Detour From Delinquency : ‘I Treat the Person, and the Behavior Will Follow,’ Says Adolescent Therapist Bruce Christle

It was a winter night last year when Jesse’s two friends approached him with a quick and easy plan to escape from Orange County Juvenile Hall. They would simply climb a fence and drop down on the outside.

Jesse’s cohorts went first--up and over. Jesse, close behind, hesitated, thought for a moment, and walked back inside, leaving his friends to go on without him.

Asked later why he aborted his escape, Jesse said that, on top of his doubts that it was a wise move, he had realized he didn’t have something he knew he’d need on the outside: the phone number of his therapist, Bruce Christle.

For Jesse (all teen-agers’ names have been changed in this story), his therapist was more than another in a series of adult scolders and authority figures. Christle, a private psychologist with offices in Orange and Dana Point, was a sounding board, a confidant, even a friend.

Under Christle’s counseling, Jesse, 15, had begun a program of self-directed, internal change, as opposed to mere behavior modification, away from delinquency.

As with many of Christle’s clients, Jesse’s problems were rooted in the family, with an abusive father who then became an absent father. Jesse used drugs in junior high school and fell into a gang environment. Now he is attending school regularly, sees teachers as resources rather than as threats and no longer has a drug problem.

In a region that’s crowded with adolescent therapists, Bruce Christle stands out. His methodology enjoys a 90% success rate--nearly twice the average--in keeping youths from second trips to juvenile hall or youth camps, says one veteran probation officer.

His techniques include candor, empathy and hard work. Christle is possibly the only private therapist in the county who will visit his clients after they’ve been arrested and put behind bars. He charges fees based on families’ ability to pay, refuses to include travel time in his fees and goes to unusual lengths, such as attending rap concerts and even visiting gangbangers’ turf, to gain the teen-agers’ confidence and respect.

Christle makes efforts to learn “everything that’s important” to the juvenile offenders.

“When you’re dealing with adolescents you have to be something of a cultural anthropologist and appreciate the fact that you may as well be dealing with a completely foreign culture,” Christle says. “They have a whole different value system.”

With his walrus mustache, longish hair and laid-back demeanor, Christle, 44, presents a refreshing image to offenders accustomed to the button-down straightness and shiny badges of the county-run juvenile justice system.

He also rises in their estimation through his mode of transit. No dull tan sedan for him; he gets from home to office to Juvenile Hall on an impeccably restored 1970 Triumph motorcycle.

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According to Karolyn Zebarth, a teacher of severely emotionally disturbed youths with the Orange County Department of Education, Christle’s persona and commitment help him get results.

“Bruce is unusually good with the delinquent population, with the real defiant kids,” she says. “He makes an effort to understand them and does achieve a real depth of understanding with individual kids.”

Christle’s background, nothing if not diverse, also helps him relate to his wayward charges. In the 1970s he worked as a kindergarten teacher, a police officer, a Kmart manager, a combat Marine in Vietnam and a shepherd.

Also, like many of his clients, he dropped out of high school, feeling he was being judged and coerced by people who didn’t care about him. He later earned an equivalency degree and went on to get a master’s in psychology from the University of La Verne.

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At the heart of Christle’s approach is a simple idea: Juvenile offenders have a sense of being that needs to be acknowledged and nurtured. This basic principle is usually overlooked, he says, because the priority of most juvenile-offender counseling is to change the external behavior, the symptoms, as expediently as possible.

“What makes my approach different is that I treat the person, and the behavior will follow,” he says. “Most therapists redirect the behavior and assume the person will change.”

He teaches the youngsters to control themselves through their commitment to being honest--both to Christle and to themselves. Their previous experience in school and in the justice system has taught them to associate honesty with punishment, Christle says, so they lie, claiming they don’t do drugs, or they say what they think the authorities want to hear.

“I get them thinking about what they really want in life, and that offers the most powerful hold over all their subsequent behavior,” he says. “I might point out, ‘If you truly want to be happy, how is failing school going to make you happy?’ I get them to claim the behavior they want, and that lays a claim to motivation.”

Christle says that virtually every troubled teen-ager he sees has had his or her sense of self degraded to the point where it has become simply another value, with equal status among other contemporary values, such as money and property.

“If being is just another value, it goes into the hopper of ‘my value versus your value’ ” and so can easily be degraded or even annihilated, Christle says.

“You have the kid who recently shot the bike store owner. For what? For the material possession, the bike. But what about the life? It doesn’t matter. Ethically, what has this kid learned? Ethically, he is behaving in a perfectly complementary way to how society functions. It’s just power and money. In my conversations with kids, they almost invariably say life doesn’t matter, only money does.”

When teen-agers do act out this skewed value system, Christle says, their behavior is all the more abhorrent to adults simply because the adolescents have no choice but to do it in a raw, juvenile way: with guns, gangbanging, carjackings or, at the very least, with chaotic graffiti.

