Opening the Door to My Work with Incarcerated Youth
There was no such thing as a regular day.
I learned that quickly. I might walk onto the unit to find a kid yelling at staff, two residents squaring off in the common area, or nothing at all, just the low hum of fluorescent lights and kids waiting out the shift change in their rooms. I learned to read the room before I said a word. I felt it in my body first: the tension in the air, the way the staff on their way out described the day, the energy that hit me before I even reached the desk.
I was twenty-three years old.
I hadn’t planned on any of this. I started college as a pre-law major, convinced I was headed toward a courtroom. Then I took a criminal law class and spent weeks wading through case briefs, procedures, and statutes. I realized fast that I did not want to do that. I switched to criminal justice I was still drawn to the law and thinking maybe forensics. And then I needed a job.
I found the probation department.
I did not expect to love it…especially working with teenagers. But something in me came alive there. The units housed twenty-five kids each, ages twelve to eighteen, in a residential drug treatment program on an open campus. Bedrooms lined the perimeter, single rooms and dorm-style. A staff desk ran along the back wall. There was a counselor’s office, a cafeteria, a school. No locked doors.
I had to learn to rely on my relationships with the kids and my own ability to self-regulate to be effective. To survive. I had parts that were scared at first, a little intimidated. But I stayed with it.
Some of the work didn’t sit well with me. Room searches and court dates. The weight of supervising every move a kid made. But the kids themselves taught me something I hadn’t anticipated: that structure and accountability weren’t the opposite of care. For a lot of them, it was the first time anything had held firm around them. That realization changed how I understood the whole job.
What I didn’t have back then was language for what I was witnessing every day.
The Parts I Couldn’t Name Yet
I was watching kids survive. Each one had arrived carrying a history I couldn’t always see and a set of protective parts that made complete sense once I understood where they’d come from. Some were loud and combative. Others went quiet and disappeared into themselves. Some tested every limit and every ounce of patience I had. I didn’t know the term “protective parts” yet. I was still an undergraduate, learning on the job and figuring it out in real time.
Learning to coregulate before I had a word for that too.
This is a new series. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing stories from those years. Stories about the young people I worked with and the protective parts that helped them survive. I’ll be exploring what I now understand through the lens of Internal Family Systems: how protectors show up, why they exist, and what those kids taught me when I started listening.
A note before we begin: all names and identifying details in these posts have been changed to protect the privacy of the young people I worked with. These stories are told with care and deep respect for each of them.
Some of those kids also live in the pages of The Hallway of Doorknobs: A Journey to the Feelings Inside. The parts they had in order to survive, the doors they were determined not to explore. As you read this series, I think you’ll recognize them.
On Monday, I’ll introduce you to a girl I’ll call Dee. She had a protector that could stop you in your tracks. Prickly. Sharp. Designed to keep people away.
It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
This post is part of my new series, Stories from My Professional Work, exploring how the Internal Family Systems (IFS) framework shows up in real encounters with real people. IFS was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz, whose work continues to shape how I teach, write, and understand the protective parts we all carry.
- Stories from My Professional Work - May 29, 2026
- Finding Confidence in Healing - May 18, 2026
- My First Library Reading at The Tyrone-Snyder Public Library - May 15, 2026