I hear shouting coming from inside the courtroom then a girl bangs through the doors with the bailiff striding after her. She’s furious.

“I told him I didn’t know my phone was on, but he wouldn’t listen!”

I’m sitting on a bench outside the courtroom waiting to see my son sworn into the federal bar. It’s the wrong courtroom and the wrong courthouse but I don’t know this yet. Instead, I’m witnessing the unspooling of a psyche unable to hold it together. Oh my god, what is she doing? I think. 

“I’ve had enough of this shit” she screams. “I’m not going to be treated like that!” It’s the bluster of the disempowered.

“You need to calm down and come back in right now or you will be held in contempt and arrested,” the bailiff tells her in the deliberate, measured tone of the person who has seen and managed it all.

This injustice enrages her further.

“I’m not going to be treated like that. I didn’t do anything wrong. That fucking judge can go fuck himself,” she screams. Then she starts to cry.

“You need to calm down and come back in,” the bailiff repeats slowly. He is a rock of patience.

This unspooling…I recognize what I’m looking at…a person not so unlike me earlier in life, a person whose sense of self was not nearly big enough and stable enough to contain the terrible indignity of sometimes simply being wrong. 

The girl stands there shaking with rage in the liminal space of what-will-I-do-next. 

The bailiff repeats himself. “Come back in now. I’m not going to tell you again.” 

She’s officially backed into a corner. 

To hang onto her integrity, she has no choice. “I’m not going back in there,” she hollers.

I can’t stand watching this slow-motion train wreck. I go to her, touch her arm, get her to look at me. I’m a new health and wellness coach, desperate to help. I feel so sure if I can just get her to breathe, she’ll be able to come back to her senses. 

“Hey, I know I’m interfering and I’m sorry, but I think I might be able to help.” I don’t give her time to decline.

“If you take a few deep breaths with me, you’ll feel better,” I say, as I begin taking big deep breaths for her to regulate with, my head lifting a bit on the inhale, and tipping forward a bit on the exhale. “It’s how the brain works,” I explain, a law we can get on her side.

I have her attention. I continue to make exaggerated breathing motions with my hands and body to keep her with me as I keep talking.

“It sounds like the judge isn’t listening to what you’re saying. I know that’s hard to take but right now all you have to do is get calm enough to rise above it for just long enough to get through this thing without getting arrested.”

She’s so stunned by the interruption she goes along with me, straining to slow down her breathing. I keep talking, telling her just to visualize rising up like she’s having an out-of-body experience. “All you have to do is just get through the next few minutes and you’ll be able to walk out of here. Just rise up,” I keep saying, trying to embed rise up” in her mind like a drumbeat.

The bailiff has been tolerant, maybe a fraction curious to see how this intervention is going to play out, but time is up.

“If you’re coming back you have to get back in there right now.”

I touch her arm again. “Rise up,” I say.

She has a confused look in her eyes like she doesn’t know what on earth has just happened but, now compliant, she heads for the door and walks through it. I sit down and exhale. 

Within seconds the double doors fly back open, and she bangs out with the bailiff quick on her heels.

“I’m not standing for that shit she screams as she runs for the stairs. “Go ahead and arrest me!” 

The bailiff shakes his head and takes his radio out.

“A young woman is heading your way. Don’t let her get away.” He doesn’t bother with a description. She will be the one losing it.

Without dropping a beat, a radio voice comes back.

“We’ve got eyes on her.”

She couldn’t do it. She didn’t have a big enough and stable enough sense of self to absorb the indignities of who she was, of how life had turned out and how bad things can go. She didn’t have a safe container to hold her outrage and frustration. She had no framework, no model to hold her together, no way to regulate. She was me 20 years ago when life had pushed me further than I had the capacity to hold. 

We can be a lot to manage. We can fly off the handle and not know how to find our way back. Where is the guidebook, I have often wondered, for being human? I’ll share a process that can help in an upcoming blog.

To being human,

E