Dent calls this kind of reaction getting emotionally hijacked, saying of Owens, “She fell victim to her own negative programming.”
Dent says in that split second, Owens had a choice: to act on impulse or to be her higher self. He says he works on this himself every day.
“If you’re driving and somebody cuts you off, you have the option to get around them, flip them off, curse them out or whatever,” he says. “Or you have the choice to be like, ‘OK, well, maybe they need to get to someplace. So I’m going to allow them to, you know, have that.’ Then I send them love and light. You know, ‘I hope you make it to your destination safely.’ And those are some of the tools I teach my clients.”
Dent calls this operating on a higher frequency. And he shares this wisdom in his classes.
“A lot of professionals have trouble relating to students because all they have is book smarts. And that can only lead you so far, especially going into the belly of the beast,” Dent says.
Dent says his own experience in public schools forced him onto his path of self-discovery. In third grade, he says, a teacher placed him in special education — where he remained until 12th grade.
“She asked me to play quietly, but what 6-year-old, you know, plays quietly?” he says. “So she influenced my mom to keep me in these classes due to my mom being on drugs at the time, saying, like, ‘If your child is on SSI, you have an extra income.’ So saying that to a person that’s hooked on something — that’s volumes.”
Dent is adamant he stopped growing psychologically at 6 when this teacher imprinted that negative view on him. He graduated 12th grade reading at a third-grade level “because all we did was sing songs and [eat] snacks and color.”
Today he has a master’s degree in behavioral psychology from Cal State East Bay. But first he had to go to Laney College for seven years to catch up on all the learning he missed in his earlier years.
“So it’s possible for you to accomplish anything,” Dent says. As he likes to tell the students, “The only thing in the way of you, is you.”
When Owens became frustrated with her teacher during finals week, instead of just walking out of school and not returning — as she says she normally would have done — she took steps to recover.
“I just kept having to breathe, and breathe, and breathe as much as I can. Anger like that, you really have to be careful,” she says.
In that moment, a McClymonds staffer who works closely with Dent also helped her with some advice: “Go ahead, cry yourself out of it. Do as much crying as you gotta do and then we gotta get right back to this essay.”
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