A Shining Affliction

Tags:  non-fiction, psychology,

A Shining Affliction is Annie G. Rogers’ account of the mutual healing that occurred between her, acting as a therapist, and a five-year-old boy named Ben, who had been terribly neglected as a child. Ben is untrusting, frequently unmanageable, and often violent. His clinical record notes that after the death of his biological mother, while he was still an infant, he was given to a foster family. His foster parents kept him locked in a windowless room for the first eighteen months of his life, ignoring his cries and depriving him of affection and even the most basic contact. Is it any wonder the kid has trouble relating to others? Or that he acts out in violent, antisocial ways?

Rogers is twenty-seven years old when she begins working with this boy. She is completing her PhD in psychology and working a one-year residency at the school for troubled children that Ben is now attending. She uses play therapy with these young children, removing them from class for an hour at a time, taking them to the play room, and letting them lead. The games they act out often reveal the children’s preoccupations, their anxieties and their modes of thinking.

When she takes Ben to the playroom, he says he wants to be the baby bear and Rogers will be the mama bear. He goes to his pretend crib and tells Rogers there is a fire. He smells smoke and things are burning and he needs to be rescued. Will she rescue him?

She does, and she is equally puzzled and moved to see that this is the game he chooses.

After the session, she goes back to his psychiatric record and reads the whole thing, from beginning to end. She learns that when Ben was eighteen months old, his foster parents’ house caught fire. The parents and other children were evacuated by the firemen, and then the fire was extinguished. The fireman, doing a final safety inspection after putting out the blaze, found Ben locked in his room, alone and terrified in his crib.

When they asked the parents why they had not mentioned Ben in response to their earlier repeated questions–“Is there anyone left in the house? Are you sure?”–the parents answer was, “Oh, yeah. We forgot about him.”

An eighteen-month-old child cannot form memories the way an older child can. He does not yet have the words to encode the story for later retrieval. And yet, as shown in his play, he knew what had happened to him. The memory, Rogers asserts, is stored in the body, even if the mind cannot access it clearly. She knows this, because her own memories of the abuse she suffered in childhood were stored the same way.

She writes, “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.”

Rogers has a deep, intuitive understanding of how to work with this child. She knows when to let him lead, what questions to ask, when to encourage him and when to guide him. She doesn’t know how she knows these things, but she understands that she does know them. Ben clicks with her, and the two develop a powerful bond.

Rogers is avowedly not an “intellectual” therapist. That is, she doesn’t buy into the traditionally accepted approach to clinical psychology that attempts to label patients and apply a “cure” that will bring them back into line with socially acceptable behavior. She trusts in a knowing that is deeper than what the textbooks offer, and in creating a deep bond between herself and the children she works with.

In many cases, children’s traumas come from the treatment or mistreatment they suffered at the hands of their caretakers. Therapy is not a one-way street in which fixes are applied by the knowing therapist to the patient. Wounds that were created in relationships, she writes, must be solved in relationships. Therapy is a two-way street in which the therapist must be as open and vulnerable as the patient. This is hard to do. It requires tremendous courage, and when it’s done right, an untrusting child like Ben, seeing the vulnerability of his therapist, can make tremendous strides.

How is it, though, that Rogers connects so well with this boy? How is her intuition–her against-best-practices intuition–so uncannily accurate?

She bears many of the same wounds as her patient, and is lost in much the same way he is. She hasn’t yet worked out the abuse that she herself suffered as a child. If Ben feels she is there with him every step of the way, it’s because she is.

Empathizing with the suffering of this young boy opens up Rogers’ understanding of own abuse in ways that traditional, by-the-book therapy could not. She sees in Ben what she has tried, without success, to describe to her own therapist. The feelings opened by this new empathy are so overwhelming, Rogers suffers a breakdown, becomes unable to speak, and has to be hospitalized herself. It’s only after this terrifying confrontation with her own past that she herself begins to heal.

Ben, himself a deeply intuitive child, asks if he was the cause of her “being sick.” Rogers tells him no, but in a way, the boy is right. Sometimes we are blocked from feeling sympathy for ourselves, or our former selves, until someone comes along and opens up that sympathy.

Much of the book recounts Rogers’ successful work with her new therapist, a man of unusualy compassion, and how Ben begins to open up and blossom in parallel. It feels sometimes as if each litte breakthrough with her new therapist is a gift that she turns around and hands immediately to Ben.

Embedded in this deeply personal story is a critique of the psychological establishment’s overly clinical approach to therapy. The “rules” say the therapist shouldn’t get too close to their patients, that they should beware of countertransferrence, that the transference of a therapist’s own unconscious feelings to his or her patient could negatively affect the patient’s progress. Rogers shows that, under the right circumstances, these feelings can be exactly what the patient needs most. She could feel the abandonment this boy had endured. She reacted to it powerfully, and he could feel her reaction. This was the source of the healing bond between them.

This is a powerful and moving book that should give hope to those whose suffering has damaged their ability to interact with and integrate with the world. The road out of psychological torment is not an easy one, but it does exist, and feeling the compassion of another human being is one of the most powerful tools on the road to recovery.