A Shining Affliction Read online




  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I - THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  II - SILENCE

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  III - MESSENGER

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  IV - EPILOGUE

  AFTER WORD

  Acknowledgements

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  A SHINING AFFLICTION

  Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Human Development and Psychology at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, directed a research study and prevention project, “Strengthening Healthy Resistance and Courage in Girls,” in collaboration with Carol Gilligan. She is now exploring children’s responses to violence and trauma through their relationships, as well as conducting her own private practice with children. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Copyright © Annie G. Rogers, 1995

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-0-140-24012-2

  1. Abused children—Rehabilitation—Case studies.

  2. Child psychotherapy—Case studies. 3. Psychotherapist and patient—Case studies.

  4. Rogers, Annie G.—mental health.

  I. Title.

  RJ507.A29R64 1995

  618.92’858223’0092—dc20 94-45171

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  The oldest meanings of the word affliction include a vision or spiritual sight that follows upon a time of darkness and torment.

  For Mary Mullens Rogers

  and Meg Turner

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The names of all the major characters and many of the minor characters in this book have been changed to protect their identity. I have also changed the time and place in which the events took place and created different physical descriptions of all the major characters except Blumenfeld. Some names in the acknowledgments are also fictitious. In particular, while there is an actual child known in this story as Ben, I have changed his name, some details of his history, and added characteristics to my portrait of him to protect his confidentiality.

  I

  THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

  If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  —GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  Why is it that angels like disguise?

  —SOPHY BURNHAM, A Book of Angels

  1

  Light filters down among the stacks inside the library’s cool vault. Dust motes swirl in the air, tiny particles of color in the muted light. I hold a stone in my hands, small, with a little dip in the very center, little dipper of a stone, cooler than the air and my hands—so I warm it before dropping it into the pocket of my skirt. I begin to sort through my pile of references, assorted scraps of paper. In the vaulted air a little circle of dust motes spins in the cool light, whirled high in space. I follow it around a corner and down a row marked PA2065. Before me stands a child (in a university library?) directly under the circling light, a child of perhaps five or six, no more, straining to see the titles above her eye level. She glances at me and gestures toward a black volume two shelves over her head. Amused, I hand her the book, a heavy volume with a title in Latin, complete with gilded pages. The child sits down in the aisle, immediately bent over this book. I remember her clearly: a child with light hair, impossibly at ease with herself, wearing a gray-and-red dress. I step over her legs, then turn to look back. Her eyes are on me, radiant, and a light moves over her whole face and lights up the library’s cool vault. I have never seen such intelligence and love in a child’s face. Searching everywhere for my thoughts, for the words that would accompany me into speech with her, I drop my piles of pages, look up to meet those eyes again. There, where she was, the spinning light of dust motes in the all-colored air moves up to the ceiling, and up through the ceiling.

  I pound up the marble stairs, my feet a thunder and drumming in my ears, to the reading room above—about where she stood—but nothing. Heads bent over books ... A young man, chewing a pencil, looks out into the August heat and haze. I rush outside, to look for her across the courtyard. The dry hot air takes the slow hiss of sprinklers back and forth over triangles of grass, water over the golden crisscrossing walks.

  I tell you, this light stays. I can’t separate the light from the silence—it burnishes my skin, a memory like a photograph—and leaves in my ears a roar of silence, deafening. You could say, “The child did not exist, or if she did, she did not vanish as you imagine.” And perhaps this is so. On the other hand, so
me angels yearn to be recognized, but can’t bear to be exposed too long in the light they themselves cast over the human world.

  2

  Less than a week later, I walk down a dimly lit hallway in Glenwood, a residential and day treatment center for emotionally disturbed children just outside Chicago. This is to be my first psychotherapy session with the first child I will treat, the beginning of my one-year doctoral clinical internship. I extend my hand in a nonverbal invitation to a five-year-old, tense little boy with dark eyes and straight brown bangs. He follows me down to the playroom, without accepting my hand, without looking at me. I open the door and we enter.

  Ben stands in the center of this small room, his back to me. He is a stranger to me and I no less a stranger to him. I sit down and wait for him to make the first move which will conduct this overture, our beginning.

