Carliss: I think I’ve been a pseudo-psychologist all my life.  I used to give out information that had no theoretical framework; it just felt and sounded right.  I was drawn to Pre- and Perinatal Psychology because I had this strong attraction to birth and beyond.  And I’ve always had such a fabulous rapport with babies!  I think, personally, I’ve never grown up.  I think my attachment to this area has been – I just get it; I get what it is to be a child.

Arabella: Your Master’s Project includes a short book – Incarcerated By Two; A FATHER’S GUIDE TO DOING TIME BEFORE THE CRIME.  Could you tell us about it?

Carliss: The book is still in its evolution stage, but it’s about creating a working tool that addresses the issue of fathers who have either been absentee fathers for the first two years of their infant sons’ lives, or who have been there but didn’t have a real understanding of the father’s role.  Many fathers have had ancillary roles – they worked and provided – but they didn’t know how to be present. 

I observed my husband for a number of years – he’s a criminal, juvenile attorney – and I looked at the rap sheets and psychology reports of the kids he works with.  He works in an environment where children are either fit or unfit to be tried as adults, and they can be as young as fourteen!  But they can’t buy liquor or vote.  I thought, “What’s up with that?!”  In looking at the psychology reports, it was all so biased!  I mean there’s nothing in the reports that gives you a real view of the family’s history, other than “mother raised him by herself, and the father was absent.”  And I was just curious.  I wanted to know why these kids had become juvenile offenders.

I used my husband’s clients and worked with the psychologists – associated with my husband – to gather information.  I was so disillusioned by the difference between what I thought was happening and what was actually happening.  And I realized that this was an area that I could penetrate, an area where I could do some real good.  I thought, “I could bring in Bowlby’s ‘secure attachment.’  I could bring in all these new pre- and perinatal theories that aren’t out there, aren’t readily available to the existing psychology discipline.”

Arabella: How does your project explore secure attachment – a chief topic of the book?

Carliss: It’s based on Dr. John Bowlby’s theory.  He has a model of secure attachment as a sound base, and then he has four prongs that interested me.  One was proximity maintenance, one was secure base, one was separation anxiety, and the other was safe haven. Bowlby’s theory is predicated on the fact that if children have a secure attachment between zero to two years old, they are more likely to regulate better in society when they become adults.  In my project, I wanted to get across the message that if you just do these four things, and you’re consistent with them for two years, you can give your child more of an optimal advantage!

I thought, “I write for children – that’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years!”  A book was the perfect solution.  I found that my parents – the parents of the children I work with – were just as interested in my book (if not more so) than in a novel.  This is because they are somewhat illiterate, so they’re drawn to the pictures. 

I run a multi-cultural literacy program.  My books are geared toward a very diverse community.  As a storyteller by profession, I thought, “Wow.  What a unique way to introduce some of the social issues – as a storyteller!  My parents will be more apt to come to me and get additional information.”

Arabella: So, you use your storytelling to reach community members on multiple topics?

Carliss: We have a lot of AIDS in our community, and a lot of drug users.  They’re just not getting help.  And the help that is out there is just not reaching them.  Through storytelling, I can tell a story and provide brochures or I can offer myself after the session. 

And I can address specific issues, like autism, and use the storytelling to teach them about it.  They come to me and say, “What, what….you were talking about autism.  I know it was a story, but it, like, sounded real!”  And so, with that authenticity, I can say, “You know, these are some of the things I know about autism.”  And when I’m concerned about a child, I leave the specific child (their child) out of it, and just make it a story.  I give them concrete information that they can follow up on, without the shame and the blame. 

So it occurred to me, “I can impact African American fathers, get them to be more involved in their children’s lives without hitting them with this whole African guilt thing!” 

I did a mini-project with Jill Kern, one of my SBGI instructors, where I interviewed a young man who had been incarcerated since he was sixteen.  He’d been in prison for eighteen years!  When I heard his story, it touched me.

