Twilight Children: Three Voices No One Heard – Until Someone Listened. Torey Hayden
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then, wandering back to the issue of how hard it was to know how to treat someone when the individual’s observable behaviors could be interpreted so many ways. I remarked that the tape reflected well the lack of focus in the sessions and my feeling that I was spending all my time reacting rather than acting. There wasn’t really much more direction in what I was doing than in what she was doing.
Dave replied that we weren’t lacking focus. Her abduction was the source of Cassandra’s difficulties and the focus of our work was understanding how that trauma had affected her and finding a way of helping her deal with that experience.
I hadn’t really needed reminding of this. Indeed, I said, that was half my problem. I’d spent a lot of time investigating the current research into treatment of traumatized children and had made detailed plans for dealing with the issues surrounding the abduction. The problem was that so far I hadn’t managed to squeeze in even one of my planned exercises. Focusing on the trauma of the abduction was what I wanted to do, but that was just never where we ended up going.
Dave smiled gently. “Au contraire, mam’selle,” he said. “I think that’s just where you’re going.” And he rose from his seat, clapping me on the shoulder as he did so. “The trick,” he added, “is fitting what you know to the events, not fitting the events to what you know.”
The day after I’d returned from Quentin, I reported back to Harry Patel regarding my visit to see Drake Sloane. I told Harry that, yes, indeed, Drake was electively mute and the preschool had tried interventions, which had thus far been unsuccessful. I mentioned the possibility of bilingualism as a contributing factor and did say there were a few peculiarities to the case, such as the restrictive nature of Drake’s mutism. My overall impression, however, was of a reasonably well-adjusted child who, given an environment sensitive and appropriate to his needs, would most likely outgrow the difficulty without further treatment.
Which sadly couldn’t be said about Drake’s grandfather, I added. I told Harry how I’d found the old man to be difficult, demanding, and meddlesome and how I suspected that if there were any serious problems, they lay in the family dynamics and not in the boy. Then I mentioned how I’d unintentionally antagonized the old man and he’d stomped out on me. So, regardless of my findings, that was the end of the story.
Or so I’d thought.
Sitting in my office with Dave Menotti, going over the videotape of Cassandra’s session, I heard a quick rap at the door.
It opened and Harry popped his head in. “Oops, sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but I’m just leaving to go over to the medical center, and I wanted to say before I missed you, Torey, that Drake Sloane is coming into the unit on Sunday.”
My eyes widened with surprise.
“Had a call from Mason Sloane, who said they’d had a family meeting and Drake’s parents decided they wanted this problem sorted out.”
Mason Sloane decided, more likely.
As I didn’t work weekends, I wasn’t on the unit when Drake was admitted, but, of course, I was slated for his individual therapy sessions. When I arrived on Monday, I found Drake curled up on the couch in the dayroom watching cartoons, his huge stuffed tiger, Friend, sitting beside him.
“Hi, Drake!” I called as I walked through the dayroom to the nurses’ station. “Remember me?”
He nodded enthusiastically, smiled broadly, and waved, then started to get down to come over.
“You wait there just a second while I talk to Nurse Nancy and then I’ll come get you. Then we’ll go do something fun. Okay?”
Grabbing Friend around the neck in such a vigorous hug that they both toppled over, he laughed and nodded.
Before starting the session, I wanted to find out how Drake had adjusted to his first day on the ward and what Nancy’s general impressions were, so I stepped into the small room behind the nurses’ station and closed the door.
“What a sweetie!” Nancy said. “He’s been just good as gold since he’s come. There were some tears last night. I mean, poor little tadpole. And his mama must have had a very wet pillow last night, too. She lingered so long yesterday. You could just see it in her face.”
This I could imagine. My impression during my visit to Quentin was not only that Lucia loved her son very dearly, but that Drake may have served as a buffer between her and the rest of the world. Indeed, my general sense was that both Mason Sloane and Lucia had more problems than Drake.
Truth was, I was not happy with the Sloanes’ decision to bring Drake for inpatient treatment. Without evidence of devastating levels of dysfunction, the boy was, in my opinion, way too young to be separated from his mother and left for days in an institutional setting. Elective mutism on its own is not indicative of serious pathology. To hospitalize a four-year-old for not speaking at school falls into the category of “burning the house down to roast the pig,” in my opinion. This left me far more concerned about the psychological damage we could do by separating a preschooler from his family and familiar surroundings for days, if not weeks, than what would occur from leaving the elective mutism untreated. Unfortunately, he was not my child and it was not my choice. If parents made this kind of decision and had the insurance or finances to see it through, our hospital unit was designed for diagnostic purposes. So my best course of action was to swallow my own opinions and simply to get on with the job as quickly and straightforwardly as possible, so that he could go home.
I didn’t foresee any problems in this. My treatment essentially involved very little more than arriving as an outsider with whom the child had not already established a silent relationship, setting up the expectations he/she could and would talk with me, and then presenting the child with opportunities to do so. Among children for whom there was no other significant pathology, this “method” had worked very well and my success rate was almost 100 percent within the first session. So I set myself the personal goal of having Drake ready to go home by the next weekend.
The therapy room wasn’t large, and it suffered from being painted a really nasty institutional gray, but otherwise it was an acceptable room. Long and narrow in shape, it had a sunny south-facing window on the far end that overlooked the trees in the hospital courtyard below. On the right-hand side of the room was the one-way mirror with an observation room on the other side. Usually there weren’t any observers, but located in there was also a video camera that recorded all sessions. On the left-hand side of the room was a low set of shelves running the entire length of the wall. These contained a small selection of playroom items commonly used in therapy – puppets, toy cars, plastic people and animals, paper, crayons, pens, plus a Playmobil dollhouse, a Fisher-Price garage, and part of a Playmobil hospital set. A Dick Bruna alphabet frieze had been put up on the wall above the shelves along with four large posters of Dick Bruna’s popular rabbit character, Miffy, displayed at rakish angles. Their bright primary colors and imaginative arrangement against the gray walls in the long, narrow room gave me the feel of being amid the cheap and cheerful decor of a student dormitory.
I always carried my own box of materials with me, the same box I’d taken out to Quentin, and I set it on the tabletop. Drake immediately settled into the chair opposite, putting Friend on the chair beside him. Friend was so enormous that he actually sat taller in the chair than Drake.
Drake proved an enthusiastic companion. If he was lonely or frightened at being separated from his family, he didn’t show it. His expression was bright-eyed and animated; his whole body wriggled with anticipation.
“So what do you think about all this?” I said. “Do you like being here?”
He nodded eagerly.
“What’s been your favorite part?”
He gestured with his hands. I had no idea what he was trying to communicate but he did so fervently, then looked up at me with expectancy.
“You know what I think, Drake? I think it would be so much easier if you used words. I really do want to understand what you are saying. I want