a hunger for contact

I gave up the end of my summer vacation to spend it with a semi-famous doctor of psychology, whose focus was on anxiety-related issues in children - but found that the information provided was applicable also to adults.  I always find these workshops somewhat harrowing.  I am meant to be learning about best practice for treating the teenagers under my care, but I cannot stop myself as I listen from diagnosing my family members, one by one, including myself, and wonder what happened to the ones who have always claimed to be healthy and well when they obviously are not.  My strength (and weakness) is that I cheerfully pathologize us all, myself included.  But the doctor did say the healthiest in his experience were those who had accepted the mess in which they were raised, allowed the pain to fully penetrate the conscious mind, and grieved it thoroughly.  I consider myself to have landed in this category.  So much of what I have written here is grieving - I call it processing - but it is grieving.  And I recognize, which I do not think they all do, that grieving is ongoing forever.  It does not have an end, the knowledge of which makes it easier as I get older to swallow it in small pieces rather than all at once.

What I take away is the comfort of knowing that my instincts work well, and that when my rational brain is combing through my books to find the right thing to say, my instinct to pretend I am the answer is a good one.  A self-fulfilling prophecy of its own.  I may not have any answers, but I can be one.  My own brokenness is of no consequence in this sort of encounter.  And what the doctor did not say - but I know in my bones - is that we all find healing in giving children the things we starved for most ourselves.


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