He told me, “I didn’t get what a father was ‘cuz my mother never mentioned him.”  I was just blown away because I didn’t have that as my experience.  I had two parents and a daddy that said, “Woa!  Up, up, and away!”  And so, when I think of my childhood and I think about sitting on the beach with my father – both in Chicago and here – those are the images that pop up.  My father died in ’94 and, even though he’s gone, I have these rich memories…he lives in such a wonderful place in my being.  And when I talk to my brother and I look at what he’s doing today, and how he was influenced because he had that father-son dyad going…I know that it has merit!  When I shed tears, I have a place that I go to – to those memories and that security – that has nurtured my soul for so long, that I know I’m going to make it.

Arabella: A solid foundation of love.

Carliss: Exactly.  I felt that we all know that if we have loving, wonderful parents, then our children are going to have a better opportunity in the real world when they get older.  My book really allows me to put something out in the community that I think people are going to think about and resonate with, on some level.

Arabella: The illustrations did so much for the book.

Carliss: I think the illustrator – he just hit it right on the money!  It’s on and crackin!  We’ve done three books together, and when I came to him with this project, I knew that the books I’d put out in the past – that he had illustrated – they were so popular with my population of children and parents.  And so, I wanted to take that same format, but I wanted to gear it towards adults.

Even if you can’t read, the visuals are so stimulating…you just get it.  You get what secure attachment looks like.  You get what “I’m lonely, where are you?!”…you get, “Oh Dad, it would be so wonderful to have you in my life at the end of the day!”  And it’s not about the ballgames and sitting up…it’s about just that idle time, saying, “You know, you matter!  I hold you because you are a little person, and you matter!”  And it’s that holding for thirty or forty minutes a day – we (mothers) need to give fathers an opportunity!  We snatch the babies away so quickly, “Oh, I got him!  I’ll feed him!”  You know?!  We say, “Could you just run to the store and get some diapers?”  And that becomes the father’s role.  And then the baby’s thinking: “No!  No!  No!  You (Mommy) go to the store!  I’ve had you all day!  Let him do something!”  And I know that once fathers are touched by those little limbs – something magical…it’s a miracle that happens!  But when you take it away, or it’s never given to begin with!

I wanted my book to really send a message.  And so, the message was: there are over two million males incarcerated in the United States and one million of them are African American.  It was alarming, the statistic.  So, I’m saying, “You know, look – without secure attachment, we’re almost sending young men their life sentences before they even get started!  And yes, there are those who make it, but there are far too many that don’t, and we need to do something about it!”

Arabella: How can the community of psychologists and MFT’s be of service in restoring the vital relationship between the African American father and son?

Carliss: I’ll give you an example before I answer that.  One of my classmates – when I did the presentation, after my mini-project – one of my classmates said to me, “Carliss, why is it that so many African American girls have babies and they all have different fathers?”  And so, I said, “Could you say that again?  I mean, I really want to hear you because I want to answer you.”  And so she said, “Well, I work with a population in Texas and there are so many girls….in fact, I have this one client, she’s twenty-two years old, she’s got four kids and they all have different fathers.”  And I said to her, “Because we don’t kill our babies.”  And I said, “Do you get me?”  And she said, “No.  Can you explain that?” 

I replied, “If you look at the research, there are less women of color having abortions.  And so if I were to look at Caucasian women or European women or white women, and I were to look at the number of abortions they had between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two years old, I wonder, ‘Are you getting pregnant by the same person?’”  When you consider that, you have less of a judgment in that area.  My point is that, to begin with, Psychology is going to have to understand the cultural norm.  When you understand the culture, the information has true relevance! 

The first thing I learned in psychology, when you ask people the question “why” you put people on the defensive.  So, I had to come back to my classmate and have her reframe her question so that I could respond less defensively.  Like, “O.k.  Tell me again what are you saying?  I want to hear you because I need to answer this, I need to really answer this.”  And so that’s how I see psychology on some level.  I want us to look at the real puzzle, so that we can stop trying to put square pegs in round holes.  

African American girls and Latino girls could have the worst life, and they’d say to you, “Well, I’m gonna keep my baby!  I’m gonna keep my baby!”  But in some other cultures, the message is, “You can’t support that baby, so you need to get rid of it.”  The psychology field is going to have to take a couple of steps back to try to understand cultural diversity first.  You cannot expect everybody to build their lives around one (biased) cultural norm. 

