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A Family Story These are the stories of some of the individuals and families who have received help from Family Resources over the past year: I am a therapist at Family Resources. For almost a year, I've been working with Patti, who now is four years old. Patti may have been physically abused. She certainly was neglected. Patti remembers being with her mother, on a bus, when her mother collapsed from a drug overdose. Patti's father was uninvolved with the family, so she was placed with her maternal grandmother. When her grandmother died of a drug overdose, Patti was sent to foster care. Then her foster parent died. So much loss for a little girl... Patti was placed with another foster family, and her foster mother has been bringing Patti to Family Resources for play therapy. At first, Patti was mute, lying on the floor in my office. Sometimes she would yell at me, "You're bad, shut up!" Gradually, over the course of the past year, Patti has started to be able to talk about her feelings. She is playing with other children in more appropriate ways and doing better in her preschool. Her foster family is not able to adopt her, but an adoptive family is almost ready to take Patti. Her foster parents will be her godparents. Recently, both families went to the zoo together with Patti. Next year, Patti will go to kindergarten. I am optimistic that Patti will flourish in her new family, and I am humbled to have been a part of her life. Stacey is 28 and moved to Pittsburgh several years ago from another part of the country. She'd heard from her house mate that Family Resources is an agency that provides therapy for victims of child abuse and decided that, even though she is an adult now, she needed help. When she was a child, she had been physically and sexually abused. Her mother, who had schizophrenia, physically abused her. Her mother's boyfriend sexually abused her, starting when she was only four years old. Stacey had been an art student in Pittsburgh, until she dropped out of school. She was depressed and thinking about suicide. With a therapist's help at Family Resources, Stacey began to think about how some of her current problems related to the experiences she had as a child. She began to focus again on her art, got a job developing photographs, and found she was very good at it. Stacey moved into her own apartment and began to take better care of her appearance. And she found a way to reconnect with her mother, able for the first time in years to acknowledge her own mother's difficult life and forgive her for not being able to care for and protect her as a child. Fran experienced physical and sexual abuse as a young girl at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. Then she was married at 14 to a man 10 years older than she was. Now in her late 40s and divorced, Fran called the police recently when her teenage son struck her after an argument about taking out the garbage. CYF directed the family to the Parent-Teen Conflict Program at Family Resources. The therapist working with Fran and her son referred Fran to the psychiatrist at Family Resources, and she has since been in treatment for depression. Fran was unemployed and suffering from chronic pain, and she confided in the therapist that she could not read. She is making progress in her own treatment plan, trying to overcome the challenges from her childhood and learning to be a more consistent and empathetic parent. Fran's son, who is a father at 17, also is receiving treatment services at Family Resources, taking more responsibility for his infant daughter, learning to better manage conflict with his mother, and making plans for what he will do after graduation. |
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