A friend is loyal only to a friend’s best interests

This is the story of Cathy and me, though you can be sure her real name is not Cathy.

The room is full of seventh-graders, gathered to listen to me talk about peer intervention. In the next hour, I tell the students that, right now, somebody on this campus is in trouble. Maybe a bully. Maybe a drug or alcohol problem. Maybe a suicidal crisis. Maybe an exploitive or abusive adult. Despair. The potential for violence. Or self-destruction.

I tell the students that, if there is somebody on this campus in trouble, I'm certain at least one other student knows about it. Because that's how it works. Adolescents in trouble tell somebody. They tell a peer. Then they apply a twisted definition of loyalty. They reveal the crisis and say, "Don't tell anybody."

I challenge the students to redefine loyalty. "Loyal is one of friendship's highest attributes, yes," I tell them. "But we are never loyal to our friend; we are loyal to our friend's best interest." If our friend's best interest is best served by breaching our friend's confidence, then we do it. We break our promise to keep the secret. We tell someone. Right now.

A true friend flatly refuses to participate in your pathology. Every time.

I tell them that if they should find themselves at their friend's funeral after, say, a completed suicide, they will find zero consolation in thinking, "Well, at least I kept the secret just like he asked me to."

Class dismissed. I'm headed across the parking lot when I hear the teacher's voice calling behind me. Two girls have come to her, hardly moments after I leave the room. They want to talk to me.

The wide-eyed seventh-graders tell me about a peer. A girl, Cathy, who wears long-sleeved sweaters. They tell me what they saw under those sleeves.

I thank the girls, dismiss them and we pull Cathy out of class. The teacher and I ask to see her arms.

It's a massacre. It's a zigzag of fresh wounds, healing wounds and old white lines. My God. Her face is unaffected, detached, almost sublime. Her arms cry out as a diary. Tears come to my eyes.

Nutty enough, I think of a scene in William Peter Blatty's book "The Exorcist," where welts spontaneously form on the abdomen of young Regan, possessed these many days by a demon. The welts form the words "Help me." The welts are in Regan's handwriting.

Cathy writes her deeper psychic truth not with welts but with razor blades.

Without the two brave girls, I think Cathy would be dead today. Even then it was touch and go for the next eight months. I've never worked harder. Never felt less competent. Over my head. So helpless. Twice I tried to convince my supervisor that I should terminate therapy and refer this family. Twice my supervisor kicked my butt, and forced me to look at myself.

A professor of mine once said that, every so often, a patient would "getcha." That for reasons unclear and probably unconscious, a patient would come to mean something extraordinary to the therapist.

Cathy got me. I've got some cosmic Big Brother/Uncle/Guardian thing going on with her. I want her to make it.

Back in the days of my intellectual idolatry, I would now take off on a professorial, therapeutically correct lecture about counter-transference. I would objectify and analyze -- read: discount and dismiss -- the powerful bond that developed between me and this troubled girl.

Of course, counter-transference happens. And a healthy therapist is obliged to recognize it and manage it in a way that does not harm the patient. But I'm no longer willing to explain away the power, authenticity and deep meaning of some therapeutic relationships. And part of their power lies in their reciprocity.

Transference, schmanference. Competent therapists aren't androids. We aren't vending machines. It's not skills that we bring to a session. We bring ourselves, and you should run terrified from any therapist who doesn't know that.

Fast forward a few years. I'm just east of the middle of nowhere in Utah. Today, Cathy is graduated from a residential adolescent program. She asked me to come. I said only my own open-heart surgery could prevent me from being there.

Cathy is alive. The scars are gone or mostly faded. She's sober. Her eyes dance with life.

Score one for the good guys.

Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Clear View Counseling and Wellness Center in Las Vegas. His columns appear on Tuesdays and Sundays. Questions for the Asking Human Matters column or comments can be e-mailed to skalas@reviewjournal.com.