What you find now is that women of color, they are buying into the prevailing cultural norm.  They’re feeling like, “There’s something wrong with me if I keep this baby.  And they’re feeling the pressure of society looking at them and saying, ‘What is your problem?!  You are twenty-two years old and you got four kids!’” 

As for the four kids situation – that’s another issue.  We need to be educating children on how to avoid becoming pregnant.  But once those babies are here, I don’t want my sisters feeling like, “I’m totally dysfunctional!”  I feel that my role, as this renegade or renaissance psychologist, is to put it in perspective.  There’s always three sides to every story – yours, mine, and something in the middle.  And I think that the new paradigm is shifting to: Hey, we’ve been looking at this from a very isolated position.  Really, we don’t even know! 

I truly believe that if there is a person of color advocating for those of color, and really opening up to let people know that there are two sides to that equation, then my mission – in this particular area – will be fulfilled.  If I can be a counter-balance to what’s out there and give the missing cultural piece and say, “O.k., now let’s make sense of it together.”  For instance, society says my parents’ kids are born “out of wedlock.”  I turn that into “born out of love!”  I think that when you raise the bar – to a more positive level – you are raising and elevating children that already come with such a disadvantage!  And when they can walk in the world with, “You know, I was born out of love – I got here!” as opposed to (a dejected), “I don’t know who my father was, and my mother…!”  You know, it just creates a whole other scenario for them to live their lives!  I want to dispel the negative thinking.

I went back to school thinking, “Well, if I intend to be heard, I need to be heard on the same level as everybody else that’s out there pontificating!  I need to be able to say, ‘See, I’m PhD!’”

Arabella: How has SBGI helped you to integrate your own personal thoughts on these issues of importance to you?

Carliss: SBGI has been that place that’s been my testing tube.  Going into a place that thinks that they’re liberal and thinks that, you know, they’re very open --- letting them see their weaknesses and allowing them to show me mine!  To see where I really needed to grow, too!  And not doing it in a large institution where I knew that I would just be another number, and a victim on some level.  Really listening and really being heard!  SBGI has really worked in that respect!

I came to SBGI not wanting to be a part of the psychology community, as I’d often understood it.  And now I want very much to be a vessel for the work that the community does because I believe it has merit.  I’m still not interested in being a traditional psychologist, but I think I’ve learned so many valuable skills!  On some level, the skills were always there!  But now they have a place – they have names, they have positions – and it’s always easier when you can organize yourself around something that has been tested, researched, and has validity. 

I feel that now I can be a mentor to a lot of psychologists.  I can say, “You know, if you’re going to work with this population, let me help you.”  And that’s basically what happened with my husband’s body of work, with the psychologists he works with.  Some of them came to me to learn.  They could see that my education had merit.  They had all heard of secure attachment, but they hadn’t really understood!  So now they understand imprinting.  And even though I thought I had a rich interaction with children, after my studies at SBGI, it’s just unbelievable!  I can tell how the babies I’m seeing were born.  I can say, “She was Caesarian, huh?  She was a premie!”  There’s so much that I can do with a child now – knowing their birth history, and a very extensive birth history.

SBGI has given me new skills to look at children – I’ve always been attentive, but now it’s more organized.  And when you’re really trying to establish patterns and positions for children, you have to be organized.  You don’t want to say (half-hazardly), “Well, I think they’ve got ADD.  Oh, well, you know, I think….” 

Arabella: Would you leave us with one essential bit of wisdom that you’ve found indispensable in the blended experience of your professional with your personal life?

Carliss: Oh, that is so heavy!  That’s one of those question you should have sent me so that I could have said something profound.  I don’t even have a quote!  Martin Luther King isn’t even erupting!  Could you repeat the question?

Arabella: Would you leave us with one essential bit of wisdom that you’ve found indispensable in the blended experience of your professional with your personal life?

Carliss: O.k.  I would say: Babies have been speaking to us since the beginning of time and it’s time we listened!