Thirty Stories From Thirty Years: Story Number 1

By Tammi Pitzen, Executive Director of the Children's Advocacy Center of Jackson County

This is story #1 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

You can read all the stories here.

I quietly celebrated the beginning of my thirtieth year of a career in child protection a few months back.

I get asked a lot about how I have stayed the course so long in such a heart-wrenching field.

I used to think it was a rhetorical question and would flippantly answer, “If not me, then who?” And then all the studies and articles began coming out in “flooding” proportions on secondary trauma and compassion fatigue and I realized maybe they were sincerely wondering how I have continued and remained emotionally and mentally healthy. (Although I think there are days that some would debate this being true.)

I am setting out to answer this in a series of posts by telling stories from my career that were pivotal in moving me forward, timidly at times and forcefully at others, through the murk of the stagnating swampy waters of vicarious trauma.

My career began before I realized it had begun. It is almost like this “thing” — greater than myself — picked me and here I am.

Picture this…(If you are a Golden Girls fan from back in the day, you totally get this reference. If you are not…skip over it—indulge me in my 80’s reference and read on.) It is 1988, in the fall semester of my second year of college. I am sitting in an auditorium waiting for the first installment of my Child Abuse 101 class to begin. Yes. It was called Child Abuse 101. There were about 50 students in this class.

It was an easy elective for Social Work or Sociology majors. There was lectures, lots of discussion on social issues, and many, many slides of abuse related pictures and graphs. My entire framework on which the foundation of my life so far is about to be turned upside down, only I didn’t know that yet.

I was raised in a very conservative, very religious family in a very small community. I was sheltered from a lot of the bad in this world throughout my childhood. In that very first class, as I heard the statistical information on the rates of child abuse in this country and drilled down to my own state, I remember looking around and wondering why no one seemed shocked by this information. I remember thinking, “How can this be true?” and “Why had I never met anyone who had been abused?”

I also remember looking back and putting the pieces together of stories I had heard in high school about classmates who no longer lived with their parents, and the reasons used to explain why were being shattered like glass hitting the ground.

That may all seem a little dramatic, but in looking back, that “awakening” was THAT dramatic. From that class on, most of my course work was weaved around child abuse and system interventions.

And…so comes STORY NUMBER 1

I completed my Social Work Internship in 1990 on a very cutting edge, as in maybe the first in the state of Louisiana, child abuse team at the Ouachita Parish Sherriff’s Office. (That is pronounced “Washitall” for nonnative Louisianans.)

On my very first day on this team, I realized I was an adrenalin junkie and was hooked on the art of providing safety for children.

I had a very smart, strong, female detective as my role model of what I thought my career would look like. I was sitting at my desk for only about 20 minutes before loading up in an unmarked police car to head out into literally the unknown areas of the parish to pick up a sex offender accused of molesting a young female child. He took off into the nearby woods and all four officers, guns drawn, took off on a foot chase. I did not participate in this chase, but quietly got back into the car and locked the doors. This act was the source of much teasing and ribbing for the entirety of my internship. However, I must point out that I was the only unarmed person there—even the offender was brandishing a fire arm. Those two female detectives I was with came back out of the woods dragging that offender with the other two male cops “covering” them and I knew I had found “my people”.

I learned more about listening to children and understanding dynamics of child abuse in those four short months than I did in any of my social work classes. I learned more humility, more compassion, and more empathy from that team of detectives than I did in three and a half years of college courses.

I also learned my first lesson in self-care.

Never take yourself too seriously and always find something to laugh about every day. Not at the expense of victims or even at the expense of perpetrators, but just something…anything. Laughter is the best medicine.

I did not end up being a law enforcement officer as I had thought I would be. I instead started my career as a Crisis Investigator with the State of Louisiana’s Office of Community Services in the very small town I grew up in, investigating, in some cases, parents that were my classmates in high school.

I literally graduated on a Saturday and started on the next workday. There was a holiday or something in between.

I took with me every lesson learned during my internship. I never interviewed a child in those beginning days that I did not think of the soft gentle voice of my supervising detective reminding me of how the picture will be made complete if we pay attention to the little voice helping us to find the next piece of the puzzle.

Back then we were in the very early days of interviewing protocols. It seems odd to think there was a practice before there was a protocol. It also seems odd to think of these protocols, and the dramatic change in how we do our work, happened in my career span.

I always try to end my post with some call to action or some profound reflection. Today I simply want to acknowledge that intervening in cases of child abuse is hard work. It takes a toll. Self-care is not a luxury but a necessity. For me it has always been about humor—not at the expense of others, but generally at my own quirky behaviors.

There is no special magical potion that provides you armor against all the hurts. Find what works for you and build it into your life.

29 more stories to go!

This is story #1 in Tammi Pitzen’s series of 30 stories from her 30 years working in child welfare.

You can read all the stories here.

#ThirtyFromThirty #30StoriesFrom30Years #ACareerInChildProtection