*These are notes from the portions of the text I was required to read for grad school. The potential gems of wisdom from this source are not represented in their totality.

 

 

38. I didn’t ask questions, nor did I interpret her representation of her body for her. I knew already that you could injure someone with the wrong words. And I didn’t have the right words-I had only art materials and the solidity of my own bodily presence.

38. There is a small psychological literature about how novice therapists sometimes successfully treat people who are unreachable. As inexperienced therapists they don’t know not to try. 

39. Inside the animals we nested our dreams. I had the kids write out their dreams, and if they could not remember any dreams, make up dreams as though they could remember them. I had them imagine dream landscapes, dream time (faster and slower and more jarring than ordinary time), dream journeys, and words spoken that made no sense but held a mysterious power just because they came from dreams

41. I talked about the idea that the mind, like a plane, could take flights into the past and future, through the imagination. I knew already that writing was anathema to most of this group because their schooling had been so patchy that the logistics of writing were tiresome and unrewarding

42. From an unusual angle appearances can change. Even an official document, like a timetable, may contain a warning about something that’s not valid. 

42. I was at ease with these spells of silence and did not press her to speak. And then one morning without any preamble her story came tumbling out of her

43. The sense of closeness and distance was enormous. Even as I was drawn to hear the details, to know the exact names for things, to feel the rhythm of her telling in electric recognition, I wanted to flee

43. Some experiences make an imprint, a kind of signature on clinical work, and this was one of them for me. With Jamie I saw that letting children lead the process of therapeutic work was crucial. I trusted her knowledge more than anything I thought I knew about her and more than anything anyone told me about her. I saw that she knew how to test me, how and when to speak to me, what to say and what not to say. This trust in my patients to show me the way remains a hallmark of my work.

 That said, I did try to provide a structure for Jamie and the other kids. I began by making a space for words and images that could surprise them, opening up a new avenue for “speaking” things that might have otherwise remained unsaid. This penchant, to invite in the unexpected and listen to the unsaid, still characterizes my work. 

 

44. I saw that what is so terrible about trauma is not abuse itself, no matter the brutality of treatment, but the way terror marks the body and then becomes invisible and inarticulate. This was the case even when someone could tell a story or reconstruct a memory. There was always something unsayable, too. In my early work with Jamie I saw that whatever was terrifyingly present in her body, yet unsayable, took a coded, symbolic form in her art, her speech, and her actions. It has taken me many years to learn to decipher this coded poetry of the unsayable and find a way to translate it back to girls themselves. 

47. And then Jamie stopped wetting the bed. I didn’t understand why. I asked her about this. “I don’t know why. I just stopped.” I didn’t see it at the time, but I now think that “relieved” found its proper placein Jamie’s speech, not in her body. The fear that her mother wanted her dead (real or imaginary or a mix of both) was no longer a fear that• could haunt Jamie once it was spoken, and this particular fear moved out of her body. I realize only now, all these years later, that to be relieved also means to have emptied the bladder, and what could be a more unconscious way to do it than to wet the bed? 

47. A symptom and an

idea she didn’t want to speak about were joined, condensed. I didn’t

have any framework for understanding what happened between us,

so these linkages seemed uncanny, something I could not grasp: Now

you see it, now you don’t.

 

47. My experience with Jamie raised questions I couldn’t answer. Do unwanted thoughts mark the body and then become invisible and inarticulate? When this happens, does the body “speak” in symptoms, and are there other ways of “speaking”? I couldn’t elaborate on these questions in my early work with Jamie. I didn’t even hear the word “relieved” as both a physical symptom and a fear. 

50. But if you l’isten to a· play sequence as though it were a language, as if actions and bodily responses, as well as spoken words, could be translated (from the Latin for “carried across”), then it’s possible to raise questions about what is going on at such a stopping point

50. I have seen other children retreat in this way, and I trusted Tasha would return to playing out whatever it was that was causing her trouble when she was able. I did not press her or push her; timing in this work is just about everything. 

