The Secret Life of Vulnerable Children

Ved Varma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317400332
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychothérapie

How do disturbed children see the world? How can we understand their difficulties?

Most children have secret worlds but for some these worlds contain secrets that are both permanent and damaging. Originally published in 1992, this moving account of the secret lives of such vulnerable and disturbed children will enable professionals working with these children to find out what is going on in their minds – what they are thinking, what they are feeling, why they behave as they do. The contributors, all experts in their field at the time, show how vulnerable children can be assessed and how they can be helped most effectively.

1

THE SECRET LIFE OF THE DEPRESSED CHILD

Robin Higgins

Wir haben, wo wir lieben, ja nur dies:

einander lassen; denn dass wir uns halten,

das fällt uns leicht und ist nicht erst zu lernen.

(Rainer Maria Rilke)¹

‘SHE’S SUCH A HAPPY LITTLE THING UNDER IT ALL’

Barry² aged 6 was walking with his mother through a graveyard. Reading the repeated inscriptions on the stones that so-and-so had ‘passed peacefully to sleep’, he said: ‘This seems an awfully sleepy place. Perhaps we better get out of here before we fall asleep too.’ He searched his mother’s face for some enlightenment.

Sheila, aged 3, told that her mother had ‘gone away’, continued to believe for years that she’d come back any day. When eventually told that her mother had died, she wouldn’t accept the statement. If they’d lied to her once, they could lie again. Somewhere, she was convinced her mother was still around, being kept hidden by a stepmother, whom Sheila never took to. In fact, she vowed secretly to give her stepmother Hell till her own mother was retrieved.

As a general rule, we try to give our children a happy time. We don’t like the idea of their being sad or depressed. Childhood is a time of hope. In our children, we hope to relive our own childhood in a better way, avoiding the mistakes our parents perpetrated on us. We don’t want our hopes blighted. We want to protect our children from the pain of sadness. But in doing so, we also deny them their capability of coping with sadness and depression. (The variation in this attitude according to race, culture, class, or historical period would make a study in itself, but take us far beyond the confines of this chapter where the limit is to late twentieth-century metropolitan England, the only setting I am familiar with in any depth.)

Staying with this position for a moment, we soon find the parental feelings more secret and complex than appears at first sight. It’s not just our children we want to protect from depressing experiences but ourselves. We resist facing the painful and the depressing. We are apt to shun the gift of tears.³ We thus deny⁴ a whole range of experience. In protecting our children from depression, we are protecting ourselves not just from their effect on us, not just from our guilt that we haven’t been good enough parents, but from the guilt and shame that coloured our own childhood and that contain vital clues as to why we are what we are.

What is the effect on the child of this parental embargo on the harbouring or the display of sad and depressing feelings? First, children who are quick to pick up from the adult world an image of what they are expected to be may obligingly hide their sadness and retreat to it only in secret. They may be adept at tuning into a sad or depressing atmosphere (a mother depressed after childbirth, or a pending divorce) but they keep their tunings to themselves. They bottle up their feelings. But, second, they may find these same feelings not so easily disposed of. The child runs into the problem of dissimulation, of putting on a false front, assuming a false self. In the more extreme instances, this may lead them to simulate the inverse of sadness, a hyperexcitable jocularity verging at times on the manic (a point to which we will return).

Third, as was apparent with Barry and Sheila, adult euphemisms designed to protect the child may just fall on deaf ears. A credibility gap opens up between the generations. Curiosity is stirred. (Why is everybody falling asleep? What have they done with my mum?) The secret search is on, with secret pacts and all the segregation of secrecy including the impossibility of sharing one’s pride and joy with those most close to you.

Fourth, being children they are likely to engage in the game of tit for tat. The parents confused us; why shouldn’t we confuse them?

Richard’s parents had done their best to persuade him all through the four years of his life that he was a loving child and they were loving parents who hated to see him sad and bad. Troubles started over toilet training when he was a year old.

