Chapter Text
Epilogue
Personal Statement Guidelines: Why does the field of social work matter to you?
Smith College
School for Social Work
23 West Street
Northampton, MA, 01063
Dear Admissions Committee,
My name is Kylie Rizzoli. If you recognize my name, you may think that’s all the reason I need to be interested in the field of social work. But there’s a lot to my story that you don’t know.
What you probably know is this: When I was three years old, I was kidnapped from a park and held for twelve days by a delusional psychopath named James Fleiss. My aunt, Jane Rizzoli, was a famous homicide detective in Boston at the time. A woman was kidnapped with me, a medical examiner named Maura Isles, and held with me for the latter nine days. She engineered our escape. She and I both testified against him, and he was found guilty on all counts, and died in prison when I was sixteen years old.
I don’t remember much of what happened while I was gone. But what I do remember, and what has motivated me to become a social worker, is what happened to me after I was returned to my family.
My parents were uneducated, young, and unprepared to have a child. They were prideful and extremely defensive about their parenting, even before I was kidnapped. While I was gone, they were blamed by the media for leaving me in that park with an unqualified babysitter who was too young to be responsible for me. After I came back, I wasn’t receptive to their parenting. I had developed a preoccupied anxious attachment to Maura and an avoidant attachment to my parents. I had no interest in my parents, and they were completely unprepared to deal with that.
They took me to a therapist who took advantage of their ignorance and fear and used them for her own agenda. She didn’t care about my wants or my feelings. Even though I was only three years old, I’ve been told that I was very clear in what I wanted. However, she disregarded me, valuing only the input of my parents, and openly overlooking the stern objections of my aunt, my grandmother, Maura, and even Maura’s therapist.
She convinced my parents to rip Maura from my life, to completely cut her off. I knew, even as a small child, that this wasn’t the right thing to do, but it wasn’t until my child psychology and childhood trauma classes at Tufts University that I began to realize the extent of the violence this was to me. This therapist, who later lost her license because of actions like this, used her power over my family to destroy the only thing in the world that made me feel safe. Not only was I still coping with the trauma of having been abducted, having had a bomb strapped to my waist multiple times a day, having been drugged, having been physically abused and nearly starved before Maura arrived in the house – but now I was dealing with a loss of safety and of security that was completely unnecessary.
I firmly believe that I was more harmed, in the long-term, by this therapist’s actions, than I was by James Fleiss’s.
I’m aware that she was a particularly awful case. However, I spoke to many childhood trauma survivors as a part of my undergraduate thesis research, and fewer than twenty-five percent of them said that their first therapists took them and their needs seriously.
I want to attend the Smith School for Social Work to become a therapist and advocate for the youngest children – those who, like myself, may be unable to communicate in full, thoughtful sentences, but who still need, possibly more than any adult, to be understood and taken seriously. I want to help this population. I want to be the therapist that I needed, back when I was so young.
I was lucky, in the end. My aunt and my grandmother never left my side, acting more like parents than my actual mother and father. However, even with their support, by age twelve I was still on track to become a statistic. I was a frequent run-away, I broke every rule I encountered, I didn’t care about school or grades. Without an intervention, I likely would have fallen in with a rough crowd in high school, and would have started trying to dull my pain with drugs. I likely would be dead by now.
It was only Maura coming back into my life that pulled me back from that precipice. I was so lucky to have her in my life. Because of her, together with my aunt and my grandmother, I spent my teenage years safe and loved by this community of three women who took my needs seriously and helped me come to grips with the ways my trauma still was impacting me. A new therapist helped immensely, and by the time I enrolled at Tufts, I was, certainly not cured, because I will never be cured, but healing in a significant way.
But not every child who survives a trauma has a Maura and an aunt and a grandmother who will stand so firmly with them for so long. Those children need someone who will listen to their voice and fight for them, even over the objections of parents who don’t fully understand what is happening.
I want to be that therapist. I want to learn how to be that therapist at Smith.
It is my great honor to apply for admission to the Smith School of Social Work.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Kylie Rizzoli