by Torey Hayden
Raising his right hand, he signed “Crying.”
“You feel like crying?”
He made the sign again, then pressed against Friend and wouldn’t look at me.
For a few moments longer I coaxed him, but to no avail. Whatever it was that I’d said or done, it had left him anxious and unhappy. Pressuring him further was only going to make the situation worse. So I leaned forward and reached into my box.
“Well, let’s do something else for now. Shall we read together?” I lifted out a book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes.
My intentions for that session had been to gently confront Drake with the tape of his speaking to his mother. My hope was that if he realized I knew, and if he heard himself and the familiar voice of his mother, this might be enough get him started. I’d brought the nursery rhyme book along with the idea that perhaps I would then be able to gentle him into speaking in the same way Lucia had on the tape—by reciting the rhymes with me. Given his unexpected upset, however, I could see the moment wasn’t right, so instead, I asked him and Friend to come sit on my lap while I read some of the nursery rhymes to him.
Drake listened eagerly to the old familiar verses. I read,
Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.
“Can you hear the rhythm in that?” I asked. Drake was still on my lap, his back to my chest. Taking hold of his hands, one in each of mine, I clapped them together and said the rhyme again, amplifying the rhythm. “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes, sir, yes, sir, three bags full.”
I stood up. Placing Friend on our vacated chair, I lifted Drake to his feet. Grabbing his hands, I started to do exaggerated motions to the rhythm, pulling him through them like a life-sized puppet. They were just nonsense motions but I wanted to give him a whole-body experience of the sound of the rhyme.
Drake loved this. He began to laugh in his soundless way.
So I went on.
Dance to your daddy, my little babby.
Dance to your daddy, my little lamb.
This was an easier rhyme to act out with the larger-than-life movements I was using. I became more and more physical at I did it. First we jigged, my pulling Drake up by his arms and jiggling him back and forth. Then I folded his arms across his chest, making the motion of a rocking baby. Then dancing again, then I pulled him down until his hands were on the floor in imitation of a four-legged lamb.
“You shall have a fishy in a little dishy.”
By this point I was almost singing the words. I’d listened to the rhyme so many times on the tape that it was now more of a song in my mind than a verse. I pulled Drake through the motions.
“You know that song, don’t you?” I said. I had been standing behind him all throughout the time I was puppeteering and now I leaned way over so that my face was very close to his. “Dance to your daddy, my little babby,” I sang. “You know the song, too.”
Drake nodded and smiled.
Turning him around so that he was facing me, I sang the whole song.
“Can you sing it, too?” I asked.
He opened his mouth. For a moment—for the briefest second—I thought, Ah ha! It’s going to happen! It was going to be simple as that. He’d just start singing.
But not so.
He closed his mouth again.
I whirled him around again so his back was to me and took hold of his hands, puppet-style once more. “Let’s sing it to Friend, shall we? Friend wants to hear the song.”
So, once again:
Dance to your daddy
My little babby.
No luck. He didn’t sing.
“Hey, you too,” I said, leaning over him to see his face. “You know the song. Let’s try it again. Let’s sing it for Friend.”
Again, it was only my voice.
I will admit to feeling frustrated at that moment. Thwarted. Why wasn’t this kid cooperating? Despite our initial anxious start to the session, Drake had recovered well. He was dancing and laughing. He loved playing with Friend; he knew the song well. The atmosphere was relaxed. He wasn’t having to face me. He wasn’t even having to start off speaking on his own but rather in a manner he was already familiar with. I had felt quite certain everything was in place to start him speaking and that this would do the trick. So why hadn’t it?
Frustrated, I grabbed the tape recorder from the top shelf and put it on the table. “Like this,” I said and turned the tape on.
Lucia’s voice filled the room.
Drake froze, his eyes going wide.
I smiled warmly. “Who’s that?”
No response.
“That’s your mama, isn’t it? And listen. What’s she saying?”
I had broken away from him to get the tape recorder, so he was still at the other end of the small room beside Friend, who was sitting on the floor. Drake remained immobile, his expression one I couldn’t read.
“Your mama’s saying nursery rhymes, isn’t she? Just like we’ve been doing.”
The tape played on. Drake stayed across the room. Staring into the space between us, his eyes unfocused, he clutched Friend to him and listened to the tape.
And then the little voice.
“Who’s that?” I said. I said it gently. My frustration had faded, and I did want to ease him into this. I could sense he was finding it hard to listen to the tape.
Eyes still on some unseen point between us, Drake absently fingered Friend’s fur and didn’t respond.
“Who is that talking? It’s Drake, isn’t it?”
He shook his head.
“It’s Drake. Drake’s lovely little voice singing. That’s you.”
He started to cry.
Chapter
17
I want to talk with you today,” I said when Cassandra and I entered the therapy room.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she replied. “I want to play pterodactyls.”
“Perhaps we will play pterodactyls later, but first I want to talk about some things.”
