‘We broke into a million pieces and we can’t go back’ – Huntrix, KPop Demon Hunters.
“Look, butterfly”, she said to me for the first time after almost two years of being too scared to say anything in my presence.
She took the little colourful plastic dreamcatcher off the window sill of this otherwise threadbare public paediatric clinic and put it into the palm of my hand – a healthily pale and padded three-year-old hand on top of my thin brown spidery hand that always smelled vaguely of alcohol rub and chilli.
A crystalline memory of my first meeting with that thin scrap of a girl, recently coming out of home care, entered unbidden into my mind.
Not knowing what to do in that moment, I held up the toy up against the tired late winter light and showed her the fractals of colour that came off it onto her hand.
“Look, kiddo, it’s magic.”
She grinned, snatched it out of my hand and pranced over to her carer to show off the new skill she’d developed.
The room, which a mere moment ago had seemed so crowded with the jagged edge of anger and complaints from her carers about the state of NDIS supports, their birth parents’ lifetime of poor choices, the shared ineptitude of all our efforts, went strangely quiet. It was a short spell of silence to honour the wonderful growth we’d all just borne witness to, that was so easily missed in the furore of broken systems, problems lists and ineffective e-mails to various multidisciplinary team members working in lonely silos.
Conversely, there was also the deafening noise of the background yet untold, potential unknowable truths of why a child arrived into the department half-starved and mute and staring in fear at the world around her.
How does a sparkling, brand new person bursting with promise and glee in the image of her parents, shatter into so many little broken shards? What demons lurk in the past to have caused such a fracture, that even the simple act of trying to pick up the remnant pieces could ricochet and hurt the child’s new carers in the form of defiance, opposition, conduct, and emotional dysregulation?
A curious shared experience for all humans is the ability to both feel, and instinctively want to reject, pain. Understandably, when faced with the undefined borders of the underworld of a child’s pain, it is reasonable to feel the urge to immediately try to fix it, fight it for them, or worse, suppress it so the image of innocence remains. The adult’s inability to look the child’s hidden demons in the eye; to acknowledge the tortured being within that’s generating the challenging behaviours will one day erupt in one maladaptive way or other.
Because what lurks below the surface is so awful to look at, choices are made for the million pieces of the child’s innate nature that might look good in the short term but inadvertently teach the child to feel shame for their demonised origin story.
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In the incense-clouded parlours that I grew up in, where spirits, demons and magic are in the everyday, the prescription would have been to hang a feng shui mirror over the lintel. Obviously, demons and evil spirits cannot bear to see their own pain reflected back to themselves, and will then leave the child alone.
Have we, in our haste to anaesthetise our souls to feel no pain whatsoever, forgotten the physiological purpose of pain? Pain has never been the enemy of humanity. If anything, it remains our most authentic warning beacon if we only allowed it to speak.
The same way pain in tissues heralds damage to an organic region of one’s person, psychological pain has always served to warn us of high pressures levied against our most secret and truest inner values. Extreme emotions and outbursts viewed from the perspective of a soul is the outward, most desperate manifestations of a person forced to the edge of their shatter point, as the distance between their innermost wishes and the image projected onto them by the world widens beyond capacity.
So, it stands to reason that perhaps the mainstay of managing this pain is to try to bring the child’s innermost, most sacrosanct emerging values closer to what they choose to show the world around them.
And if they had been shattered by circumstances that they did not choose, it becomes the role of their responsible adult to collect the shards of personality left behind and figure out what to do with them. The temptation to sweep up all the dysfunctional broken bits into a neat little box and shut the lid, or slap on a neat little diagnosis to explain away all the pain, is but a deferral of a bigger shatter – adding the fragments of the box to the mess in a few years’ time, alongside the eroded trust in the relationship between child and carer as the child grows in understanding that their true visage is met with revulsion.
As we tiptoe in clinic among the shrapnel of her beautiful butterfly soul and teeter precariously in the tension of the carers’ request for emotional anaesthesia and the logic of developmental trauma, we are saved as usual by the clear ring of the child’s voice.
There was that little voice again, whispering something cheeky in her carer’s ear. Akin to shouting from the rooftops it was her vote of the strongest confidence in her carer. And so, with a wary eye at the clinic list’s growing waiting times, we made an attempt to exorcise a child’s inner demon by building a mirror from the broken glass.
It was immediately overwhelming as a project, because how do you even begin? Here there was a fragment of neglect, there a chip of witnessed violence, and there an amorphous yet sharp shadow of horror that a child of three has not yet found the vocabulary to define into form.
How do stop yourself or the child from bleeding to death from a thousand cuts sifting through all the accumulated anguish formed from conception?
Fortunately, darkness cannot exist without light, and for every clawing piece, there is a counterpart made of seaglass – manufactured by every child’s inborn right of hope, and proudly waiting to be showcased to bolster their strength, like a happy little faerie protector in contrast to the shadows.
We might start this journey by collecting seaglass to fortify her with confidence, building hope for her carers that she is not just all the broken crags they first came to clinic to remove.
I suspect we will spend the years ahead with a growing village of makeshift glassworkers juggling many other patients both like and unlike her. We will work together, collecting shards, recognising that both golden seaglass and angry fragments that hurt us as much as the child, are equally important to Tetris together a full person.
Invariably, with time and patience, and many segues of being realigned from taking the easier way out by suppressing the child’s true self, we will learn the emerging adolescent’s true nature. Perhaps there never were demons, and the mirror we were building from the past simply reflected that we are all made of fragments of experiences both beautiful and painful. The village’s duty then becomes to observe these truths with understanding and kindness, and to create opportunities to grow in character.
And one day, even if this is when I have long left the story and she is an adult, when we have shown the cowering child inside enough shimmering seaglass that she is ready to pick up the most uncomfortable shadowy pieces, we might arrive at the start of a new lifelong journey of truth-telling and growth.
Dr York Xiong Leong is a general paediatrician in Eastern Health, Melbourne, working in public inpatient and community paediatric services, and a medical educator with Monash and Deakin universities. One of the best compliments he has ever received is “Babe you barely live on this planet”.
