by Anthony Gannon Robledo, Pre-Doctoral Intern

GHOSTS, UNRETRIEVED

Seated across from me in an empty classroom, an eleven-year-old client describes last night’s dream. As he doodles on a sheet of construction paper, he tells me, haltingly, of a funeral for a family member who died during the pandemic; in waking life, the funeral never happened. Then he remembers another dream from when he was five, foretelling the death of the same family member. He stops, as if on the edge of something.

I write from the shallow depths of pre-licensure, amidst an abyss of sociopolitical, cultural, and personal change. My clients, mostly elementary school boys, struggle with abandonment, the aftermath of violence, severe systemic pressures, or some combination thereof. My willpower is tested daily, and I find solace in Selma Fraiberg’s writing on transgenerational trauma (1994, 1974); indeed, I see many "ghosts in the nursery" as my client tells me his dreams, his ancestors swirling around, bidding for our attention.

Tú eres mi otro yo–I am you, you are me–is my community agency's framework, which I have at heart every day working with children of immigrant families, often conducting sessions in Spanglish. At the same time, my wife is home, pregnant with our first child. I choose to tell my clients about the pregnancy so my abrupt disappearance, when it comes, might not be a mystery. 

Nearly all my clients grapple with the sudden loss of a loved one. On a day I'm meeting a student’s mother, I remember the spectre of state agents arresting parents as they drop their children at school permeating my news feed. Every day, watching videos of forced separations, I feel an encounter with the state is inevitable.

One day, overwhelmed by a therapy group for boys, I attempt to banish a student from the group. "No," he says, digging into his chair. Like many of my clients, his family hails from Central America. Processing this interaction later, I recognize that, for all my best intentions, my motion to exile the student rhymes with current machinations of state power. For days afterwards, I can’t shake this moment when normativity, coloniality, and the clinician-as-state-agent stopped being abstractions and enacted themselves through me. I process my feelings in writing, attempt to repair the rupture, and successfully create a stronger therapeutic alliance. I realize it's working–I'm being trained!–amidst a deep shame.

When it's time for the birth of my child, I conduct formal terminations rather than working until the moment I’m forced to disappear. Terminating with my dreaming-student, I know I’ll likely never see him again; unbidden, he talks about his ghosts. I attempt to convey the impact his dreaming and drawings have had on me, offering him a folder of his creations I've saved. I tell him he's a good kid, but he shrugs it off. He accepts the drawings but doesn’t want to take them back to class, saying he'll pick them up later from the office.