  He stands very still, alone, silent—then explodes into action. He runs once around the room, touching things deftly in his flight—the desk, the chair, the chalkboard, puppet box, toy shelves, sink. He jerks toys from the shelves, throwing them on the floor.

  “I want to play with this and this and this,” he says, pulling down clay, a puppet, Tinkertoys and a box of train tracks. He squats down on the floor and begins to put the tracks together. Without looking at me, he speaks again: “There’s gonna be a big fire. There’s gonna be a big explosion!”

  He switches the focus abruptly, but continues to tell me about the same thing: “You and I, we go camping. I get lost in the woods. There is a big fire.”

  He dumps out the Tinkertoys and quickly sifts through a box of small plastic figures, pulling out six soldiers, then places them in a circle all around him. “They will protect me.” He wraps his arms around his bare knees and sits perfectly still. Silence wraps itself around us.

  “The woods are burning down, but you are safe now?” I ask. These are my first words to him.

  He glances at me briefly, and, as if to show me how unsafe he really is, he says, “I am sick. They took me to a hospital. You are the nurse and you will give me a shot.” He pulls two pillows under his head and lies down among the Tinkertoys and railroad tracks. He extends a fistful of long Tinkertoy pieces to me.

  “These will be the shots. I have to get all of ’em.” He looks away and a small shudder passes through his body. I see his fear and his bravery at once. I take one “shot” from him.

  “Perhaps one shot will make you better.” I roll up his sleeve and rub a spot on his arm. He watches me intently.

  “It will sting just for a moment, then it will be over and you will sleep,” I say. I touch the Tinkertoy to his arm. Ben winces, then closes his eyes and “sleeps,” as I suggested.

  Abruptly, he sits up and begins to pull more toys from the shelves.

  “I am going to play store. We need this and this and this!”

  He runs around the room again, picking up chalk, a cup, even the sign on the door. His words come out with quick breaths; his breathing carries the sound of fear. “I have my baby dragons, too, and baby Superman, and they are all very sick,” he tells me. “Make them be well,” he adds, without looking at me.

  He rushes to the light switch before I can answer and turns the light off. Blackness. No text on child therapy has prepared me to work in the dark.

  “How can I make them well, Ben?” I ask. But he ignores my question.

  “I will sleep in the store alone. I am not afraid,” he says.

  Blackness and silence. I wait, not knowing what to do. “Turn on the light. It’s morning now,” he shouts. I grope for the light.

  Ben sits up, blinking. “I had a bad dream.”

  “A bad dream?” I ask, feeling stupid, not in any way prepared for this child.

  He nods and moves toward the pile of assorted toys he calls “the store,” trying to line up the toys in rows, but he is unable to focus at all now. He runs back and forth across the small room, and then, suddenly, at the other end of the room, he flicks out the light.

  “It is night now. You are my mommy now and I am your son, OK? So don’t leave me alone at night.” Then silence as he settles down to sleep.

  “No, I won’t leave you alone,” I reiterate.

  “Goodnight, Mommy.”

  “Goodnight, Ben.”

  The stillness lasts several minutes, then Ben switches on the light again. I glance at my watch. Our time is almost up.

  “Morning again,” he announces. “Now I will be the teacher.” He moves toward my desk and uses the paper and crayons lying there.

  “This is how to make an eight, little boy,” he says. He draws a clumsy 8 in red crayon. “No, not like that, like this!”

  I tell him our time for today is almost up, but that I will see him two times a week and he will come again and play as he likes. I ask him to help me put away the toys before we leave. Ben throws them at the toy shelves haphazardly.

  “Where is my class?”

  I touch his arms lightly. “You’re worried about where your class is,” I say. “You don’t want to stay and clean up now.”

  He pauses and nods.

  “Today, you can go, but tomorrow we’ll clean up together, all right?”

  He does not answer. He backs away from my touch until he reaches the door, then turns and runs.

  I sit alone in the playroom, trying to “see” clearly what this child has shown me, what he was telling me in his play. When a child does not know and cannot describe, in words or in play, what has happened to him, it dominates his life. I knew this from the beginning of my work with Ben.

