People are amazing creatures. I went to breakfast with my wife. The atmosphere felt festive. The holidays are on the way, and people were out shopping together. We sat watching them through the windows where we were eating, sipping our coffee, and talking.

After breakfast, I gave her a kiss, and headed to the office to catch up on some work. On the way, walking down the hill from Reid Street to Front Street, I noticed a man on the other sidewalk coming up the hill. He was yelling and looked agitated. He was waving his arms as if he were bowling up hill or herding sheep. I could not tell if he thought he were actually talking to someone or just talking in general. It reminded me of my mother, and how she had a habit of walking into a room where several people were sitting watching television or reading, and she would start talking about something that had been going through her mind. She would not address herself to anyone in particular, and it used to annoy my brother no end. He called it "Talking to the room." Well, the man on the sidewalk seemed to be talking to the world.

It reminded me of all the various amazing people with whom I've worked as a therapist or merely lived as a person over the years.

One man was having a manic episode, and so we locked him into the quiet room, but we left his shoelaces in his sneakers by mistake, and he used the frayed ends of those laces to pick the lock from the inside and stroll out of the quiet room, right past our flabbergasted faces on his way to escape from the unit. Then, he leaped to the top of a twelve-foot wooden fence and was loose in the neighbourhood. A few hours later he strolled right back into the hospital because he'd gotten bored.

I met another young man when I was working on the units of the US Naval Hospital in Oakland, California. He had been in a motorcycle accident. He had not been wearing a helmet, and he had brain damage such that he could not recall a normal vocabulary. The only words he could use were swearing and blasphemous epithets. These he strung together in cryptic sentences to ask for such things as cigarettes and food.

I met a beautiful young woman when I was living in Berkeley, California. She had blue eyes, long, dirty blond hair, and a gorgeous figure. She wore Indian prints and beads, and she smelled of fragrant oils. She looked for all the world like a gifted and free spirit, but she was tormented. One day I saw her looking especially forlorn while sipping coffee in a restaurant, and I sat down with her. Tears were running down her face, and I asked her what had happened. She looked at me with such a suffering expression that I have never forgotten her, and she said, "It takes me so long to feel good, and now I'm losing it again."

Then there was the sociopathic murderer who frightened most staff so badly that they avoided him wherever he went on the locked unit. For some reason he opened up to me and shared a history of one loss and disappointment after another in life until he had adopted a tough approach that suffered no fools. We did nothing more than talk from time to time, but his psychiatrist wrote me a special note of appreciation saying that I had been one of the few people in life this man had ever spoken with like that. He thanked me, and then I turned around and thanked God for the gift this difficult man had given me.

All these people had something in common. No matter how difficult and unique were their circumstances, they each made creative adjustments to life. The manic patient came back to the hospital, the brain-damaged man re-learned his vocabulary, the sad young woman eventually became part of a creative community, and the sociopathic murderer made himself vulnerable.

When the press of life reaches a certain point, and when "something has to give," people find a way to cope. Sometimes their creativity leads to an actual advance. They find a new way of dealing with an old problem. Actually, this is the core of therapy as well, for no therapist fixes, saves, or cures any client. It is the client who makes the adjustment out of the experience of working with the therapist. Unless the client works and somehow discovers this creative adjustment, no progress is made, but since people are such amazing creatures, my experience tells me that there is always hope that any given person will do exactly what is required. That is part of what makes my work worthwhile.

Dr. Philip Brownell, M.Div., Psy.D. is a psychologist at Benedict Associates. He can be contacted at 295-2070 or by e-mail at crossroads@g-gej.org