As the mother of three children, ages 11, 9 and 6, Clover Lewis knows a thing or two about guiding children through their younger years. It’s a big responsibility — and one that might be enough for most of us.
But Lewis, 39, of Northampton, has chosen to help numerous other children in the Valley, too, as a clinician at the Cutchins Center for Children in Northampton. There, she works with children — most of whom have witnessed violence or neglect — to form the two things she says they need most: safety and attachment.
Lewis says she enjoys working with the children, but it can be trying. Many have witnessed such severe trauma that she sometimes questions her ability to initiate effective change for them.
Fortunately, she says, there are success stories that keep her going. Like one 14-year-old girl Lewis has been working with for four years.
After “a pretty horrific childhood,” Lewis said, the girl is living with her grandparents now, and holding her own.
“She has friends, has learned to hold a relationship with her mother, and she’s formed a good attachment to her grandmother,” Lewis said.
And though, she adds, the girl might have some trouble further on in adolescence, “Right now, she’s a functioning 14-year-old girl, and she wasn’t so much at 10.”
Lewis has worked at Cutchins since 2012. She received a master’s degree in social work from Boston University in 2000, and then worked at Boston Medical Center, Children’s Hospital and Boston’s Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
Now she maintains a caseload of 15 children between the ages of 2 and 18, most of whom have experienced trauma and who are, or have been, in foster care.
They find their way to Cutchins, usually with their foster parents, through referrals from the Department of Children and Families (DCF), and through foster care service providers.
Cutchins currently serves more than 350 children and families from Hampshire County and the surrounding area. Its mission is to provide the best-trained clinicians to work with those children most in need of services.
Lewis says other people in the children’s lives — teachers, foster parents and biological parents — are often frightened by the traumatic experiences the children have had, and can’t, or won’t, deal with the issues effectively.
“My job is to witness their pain, address it as real, and listen to them without judgment,” Lewis said.
To do that, she allows them the space to talk if they want to, or play, or just sit, until there is some trust built. Then, when the child is ready, and in a safe situation, she starts to introduce the idea that healing can happen — and that there are safe grown-ups in the world.
Lewis says the youngest children want to tell their stories.
“It’s like their body wants it,” she said. “Even if they don’t tell me straight out, it will show up in their play right away.”
There is a dollhouse in the room where Lewis works with the younger children. Often, what they have experienced is played out with the house.
“They might bash all the furniture around, and people are getting hurt in the house,” she said. “Eventually, I’ll say to them: ‘I wonder where that safe grown-up is.’ ”
If they’re in the early stages of the process, there won’t be one, she says. But eventually, they will pull some figure out and say, “This person is going to help.”
Even then, a child might cover up the pain again, for a few months, or maybe forever.
“They may never show me a sign of trauma again,” Lewis said. “But they showed it to me; showed me what was going on inside.”
Because Cutchins does long-term work with families, clients often come back, some repeatedly.
“New behaviors and new symptoms appear with each developmental stage,” Lewis said. “Sometimes a child will seem well-adjusted, and then the chilly air of fall hits, and she’s a mess again, because of a trigger.”
In her opinion, Lewis says, the ideal scenario for clients who have experienced trauma is to offer birth families all the resources they need to keep their children with them. Some of them, for example, have been separated from their parents because of general neglect, often due to substance abuse, perhaps by the mother.
Lewis wonders: Could there be a way to hold that child in the home, while mom is going through rehab?
And many of the children have been removed from the home after witnessing violence, often against the mother, by a partner. Lewis says it’s important to look at alternative approaches.
“Some would argue that you’re victimizing the mother all over again,” she said. “She’s being beaten up by her partner, and now she loses her kids. Could there be services we could provide for that family without taking the children away from their mother?”
Keegan Pyle can be reached at ValleyStoryPlace@gmail.com.