On a flight out of Charlotte I sat next to a demure lady. She agreed with my choice of diet Pepsi when the flight attendant came to ask. She took her nap while I wrote in my notebook and gazed farm tessellations being past by. When she came to and was bored we began.
She’s a cognitive therapist, priding in working with children. She’s flying home from a conference for psychologists and she was a-buzzed about her work like I’m obsessed with wife-beaters on girls. She was excited and depressed with how it took a War at the human cost of soldiers and sailors suffering from PTSD to finally get the funding and attention needed to generate new techniques. She went on about what the front-line mental health professionals had to see day in and day out. She told me the names of the children she work with for the past six years, as in she’s seen these children for six years, sometimes teens until they’re into young adulthood.
One technique she’s tried, with great success in increasing communication and trust, is the toy figures. She asks the children, abused or traumatized from dysfunctional families, to just play with a box full of figurines. Cowboys and indians, army men, farm animals, people figures. She says time and again the heart breaking commonality that stood out was how they would pick out a daddy, a mommy, maybe siblings, and fences. The family members would always be boxed in by fences. The fence is the fantasy of safety and stability.
In 2005 I was sent to southwest USA to build a fence. In 2010 there are still boundaries issues.
Hurt goes deep. Let’s not pretend we’re all strong enough to move on.
