They say you always remember your first.

It was 1978, and I’d just graduated from social work school. I saw myself as a kind of perky Jane Addams, brimming with altruistic energy. I’d just landed my first job as Illinois’s first in-home family therapist for child abuse and neglect cases. And my very first case was the Byford family.

The Byfords lived in what’s known as a Chicago bungalow, a narrow brick house with a low-pitched, overhanging roof. But the Byfords’ house wasn’t the neat and clean type with mowed grass and flower boxes under each window. When I walked on the dry, brown grass, dust blew up in my face. The windows were grimy. The place looked more like a bunker than a home.

When I first met the family, the father, Robert, was serving a six-month sentence for domestic abuse. He’d sexually abused his 16-year-old daughter, Laura, for many years. Yet when Laura opened the front door for me, she was warm and welcoming, with a cute bob of a haircut that I immediately envied. I was struck by her bubbly hospitality, given what she’d endured.

Laura stood in dramatic contrast to her mother, Reesa, who was still in pain from two broken ribs Robert had dealt her three weeks earlier, on the day he’d gone to jail. She was curled up in a barrel chair in the corner of the room, wearing a faded housedress over gray sweatpants.

Carl, age 14, was a playful kitten. Within the hour, he was teaching me the latest dance steps, cavorting across the floor in a yellow Grateful Dead T-shirt. He, too, had been beaten by his father. Later, in an individual session, Robert explained to me that he’d hit Carl “to beat the gayness out of him.”

Five months into my work with the Byfords, I walked up the front steps for a scheduled visit and heard loud voices and the sound of crashing glass. I pushed the door open and found Laura, Reesa, and Carl in the living room, shards of glass around their feet. I watched Laura pick up a drinking glass from the coffee table and hold it over her head like a quarterback, aiming straight for her mom. Reesa was huddled in her barrel chair, crying, “Please don’t hit me.” Carl was pacing back and forth like a caged cub, his hands over his ears, muttering, “Shut up, just shut up!”

When Laura heard me come into the room, she spun around to face me. “I hate you,” she shrieked. “I hate you all! You were supposed to take care of me!” She whirled to face her mother. “Dad is getting out of jail today! And he’s coming here!”

My mind went blank. I found myself falling backward into the couch I’d avoided for months because it smelled like cat piss and looked like it’d swallow me alive. Voices in my head taunted, You have no strength, no skills. You have absolutely no idea how to help these people.

A low, keening sound snapped me back to the present. Laura was crumpled on the floor. Carl was crouching next to her. “Mary Jo, help me,” Laura whimpered. “Help me.” I looked frantically around the room, unsure what I was looking for—maybe a way out. At that moment, my eyes fell on Reesa. We gazed at each other. It was as though I passed whatever strength I had to her, and she then passed it back to me.

“Reesa, I need your help,” I said. “I need you to help me help your children. What do you need from me?”

Reesa stood up, walked over to her children, and got down on her knees next to them. Gently, she began to stroke their hair and rub their backs as they cried. I’d never seen Reesa this way with her kids. She looked up at me and said, “Help me keep my children safe. I want to be a good mother. I need your help.”

Something had happened here. But I didn’t know exactly what.

I worked with the Byfords over the next four years. During that time, I witnessed enough of these shifts that I began to call them Byford moments, even when I’d experience them with other families.

About a year into my work with the Byfords, I walked into their home and found Reesa, Laura, and Carl sitting forlornly in the living room. They looked sunken, as though all the energy had been sucked from their bodies. Reesa looked at me dully. “Will we ever be normal, ever have fun like other families?” she asked. “We’re so sick,” added Laura.

“Well,” I said, playing for time, “what do you think fun is, and how could you have it?”

They thought for a while. Then Carl shrugged and said, “I think bowling would be fun.”

“Say no more,” I responded. “Excuse the pun, but that’s right up my alley.” A little-known fact about me is that in my youth, I wanted to be a professional bowler. My mother told me that this was impossible: Jewish girls do not become professional bowlers. But that didn’t mean that a Jewish social worker couldn’t take a client family bowling!

“If you guys can find a bowling alley and decide on a time,” I said, “I’ll meet you there.” Reesa organized the outing, and I met them at the alley the following week. Carl and Reesa were decent bowlers and Laura not so much, but she was a good sport. We even talked a bit about bowling as a metaphor for family—acting as a team, cheering each other on, and yet remaining individuals. I walked out of the lanes that night musing, I’m not sure what happened here, but I think they had fun.

Then, a few months after Robert had gotten out of prison, I visited him. It was our sixth session. When Robert had first been paroled, his supervision order forbade him to be within 300 yards of his family. So he bought a motor home and parked it on the street exactly 300 yards and one inch from the family bungalow.

