UNCOVERING, TREATING THE TRAUMA

Intensive New Program Is Designed To Help Those Hardest To Train

Single Women On Welfare In San Mateo County Are Having Their Ongoing
Personal Problems Addressed In Hopes They Finally Can Get Off The Welfare
Rolls And Have A Better Life.

San Mateo County leads California when it comes to moving people off
welfare, but it can't shake free Kayla Gaines, Hope Richard and 600 other
single parents stuck on aid.

Gaines is 44, recovering from a heroin addiction and quick to acknowledge
her work history includes ``nothing legal.'' Richard is 36, a mother of
three, and wants her supermarket job back but battles depression and the
lure of liquor.

Crash courses in job training and a wealth of low-wage jobs have helped San
Mateo County slash the number of people on welfare since 1995 by a record
77 percent. But these women need something more.

That's why the county is gambling on a new intensive eight-week treatment
program designed to uncover the women's deepest traumas before they're sent
into the work world.

Substance-abuse and mental-health counselors, three with doctorates in
psychology, meet with the women eight hours a day at a newly opened Women's
Enrichment Center. A specialist manages the single mothers' lives: housing
crises, dental needs and custody battles. They're given rides to the center
and back; their kids are dropped off at day care. Breakfast and lunch are
served, with an occasional food basket to take home.

No one knows whether the program will work, and it isn't cheap. The county
pays $4,000 for each participant -- more than three times what the average
welfare recipient receives in cash aid.

The first group started in October with six women. Four dropped out within
weeks. Another ended up in jail, after an outstanding warrant caught up
with her during a trip to Nevada. But now she's back at the Women's
Enrichment Center for eight more weeks.

``If I don't get it right this time, I don't think I can come back,''
Gaines said during a recent class, echoing others' sentiments. ``I can go
straight from this door and get some heroin, but my next stopping point
will be death.''

Yet for all the good intentions, some say the program is too short to do
any long-term good.

``People with serious addiction or mental-health problems are not going to
recover in an eight-week period of time,'' said Sandra Naylor Goodwin,
director of the California Institute for Mental Health in Sacramento.
``That's just not the reality of a serious clinical depression or a serious
drug addiction.''

But local officials say there are few options, so they've paid a non-profit
agency $350,000 to run the Women's Enrichment Center for a year.

The old welfare system asked no questions about why women remained on
public aid. Now, with the task of putting recipients to work within five
years, welfareagencies-turned-employment-centers have to probe personal lives.

``There are experiences like chronic trauma, poverty, educational
deficiencies, drug use and mental-health issues that honestly and truly get
in people's way. That's what we have to focus on now,'' said Marilyn
Kissinger, director of the new center in San Carlos.

The women gather there in a plushly carpeted classroom that overlooks a
courtyard dotted with bird feeders and a splashing fountain. In class, even
the simplest accomplishments count.

Maggie Casson gets applause for using her free time to grab a burger, not a
syringe. Gaines gets praise from counselor David Meshel for ``identifying
her core beliefs.''

``Everything that I used to believe for 30 years as a heroin addict didn't
work,'' she tells the class bluntly.

Richard sits in the circle next to Gaines. She's nodding.

``I'm tired of being a failure,'' said Richard, who's been trying to pass
her high school equivalency exam since 1982. Counselors press her to find
time to study.

She listens to a fable about Genghis Khan, debates the effectiveness of
Alcoholics Anonymous sponsors and helps herself to a lunch of croissant
sandwiches, fresh strawberries and sparkling juices. She misses life with
paychecks. Child-care problems cost her a job, she said. She cries when
recounting how her daughter reacted to a Thanksgiving Day handout:

``I don't want to eat that turkey -- that thing ain't no good,'' the
6-year-old told her mom. ``That turkey's for poor people.''

Richard compares the conversation with the shame of her own childhood as
one of nine children her grandmother raised on domestic work and public
assistance. Her brother would melt the ``W'' off the back of his sneakers
so no one could tell they came from Woolworth's.

Now, Richard is crushed to see her daughter suffering the same shame.

Substance-abuse counselor Deborah Casta=F1eda coaxes Richard to say: ``I'm
a successful person.'' But it isn't easy to say, or to feel like the image
fits.

``It's been a tough week,'' marriage and family therapist Clarise Blanchard
said with a sigh after class, ``a lot of crying and people needing
individual sessions to just contain themselves.''

The sessions mark a dramatic break from welfare-to-work programs of the
recent past.

Job readiness classes have been required for all San Mateo County adults on
welfare since 1997 -- one year before other California counties began the
transition. But human services agency Director Maureen Borland has since
discovered that the job clubs aren't working for the vast majority of moms
who stay on aid more than the typical two to four weeks. Resume writing is
out because many can't write. Mock interviews don't help -- the women are
too beaten down to present themselves confidently to strangers. Even the
freedom to work, for almost half of the women, is bridled by an abusive mate.

A study of welfare moms in two California counties confirms these women are
not alone.

The California Institute for Mental Health reports that in two long-term
case studies, most welfare parents had at least one diagnosable disorder.
Almost half said they'd been battered by a mate within the past year, often
resulting in post-traumatic stress disorder or injuries that interfered
with work.

Meanwhile, since 1995, the number of families on welfare has dropped 50
percent nationwide and 34 percent statewide. San Mateo County led the
state, dropping from 7,156 families in 1994 to 1,641 last year. That number
includes 1,030 families in which children are eligible for welfare, but
their caregivers aren't required to work.

Santa Clara County still has 10,400 families on welfare -- down 69 percent
from 1994. That county has spent the past year broadening its services for
welfare recipients, including expunging criminal records and removing
tattoos. Mental-health and substance-abuse treatment is available as part
of a broader array of job readiness and education programs, but nothing as
intensive as in San Mateo County.

``We can't carve people up into little pieces,'' said Kissinger, the
Women's Enrichment Center director. ``We have to treat them and see the
whole person.''