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11 JUNE 2010
NO 1589
Troubled children teach us a lot about ourselves
Some years ago, when I began working as an expressive arts therapist in a residential treatment center for latency age children, I thought of my childhood as safe and protected. A time when life made no difficult demands. However, as the children came to therapy weighed down by conflicts, my carefree early days faded and I was confronted on a new level with unsolved problems from my own childhood which I felt had been left behind or forgotten.
The children gave me a choice. I could stay on the surface or, through artwork and sandplay, enter inner lands where I might view the world from behind their eyes, and feel the pain and sadness they were experiencing. In doing so I would come across similar feelings from my younger years. Although I knew intuitively that I must comprehend my own inner life if I wanted to understand the inner life of children, I put up a struggle, attempting to avoid buried content. It was during these difficult and conflicting times that the children came to my rescue as if they sensed the apprehension I was experiencing.
So with the children leading the way, I stepped into lands where fear, poverty, despair, hunger and sudden anger walked about. Through drawing, painting, puppets, drama, sculpting with clay or playing in the sand, the children found a voice to cry out against the injustices of their painful experiences. They seemed relieved to find someone with whom to share their reality.
There were days of growing, days of pulling back. There was waiting. Sometimes children would tell me they were broken, and ask if I could fix them. I would explain that we could begin to put the pieces back together again. Maybe they would feel better about themselves, hopefully they would smile more. By working hard, anger, mistrust and despair could be replaced with an increasing sense of being able to communicate fears, concerns and hopes.
I came to understand that children who had been victimized wanted me to listen and to hear them with an attentiveness their troubles deserved. They hoped I could accept the reality of physical abuse, sexual abuse and other trauma without being afraid, offended or embarrassed. They longed to trust enough to tell the truth, and needed a safe place and a safe way to sort out feelings of anger, sadness, hostility and fear. What I attempted to do was to give the children opportunities to uncover repressed conflicts, bringing them to the surface where they could be integrated into their daily lives. By being responded to lovingly, and by being valued, children used their artwork as a bridge to verbalization.
Physical and sexual abuse leave deep scars. Expressive arts therapy served as a tool to allow children to participate directly and actively in the resolution of their conflicts, and find appropriate ways to externalize some of the trauma they had experienced.
Alone at my desk, at work, at home, I found myself engrossed in children’s artwork, distressed by the anguish and touched by the courage I saw in drawings and paintings. I wrote about what the children shared in therapy, how they were feeling and how I was feeling about the unspeakable abuse and hard times they had experienced. I also kept a journal of my childhood memories, which came into focus. Although some time has passed since I listened to the voices of these special children, through my writings they remain with me. My experience with troubled children has shown me ways of opening up in myself feelings of which I had been only dimly aware, and I now understand the vast potential of nonverbal communication.
At the outset of my work with victimized children, I was willing to leave my early conflicts undisturbed. But when the children slowly and sometimes shyly, gave me permission to step into their inner worlds, without knowing it, they gave me a very special gift. A chance to recapture my own childhood from the mists of the past.
MARY JEAN MEYER
Meyer, M.J., (1991). Troubled children teach us a lot
about ourselves. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 7. pp.
81-82.
