Early in my career, I worked as a case manager for individuals reentering society after incarceration. One of my first clients was a woman who had spent over twelve years in prison. When she was incarcerated, she was the same age I was when we met. When she was released, I was responsible for helping her rebuild the basics of her life; food, clothing, housing, medical care. From the very beginning, it was clear that something stood between us and it didn’t feel like logistics, it felt like it was something deeper.
When she learned I would be her case manager, she was openly upset. She yelled at me, called me names, and refused to get into my car until her parole officer made it clear she didn’t have a choice. And then we began. We spent hours together driving all around Cleveland to appointments, filling out paperwork, securing what she needed. We were productive. We got things done. But it was so uncomfortable. There was no real connection between us. Only function. I could feel the tension of how much was present but unspoken.
So one day, I asked her a question: would you be willing to talk to me about how being together feels for you because I would like to talk about how it feels to me.
What followed was one of the most important conversations of my life. We named things that would have been easy to avoid. I was a young, white woman in my early twenties, fresh out of college and in graduate school for counseling. She was a black woman who had spent over a decade in a women’s prison- much of that time in isolation, in an environment that deeply impacted her mental health. I had never been to prison. She had lived a reality I could not fully understand. And she told me exactly that. She questioned how I could possibly relate to her. She told me what it felt like to be assigned to someone like me. She named her anger, her distrust, her resistance. And I stayed. Not to defend, not to explain, but to listen.
And then something shifted. Because once the truth was spoken, once the hardest things were named something else became possible. Curiosity. She became interested in what it was like to be me. I became more deeply interested in what it was like to be her. We began to see one another not as roles, not as projections, but as people.
From that point forward, everything changed. We still did the same tasks. We still worked toward the same goals. However, now there was movement not just in what we were doing, but in how we were relating.
That experience has stayed with me ever since. It showed me something I now see over and over again: progress doesn’t come from avoiding what’s hard. It comes from being willing to name it. When we can name it, we create the possibility for something more than function, we create the possibility for real connection.
