by Valerie Klaassen

Created on: April 03, 2009

I am writing you this article under "How mentoring an adult differs from mentoring a youth. Yes, how is mentoring an adult is different than mentoring a youth? My name is Valerie Klaassen, and I am a 53-year-old woman with a disability which I was born with by birth. Now from time to time, I have been looking for a mentor who can mentor me and will help me get my life and myself back on my own two feet. I have tried the Traumatic Brain Injury Association of Northern Virginia in Springfield and Fairfax, Virginia to get a mentor through the case worker, and they won't even help me at all, because I do not have traumatic brain injury. Why is it that I am having problems with looking for a case manager through the Brain Injury Associations in Northern Virginia and the Fairfax Country Government Community Services Board on Mental Health and Mental Retardation? All of this is nothing but a big headache and a heavy load of stress that this keeps putting me under, and I am sick and tired of it. You know what? I am not going to say this to you sounding like I am doom and bloom or to bring up my past times; I am going to tell it like it is, because of the way my mother has always been treating me all my life. My mother would not get me a mentor for youths with disability and she would not put me into a rehabilitation program for people with developmental delays, short-term memory loss, cognitive delays, autism/autism spectrums and emotional delays. Now I have been having trouble with communication skills whenever I try to express my feelings and thoughts to tell it like it is with my family and sometimes with my 80-year-old husband. I would get all torn to pieces, and go off and through tantrums or hollow and scream at my husband on top of my lungs. My anger management is very, very poor in this inappropriate distructive ways that came from living and being around my abusive mother, because everything has got to be her way, and that really put me in that wrongful ways of living. These are called learned behaviors that I have gotten through my abusive mother. Even today, she has been mentally and emotional abusive toward me and Al who is my husband. There has been two sets of parents wanting to run my life and my marriage and all it does it keeps me and Al under conflicts, turmoils, upsets, arguments and retalliating with each other. Those people will not compremise, or share with us what we would like to do, because it is always what they want us to do and tell us what

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