Every Family Has a Story by Julia Samuel

Author:Julia Samuel [Samuel, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241480649
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2022-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

The Rossi Family

How to recover from the long tail of trauma

Case conceptualization

The Rossi family consists of Sarah, seventy-five, a retired physiotherapist, and her three daughters: Francesca, forty-eight, a single mother of two living in Italy and working as a curator in a museum; Maria, forty-five, married and a full-time mother of three; and Anna, forty-two, married and on maternity leave from her work as a nurse. They were practising Catholics, Sarah most particularly a regular churchgoer. Her husband, Matteo, an Italian policeman, died by suicide when the girls were young. Four years ago, when Francesca was in a treatment centre for alcoholism, it became apparent that there were unresolved family issues from his traumatic death, which impelled them to seek family therapy. We met over Zoom.

Suicide is like a cluster bomb. The shards pierce those closest to it, living inside them in the form of grief and trauma until such time as they are located and the injury addressed. Guilt and the repeated ‘what if’ and ‘why’ are but a few of the agonies survivors contend with. Matteo’s three daughters had been living with the pain of their father’s death for too long. Now, forty years on, they wanted to work through how it had affected them and their mother.

When I first met Sarah I was struck by the power of her voice, which was loud and gravelly. She looked at me through oval spectacles, her thick white hair neatly groomed and held back with a tortoiseshell clip. The message she wanted to convey was clear: ‘Don’t mess with me. I’m strong.’ As a therapist, I make the assumption that harder defences mask greater vulnerability. I soon learnt that Sarah’s carapace of protection was in place for good reason.

When I first meet a client I ask myself: how did she get to be this way? Sarah told me her story. Her early life had not been easy. She was the youngest and only daughter of three children in a middle-class family in York. Her father was a GP, and her mother had been a nurse until she gave up work when her children were born. But her father had strayed with her mother’s best friend, resulting in a vicious divorce. Sarah was just seven. I was shocked to hear that, in the divorce settlement, the children were split between the two parents, as if they were chattels. One brother went to live permanently with their father, the other with their mother, while Sarah bounced between the two households, like a ball in a bitter game of ping-pong.

Her voice was uncharacteristically quiet, signifying a reluctance to remember, as she recalled that time: ‘It was all I knew from such a young age so I didn’t question it. But I look back now and wonder what on earth they could have been thinking. The one bit of relief was that I only had to see my elder brother every other week. He intimidated me, treating me like I was this weak and

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