The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog by Bruce D. Perry

Author:Bruce D. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

WHEN AMBER STARTED THERAPY, I was surprised by how quickly she opened up to me. It is not unusual for several months to pass before a patient shares her intimate thoughts during a weekly psychotherapy session. It took only three or four weeks before Amber started to talk about having been abused by Duane.

“Don’t you want me to talk about being abused?” she asked one day.

“I figured that when you’re ready to talk about it you’ll bring it up,” I said.

“I don’t think about it very much. I don’t like to remember it.”

I asked her when she did think about it.

“Sometimes when I’m going to sleep,” she said, “But then I just go away.”

“Go away?”

I knew she was talking about dissociation but I wanted her to describe what happened. There was a change in her posture: she cocked her head and stared into space, her eyes fixed down and to the left. I knew she was running some painful images through her mind.

“When it first started to happen I was so scared,” she said in a quiet, almost child-like voice. “And it hurt. Sometimes I couldn’t breathe. I felt so helpless and so small and so weak. I didn’t want to tell my mom. I was so embarrassed and confused. So when it would happen, I would close my eyes and try to think about other things. Pretty soon, I was able to go to a safe place in my head.”

As she described it, she seemed to change. “Little by little, I made that place my special retreat. Whenever I thought about going there and being there, I felt safe. Nobody knew where it was. Nobody could come in there with me. Nobody could hurt me there.” She paused. She was now speaking in a low tone of voice, in a monotone, almost robotically. She was staring off into space as she spoke. She hardly blinked. We sat in silence for a moment and then she continued.

“I felt like I could fly when I was in that place. And I began to imagine that I was a bird, a raven. I tried being a beautiful bird, a bluebird or a robin but I couldn’t be beautiful there. I tried being a majestic bird, like an eagle or a hawk, but that didn’t work either. My mind kept making me something dark. Like a raven. But I was powerful. I could control other animals. I was wise and I was kind, but I was absolutely ruthless in hunting down and using my power to kill evil. To those creatures, the bad ones, I was the Black Death.”

She paused again. This time, she looked at me. Her words had been moving. I knew she’d never shared this with anyone and that she felt that some of the power of her fantasy to comfort her lay in its secret nature. It is critical to protect someone when they are vulnerable in moments like this.

“Are you still the Black Death?” I asked. She looked away for a moment and then back at me and started to cry.

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