it easier for me to deal with different personality clashes.

I walked into these groups hoping for a complete turnaround for most of these men. I had thought that they would start the group one way but come out totally different.

I unfortunately did not get an opportunity to do a second stage group where change is more evident among the men. It is important to mention that in the first stage groups, there is more resistance and denial. Only minor shifts in behavior happen in the first stage.

Once I started to co-facilitate the groups, the first thing that I realized was that the men who were a part of my first stage groups were in fact different from each other. They were different races, nationalities, socioeconomic backgrounds, had different professions and of course all of them came with different points of view. I realized that I could not just bunch them up and put them into one "box." I learned that it is important to take each individual man and meet him where he was at.

I have engraved in my mind that I cannot change these men. I can only hope that something said in group hits home for them and they choose to change their behavior.

My other role during the past year at Emerge was doing the 14 session anger management program which served men who had not been violent or controlling toward an intimate partner. I truly enjoyed the anger management sessions. The clients that I worked with came from all different backgrounds.

For the majority of my clients, patterns of abuse included either road rage incidents or fights with other people in bars or clubs. Their angry behavior took many forms and had different intensity levels.

Many of the people that I saw were resistant to coming because they were court mandated to do anger management sessions.

I did my anger management sessions using a therapeutic style. I found it productive to let the client speak and process their experiences and examine their abusive behavior. I provided information about how to look at and change their violent or controlling behavior and hoped that by the end of the fourteenth session they took something from our sessions that motivated them want to change their behavior.

I learned a great deal doing my internship at Emerge. My purpose was to learn about abuse, control and violence and help as many people as I could to understand their anger and abusive behavior. I am honored to have had the privilege to work at Emerge. It is a tough job to do this work day in and day out. I commend the staff at Emerge for the wonderful and hard work that they do every day with these clients.

As the end of the academic year draws near and my internship at Emerge comes to an end, I reflect back to all the groups and all the clients I have seen and I think to myself, "What a remarkable experience!" I am so grateful to have had this opportunity. I would like to give a special thanks to Susan Cayouette, David Adams, Ted German, and Christopher Hall. Thank you for making my internship at Emerge an intriguing and productive learning experience.

For information on Emerge internship and volunteer opportunities, click here.