How Wraparound Changed My Life—A Youth Partner Profile

Much of my childhood can be described very succinctly in three words: violence, chaos, neglect.

One of my earliest memories was standing behind my dad looking up at him having a conversation with a man at our front door. The man pulled out a knife and stabbed my dad in the side, and I remember watching my dad fall to the floor and bleed almost as if I was watching something on TV, something innocuous. I felt nothing about it, and for the longest time this was how I viewed many of the most traumatic events in my life: physical abuse, seeing my parents fight each other, being taken into foster care.

When I was taken away from my parents at nine years old, one of the social workers told me that I was brave for not crying. That has always stuck with me. I couldn’t understand or articulate it then, but I wasn’t being brave at all; I was oblivious, naively optimistic and comforted by the fact that I would still be with my two big brothers. I was still afraid to be away from my parents, and the longer I stayed in foster care, the more bitter, hopeless and depressed I felt.

I bounced around from foster home to foster home for a few years and became separated from my brothers. It wasn’t long before I had one of my first experiences with therapy. I was assigned a therapist who I’ve come to refer to as Clipboard Lady. I would come to dread our sessions. She made it a point of telling me what was wrong with me rather than asking me. She was often so negative that I would shut down entirely. Every word that came out of my mouth was matched with her pen scratching against her clipboard; my thoughts ran wild with what she could be writing and what pathologizing would surface as a result. The most important part for me though was that our sessions made me feel bad about myself for isolating, for being depressed, for not being able to get out of bed in the mornings. After Clipboard Lady, I thought that all therapy would make me feel that way.

When I was 12, I was assigned a Wraparound team, and to be honest, I was afraid that it would be like five Clipboard Ladies. It turned out to be the first step in changing my perception of therapy, the first step in repairing my ability to trust people, and the first step in giving me hope for the future. What I quickly noticed about the Wraparound team was how positive they were. They were welcoming and encouraged me to think about and talk about what I wanted for my future. Perhaps one of the most important and impactful parts of their approach was the involvement of my family and my foster family.

I became so used to moving around to different foster homes that, until I met my Wraparound team, I hadn’t considered that I could actually find happiness or stability in foster care.

                 Ultimately, my Wraparound team would become much more than just a therapeutic service. They were the only sense of normalcy and support that I had throughout much of my foster care experience. They empowered me to find purpose through pain, which is why for the last 11 years I’ve tried to use my lived experience as a catalyst to help people; first as a peer, then as a trainer of evidence supported practices and now as a Wraparound trainer. I enjoy being able to use my experiences, however traumatic they may be, as a way to illustrate the importance of strength-based and family-focused practices and to provide hope that these practices can make a profound difference in the lives of youth and families who are experiencing tremendous hardships.

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