My Passion Lies in Helping Others

Submitted by: Margaret Phillips

(Warning: This article may contain triggers for individuals who have experienced sexual abuse or family loss through suicide.)

In my family, my mother was a psychology major and worked as a school guidance counselor while my father was the county sheriff. Professionally, I ended up somewhere in the middle. After graduating from college, my first job was as a juvenile probation officer working with young people who were getting into trouble in the inner city. My clients were impacted by extreme poverty and community crime.

At that time, in the early 1970s, the drugs were definitely out there, but they were not our primary problem. Crime was the bigger issue in the inner city where I was working. I wasn’t getting involved with the areas and populations that had substance use issues at that time but rather those who suffered various levels of abuse. I dealt with all abuse, whether it was physical, sexual, mental or emotional. This was also a time which pre-dated many child abuse laws. There were young girls being sexually abused by family members – fathers, brothers, uncles, boyfriends – and the only recourse for assistance was to pull the girls out of their homes and place them in detention homes for their protection.

Again, at that time no one was talking about sexual abuse and in most cases the mother and/or father would never put the abuser out of the home. In those instances, that made pulling the child out of his or her home the only option.

My passion was born as I wanted to work with those abused and neglected children.

I ended up leaving the city where I was living and I went closer to home to work in the juvenile and detention court system as a probation officer. This would have been the mid-1970s and child abuse laws were starting to be written with enforcement coming shortly thereafter. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I wanted to help these children in a much deeper capacity. That meant going back to graduate school for my masters in social work. As a probation officer, I was limited in the amount of assistance or ongoing support I could offer. Everything I did was really within the court system to legally get the children safe, but I felt I needed to do more.

Working with the juvenile court system meant I was on call all of the time, so I couldn’t do that job and go to graduate school. In order to reach my goals, I transferred into the adult court system. Even in adult probation, I still worked a great deal with abuse, but it was from the other side. I was now dealing with the abusers.

In most cases, the adult abuser had been sexually abused as child themselves and they couldn’t break the cycle. I had one case in particular where several young boys were sneaking out of their homes to go down the street to a gay couple’s home to get pot. In return, the gay men would request sexual favors of these boys. Later on, one of the abused young boys returned as an adult and murdered one of his abusers. He was sentenced to life in prison for the murder. Another abuser, once caught, went to prison, and another was ordered out of the state never to return. Remember, this was still in the infancy of child abuse laws and no one discussed sexual abuse.

One of the saddest cases I ever had while working in the adult probation system involved a gentleman who was an alcoholic. He had a great family, a wife, and four wonderful kids. But when he drank, he drove, which meant he had multiple DUI arrests. After the first few, he was sentenced for a mandatory prison term. He went away and served his year, vowing to never drink again. Well, he ended up relapsing, driving, and getting caught. He had multiple charges in several localities and with his prior record, it wasn’t looking good for him. However, his attorney assured him that the judge would be lenient and he could end up with work release.

In court, the judge didn’t do any such thing but rather sentenced this man back to prison. The attorney pleaded but to no avail. This gentleman requested that he be allowed to return home to get some belongings and say goodbye to his family before being ordered to prison. The judge agreed but under the one condition that the attorney would be responsible for seeing him to the home and back to the jail for processing. While at the home the man said he would run to the basement to grab something and be right back upstairs. The attorney waited upstairs while the man committed suicide in the basement.

In total, I stayed in the adult probation and parole system for about five years into the early 1980s before staring my own family. I decided to get out of the court system and move into employee assistance so I could have time to raise my children.

During my time working in employee assistance programs, I was exposed to a greater degree of substance use disorders. While this was a population I wanted to help, it did hit a little too close to home. My second husband was an alcoholic and went treatment three times in our first three years of our marriage.  Thankfully he’s been sober since.
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Looking back, there was substance use among my family members. When I was a child, my father never drank to extremes, but after a catastrophic flood in our community in 1969, he began to have a problem after he saw and dealt with the extensive loss of life and devastation done by that flood. It just got to him. He ended up commuting about two hours away from home to work. That meant that he was alone in another city during the week with nothing to do outside of work.

My family ended up conducting an intervention for my father and he accepted help and got sober. My youngest brother was an alcoholic and literally drank himself to death. I also had a first cousin who committed suicide as the result of his alcoholism. These are some of the reasons where I didn’t want to work directly with a population where substance use was the primary diagnosis. It just hit too close to home for me. However, if there was different primary diagnosis such as mental health, abuse, or other trauma I was good with it.

There was one client that was the oldest girl in a family of four. The mother had passed away and the father brought in nannies to help with the children so he could continue to work. The children’s ages ranged from seven down to a one-year-old. The father married one of the nannies who had two other children of her own. The step-mother became very abusive to the four kids. The details were terrible. The children were very malnourished. Later on, social services was called into the home after someone reported seeing the children eating out of a trash can. The children were removed from the home and the parents went to prison for neglect– though not for as long as you may think.

The youngest boy would later commit suicide. The other three have done well considering what they went through. The oldest daughter was my client when she was a teenager and I’ve watched her become a successful woman with a family of her own. From where she started to where she is now was something I wasn’t sure would happen.

For every ten significant cases (by significant I’m referring to those diagnosed with severe substance use, mental illness, or trauma) I may get two “success” stories. Now don’t misunderstand me—I do see successes all of the time with those clients that come in needing help through temporary situations.

You have to hold on to those smaller successes to get you through the times when you just can’t save someone. It’s those clients that have endured so much for so long that tend to pull at your heartstrings. I have one woman that I saw for over ten years who had the trauma of sexual abuse as a child topped with a significant substance use disorder. I started seeing her when she was about 30 years old and struggling. She was lucky because she had a huge support system that wouldn’t give up even when she had long ago given up on herself. I still keep in touch with her today. I’m extremely proud of her and others who I’ve gotten to watch grow in their recovery journey. These are the things that make me extremely proud to do what I do every single day. I truly love what I do.

There needs to be switch you can turn off when you leave the office so that you don’t get pulled into the tragedies of other people which then ends up becoming yours. I have a family and I have my horses. Lots of horses! That is what keeps me grounded and able to be there for every client that comes into my office. I find satisfaction is seeing my clients succeed at whatever level that is for them.

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