‘He’d been trained for the past six months’, his mother said ‘He knew perfectly well what the score was. Suddenly out of the blue he deposits this enormous turd in the middle of the living room carpet. He knew it was wrong. Just did it to test me out I suppose. Anyhow I pretended it was a joke and got him to help me clear it up and reminded him of the proper place which at this time was his potty. But he said he didn’t want to use that any more and kept asking me to take him to the loo. I thought it was a step forward till his next move hit me. He found he could lock himself in and the cunning little devil mixed my best bath oil and powder with the the scourer and sprayed the lot all over the floor. I was at my wit’s end. This time you’ve gone too far, my lad. That’s not a funny game. But he just laughed like a delinquent. At the week-end his dad suggested a game of hide-and-seek. I knew in my bones this was risky but I didn’t want to spoil their fun. They see so little of each other. Well, while John had his eyes closed counting up to a hundred, do you know what the little monster did? Set fire to his dad’s armchair. There could have been a horrible accident.’

This situation can quickly slip into a vicious circle, the two parties becoming increasingly infuriated with each other as hidden meanings are set up against hidden meanings, confusions added to confusions. In such circumstances, parents may be driven to rifle their child’s private drawers in search of clues to incomprehensible behaviour. ‘I think you should read these diaries,’ a mother will say to the therapist and high-hand over her daughter’s personal account of her love-life, grossly intruding (with the best intentions) on the girl’s privacy and jeopardising relations all round: one route into chaos.

THREE BASIC DISTINCTIONS

To tease out some of the threads in this embattled situation, I would like first to look at three interrelated issues.

The first concerns the difference between sadness and depression. In studies on emotion for some time now it has been customary to separate sadness from depression and link the latter with clinical states.⁵ Sadness, Weltschmerz, is a universal, empathic, quiet, conflict-free emotion in which we are aware of often inescapable pain. It goes with a capacity to weep and to be alone,⁶ to separate oneself off from someone else, to be aware of having, holding and sometimes losing. For the most part, the feelings we have when we are sad are congruent with events which prompt them. We can quickly feel in tune with a child who chooses to keep secret his feelings about the death of someone close to him or about an incident where he lost face or self-esteem. Once we can appreciate what lies behind his sadness, we can understand his feelings and his wish to keep them secret. Both sadness and secrecy make sense, seem reasonable.

This is not always so with depression where the very word starts out with the core idea of ‘pressing down’ as an action (I am pressing down on something) or as a state (I am being pressed down on, lowered or sunk by something). When applied to the emotions this word ‘depression’ came to signify being in low spirits, gloomy or melancholy. It also implied that two (or more) people are involved. Someone is depressing or being depressed by someone else. There arises the possibility of conflict which is absent from sadness, and along with the conflict goes aggression and more complicated moves such as the turning of aggression against oneself (see further pp. 12–17). As a result, in depression there is often not the same rapport, the same congruency between the feelings and the events which cause them as there is in the case of sadness. The reasons for children’s depression are often as obscure to them as to those looking on from outside, trying to understand them. In this respect depression, because of its hidden meanings, can antagonise all parties, depressed and undepressed alike.

The distinction between sadness and depression applies across the board of personality measures including gender identity and the way the opposite sex is treated. (It thus provides an index for later marital relations.)

Sophia was an only child, arriving after several miscarriages. Her mother never enjoyed good health and Sophia came to trust her father to fulfil both parental functions as he to trust her to be both son and daughter. Her favourite dress was the clan costume he made for her to wear on special days. She loved it partly because when she put it on she saw how proud he was of her, partly because the dress struck a chord deep inside her, resonating the roots she shared with him. He was to her someone in whose arms she could feel utterly safe and loved and protected. This same feeling never deserted her in the doldrums which hit the family (her father’s lost job and the family’s move south from Aberdeen) nor in the friendships she made with boys and girls alike. When Sophia loved someone it was with an unswerving and wholly-committed loyalty. Any half-heartedness or deceit on their part was not taken as a betrayal or let-down. It was just not understood. When a teacher once accused her of lying, Sophia was confused and took weeks to sort out the affair. For it had never occurred to her to act that way.

The good father/(mother) she had inside her ensured that though at times she might become deeply and painfully sad, Sophia never sought to deny or distort the feelings. She held on to her sadness and after a while was usually able to put a finger on what was bringing it about. To succeed in this detection might mean spending long hours on her own.

Sophia knew sadness but rarely depression and never clinical depression. Joan presented a different picture.