“I want to do that feelings paper. With that bag of colored poker things,” Cassandra said. “Where’s it at? Where did you put it?”
“Perhaps we will do that later, but first I want to talk.”
“Where’s it at?” Cassandra pushed past me and went along the shelves. Of course, because I had hoped eventually to get to that activity, it was there and she found it. She lifted the papers she had made during the earlier session onto the table and set the bag of poker chips beside it. Then she took the top off my box and found the smaller box containing the marking pens and crayons. She sat down.
“I know you like to be the one who decides things,” I said. “I know you like things to go just as you plan. However, right now, we aren’t going to do that paper.”
“I’m going to do it,” she said, unconcerned. “Let’s see. ‘Baby feeling,’ ‘flower feeling,’ ‘pterodactyl feeling.’ I’ve done all those. Now I’m going to do a picture for …” She sorted through the papers, looking at the lists of feelings we had enumerated. “Disgusted. I’m going to draw a picture for ‘disgusted’ and it’s going to be puke. ‘Puke feeling.’ No, dog puke. That’s so disgusting, dog puke is. I’m going to draw a picture of dog puke to go with this one. ‘Dog puke feeling.’”
The thing about Cassandra was not that she was so manipulative per se, but simply that she could move so fast and switch directions with such ease that it was hard to get in front of her quickly enough to stop her. Literally and figuratively. That itself was a form of manipulation, of course, because speed ensured her control of the situation, but I was surprised at how hard it was for me to keep up with her. At nine she seemed capable of thinking on her feet as quickly I could.
Sitting down opposite at the table, I lay my hand flat across the paper she was preparing to draw on. “No, right now we aren’t doing that.”
“I’m supposed to do whatever I want in here. That’s what I did at Dr. Brown’s. That’s ho
w I got well.”
“I’m not Dr. Brown, Cassandra,” I replied.
“You don’t know how to make me well.”
“This isn’t what we are doing right now. We aren’t working on the list of feelings. And we aren’t talking about Dr. Brown.” I looked at her. “We’re going to talk about other things instead.”
She met my gaze. We were both leaning forward on our arms on the tabletop, eye to eye, like people about to take up arm wrestling.
“You don’t know how to make me well,” she said again, her tone acerbic and dismissive.
“And you’re afraid to let me try,” I replied.
Her expression was, if anything, hateful. She kept me locked in her gaze and just glared.
Because her energy was directed at me for just that moment, I took it as an opportunity to whip away the poker chips and the papers containing the list of feelings. Realizing what was happening, she reached to grab the papers as they slid out from under her hand, but I was faster. I put them on the floor beside my chair.
I then quickly grabbed a coloring book out of my box of tricks. It was a basic one, full of simple line drawings, most suitable for a preschool child. Opening it, I laid it in front of her. “Today, we’re going to start by coloring.”
“Coloring? Why coloring? You said nothing about coloring. You said we were going to talk. Just now. When we came in. This isn’t talking. This is crap for babies! I won’t do it!” She was genuinely outraged. With one swift gesture, she knocked it from the table.
I leaned over, picked it up, reopened the coloring book, and put it back in front of her. “Yes, Cassandra, you will. Because that’s where we’re going to start.”
She knocked it off the table again.
I looked at her. “We can, of course, spend the whole time pushing it on the floor and picking it up, which would be pretty boring. But it’s going to keep coming back up, because that’s where we start.”
“You think.”
“Yes, that’s right. I do think that. Because that’s where I have decided we will start. I’m the grown-up here. I’m the person whose job it is to help you. And this is how I am going to start helping.”
“You think.”
“I know you’re scared—”
“I’m not scared.”
“I know you’re scared for me to have control in here instead of you—”
“I’m not scared.”
“And I know you’re scared for me to have control in here instead of you, because it’s hard not to worry that maybe something awful will happen. Maybe I will make you do something too frightening. Or maybe you will start to feel feelings you don’t want and you won’t be able to stop them. I know it’s really scary for you to trust me. It’s scary even to want to trust me. But my job is to help make things better for you. If we’re going to change things so that you can leave here and go home, so you can get on with school and having friends and growing up, then we need to start working hard on that trust. And how to start is right here, right now, with this coloring book.” I reached down and picked it up off the floor again. I laid it open.
She glared at me, and her teeth were literally gritted. “I’m not scared,” she hissed in a very low voice. “And I hate you.” She didn’t, however, knock the book off again.
“It’s okay to hate me. It’s okay to feel strong feelings, because I will never let them get too strong. Even so, you still need to do this.” I opened the book to a picture of a rag doll. Then I took out a red crayon from the box. “Today’s work is to color this picture. Start by making the doll’s skirt red.”
“I’m not going to do this.” She snapped the crayon in two.
“Well, I’m putting no limits on how long it’s going to take us to do this, but we are going to do it, because this is where we are going to start,” I replied. “So if you don’t want to use a crayon that is so long, here is this part that is now shorter.” I handed a broken section of the red crayon back to her.
