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

it, shut it down—temporarily, of course. Same goes for the unattached child. Under normalcircumstances, holding down a child, inhibiting his movement, goes against everything we think and feel about caregiving.But the children who come to Arden express their trauma through their bodies, through movement: the hitting out, the rocking,the spinning. These are memories activating at the cellular level. The memories and trauma are kicking the kid around, jerkinghis arms and legs like a master puppeteer. It’s an emergency, and so in holding therapy, we step in and apply pressure tothe wound. We stop the trauma from working.”

“But the holding is—what? What does it do?”

“There are several different techniques. One that you’ve seen is the basket hold: the child has his arms crossed in frontof him, his back pressed against the therapist’s chest, and the therapist is either holding his hands behind him or has herarms wrapped around him.”

“I do this with Mirela,” Jane said. “I didn’t know it was a—a technique—”

“You used your intuition. Because you’re a born mom.”

“I get her turned away from me and hold her tight—not tight but firm, and I rock her and sing to her until she calms down. I showed my older daughter how to do this, too. Mirela rocks and humsand holds herself when she is upset, so I’m kind of mirroring what she does anyway, but in a way that gets her more undercontrol.”

“Yes, you’re doing the basket hold.”

“I call it the squeeze.”

“Basket hold is an easy one—it’s rather like the Heimlich maneuver. It gets results, simple as that.”

“I don’t know that it does. Maybe Mirela would calm down on her own without it. But it helps me feel as though I’m doing something.”

“There are also the prone positions, which you’ve seen. The position where the child is laid out on a therapist’s lap, lookingupward at her, with perhaps a co-therapist helping to apply pressure. Or the child laid out on the floor, with a second orthird co-therapist applying therapeutic pressure.”

“Yes, this is what concerns me—Mirela flat on the floor, these people on top of her. It’s just—I know I’m new to this, but—”

Carolyn nodded. “It is intense. But it’s a perfectly safe, evidence-based therapy carried out by trained professionals.”

“But why is it done?”

“Well, the child doesn’t want to be held, right? And that refusal affords us an opportunity. As the child—”

“Mirela.”

“—as Mirela strains against the hold, she feels on the cellular level that she herself is both powerless and profoundly safe. The universal condition of the loved infant. In this powerless and safe condition, she can release her rage against the absent mother, returning the rage and pain back where it belongs.”

“She’s giving the rage back to Mom.”

“Well, she’s giving it back to bio-Mom. Bio-Mom, or absent Mom, or abusive Mom will always be in the room with her, but shecan no longer get a seat at the table. In the holding position, the rage of the child—I must speak in generalities, forgiveme—the rage eventually succumbs to exhaustion, and the child surrenders to a feeling she hasn’t experienced before, sinkinginto rest in her loving caregiver’s arms.”

“But she’s being forced to do it. She’s not coming to it on her own.”

“Think of infancy. During the baby stage, the mother is the baby’s prisoner, you might say, but the baby is the mother’s prisoner,too. The baby didn’t choose that, but she’s mostly okay with it. In fact, being okay with that arrangement is the foundationof her whole life to come—because that’s the beginning of attachment, and attachment is the name of the game.”

“But these are—you’re talking about it like it’s surgery, but really it’s metaphors. You know? How does such a small childgrasp these metaphors? Somehow this narrative is taking shape through her own experience?”

“On an intuitive level, yes. You talked about intuition before, and she has it, too. On a cellular level, most definitelyshe can grasp it all. The body knows these things even if it cannot put them into words. Words aren’t everything, you know.But the thing is happening even if you can’t articulate it. You have to temporarily make something stop working in order tosave it—break down cells in order to give birth to new ones.”

“And rebirthing? That’s what’s on the schedule for tomorrow.”

“I think, as with your questions about holding therapy, that what you’re really asking is Why does she need that? and I can’t tell you exactly until we’re in the middle of it. Attachment therapy, for all its rules and protocols, doesn’t necessarily follow a script. It’s more of an improv class.”

“But what are the basic, I don’t know, principles of rebirthing? The brochure didn’t say.”

“Well, we can’t fit everything we do into one brochure.”

“How does rebirthing grow out of holding therapy?”

“So when we talk about attachment—what was the first attachment? It was the embrace of the mother’s womb, yes? But for thechild who comes to Arden, that embrace may have been poisoned by—well, let’s back up. What do we know about bio-Mom?”

“Not much. Mirela had hep B, but we don’t know where she got it from.”

“But—was the mother dead? Unfit? Did she sign away her rights?”

“I adopted Mirela out of an institution. An orphanage.”

“But that can mean so many things. A lot of kids in Eastern European orphanages aren’t orphans—rather, their parents havesigned away their rights. I mean, you know this.”

“Yes, I do, and I didn’t meet anyone claiming to be Mirela’s mother. What I have are reams and reams of paperwork.”

“And what did the paperwork say?”

“I don’t—I’m sorry, but I don’t see how this is any of your business.”

“My goodness!”

“I’m sorry, I just—I don’t know if anything in her medical records is accurate. I don’t know what happened to her before Imet her. I do not. I never will. I can only imagine, and I imagine the worst, and it’s unbearable, so I don’t. So—so we justhave to deal with what’s in front of us.”

“I see. Well, then. We can keep to generalities. The embrace of the mother in utero may have been poisoned by