The Monitor: ‘If You Really Knew Me’ on MTV

As sure as there is high school, there are cliques. And as sure as there are cliques, there are outsiders. As schools get more and more diverse, old hierarchies may be getting challenged, but groups are also becoming more atomized. No one belongs everywhere, and everyone doesn’t belong somewhere.

But what every young person has in common is trauma: That’s the glue that holds together “If You Really Knew Me,” an MTV series that began last week. It focuses on efforts to break down social barriers in high school through the lens of Challenge Day, an organization that carries out one-day in-school seminars on emotional justice.

“If You Really Knew Me” is a documentary series with some of the narrative conceits of reality television. Each episode focuses on a Challenge Day seminar in a different school — last week it was Freedom High in Oakley, Calif., and this week it’s Anthony Wayne High in Whitehouse, Ohio.

The Challenge Day program was founded in 1987, and its key twist is in reframing the school as a safe space, not a site of hostility. By inviting young people to be at their most vulnerable within the walls of the institution where they normally act hardened, it theoretically allows for honest contact among people who historically communicate poorly or not at all.

The success of the seminars and exercises depends on its participants being able to access their pain, to be articulate about it and to allow others to share their experiences in a nonjudgmental environment.

Obviously, there’s skepticism going in the door. Last week, Barbara, one of the school’s “A-Quadders” — named for the area where the outcasts congregate — said, “I don’t really wanna, like, break down in front of everyone and just, like, break every barrier that I’ve put up, ‘cause it hurts when I think about some of these things, and I’m not sure that I really want to.” Sure enough, during one of the exercises, she outs herself as a former cutter.

A gay student talks about his father’s threat to kick him out of the house. A jock admits he’s stood by idly while those around him engaged in racist behavior and that he plays football only because it makes him popular.

In one exercise, students (and teachers/supervisors) are asked to stand on one side of a room. Then, after a particular trauma is named — family troubles with alcohol or drugs, racial or ethnic discrimination, persistent verbal abuse, thoughts of suicide — anyone with that experience is asked to walk to the other side of the room and face the others. Last week, one student, P-Nut, crossed the line for almost every situation.

After the exercise, he addressed the group: “I look at everybody and they crying and stuff. Like, that’s good. They got feelings. But I don’t really think I have feelings, ‘cause no matter what I go through, I don’t cry.”

These are elaborate, forceful and sometimes devastating acts of emotional theater, scenes that run from pretty disturbing to downright brutal. In some cases, at the end of the day, students are invited to apologize for their previous behavior in front of the group for what are inevitably vivid moments of public contrition of the sort you rarely see from adults, to say nothing of teenagers. This sort of brazenness should happen in workplaces, on city trains, on street corners.

In the first two episodes, the session leaders are Sela, a nurturer, and Vinny, who has a bit of Scared Straight to him that gives his encouragement an additional edge. “I guarantee you, you have no idea what the people in this group have been through,” he said in last week’s episode, hovering between empathetic and threatening. (Sela and Vinny are two of about 20 session leaders listed on the Challenge Day website.)

What these episodes reveal is that young people — molded by their experiences but not yet ossified — are capable of awe-inspiring compassion. But what happens next? “If You Really Know Me” is like footage of a successful surgery with only glimpses of how the patient functions when back on his feet. Once home, Barbara tries to convey to her father how much she loves him and is met with awkwardness and what appears to be some deeply masked rage about his own parents.

During the seminar, the collective emotional fervor is intense enough to encourage even the most walled-off teens to admit to their feelings. But what about when they have to listen? Challenge Day teaches the value of sharing, but the guarantee of confidentiality is only implicit. Watching these young people confess to family troubles, self-image concerns, thoughts of suicide and more, it’s hard not to fear for them. Once you reveal your true self, what’s to stop someone else from using it against you?

calendar@latimes.com