  What did he show me in one hour? Running, being lost, and fire. Fear of being left alone, being controlled, or being touched.

  It’s a confused story Ben enacts—a story line without a clear sequence or plot, a jumble of scenes—in the woods, in a hospital, in a room at night where he tries to sleep alone. He throws toys and runs around the playroom; his feelings shift quickly. Fear is uppermost among the feelings that come into the room. But there is bravery too, almost a stoicism about taking all the shots. The plot of his story shifts as rapidly as his emotions, and it’s hard for me to follow; I stumble after, learning in darkness that he is searching for a mother to stay with him at night, and for a nurse who can make him “better.” I know this only as I begin to respond and play my part with him. In the process of playing with Ben, following the pace and rhythm of his play, I feel he is running from haunting memories.

  Ben sits inside his circle of soldiers and tells me a story about the danger he feels with the woods burning all around him. There is a story behind this one, a room beyond this room, but neither he nor I know this consciously. In this beginning we are strangers to one another, telling stories and acting on a stage neither of us has constructed alone. Ben is a little boy who has come to be with me in this small room. He is my patient and I am his therapist. Yet from the beginning, different as we may be, we are engaged in a powerful human drama, a drama that neither one of us can play out (or even imagine) alone.

  And what have I shown Ben? That I will wait for him to make a beginning. That I will play a part in the play that he began. And that I am willing to work in the dark.

  After seeing Ben, I am curious to look at his record. My child psychopathology professor advised us to see a child at least once without any preconception from a record that might constrain a therapeutic alliance. Now, I walk down the hall and return with a heavy, thick file labeled BENJAMIN BRINKER. In it Ben is diagnosed with “oppositional personality disorder,” and is described as being extremely bright. He was once misdiagnosed as autistic. Ben was born a bit prematurely, and has two older siblings, both in foster care. He has a history of rocking, head-banging and biting which began in his first year of life. Ben was abandoned by his natural mother at six weeks of age, then placed with a foster family. He was removed from the first foster family at eighteen months after evidence of severe neglect, and placed with another set of foster parents, Charles and Kate Brinker, who just recently ado
pted him. The file provides no details about the period of “severe neglect.”

  At eighteen months Ben spoke few words, engaged in head-banging and rocking, and cried and stiffened when held. He did not use full sentences until he was three, and completed toilet training at five, just prior to his placement in the day treatment program at Glenwood.

  I read his medical record too. Ben has been hospitalized several times in his short life, at eighteen months and at twenty-four months for severe diarrhea, at three years for neurological tests, and in his fourth year to regulate his medications.

  I stop reading and become aware of my breathing, shallow and tight to contain the sorrow which has swept me. I wonder how I will affect Ben and how he might affect me as I swivel my chair to take in a slow panorama of the small white room: toy shelves, a desk and chair, one other chair, more toy shelves, a bottle, a yellow puppet, clay, dolls, dollhouse, chalk and board, paints, building blocks, a blanket, and above the desk, a calendar.

  After seeing Ben, I meet with my on-site supervisor, Mary Louise Sweeney, a woman with many years of experience with children. My responsibilities at Glenwood will include psychological testing and team meetings with other staff, as well as individual cases. I have negotiated thirty minutes of writing time after each session with a child. All of my work will be tape-recorded for supervisory purposes. I have already requested additional psychoanalytic supervision and will meet my second supervisor, Dr. Rachael Sachs, later in the week. Mary Louise and I set up my schedule together.

  I have made a good choice to come to Glenwood; I feel a renewal of the certainty I felt on my first visit. That day I met the director, Dr. Wilson, a middle-aged man who gave me a tour of the school building and cottages in the company of a large dog of uncertain breed. Everywhere we went, inside and out, he had strategically placed water bowls for the dog’s comfort. Those bowls mitigate the institutional nature of this respected residential and day treatment center for seriously disturbed children. In comparison with the other internships I considered, where I would have little choice about my supervision and virtually no writing time, I have definitely fallen into the right rabbit hole.