What it means not to hear

 

I’ve gotten somewhat familiar with the parents of several of my teen clients. These parents have attended one or two sessions with their child, or a “parent only” session. I have seen a very interesting phenomenon. These parents can listen, but they cannot hear. This deafness is as powerful and implacable as if a thick steel wall, or actually planetary distances, separated their mind from their ears. They can, I’m sure, hear things that have no content but the concrete. “Don’t step on that broken glass.” “The half-and-half is spoiled.” “The car is out of gas.” But any communication, or anticipated communication with a person raises the wall. They are blocked by the burial of their history.

This is never easy to explain quickly and simply. Our history is of course embedded in us, but more, it is the foundation of our identity. If it has brought us psychic injury that never healed – the kind that damages our young soul and heart – our life following it must be, to a great extent, an escape from that injury. Our adaptive identity is that: escape.

Picture the hurts you simply had to swallow in your childhood. Arthur Janov writes that if a child’s tears are “shushed” away, where do those tears go? Similarly, where do those hurts, those losses of love and security, go? They go nowhere but deeper, and we have to live on top of them.

This is why the parents can’t hear. They have escaped from their truth, the loss of their best, their soul and heart, and now can’t ever let themselves feel it, be reminded of it. Having children is one of their greatest escapes and greatest reminders. Now, as parents, they can believe they feel ascended, arrived, stronger, superior. But when their child has a problem, is sad or angry, their formative failure comes back to them and they have to wall it off. I’ve sometimes been a little silly in sessions by saying that “in your brain, ‘the past’ is half-an-inch to the left of ‘the present’.” It’s right there, but like in a different dimension, a nightmare so buried it might just press upon your eyes ever so slightly, create an unnamed feeling of a timeless pause.

I look at these parents and I talk to them about hearing their child’s feelings, which are her iden­tity and meaning. They listen to me and cannot allow themselves to grasp what I mean.

They literally cannot allow themselves to grasp what I mean. And so their child remains unheard and invisible. Invisible children grow up escaping from their past.