All through her childhood Joan, now 13, saw a gap where she felt her father should have been. The last of her parents’ five children, she reckoned she must have been the straw that broke her father’s back. For he chose the week of her birth to leave home and go to live with the woman he’d been courting all through her mother’s pregnancy. He kept in touch with the first two children in the family (both boys) but all Joan could remember of her contact with him were cancelled meetings and forgotten birthdays, disappointments and disillusions. The father she built up in her mind was one she had, as she put it, to suck out of her thumb: an ideal, rather brittle figure who owed a lot to the TV programmes she was always watching and one whom the boys she met never came anywhere near emulating. Joan was edgy with boys. She longed to be loved, hated being left on her own, but would always end up teasing the boy who took her fancy, discountenancing him and laughing at his predicament.

Joan was rarely sad. She spent a lot of time feeling angry, betrayed and depressed and twice made a half-hearted attempt at suicide.

The immediate significance of this distinction between sadness and depression emerges when we consider the second basic distinction: namely that between secrets which we know about and can control and secrets which turn out to be hidden from ourselves (or, as we say, unconscious secrets).

Justin was 7 when his mother died. His immediate response was to withdraw, say nothing to anyone and leave the family table as soon as possible having eaten very little. When he came to see me, he sat by the window looking out and we both noticed a blackbird on one of the bare branches of a tree on the other side of the road. I said: ‘It’s his favourite spot.’ It was the only remark that passed between us on this occasion. When he came again he started to draw: a black house. And for 7 weeks he repeated this picture without comment. Occasionally he’d let out a long sigh but for the most part we sat together in silence because we both knew on one level what his sadness was all about. As it began to lift, his house started to change colour. First it became grey and then streaked with dark blue. In an upstairs window appeared at first a yellow curtain and then a face: his face, looking out. Then he began to talk.

Only Dad, he said, was at home now; Dad and this new woman called Aunty Ethel whom Justin couldn’t stand. She was always talking about God and Jesus (the family was Catholic) and how they love people. Justin didn’t believe in God or Jesus any more. They’re liars and hypocrites like the Ethel woman. As a matter of fact, he didn’t believe in anything any more; wasn’t interested in anything either, he said, as his right hand slowly and faintly drew a picture of the truck his mother gave him for his birthday two weeks before she died.

Essentially Justin wanted to share his secret sorrow, pain and anger, and over time he did so. With Mark the situation and outcome were different.

Mark was 10 when his mother died. She and his father had (according to Mark) never loved each other. He’d heard his father say as much. Once the boy came, you only had eyes for him’, he’d heard his father shout, ‘With him here I’ve served my purpose.’ His mother had confided in Mark a year before she died that she was going to leave his father. All that year, Mark found himself torn and guilty that he knew more about his mother than her husband did.

When she died, he felt ‘numb and dumb’. He couldn’t get at his feelings. If he sat down to draw he only did bits of things, a head here or a boat there without any sails. He spoke disparagingly about his school and the boys and he saw no point in coming to see me. Why should he be treated like a nutter when there was nothing wrong with him?

His visits were very irregular but on one of them he let out that he felt betrayed by his mother (‘led on and betrayed’) and on another that he wished he could stop feeling, well, not exactly responsible for her death but certainly connected with it somehow, ‘very much part of the tragedy, if you see what I mean’.

This distinction between knowing secrets and finding them hidden is by no means watertight. Often the known and the hidden are mixed. In Richard’s ambiguously motivated games, the behaviour his mother found ‘incomprehensible’ almost certainly combined conscious and unconscious drives. For some of the time he knew what he was doing. For some of it, he was also swept up by forces over which he had little control and which surprised and confused him as much as their outcome did his parents. So it is with many children’s secret actions.

The third basic distinction lies in the nature of secrecy itself. One has only to consider for a moment the ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 THE SECRET LIFE OF THE DEPRESSED CHILD
• 2 THE SECRET LIFE OF THE NEUROTIC CHILD
• 3 THE SECRET LIFE OF AN EXCESSIVELY PASSIVE AUTISTIC BOY
• 4 THE SECRET WORLD OF BEREAVED CHILDREN
• 5 THE SECRET LIFE OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED EMOTIONAL ABUSE
• 6 THE SECRET LIFE OF CHILDREN WHO HAVE EXPERIENCED PHYSICAL AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE
• 7 THE UNBEARABLE TRAUMATOGENIC PAST: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE
• 8 THE SECRET LIFE OF HYPERACTIVE CHILDREN
• 9 ON RELATING TO VULNERABLE ADOLESCENTS
• 10 THE ART OF COMMUNICATING WITH VULNERABLE CHILDREN
• Name index
• Subject index