I’ve found myself wondering lately which of my patients were lucky enough as children to play hide-and-seek with their parents. When it’s played as it’s meant to be, it’s such a delightful game. Kids ask to play it, though, only when they’re confident that they’ll be found. In that way, it’s a bit like psychotherapy: Only when patients feel hopeful that their experiences and feelings will be understood does the work begin in earnest.
We all need to hide sometimes. We need to go into the private space of our mind and take measure of our thoughts. We need to enter this space so we can reflect. And then, having done so, we long to be discovered by someone who’s looking, someone who really wants to find us. If we never have our feelings known and accepted by the people who are important to us, then hiding is no game; it’s a way of life.
It is “joy to be hidden,” the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote, “but disaster not to be found.”
Early in my training as a psychologist, I worked with a 4-year-old girl for whom hiding was a way of life. That girl, Sandra, was selectively mute. She spoke on occasion inside her home, but never in public. After years in which no one had come looking for her, she had gone into a deep and desperate hiding.
In our first session, Sandra and I met with her mother in a room full of toys. The mother was a small woman in her mid-30s whose dark hair, pulled back in a ponytail, set off an angry and anxious face. The pair sat down at a long table, and the mother turned away from both of us. I brought over some toys — fuzzy hand puppets and a basket of plastic fruit. No one moved. After a minute, I put a dog puppet on my hand and started feeding it a plastic banana, narrating all the while: “Yum, yum, yum. Boy, that tastes good.” I glanced at Sandra. She was intrigued. I glanced at her mother. She was still looking away.
[For more of this story, written by Alison Carper, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...-hide-and-seek/?_r=0]
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