In 1979, I began a professional involvement with a private, not-for -profit foster care agency called St. Christopher’s Home, eventually re-named SCO Family of Services. For several years, my role was strictly clinical, conducting individual therapy, play therapy, and group therapy to children and adolescents in foster care. Among my clinical duties was to run a parent training group. The weekly group, mandated for parents seeking reunification with their children who had been involuntarily placed in foster care, was initiated in 1982. Several years later, a parallel anger management group was added on another day. The groups continued on a regular basis until 2014. Over the course of 32 years, approximately 2500 group sessions were conducted, delivering much needed guidance and support to hundreds of parents with histories of having neglected and/or abused their children. In many instances, after completing the parenting group training, parents attended family therapy, providing opportunities to apply lessons learned about communication, discipline, child development, anger control, and tapping into the child within themselves to facilitate play, as well as empathy in interacting with their children. My extensive work with the parents of children in foster care eventually encompassed the development of protocols and procedures for assessing parental capacity. In 2002, I convened a panel to address “Parenting Assessment in Foster Care”, for a conference sponsored by the Committee of Physicians and Psychologists of Voluntary Child Care Agencies in New York, (Gries, L., 2002). Then, two years later, I conducted separate trainings in Brooklyn Family Court and in Queens Family Court on Assessing Parental Capacity of Parents and Infants in foster Care, (Gries, L., 2004). These trainings were part of the “Babies Can’t Wait Training Clinic”, sponsored by the Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, White Plains, N.Y.
Through much of the 1980’s, the Department of Mental Health Services was started from scratch much like the Psychology Department I founded at BDC and expanded to keep up with the expansion of SCO. The agency was on its way to becoming the largest foster care agency in the state of New York, serving as many as 2,500 children and families at any point in time. There was a need to staff offices and group homes across 4 counties with Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Psychiatric Social Workers and Mental Health Counselors totaling 30 professionals as well as support staff. In creating a department, a solid foundation must be laid, whereby mission statements are clarified, a manual of operations is prepared, and specific ethical, procedural and oversight considerations are spelled out. The administrative tasks of staff recruitment, vetting and interviewing had to be executed without compromising the quality of “my day job” efforts, i.e. providing direct evaluation and treatment services to all in need. Then there was the question of clinical supervision. Although all mental health staff hired were either independently licensed or license eligible, more than a few required supervisory assistance, at least during the first year or so if they were new to foster care. Over the years, I was responsible for the launching of the successful careers of hundreds of staff mental health practitioners. Additionally, I served as mentor and supervisor to dozens of clinical interns and externs from graduate programs throughout the NYC metropolitan area throughout my 35 years at SCO, and my 30 years with the Institute for Emotional Health (IEH) to be described below. An important function of administrator as well as supervisor has always been the education of staff and trainees. In a more formal educational setting, the university, I also fulfilled the education mandate, serving as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1979 and 1980, lecturing on psychotherapy to undergraduate psychology students, and later serving as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Queens College of CUNY in 2002 through 2004, teaching developmental psychopathology to students within the graduate program in School Psychology. In 2003 and 2004, in my capacity as Clinical Supervisor, I also helped educate students of the Post Graduate Certificate Program in the Treatment of Interpersonal Trauma at Fordham University, Graduate School of Social Service. Between 1975 and 2008, I devoted significant time educating, training and supervising budding mental health practitioners enrolled at numerous colleges and universities, including, Walden University, Yeshiva University, Hofstra University, Fordham University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and St. John’s University.
During my early years at SCO, throughout the 1980’s, I felt it incumbent upon me, as a clinician, supervisor and department head, to expand my knowledge base and areas of expertise as much as possible, so as to meet the clinical needs of the SCO foster care population. This meant becoming well versed in factors involved with separation, loss, adoption, child abuse, and child sexual abuse. This was accomplished through attending specialized postgraduate courses and conducting or facilitating applied research in studies pertinent to our client population. With enhanced knowledge came innovation in evaluation, treatment and service delivery.
In the early to mid-80’s, the professional literature offered only limited clinical guidance about child abuse, child sexual abuse, and the psychological needs of children placed in out of home care. I and my colleagues essentially had to discover for ourselves what constituted the particularized needs of children in foster care. Within a few years, sufficient insights were reached to enable me to offer some observations based upon a particularly informative case study. My article, “The Use of Multiple Goals in the Treatment of Foster Children with Emotional Disorders”, was published in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, (Gries, L., 1986), and served as a useful resource to my staff and to other mental health clinicians working with foster care populations.
More specific information about the dynamics and impact of child abuse were revealed a year later when I became immersed in a case involving the plight of the 9 year old son of an attache’ to the Zimbabwean mission to the United Nations. The child was found to have been severely physically abused by his father, who was summarily exiled from the United States, but the case placed me in the middle of a colossal struggle on the world stage, pitting prerogatives of diplomatic immunity against the rights and welfare of the child, with the involvement of the President of the U.S., the U.S. Secretary of State and State Department, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the U.S. Supreme court, and the President of Zimbabwe. At the clinical level, the case provided a first-hand account of how dissociation serves as a protective psychological factor for the child victim in the short run, while contributing to the emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder, and co-morbid depressive reactions.
At a systems level, the case was illustrative of the varied reactions to the abuse by everyone from the non-abusive parent to child protective personnel to judicial and legal individuals, and to politicians and the public at large. In the introduction to my book, “Gregory of Zimbabwe. A True Story of Overcoming Child Abuse and the Scandal of Diplomatic Immunity,” (Gries, L., 1993), I mention my “intention of illustrating how our society works effectively and ineffectively at the task of protecting its young.”
