Staff

I just had an amazing meeting with a student. It’s 6:30, right before dinner and I’ve just come out of the family leaders meeting.  Panava, a senior floor person tells me there is a student who needs to see me. I’m the highest authority in the school at the moment and he needs to get something off his chest.  John, not his real name, comes into my office. He tells me about a negative contract he has with two boys from another house. He has known about them doing drugs. Details spill out from him. He smuggled in $21 when he came back from his Christmas visit. A week after he returned, he told one boy, call him Zack, who then told John, that he and another boy, Eric, were getting high on some Klonopin they had in the dorm. So, John had been carrying the secret for about a week.

I thanked John for his honesty and I asked him to tell me a little something about himself because he was not a student that I knew well. He said, very matter-of-factly, I’m a liar. I lie to my parents. I lie to everyone here staff and my friends. I lie all the time. He is calm, relaxed, he has a smile on his face.

I ask him, “Do you mean, that you’re okay with the fact that you’re a liar? Or, are you saying that you want to stop being a liar?”

“Yes, I want to stop lying. I am…”

I asked another question. “So, how long have you been working the program?”

“15 minutes about.” He says, blowing me away.

“What happened?” I said, curious look on my face.

“Okay, I better say the whole story.”

In addition to knowing about the two kids getting high in the dorm, he had had another secret. He had gotten high and smoke cigarettes on his home visit at Christmas. When he came back, he tested positive for marijuana and nicotine on his drug test but he denied it. These tests are wrong once in a blue moon. His family counselor had arranged a telephone conference with his family. They confront him.  He denies it. The family group ends. His sponsor and his junior sponsor, who had been in the family group and “knew in his gut” that John was lying, talked to him. By now both the junior sponsor and John are talking excitedly, telling me what has happened.  Clearly, both got something positive out of the experience. I am not sure what the junior sponsor said.  They referred to a couple of stories and analogies.

John continues,  “I can’t explain it, I just decided to tell the truth.”

“How does it feel?”

He said, “better, lighter. As soon as I told my sponsor that I  lied, I called my parents back.  My father was angry. Normally I would be sad.  But I felt okay.  It didn’t matter.  I was free.”

John rattled on about what was going to happen next…., “yes, I got a make amends for my brother. I have to apologize to the family. But there’s other staff I need to apologize to…”

We talked for a few more minutes, and I came home to feed the dogs. Now I’m writing this before I forget. It isn’t every day you get to witness somebody in the first 15 minutes of a new life.

There is a lot of trash being written about me, my family, and The Family Foundation School on the Internet. They twist everything we do, taking something beautiful like the encounter that I just had and they do the best they can to make it sound ugly and mean. Sobriety is so fragile. Our relationship to honesty is so fragile. A student I’ve called John is having a real moment of conversion right now here in Hancock, New York. It might not last. He might go back to being the liar he was an hour ago. But for right now, he is a fellow traveler.

~ Rita Argiros