On Homelessness

As I have said before, there are two types of homeless people. There are those people who become homeless only because of some financial crisis. Yet, no financial crisis lasts forever, and once these people over come their financial problems, they leave homelessness, never to return. The other kind of homeless people, are those who become homeless for every other reason. And though these people become homeless through an infinite variety of circumstances, they all have two things in common. They are either very sad, as in suffering a tremendous depression, or very angry, usually a non-violent variety, where the person is given to dispersing much blame, and harbors a considerable amount of self loathing.

Now, someone may say that all people experience sadness and anger at different times in their lives, and that they never become homeless for it. That is true. But for homeless people, the amount of sadness and anger they feel is so extreme that they are unable to overcome it.

The key lies in the human event of "loss." Again, every person experiences loss in their life, but it has been proven that homeless people experience many more loss events in their lives than other people. Also, for a great many homeless people, opportunities to learn loss coping skills are rare. And, the types of loss homeless people face are usually more severe. Divorce is very common, as the straw the broke the camels back, so too is the death of a loved one, especially a child. And, so is the loss of a healthy childhood, due to abuse. But the loss events homeless people face, and have faced, run the whole gambit of negative experiences.

The inability to cope with these problems of loss ushers in all sorts of coping attempts, by the soon-to-be homeless person. They begin taking drugs and drinking alcohol. And often, under the duress of these issues, a person may become ill, physically and/or mentally. But these coping attempts only exacerbate the problems the person experiences, and their lives eventually collapse. It is not long after this collapse that people begin to lose their jobs, their friends and family, and eventually their homes. Now homeless, their situation becomes significantly worse. The opportunities to overcome personal problems are almost non-existent while homeless. But, much more problematic is the superstitious stigma society places on homeless people. Instead of seeing homeless people as being in need of great care, much like a person with cancer needs care, homeless people are usually ostracized from society, and blamed for the condition their lives have fallen into.

Now, there is something that society says about homeless people that is true, although it sounds harsh. But the harshness isn't in the truth of this statement, but in how people generally respond to it. Others will say that homeless people lack the proper motivation for successfully leaving homelessness. Yes, for the chronically homeless that is true. But then most of these people will also say that the best way to motivate homeless people to get out of homelessness, is to make homelessness as difficult as possible. And that is just not true. When you take a person who is feeling so much sadness and anger, and who has experienced an inordinate amount of loss in his/her life, and then add more loss to their life, you only make their problems worse – the loss of good shelters, the loss of proper quality and quanity of food, the loss of proper health care, the loss of adequate mental health care, the loss of the basic rights of citizenship, the loss of being treated like an equal, of thus being harassed by the police and other citizens, the loss of the right to walk through a park, or sit on a bench, the loss of access to basic facilities like clean restrooms....etc. All of these only compound the exacerbate the problems homeless people face that led them to homelessness in the first place, and making it all the more difficult for people to overcome their homelessness.

For homeless people, but mostly chronically homeless people, the solution to ending their homelessness is found in countering all the losses they have experienced in life with positive experiences. They need to start having some real and serious gains in their lives. They need friends, and family if possible, to have positive experiences with. They need to have experiences in life that don't end with some kind of loss. They need for others to stop passing judgment on them. They to have a real community to belong to. They need to be treated with respect. They need people to be on their side, and to not give up on them. They need access to health care, and a clean and safe and dependable place to sleep, they need to start collecting personal belongings without the threat of theft, or of some shelter employee throwing their belongings away. They need for the police and other law enforcement types to leave them completely alone, if they have committed no crime. Etc.

It must be known, that even with nothing but positive things happening in a homeless person's life, it will still take quite a while for it all to have a permanent effect against all the negative things the homeless person has experienced in life. So it will require constant vigilance on the part of everyone who comes in contact with homeless people, so to make the transition from homeless to homed as quick and permanent as possible for all homeless people.