Over the past three decades, I have referenced the case extensively in educating my audiences – parents within parent training groups, clinicians treating abused children, caseworkers and casework supervisors, family court attorneys and judges – about the many aspects of child abuse and its causes, treatment, and case management. I have maintained contact with the child victim who is now 41 years of age, married and the father of two young sons, and who has expressed his gratitude to me for saving his life. Although almost a third of a century has elapsed since the events which drew international attention at the time, the subject matter is still quite relevant in 2020. There is presently an effort underway by a producer in the film industry to dramatize the case within a movie feature or T.V. miniseries.
Leonard T. Gries, Ph.D., DABPS
3/20/2020
Parts lll and lV to follow
Through much of the 1980’s, the Department of Mental Health Services was started from scratch much like the Psychology Department I founded at BDC and expanded to keep up with the expansion of SCO. The agency was on its way to becoming the largest foster care agency in the state of New York, serving as many as 2,500 children and families at any point in time. There was a need to staff offices and group homes across 4 counties with Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Psychiatric Social Workers and Mental Health Counselors totaling 30 professionals as well as support staff. In creating a department, a solid foundation must be laid, whereby mission statements are clarified, a manual of operations is prepared, and specific ethical, procedural and oversight considerations are spelled out. The administrative tasks of staff recruitment, vetting and interviewing had to be executed without compromising the quality of “my day job” efforts, i.e. providing direct evaluation and treatment services to all in need. Then there was the question of clinical supervision. Although all mental health staff hired were either independently licensed or license eligible, more than a few required supervisory assistance, at least during the first year or so if they were new to foster care. Over the years, I was responsible for the launching of the successful careers of hundreds of staff mental health practitioners. Additionally, I served as mentor and supervisor to dozens of clinical interns and externs from graduate programs throughout the NYC metropolitan area throughout my 35 years at SCO, and my 30 years with the Institute for Emotional Health (IEH) to be described below. An important function of administrator as well as supervisor has always been the education of staff and trainees. In a more formal educational setting, the university, I also fulfilled the education mandate, serving as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY) in 1979 and 1980, lecturing on psychotherapy to undergraduate psychology students, and later serving as an Adjunct Associate Professor at Queens College of CUNY in 2002 through 2004, teaching developmental psychopathology to students within the graduate program in School Psychology. In 2003 and 2004, in my capacity as Clinical Supervisor, I also helped educate students of the Post Graduate Certificate Program in the Treatment of Interpersonal Trauma at Fordham University, Graduate School of Social Service. Between 1975 and 2008, I devoted significant time educating, training and supervising budding mental health practitioners enrolled at numerous colleges and universities, including, Walden University, Yeshiva University, Hofstra University, Fordham University, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and St. John’s University.
During my early years at SCO, throughout the 1980’s, I felt it incumbent upon me, as a clinician, supervisor and department head, to expand my knowledge base and areas of expertise as much as possible, so as to meet the clinical needs of the SCO foster care population. This meant becoming well versed in factors involved with separation, loss, adoption, child abuse, and child sexual abuse. This was accomplished through attending specialized postgraduate courses and conducting or facilitating applied research in studies pertinent to our client population. With enhanced knowledge came innovation in evaluation, treatment and service delivery.
In the early to mid-80’s, the professional literature offered only limited clinical guidance about child abuse, child sexual abuse, and the psychological needs of children placed in out of home care. I and my colleagues essentially had to discover for ourselves what constituted the particularized needs of children in foster care. Within a few years, sufficient insights were reached to enable me to offer some observations based upon a particularly informative case study. My article, “The Use of Multiple Goals in the Treatment of Foster Children with Emotional Disorders”, was published in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, (Gries, L., 1986), and served as a useful resource to my staff and to other mental health clinicians working with foster care populations.
More specific information about the dynamics and impact of child abuse were revealed a year later when I became immersed in a case involving the plight of the 9 year old son of an attache’ to the Zimbabwean mission to the United Nations. The child was found to have been severely physically abused by his father, who was summarily exiled from the United States, but the case placed me in the middle of a colossal struggle on the world stage, pitting prerogatives of diplomatic immunity against the rights and welfare of the child, with the involvement of the President of the U.S., the U.S. Secretary of State and State Department, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the U.S. Supreme court, and the President of Zimbabwe. At the clinical level, the case provided a first-hand account of how dissociation serves as a protective psychological factor for the child victim in the short run, while contributing to the emergence of posttraumatic stress disorder, and co-morbid depressive reactions.
At a systems level, the case was illustrative of the varied reactions to the abuse by everyone from the non-abusive parent to child protective personnel to judicial and legal individuals, and to politicians and the public at large. In the introduction to my book, “Gregory of Zimbabwe. A True Story of Overcoming Child Abuse and the Scandal of Diplomatic Immunity,” (Gries, L., 1993), I mention my “intention of illustrating how our society works effectively and ineffectively at the task of protecting its young.”
Over the past three decades, I have referenced the case extensively in educating my audiences – parents within parent training groups, clinicians treating abused children, caseworkers and casework supervisors, family court attorneys and judges – about the many aspects of child abuse and its causes, treatment, and case management. I have maintained contact with the child victim who is now 41 years of age, married and the father of two young sons, and who has expressed his gratitude to me for saving his life. Although almost a third of a century has elapsed since the events which drew international attention at the time, the subject matter is still quite relevant in 2020. There is presently an effort underway by a producer in the film industry to dramatize the case within a movie feature or T.V. miniseries.
Leonard T. Gries, Ph.D., DABPS
3/20/2020
Parts lll and lV to follow
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