This kid wouldn’t break. He was locked up emotionally and I was a brand-new therapist, still a kid myself in so many ways, unsure of my abilities, my gut or what I was doing. We were walking through the woods to a more secluded spot at the treatment center I was working at. I can’t tell you what time of year it was, what it felt like outside, all I can remember is the banging of my heart in my chest and the crunching of sticks and gravel as we walked along the trail. He carried the giant punching bag while I carried the baseball bat. I was staff, but he wouldn’t let me carry the heavy part because I was a girl. He was only 18, and a drug addict, but he was a gentleman and so good and kind. Life had thrown him a crappy deal and heroin had been the only way he had found to cope. I felt the weight of his recovery, his healing and his freedom on my shoulders as we walked. It would have been nothing to carry the punching bag compared to that. I had no idea if this was going to work. He was my first solo resident, his treatment solely on my shoulders and this exercise, oddly called “Beat the Dummy,” was my Hail Mary pass to help him to feel what he needed to.

My personal experience with substances was severely limited. I went to a conservative Christian university in the same town I was working in now, and the rules were pretty strict about drugs and alcohol and…..everything really. I remember reading the list before I ever got to campus and noting where we couldn’t have “rock and roll” posters on our walls. I went that moment to Wal-mart and bought a Blink 182 and Green Day poster and they became the first things I packed for college. I’ve always been a rule follower, but some rules are just begging to be broken. When I turned 21 at college, two of my three roommates and I snuck alcohol into the dorm, made daiquiris and watched the Notebook. The third roommate was not invited because she would have told and gotten us kicked out of school. When she came in at curfew (yep….. curfew in college) we were furiously scrubbing the blender and the butter tub we had poured the rum into to get into the dorm, cheeks red and giggling. The alcohol didn’t capture me that day, the way it does some, but my body held on to the feeling of doing something that was “wrong” simply because I knew it wasn’t.

“Beat the Dummy” is an exercise about releasing your emotion at the addict/trauma/whatever weighs you down, and it’s usually done in a group. There is a strength that comes from several voices echoing around you, cheering you on as you wail on the bag with the bat. I had never led it, only been a witness, and it took a strong loud voice and fully committed belief that it would work, neither of which I had. We came to a clearing and he dropped the punching bag. I handed him the bat, hoping he couldn’t hear the uncertainty beating in my heart. This was either going to be amazing, or it was going to fail drastically.

Sometimes the uncertain choices, the ones you make with your gut and not your brain are the most important ones. When I was 19, my best guy friend visited home with me to support me as I said goodbye to an older woman in my church I had been close to. He was the Dawson to my Joey. The Ross to my Rachel. Will they? Won’t they? In the living room of my childhood home, sitting on the familiar scratchy carpet, MTV playing in the background, we both made a choice to lean in and with a few kisses went a direction we could never come back from. Heart pounding with certainty it was right. And it was right, but not in the way my rom-com heart wanted it to be. It was not a fairytale, but a short story of fireworks and fires that ended our relationship, friendship and my unwavering belief that every story has a happy ending.

I stepped back from my resident and the punching bag and began slowly and softly speaking of the hard things in his story; the loss, the pain, things he had no control over and the mistakes he had made. He half-heartedly hit the bag with the bat. My voice grew stronger because it had to. The wind picked up and blew through the trees, nature bearing witness to this young man’s journey. And slowly, this left-brained, highly logical, tightly wound boy, stepped into his own and began releasing. The loud crack of the bat reverberated through the trees, his sobs and wails caressed by the breeze to be held, finally, by someone other than him. He collapsed into a squat on the ground sobbing, and I broke another rule when I walked over and put my arms around him while he cried.

But, it was right, even though they tell you in grad school not to hug your clients, because sometimes the gut knows better than the brain. We both emerged from the woods that day, different. We had released uncertainties that had kept us bound by chains, different chains, but binding all the same. It was not a tidy, happy ending, because there was still a lot of hard left to come, but the beginning of living differently.

For me, it was the beginning of recognizing the strength of my own voice. And even though I don’t always use it well, I am certain that I have one now. It’s where I began to learn that sometimes you have to risk that something is a colossal mistake because it’s the only way you can learn what you need to grow.

My brilliant supervisor told me when I was a young therapist that “everything is useful” and I have found that to be true in every layer of life. When it works, it’s useful. When it blows up in your face? It’s still useful.

Rules are useful. Sometimes breaking them is too.

When you don’t get the happy ending it’s not always because you wrecked it, it may be because it’s not actually your story. Sometimes the failure is more important than the fairytale.

I’m a supervisor now, and Itell all my supervisees that everything is useful and my biggest goal is to help them not be afraid to mess up, to try something new and let it fall flat with a client. Or let it work beyond what they thought it would. Either way, it tells you something you need to know.

That kid in the woods has kids of his own now. I hope that day comes to his mind sometimes and reminds him that it’s ok to let go. I hope it is still a gift for him. I know that day was for me.