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Richard, 16, is typical of Christle’s clients. A product of divorced parents, he hasn’t seen his father in two years and was put on probation for an alcohol-related offense 18 months ago. Richard so enjoys his counseling sessions that he phones in the appointments himself, says his mother, Carla, a financial consultant who lives in Orange. “It’s the first time I’ve seen him be so responsible about anything,” she says.

As a result of the therapy, Carla says, “my son and I have developed the ability to communicate 80% more than we ever have. I’m a single parent, and there’s a vacuum. Bruce is able to fill up some of that vacuum. Richard still sees his (probation officer), and it’s like a team for him. He feels real valued. It helps him build self-esteem.”

Christle is often on the road, taking his Triumph to Los Pinos Forestry Camp near Lake Elsinore, Joplin Youth Center in Trabuco Canyon, Juvenile Hall in Orange and the Youth Guidance Center in Santa Ana.

Christle doesn’t advertise his services, preferring to get his 40 or so annual clients through word of mouth or court-ordered placements. Despite his success rate in juvenile counseling, it constitutes only half his business. He also does traditional marriage and individual therapy.

Sherry Arkins, a deputy probation officer with the Orange County Probation Department, says she has referred hundreds of offenders to Christle over the past eight years, many of whom had had unsuccessful dealings with other therapists.

“I’ve never had one kid who had complaints” about Christle, she says. “Some would even call me and ask to go (to see him) two or three times a week instead of once a week.”

Developing a frank and close relationship among the client, the probation officer and the therapist is key, Christle says. He helps the client interpret the limits and standards set by the probation officer.

“Some therapists don’t ever work with the probation officer,” Christle says. “I ask the kid, ‘Do you mind if I talk to your P.O.?’ They say yes. I tell them I won’t say anything personal about them. Then it’s not adversarial. Then they start to re-experience the P.O. as someone who’s not out to get them but as someone who’s out to help them.”

According to Arkins, the teamwork gets results but takes commitment on the therapist’s part. She says Christle is the only therapist she knows who visits clients while they’re in Juvenile Hall. Others wait until the teen-ager is released from custody.

“The kids know up front that (Christle) and I are going to communicate (with each other), and also with the parents and schools,” Arkins says. “It’s a picture of totality, with everyone working together. We’re not reinventing the dysfunctional cycle. And the parents are drawn into that too. We try as a . . . team to break that whole cycle.”

Sophie, an accountant in Orange, has met with Christle several times with her son Jim, 15, who was arrested six months ago after a fight with his sister. He has spent time in Juvenile Hall and is on probation.

Jim’s father died recently, and Jim hasn’t talked about it yet, Sophie says.

“But he’s come a long way. He has some problems to work out, but he’s a lot better,” Sophie says. “My son loves Bruce; he trusts him completely and tells him everything. He gives kids more credit than other people do.”

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In Christle’s opinion, many adolescents get into trouble because of learning disabilities.

Virtually all of the kids Christle sees have disabilities, he says, although most of the problems are not severe enough to justify special educational intervention. (Christle is dyslexic, which he says has helped make him sensitive to his clients’ disabilities.)

For these kids, Christle says, a neurological sequencing problem results in impulsiveness, lack of concern for the consequences of their actions and disorganization. Beginning in about fifth grade, poor organization causes schoolwork to suffer; the student is criticized and ultimately drops out of school, gravitating toward other dropouts.

Because of poor sequencing, many adolescents literally do not understand the concept behind the words “pay attention,” Christle says. In therapy, he breaks it down into a half-step, or even four incremental steps, then later the students are able to internalize what the words mean.

A chief underpinning of teen-age criminality, Christle says, is the widespread feeling among the adolescents he sees that they have no future.

“Kids know that if they go to school and do what they’re supposed to, they’ll basically be poor,” he says. “They know that if they get a typical minimum-wage job, they can’t live. You have to have parent support. You have to have a ton of subsidy. None of this is lost on the kids.”

He points to statistics from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that say 55% of working couples and 95% of single individuals will never be able to own a home. “Kids know this. This is part of why they tag, for example. They’re claiming the property vicariously.

“What kids are learning is that life is a power struggle to get money. And that you can’t get it in the traditional ways anymore, by working. You say, ‘Why don’t you go to school?’ They say, ‘What the f--- for? So I can get a job at McDonald’s?’ But if you tell a kid he can make $100 a day dealing drugs, he says, ‘Great.’ ”

It’s Christle’s goal to get young people to stop feeling OK connecting to drugs and crime, and learn to be OK by connecting with values such as honesty.

When that happens, he says, “they get in touch with stuff like self-esteem, good relationships with other people, these things that money can’t buy. Their family gets along; they have a nice girlfriend. Would they trade that for drugs or crime? No, because they only trade up. Remember, they never even had that choice before.”