On this particular day, I walked into the motor home and found Robert hunched in a kitchen chair. All the color was washed from his face. You should know that Robert, a six-foot, four-inch ex-cop, usually spoke in a dominating, scary voice. Now, he wouldn’t even look at me. “Robert, what’s wrong?” I asked. Silence. I took a deep breath and walked closer to him. “Tell me how I can help.”

I saw then that he’d been crying. He looked up at me. “Do you think I have what it takes to be a decent human being?” he asked.

I had asked myself that question many times while working with him. He was forever minimizing his abuse and rationalizing his behavior. Finally, I said, “Robert, I don’t know. I don’t know if you can. Tell me, what do you believe is a decent human being?”

He thought about it for a long time. “I think I’d have to get to know myself,” he finally said. “I’d have to understand why I hurt my wife and kids. I’d have to change into the kind of man I want to be.”

Together, we created a recipe that included the ingredients of a mensch. (I’d taught the family a little Yiddish.) Robert made it his goal to access the ingredients we chose—responsibility, caring, respect for others—and become a man he could be proud of.

At the next family session, which Robert was allowed to attend with everyone’s agreement, he apologized genuinely for his abusive behaviors. “I want to become a good father, husband, and man,” he said softly.

I asked Reesa, Laura, and Carl to think of times when Robert was the kind of person they’d want back in their family. Each made his or her own recipe card, not just for Robert, but for each of themselves. We sat around the kitchen table brainstorming the ingredients that were necessary to make and bake a happy, nonviolent person and family. Some of the ingredients they chose were:

• 2 cups of God and going to church as a family
• 4 tbsp. of no alcohol
• ½ cup of good communication
• 1 cup of safe boundaries

Other ingredients were honesty, humor, and fun. I structured sessions based on these recipes, and family members began to design their day-to-day lives around nourishing activities and interactions. We imagined together that we were actually making—baking—a different life.

To this day, I’ve stayed curious about what makes treatment effective for traumatized people, especially those who’ve endured interpersonal violence. I knew that something had happened in those Byford moments that helped clients move forward, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. So, two decades later, after I’d started my own therapy center, my staff and I began interviewing clients after they’d completed treatment. We asked them straight up, “What were the essential ingredients in your growth and healing?”

One day in 2002, 24 years after I’d last seen the Byfords, I found myself thinking of them, and an idea bubbled up. Maybe we could find them, wherever they were, and ask them what they thought. Thanks to the internet, three weeks later, the family was sitting in my office. When I paused for a moment outside my door, I heard loud voices and chairs shifting. Were they fighting? My heart sank.

I braced myself and walked in. On the loveseat sat Reesa, looking fit and vibrant in a turquoise yoga outfit. She and Robert were holding hands. On the couch sat Carl and his boyfriend, Brad. In the chairs next to Carl were Laura and her 11-year-old daughter, Shauna, who attended the school where Laura was a fifth-grade teacher. All of them looked relaxed and vital.

Laura jumped to her feet and wrapped me in a hug. Afterward, I hugged Reesa, Robert, and Carl and introduced myself to Brad. Then I fell into my chair. “Look at you!” I exclaimed. “Do you realize that 24 years ago, when we first began working together, I had no idea what I was doing?”

There was a pause, and then some giggling.

“It was kind of obvious,” Carl said, trying unsuccessfully to maintain a poker face.

After some catching up and progress reports, I asked, “Do you remember that day when Laura threw the glasses? The day Robert got out of jail and moved into the motor home?” The room became quiet. Turning to Reesa, I asked, “How do you remember that day? What did it mean to you?”

She paused a moment. “That was the first time anyone ever had faith in me,” she said. She took a breath. “That’s what it was. It was the first time someone else respected me enough to truly look at me and ask me what I needed.” Reesa gazed at me. “If you could ask me for help, I knew I could ask you for help. It was then that you and I became a team to help my family.”

And at that moment, I knew what I hadn’t known before: that all the families we’d been interviewing were telling us essentially the same thing. It wasn’t just the techniques and protocols we utilized to work with clients. After all, back in the day when I’d been working with the Byfords, I didn’t have models or techniques. I learned that even a therapist’s compassion, humor, and awareness aren’t enough, although those qualities are essential. What I learned in that meeting, 24 years after my first Byford moment, was that truly effective trauma treatment depends on my capacity to collaborate deeply with clients in discovering what they believe they need to heal. When you ask them, they know.

Return to the other stories in “What’s Your Most Memorable Therapeutic Moment?”