My child, My healer

ReMembering

This text is difficult to write. I guess it is because it talks about pain. The pain of a mother. The pain of a society. It is also difficult because I don’t think I have it all sorted out in my head and in my heart. I am still trying to untie the knots …but here I am writing it : I know more now than 7 years ago when all this started and I know less - hopefully - than I will in the 7 years to come. I also feel it is really important - now more than ever - to talk about what made me who I am today. A new mother.

In ancient times and cultures, it was common to believe that disease came from evil spirits. They had the ability to bother us, infect us, make us sick; often came into us because of our actions. But we would become sick not only because of what we did as individuals. The collective had also agency over the state of our health. Health was so much broader than the narrow modern interpretation we have on it now and much more entangled than what we can think. People living in and by nature were inherently trained to observe signs and to interpret them as such. Often, messages would come from animals, ancestors or deities. People would see, feel, and understand the connections we are so blind to today. They identified how ecosystems were thoroughly working together, as a whole. It was evident that if there was an imbalance in one place, one state, one generation, it would impact and lead to disharmony in another. The remedy was based, first and foremost, in seeking the root, revealing the sources of the evil. Most of all, healing was ritualized. Plants, water, the wind, the animals, the sun, the stars, the rocks; everything and everyone would be called in to take out the entity that was causing pain. Bringing back health to the affected one was not the only goal: the harmony and the restoration of the whole system into balance was equally important - sometimes even more.

It was 7 years ago. Our daughter, Alfie, was 8 when she started developing anxiety and having panic attacks. Whenever we planned to leave our house and step into a car, go anywhere, whether it was to visit friends, go shopping, or for any longer journey, she would find at first (good) excuses, (I am tired, I have a headache…my belly hurts…) and then eventually, if pressured for whatever reasons, she would go into fight mode; tremble, hyperventilate, sweat, get palpitations, chest pain. She would resist the travel and cry. Cry hard. Exhausting shouting cry. My mama heart crushed a million times! I got angry. I got sad. I got scared. I got desperate. I would cry - me too - hidden in the bathroom or in my bed, I would cry on the phone with my sister, I would cry at work silently and hiding. I would cry toutes les larmes de mon corps¹. Often, when I found refuge in the forest, it felt like I was inhabiting an empty corpse and it was the trees that were crying.

Panic pulled her under the earth
Pression held her there, beneath
Her lungs burned
Her vision went dark
Everything around her was gone.

Resigned to drowning
She opened her mouth
To take one last breath

But nothing happened.

Something was different now,
She had grown wings.

Our happy, smiling, solid, family nucleus was under a lot of pressure. For almost 4 years, the three of us walked a very dark path. Full of doubts, pain, and guilt. And a lot of mistakes.

At every panic attack, Alfie thought she was dying. It was war in her little body.

No one was really able to help. People around us would either give a casual and uninvested comment such as “Don’t worry, it will pass…” or a patronising and passive-aggressive “Don’t you think you should have a little more authority or control over her? Kids love boundaries and even if it is hard, they don’t know better, and they will thank you later on” followed by “Just put her in the car and let her cry it off”. My friends and my family were more or less on the same page: this could be solved with a better parenting style. I am not blaming them. If they knew better, they would have said better. But they did not.

Being both therapists, my husband and I, we were quite suspicious and picky (or biased) - and we still are - but we did seek for the expertise of medical doctors and psychologists. You know, parents are the worst therapists dealing with their own family problems. That did not help much either. For quite a long time, once a week, every week, Alfie had sessions with the local psychologist CBT trained. Her main tool was to put Alfie in a car and drive around with her for an hour. I guess the plan was to make her become friends with her fears. Needless to say, it did not help much….And do you know why? Because her fears were not hers!

A Collage I did specially for this piece. I called it “Behind my Fears.”

Time was pressing. From 2016 to 2019-2020 no traveling, no outing, no restaurants. Not going to the beach in the summer and if we would decide to go we would have to prepare as if we would leave our house for a year!

In 2018, I started studying again. I don’t think this is a coincidence. I was reading a lot and was trying to help myself understand how and why a child, who otherwise functioned normally, a happy smiling little girl, eating her fruits and a lot of vegetables mainly grown in our garden in the summer, sleeping good, quite active socially, with loving and caring parents, how she could be in such a state of disarray. This did not make sense! After some disillusionment over psychology and how it is administrated in our modern societies (I will write about this specifically another time - I think it is relevant), I decided to take things into my hands. I recalled the work of Bruno Clavier² a French clinical psychologist working mainly with children with autism, OCD, ADHD and other ailments. Informed by his practice of many decades, he has theorised the hypothesis that most of the children he sees, did not experience trauma themselves, but are affected by them. In fact, he observes that children are directly impacted by the trauma of their parents (or grand parents); specially if the traumatic experiences have remained silenced, secret or unprocessed. The children carry in their body unexpressed emotional states from the past into the here-and-now! Children get sick in order to heal their parents. Through their pain, the entire system - the parents -the community - the society is called to repair together, and to restore harmony.