53. For my part, I attended to Tasha’s unspoken pain in relation to the metaphors of her play and responded in the language of her play when I could not grasp the connections to a wider story. This way of listening, in conjunction with her mother coming into several sessions, allowed Tasha to connect the disjointed pieces of her trauma, creating a new ending, literally the birth of herself. 

53. Someone else might have redirected Tasha, but I have learned to trust what children choose to say and do as what is necessary. While I do not doubt for a moment that she was badly abused, Tasha needed to sort out her fears and rework some terrible ideas about birth in her therapy. 

54. I gradually

learned that trauma follows a different logic, a condensed psychological logic that is associative, layered, nonlinear, and highly

metaphoric. Trauma is a letter written on the body in vanishing ink, a

character of the alphabet that seems to stand alone as it emerges into

view. As one letter collects other letters, a message emerges that

demands to be read, to be known. I saw that this message quite often

entwined the actuality of trauma with unconscious ideas and fantasies. Both the actuality of terror and the power of fantasy have

effects on the body.

Working with this new understanding of trauma allowed me to

help my young patients to tell me about terrible things that had happened, elaborate on those fantasy elements that had become

entwined with terror, and revise a story of terror in the body through

imaginative play.

 

56. “If you talk about a dream, does it feel more real to you?” I asked. She turned and looked at me. “Yeah, and I want to forget it.” 

57. Tasha wanted to speak and to avoid speaking (and remembering) simultaneously. I began to hear the “unsayable” as something that moves toward speech and away from speech at the same time. If you follow this movement in play and speech, sooner or later you will hear a contradiction. 

58. Initially I wanted to understand how girls made sense of experiences of trauma through a guided, reflective process, hoping they could tell me more than my young patients could. But almost from the start I was in the presence of the unsayable again, and I began to hear unconscious contradictions. 

60. Camile sighs again. “I just wish that you could understand that someone could really know me without me having to remember stuff and talk about it.” ‘That’s hard, isn’t it?” I say. Camile shrugs, as if to signal that her feelings don’t matter very much to her, then adds, “I can give you some stuff I wrote on the computer if you want to read it.”

61. As I continued my conversations with Camile, the room filled with a thousand little silences and evasions, rather than a refusal to talk at all, as was the case with Jamie initially. Camile left a trail of crumbs, allowed sentences to dangle. Her hesitations and negations piled up and became a haunting sense of the unsayable in her life. Listening for the unsayable directly required another shift in my thinking. I was used to thinking of silences as long pauses or refusals to speak about something particular. However, to hear the unsayable I had to consider words as revealing both a conscious narrative about experience and an unconscious one. I began to hear in a new way. Every sentence we speak is continually surrounded by what is not said and may in fact be unsayable. Ironically you can only hear the unsayable through what is said. I then began to underline negations, evasions, erasures, and omissions in transcripts, making notes in the margins, listening for another melody within the spoken story. 

62. My question was not about which of the girls’ memories were “real” or verifiable, but about how remembering itself might be an expression of something unsayable. 

65. She continues, “I don’t know. I just think about some things and just try to realize what exactly did happen. And then I, I don’t want to know, so I just stop thinking about it, and I forget about it.” Here . Camile captures powerfully a process of resisting knowing that results in forgetting so effectively that even when she does “try to realize what Exactly did happen,” she must ask herself, “Why don’t I remember so much?” 

66. In Camile’s interviews I can hear how the unsayable sounds when a girl consciously resists remembering. Memories girls actively resist become unsayable-difficult to remember, to know, yet they are still registered on the body and revealed in speech. 

70. Her past is alive within her and repeats itself in dreams, which she understands as predictive of her future. 

71. Then she repeated the unsayable-a rape. She didn’t choose to be raped. I don’t think that for a moment. But in the logic of the unconscious she was seeking knowledge she desperately needed, and she discovered her missing knowledge with uncanny accuracy. 

72. For each of these girls, their symbolic actions represented something they wanted to say and could not say. Something unsayable had insisted on another expression. It was becoming clearer and clearer to me that the unsayable could be “spoken” through unconscious reenactments but at a terrible cost.