A Personal Perspective: A heartbreaking yet powerful personal experience of trauma.
stories, mine begins not with a catastrophic event but rather with a harmful idea: that I was somehow abnormal and needed to be fixed. The idea was introduced when, at age six, my parents began taking me for weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. Back then, taking a child towasn’t aimed at helping the child learn to thrive or work through a difficult experience.
I was used to stumbling down this hallway in the mornings and climbing into my parents’ bed. Today, however, both my parents were awake already. My dad was perched on the edge of the bed in his Jockey underwear and “dago T” . At his side was my mom in her lace-edged nightgown, propped up by pillows against the headboard. Though they’d called me in, they looked up when I entered the room as if I’d caught them in a secret conversation.
The tests weren’t the kind one would expect at a big university Hospital. No bright lights, no stethoscopes, no blood work or X-rays. No explanation from my parents, either. I found myself alone in a stark white room with a stranger, trying to answer the questions he asked me while looking at a peculiar array of pictures: a woman gazing forlornly out a window, a little boy playing with a dog, a series of half-finished shapes, a collection of black-and-white blobs that made no sense to my eyes.
Despite having no answers, I got used to the routine. Every Tuesday brought another long car ride, another “special meeting” that remained largely a blur. It wasn’t until several years later, when I was in the sixth grade, that Dr. Dwight asked me if I would like to play with some toys. He walked me over to the carpeted area and opened the chests of drawers. My eyes lit up at the things in the first chest—stuffed animals, ribbons and buttons, multicolored beads.
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