Back to School Can Be Loaded

When I started teaching in the ’90s, student disclosure of terrifying and heartbreaking memories felt sacred. Even before I heard the phrase “holding space,” I realized I was indeed being tasked with holding something carefully and gently.

Simultaneously, I was attending to other students’ reactions so that the classroom could be an open, comfortable space for discussion of highly charged and complicated issues.

I recall in 2002 a student shared that she had enrolled in my family violence class because she was insistent on breaking the cycle of it in her family. Her grandfather killed her grandmother, her great-grandfather killed her great-grandmother, and her stepfather threatened her mother.

My student was also sexually abused by her stepfather while her mother worked the night shift. She shared another secret that felt equally brave: She had considered folding rat poison into a casserole, hoping to kill him.

Helping Students Make Meaning of Their Experiences

I have read so many papers detailing family dynamics similar to this. I remember trying to catch my breath as I was reading, letting my heart and my head catch up with each other.

The terror of it all gripped me, but perhaps most compelling was the resistance that such students conveyed. It was because of that resistance that I was able to help students make meaning of experiences, sharing with them social-psychological concepts and theories to give language and voice to what they’d endured.

Resistance can take many forms. I’ve witnessed it in terms of writing and other art that students have created and shared with me, done not for class but for their own healing.

I’ve watched with profound admiration as students have organized events on campus to assert their voices. I’ve invited some students back to speak at my classes about their experiences of survivorship, resistance, and healing, and in so doing, newer students have seen them as mentors.

The Context Has Changed

Fast-forward, and now I’m struck by something else. I’ve come to think about student disclosure in a different way: It doesn’t look quite as brave anymore. Not because of anything that the students really did wrong, but because the social context for their sharing differs so significantly.

When I started to teach, students weren’t posting every hiccup of their private lives on social media, performing for the crowd. They were talking about their struggles years before this country announced that young people were having a mental health crisis.

Nowadays, when students share, there’s a flattening to it in keeping with their overall flat emotional effect. Whereas students used to display great angst when disclosing things, they now share such information in a routinized, mundane way. I still hear about brutal transgressions that students have endured, experiences every bit as horrific as in years back.

Yet, today they share it in a tone and cadence similar to how they describe what they ate for lunch. That steely cold reporting reveals the way that students are actively relying on what they know to be true in the culture. They’re drawing on the messages they know are concerning to adults.

While I don’t mean the word manipulating in a malicious way, students are indeed manipulating language and the telling. For example, when students express themselves, they’re not sad, they’re depressed. They’re not nervous, they’re anxious. They’re not having performance anxiety about an upcoming presentation or test, they’re having full-blown panic attacks. Words like trauma even lack meaning now when people use these words to describe anything and everything distressing, and we begin to lose sight of what the words truly mean.

Students announce in classes that they’ve attempted suicide. Hungry for a diagnosis, they’ll refer to themselves as having depression, anxiety, or bipolar disorder, even if they’ve never sought counselling. In large classes, they very publicly report their diagnoses—self-proclaimed or offered by professionals—unlike students from years past, who spoke of such things in hushed tones in my office upon realizing they could trust me after a long conversation.

These current students have quickly bought into a paradigm of disease—fully medicalizing any sort of feeling ill at ease. And in all our talk about the mental health of college students, nowhere are we really seeing an important discussion about what all this disclosure means and will mean going forward.

The New Crisis of Disclosure

In Judith Herman’s groundbreaking work on incest, she refers to a crisis of disclosure to describe what happens when a survivor of sexual abuse goes through the process of disclosing a series of traumatic events as well as the fallout of that for not only the person but the constellation of the family in light of the secrets.

I want to extend the idea of a crisis of disclosure beyond the family unit to suggest that we’re now in the midst of a public crisis of disclosure on our college and university campuses.

But the concern isn’t just in the telling; it’s in the way meaning is lost. Catharsis isn’t enough. My former students from years back know this well. Disclosure was contextualized, and classroom concepts became a container for holding the sharing.

Together with their peers, I’d push them to see the connections to what we were learning, as well as encourage them to take positive action in the form of volunteering, advocacy, and social change.

When I think about catharsis, I think back to when I was writing a book about caregiving for my adoring and abusive father, and people often asked if it felt cathartic to me.

I found myself perpetually confused by the question, as it seemed to reduce the writing of such a book into a series of tawdry diary entries or the like. So much more was at stake, and so much more was involved.

Of course, I trusted the question was well-intended and people asked because they wanted to know that I was OK—they wanted the reassurance of healing. And in some cases, they wanted to know whether they, too, might be able to expect catharsis if they themselves set out to write.

Going Beyond Disclosure

The problem is that disclosure on its own may not be enough. Neither disclosure nor catharsis is enough. That’s because the heart of the telling and the heart and art of the healing are firmly rooted in the meaning of the disclosure—or you might say the meaning-making of the catharsis.

As a culture, we’re consumed with the allure of the reveal. We see this in happy events like a pregnancy announcement complete with a dramatic gender reveal. We see it in the titillation that some have when they reveal family secrets. If the real purpose of revealing secrets is to break the silence and initiate a healing process, then what’s most transformative goes far beyond the telling.

That’s where educators are responsible for not just holding space, but holding students accountable for what and how they share so that it isn’t gratuitous, but instead meaningful.

By doing this, we help students move beyond the paralysis of despair and empower them to change the course of their lives; we walk our students to the farthest edge of courage, all the while helping to ensure they don’t fall.