The Fourth Child by Jessica Winter (best classic novels TXT) 📕

no eye contact. When co-therapist redirected her to resume eye contact, focus student deflected through laughter, jumping, turning, and making “funny faces.” Therapist interpreted this behavior as attempt to maintain control. Introduction of holding therapy led to similar deflective responses of smiling, laughter, fidgeting, and kicking.Session 2—Body Work

MODULE: Rapport-building continues. Intensive verbal directives/corrections, compliance exercise, biographical narration, and holdingtherapy.

Notes from session: Focus student engaged with Simon Says and hide-the-shoe game. Deflective response (laughter, spinning, falling on ground) as commands became faster and more complicated. Deflective response (laughter) when therapist used therapeutic hostile command tone. Difficulty during biographical questions and answers. Focus student repeated questions back to therapist but did not answer. (Prompt questions included “Were you a bad baby?”; “Did no one take care of you?”; “Why didn’t anyone love you?”) Second holding therapy session cycled rapidly through deflective response to frustration response. Focus student exhibited physical resistance requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from co-therapist. Session 3—Role-Playing, First Module

MODULE: Compliance exercise continues with additional rules, increased speed, and intensified therapeutic hostile command tone. Regressionrole-play followed by holding therapy.

Notes from session: Role-play cast therapist as focus student’s birth mother and co-therapist as orphanage nurse. A third co-therapist placed focus student in modified holding position. Focus student was asked how she felt to see her birth mother and nurse. This question only elicited laughter and other deflection. Third holding therapy session bypassed deflective and frustration responses to rage response, with extreme physical resistance to therapy requiring compression-therapeutic intervention from two co-therapists.Session 4—Role-Playing, Second Module

Notes from session: Therapists attempted to direct the focus student’s anger toward birth mother. (Prompt questions included “How does it make you feel that she left you?”; “Why did she leave you?”) Adoptive mother expressed concern that drama practice was inappropriate for focus student’s age and English-language skills. Fourth holding therapy session commenced during rage response, again requiring therapist and two co-therapists. Therapists introduced use of blanket during holding therapy as precursor to forthcoming rebirthing session. Adoptive mother expressed concern that focus student could be injured during holding therapy.Session 5—Minding the “Baby”

MODULE: Therapeutic return to state of infancy using bottle-feeding, cradling, swaddling, rocking, lullabies.

Notes from session: Focus student’s deflective response to first set of babying tactics converted immediately to rage response when swaddling was introduced. Responded well to bottle-feeding and sweets. Responded well when given a teddy bear she was “in charge” of. Repeatedly told therapists throughout the session that the teddy bear belonged to her. Adoptive mother again expressed concerns about potential injury to the focus student during holding therapy. Adoptive mother also expressed concerns about the next day’s planned rebirthing session.

Carolyn Dewey, founder and clinical director of the Arden Attachment Center, shrugged her marathoner’s arms out of her lavenderblazer. She folded her hands on her desk, which contained two short stacks of papers, plaques and awards to her left, wood-framedphotographs to her right. She took a lip gloss and a compact mirror out of the mauve leather handbag on her desk, flippedthe compact open with her left hand while glossing her lips with the right, pulled her lips over her teeth and kissed themtogether twice, pop-pop, baring her teeth at the mirror to check for stains, and slipped the gloss and compact back into the bag—all in one flowingvapor trail of a gesture, without breaking the line of her monologue.

“When mothers bring their children to Arden, I want them to see something to aspire to. To see it inscribed in me. To be sure,it’s not about me or what I have done, it’s not about envying me—I’m not that vain—but rather envying the time, wanting the time back, seeing the intent and the effort expended, and thinking, If I had all the time she had to work on myself, I would walk across all the deserts of the world, or I would rekindle three friendships I lost to the parenting years, or I would read all of Proust, or whatever it would be.

“I see my upkeep, if you will, as a pact I keep with myself and with all of my fellow Arden parents. I see myself as one ofyou, and I want you to see yourself in me. In all this paint and coiffuring and visible workouts I want you to see a clock,and the hands of the clock are moving backward and giving you back your life. Not the life you had before you were the motherof an attachment-challenged child. You’re not getting that life back, and you wouldn’t want it back. But a life where youcome first again, because if you’re not taking care of yourself, then you can’t take care of anyone else.”

Carolyn started almost imperceptibly, as if sensing a mosquito somewhere behind her right ear. Her frosted blond hair wasbrushed and blown to curl under, tickling at the places where her slim shoulders met her neck; a front curtain swooped outof a deep side part and over a thinner translucent canopy of wispy bangs. In another compound gesture, Carolyn put her handinside the mauve leather to retrieve a small aerosol spray can. If Lauren were here, she might scold Carolyn for ripping aslightly bigger hole in the ozone layer. Carolyn misted the area in question with a spiraling flourish, and patted the calmedzone with one hand while slipping the can back inside the bag with the other.

A few stray particles of the spray misted onto Jane’s face, and with them a memory. The party at Rhonda’s. Brad Bender swingingthe cheerleaders around, Pat setting his hand on fire with the hairspray and the lighter, Colin screech-laughing at Pat inpain. And yet nobody whisked them off to Colorado for behavior modification therapy. Fifteen years later, a patch of Pat’sleft hand was still raw pink and mottled where it had gone up in flames.

“Sore paw?” Carolyn asked, and Jane felt a momentary calm surprise that Carolyn’s clinical training equipped her to