Cop, Substitute Teacher, Group Home Staff, and Prison Guard: What Those Jobs Taught Me About the Word "No"

A look at the most important behavioral shift we saw.

Nell Bernstein/The Imprint

My career has taken me on some twists and turns over the years.

I have walked into houses on domestic violence calls as a military police officer and put parents in handcuffs as their children watch from a cracked bedroom door. I have walked into classrooms as a substitute teacher where previous subs refused to come back, leaving in tears because of the kids heckling. I have walked into group homes full of boys just out of juvi for trying to stab staff at the last group home. I have walked through the heavy metal doorways of prisons and stood with the men who victimized and abused the kids in those group homes; knowing full well that most of the kids who end up in foster care group homes will themselves end up harming others and repeating the cycle.

Most of these boys carried diagnoses. Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which is the label clinicians give to a minor who is chronically defiant, angry, and argumentative with authority. Conduct Disorder, which is the next rung, what they call a minor whose behavior has moved past defiance into actually violating the rights of other people. Stealing. Assaulting. Hurting animals. Setting fires. The kinds of things that land a kid in juvenile detention which is where most of these boys had already been. And at eighteen, if the pattern continues, Conduct Disorder becomes Antisocial Personality Disorder. ASPD. The adult diagnosis for someone who has no functioning conscience about other people. No remorse. No empathy. A pattern of using and harming others without it costing him anything internally. This is the pipeline. ODD at eight. Conduct Disorder at twelve. ASPD at eighteen. Most of these boys were already on that ladder by the time the system showed up and most of them will end up incarcerated as adults.

There are some patterns I observed in all those roles, and it started to feel like looking at the same population at different stages of the same ride. The man I cuffed at two in the morning was once a boy in a group home like the one I staffed. The boy in that unit had a father who got arrested in front of him. The man on my tier in the prison was both of them, grown up, and putting more vulnerable humans on the victim to predator conveyor belt.

I spent a long time thinking the work was about anger. Teaching boys to regulate, to understand on a physiological level that they could communicate their isssues without screaming or becoming violent.

Eventually, I found what appeared to be a single behavioral pattern that, if reversed, would signal a pro-social cascade of growth and development that would eventually lead to stable foster home placement and escape from the cycle of abuse.

What changed?

Learning to take “no” for an answer changed everything.

Not feeling wounded or insulted or hurt by a boundary meant respecting others validity as a living being.

It meant understanding that your worth isn't dependent on others doing what you want them to do.

It also meant they developed an awareness that the person telling them no had an inner world as rich and real as his own. That what another person wants to do with themselves is theirs, and belongs to them, and is not his to manipulate or punish or take.

I see adults who can’t handle being told no. Who rage at a closed door. Who treat every no as a transgression rather than a boundary. Somewhere back there, nobody taught them. And somewhere ahead of them, someone is going to pay for it.

We spend billions on the back end of this. Prisons, courts, victim restitution. The front end costs a fraction and works better. Teach a child that it's ok not just for them to say no, but also for others to say no.

So, how do we restore empathy, particularly in young men, and avoid creating more predators?

We practice with ourselves and others, saying and hearing “no.”

That's what I think, at least.

What do you think?