“I’m not going to do this.” She refused to pick up the crayon. “And you can’t make me.”
I suppose if I were a good psychologist, I would have been following someone’s well-researched, deeply thought-out theory at that point that said something about good therapy not involving forcing a child to do things. Certainly none of my training had included demanding a child do exactly as I say, but the teacher in me took over at that moment. If I had learned anything as a teacher, it was the importance of setting limits and establishing control before going forward with change, because this defined the safety of the environment. Safety is the most basic task of all. Without a sense of safety, no growth can take place. Without safety, all energy goes to defense.
In a traditional therapeutic setting, there is often no problem with taking whatever time is necessary to win trust. In such a setting, Cassandra might have needed weeks, if not months, to develop the level of trust necessary to allow me to implement change, and this would have been great. I would have loved to have been able to give her that kind of gentle interaction. Unfortunately, here in the hospital, where the cost—both human and financial—of institutionalizing a child over a period of time was high, we needed to march to a faster drummer.
I sat back in my chair.
“I’m not going to do this,” she stated.
I said nothing.
“I’m not going to do this.”
I sat.
“I’m not going to do this! Listen to me, you old hag. I’m NOT going to do this.” Cassandra grabbed up the small piece of crayon and threw it at me. Then she shoved the coloring book angrily off the table again.
Picking up the piece of crayon, I put it back on the table. Then I retrieved the coloring book and placed that back in front of her. I opened it to the picture of the rag doll again.
“I’M NOT GOING TO DO THIS!” Cassandra shouted. She pushed the book away again and got up from her chair to leave.
I got up faster. Grabbing her shoulders, I stopped her from going through the door. She struggled fiercely at that point, lashing out angrily. I held on.
At last I maneuvered her back to the table and into her chair. With that, Cassandra started to cry. Indeed, she cried very piteously.
I returned to my seat on the opposite side and sat down.
“Why are you doing this to me?” she wailed.
“Because this is where we start.”
“But why? Why do I have to do this?”
“Because I am here to help you, but I can’t do the work all by myself. You have to work, too. And this is the beginning of your work.”
“But I don’t want to,” she howled, her voice trailing off into a high-pitched whine. “I want to go home. I want my mom.”
I was very aware at just that moment how terrifying this situation must have been for Cassandra, because how was she to know I was any different than her abusers? Or that the enforced hospital stay was any different than her abduction? There was such a thin line here between gaining very crucial control in order to make progress and simply reinforcing trauma. To be honest, at that precise moment, I was feeling pretty terrified, too.
“Cassandra, I want you to color this picture. Here.” I put the piece of red crayon in front of her.
“I don’t want to,” she protested one more time.
“Here.”
And finally she picked up the crayon. She scribbled angrily over the picture.
“Okay.” I picked out a green crayon from the box. “Now, color the doll’s top green.”
She snapped the crayon in two.
“I can see you don’t like long crayons.”
“I don’t like YOU!”
“Color the doll’s top green, please.”
Harshly, she scratched the green crayon across the page.
“Okay.” I took out a black crayon. “Color the doll’s hair black.”
Furiously, she started to scribble with the black crayon. Indeed, this seemed to give her some pleasure, as she continued scribbling,
covering the picture all over in black lines, the crayon held viciously, like a knife.
Oh well, at least she didn’t break the black crayon.
I picked a yellow crayon from the box. “Here. Color the doll’s shoes yellow.” This was a somewhat ludicrous request, as Cassandra had covered the page with so many black lines that the outline of the rag doll had all but vanished.
She took the yellow crayon and scribbled across the bottom of the page in the general vicinity of where the shoes should be.
“Okay,” I said. “I think we’ve colored that page.”
“I hate you,” she said.
“Now, you may choose what we do next.”
“I want to go.”
“It isn’t time to go. See the clock? Ten more minutes.”
“I don’t care. I want to go now,” she replied.
“All right,” I said and sat back. “If that’s what you choose, you may go. First we did my activity, now it’s your choice. So you can go.”
She stared at me. It was an unreadable expression. I couldn’t discern whether I’d caught her off guard by acquiescing and she was looking at me in confused surprise, or whether she was sizing me up for the next challenge. Whatever, she didn’t rise from the chair.
After a moment, Cassandra’s shoulders sagged very slightly and she looked down at the coloring book, still open on the table in front of her. She seemed tired, which was understandable. Certainly I was.
The aura of frisson faded. Cassandra continued to stare at the coloring book. She made no attempt to leave. The silence lingered.
Finally she said, “That’s not very good coloring.” Her voice was soft and matter-of-fact.
I didn’t reply.
“You’d think a little kid had done it. Like maybe a five-year-old. Like maybe that little boy who’s here,” she said. “People are going to see it and they won’t know it’s me.”
“Inside us we often have parts of us that still feel like little kids,” I said. “Even though our bodies are much older.”
“I can color much better than that,” she replied.