Oh this made so much sense! This resonated inside me as a deep revelation. Of course I was fast to go into the guilt trap and carry on that burden that I find so normal and easy to carry...But the road was long and I was starting to discover that more than caring and loving, parenting meant staying with the trouble³.

As parents, we are holding space for so much. Often we cannot understand the extend of what we hold space for. For ourselves and for our children. From our past, for their future. There is so much we need to do. Sometimes, we are not even able to handle our basic needs, how can we possibly attend to all the rest, the untangled, the unseen, the cosmological, the generational, the hidden, the invisible, the silenced parts… the un-manifested past that haunt the bodies of our little ones.

Parenting refuses to leave us separated, individualised; it refuses to leave us in isolation. Parenting shatters whatever illusions you had of your own centrality. It locks you into the chain of generations; it releases you from any compulsion to make your life a story in itself.⁴

Life is porous. Energy leaks. If you really think about it, events carry energy which is constantly released. Transmitted. Constantly carried away. And it comes back. A little like a pendulum. Like the principle known as the conservation of energy, energy can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only be changed from one form to another.

Everything is connected. I know that we are fed up of reading and hearing this sentence, sorry for that. I also know that we are becoming immune to the concept but when you really see through it, when you live the connectedness beyond yourself and work with your ancestors, in your body and in your soul, the interconnectedness of the world blows your mind.

When I was 8 years old, after a disastrous marriage, my mother decided to flee from her husband in Paris and take her children (my youngest sister and me) to Greece. We left our home from day to another. Left everything behind. She booked tickets, and left almost like a thief in the night. I experienced this departure as a real cut, a wound, a very traumatising experience; one-way ticket from Paris to Athens, 2 kids and 2 suitcases. But I did not say much. I could not. My father has whispered a killing sentence in my ear: You are the chief of the family now. Be good. Be brave. I often refer to this day, this sentence as the end of my childhood. This is what it was: in a split second, I left my home, my security, my laughter, my lightness, my language, my toys, my friends, my father. Yes, my entire childhood in pieces. Never would it be ever the same again. That night, I was terrified.

Alfie’s first panic attack happened while we were boarding on a plane to Athens! She was 8, we were just going on vacation to visit my family for Easter. Suddenly, as we entered the plane, she was seized with tremors. Soon, she could no longer breathe. She was ventilating so hard, we thought she would collapse. She was no longer herself, as if possessed by an intrusive energy of a ghostly form.

Was it possible that my child retrieved the emotions of her mother with such intensity, more than 40 years after, in the here and the now? Was Alfie letting out that pain? An encapsulated powerful energy not expressed in so many decades? This was such an extraordinary finding! This was one of the most incredible understanding and lessons, as a mother, as a human being. Yes, we are connected beyond one’s understanding. Our children are suffering not only because of an inheritance or heredity, or even a biological disposition. We are connected through the pulse and the stars and the universe and everything that made us before and make us now.

Our children love us so much, they would die to heal us. Some of them do.

With their symptoms, their ailments, their diseases.

So when I was trying to help my little one, I should have asked myself the question: who is healing who?

Please do not think that arriving to that conclusion was easy.

Please do not think this is magic.

Or anything supernatural.

I am writing this piece to give my readers a more holistic and deeper understanding, beyond the obvious, of what could be happening, if you have a child that develops anything that doctors cannot understand or that you cannot understand either.

The first question from me to you would be: what happened to you when you were his/her age? What is it that you carry in your body that you still carry …a secret, something (traumatic or not) that needs to be go out, to be healed? Go there first.

When I think back, the real problem is that in this society we live in, we cannot see behind a diagnosis and we are often fixated on finding a solution. What else could a parent do? Our child was experiencing distress, and as loving and caring parents, we wanted to help her! We also wanted to go out, travel, visit places, enjoy a normal family life. It had never occurred to me back then, that this was very shallow and narrow and egoistic and that a lot of other things needed healing first before the pleasures and the normalcy of any life. All I wanted was to just make it to go away. Erase it. Go back to normal!

Little did I know, that her whole way of being was pointing at something much bigger than her, much more deep and fundamental than “normal life” had to offer. I did not realise that the natural entanglement between beings, between a mother and her child between mother or father or any caregiver and their child was pouring out of her in a very special way, through her terrors, her tears, her short breath, her pouncing heart…. All expressing the immense pain of her ancestors and more specifically her mother’s. So much to process. So much to heal from.

Something was revealed, something extravagant, disruptive, weird, monstrous even.

I needed to learn from her and not to learn about her.

We need to learn from them. Our children, our healers.

1. All the tears of my body

2. I have mentioned him before in another article here

3. The title of the famous book by Donna J. Haraway

4. I am here paraphrasing a quote from the last substack article by Douglas Hine

Childish Things