A Father in Treatment; The Former Child Patient; The Child Analyst
The family problem: clinical conflict i–iii
CLINICAL CONFLICT I:
A Father in Treatment
After a few hours' sleep, the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: “Father, don't you see I'm burning?”
— Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
Tolstoy was wrong. There are no happy families. Conceiving of a happy family is like imagining a single successful communist nation-state within global capitalism and the framework of nation-states. Actually, I think Tolstoy knew this. Both parts of his famous sentence are the provocations for an epic-enabling satire: happy families are alike in being regulative, aspirational fictions, and unhappy families are only pseudo differentiations of an immiserating structure. As Adorno movingly wrote, in this world “individual happiness is ascribed a dignity it only would attain with the happiness of the whole.” And yet even if we reject the pursuit of that happiness enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we seek wrong life’s survival in the solidarity of love and filiation (hidden parapraxis: I wrote “familiation” first), working toward a reliable proximity to others until suddenly one day we might find ourselves waking up in the same dwelling to the sounds of a young child who doesn’t yet understand the commodity form, all the compulsory performances of race, class, and gender and their attendant phobias, and the police. By the time these can be clearly explained, they will already be conditions within for both parent and child.
I avoided psychoanalysis for a long time because it felt like lipstick on the pigs, displacing the revolutionary treatment of systemic illness and injury to the individual subject and the bourgeois family form. I felt that the consulting room was a factory or lab where revolutionary energy is vented and recast as private grievance, where battles are fought with melancholy and repetition rather than with the state, and where money coats the ear of both analysand and analyst. Then I decided to open the door to that strange room anyway, hoping for at least some relief and possibly some tools for becoming a slightly different kind of subject. I was in a quasi-analysis in California for thirteen years, which I only stopped for lack of funds as I became a parent (I confess I hate to say “father”). Then I started another, cheaper tele-analysis with a British Kleinian during the pandemic, audio-only over Skype, because I had become this thing, a “father.”
That terrible word. Full of law and punishment and low affect grimly contained. The paragon of cishetmasc performance and of injury to self and all others. How would I minimize this in my caring self and how might (I always hear the synonym for power in that modal verb) I maximize the field of good possibilities for my biologically male child so that they could avoid the worst scripts and outcomes of such a body and subject? Could talking to a dark screen with a British accent a few times a week actually help me become more patient, nonprojective, imaginative?
*
I don’t know how many times a day my toddler asks me to tell the same story—at least fifteen; sometimes it must be over thirty. A car has a flat tire or its engine has stopped working and a tow truck must be called in; every problem resolved leads to more problems. I’ll spare you the rest of the infinite invariance. I try to meet the demand with love and suppleness, locating possibilities for minor difference and surprise within the unchanging, foreordained narrative of damage and repair and more damage. Sometimes, too often, I am much more in contact with the oppressiveness of the tale, the predictably gendered elements and the need or desire to adduce the same sequence of events—it feels more like a story of repetition than the repetition of a story, and more like repetition than a ritual in which we meet and rehearse our love. At these times, I feel I am failing both of us with my impatience, privileging my own unexamined need for the new or mutable over my child’s delight in a familiar arc and in his parent’s vocal provision of that narrative. I neither want him to have these predictable masculine correlatives nor deny him any delight in the moving colored shapes of the world and narratives involving them (with one exception: no police cars).
I tell my analyst about this guilt and immediately hear the pun of “familiar,” hear how it is not a pun so much as a capacious adjective that can compass any here and now into the there and then of early formation. I hear how the comparison of bad, uninhabitable repetition to good, revisitable ritual may as well describe unproductive and productive psychoanalytic sessions, or good and bad families, if there are such things.
As I tell of telling, I hear myself, and then I fear that my hearing is merely defensive interpretation, creating a tractable object for mutual, nearly literary consideration when it would be better, much much better, to stay in feeling, even when feeling is compatible only with silence, to let feeling tell its own story without gloss, without the doomed will to hermeneutic mastery, which leaves one with readings rather than new capacities. Some problems are not to be fixed, at least not without abolition of the structures in which they are certain to arise.
I still feel this way about analysis. Its frame doesn’t make an inside to the outside; its event and its history don’t constitute a privileged vantage. It has our problems and we its. But I’m less interested in the obvious fact that there is no sanctuary and more interested in the feeling and feeling-rules of confronting it weekly, anyway, in an artificial structure of asymmetrical information (the relative blank of the analyst). Or, as my toddler interjects during this endlessly repeatable story, “And then there was another problem.” Sometimes, out of both impatience and a desire to invite him further into collaborative imagination, I’ll ask him what this latest problem is: “You should name it, Dada.”
In analysis, I’ve learned the hard long way that I shouldn’t name it so much as encounter it, guided and nudged by my analyst to move from comfortable if despairing witness to the confusion of whatness in order to pursue how I am what I have been and been made. Often that encounter sounds like silence, which explains my massive resistance to permitting it, and the psychic activity within this silence is usually that of my making hypothetical forays into further speech and discounting them as obfuscation or solicitation of my interlocutor before they reach my larynx; it’s like a chess master’s move horizon but without a clear board or opponent or any mastery to speak of. I have to hope that considering and discounting such testimonies constitutes a refusal to speak in the grooves of defense rather than simple censorship. That refraining from saying is a vital part of free association rather than its opposite.
Instead of overfluent, familiar (there it is again) naming, a resummoning, or a permitting access to what is already and always fully present. My lay sense of analysis is that it still depends on a fall narrative in which we were once being-without-border and then were miraculously with but furious at any dropouts in withness: the breast elsewhere, sleep. Then developed away from the innocence of this first, already inconstant withness into the experience of something else and less—let’s call it the family. And a self precipitated from its matrix, being the having been put into. Analysis is this ancient, irrecoverable yet unavoidable scene of withness (transference) restaged as witness to its first doomed forms.
What am I to do to and with myself in these two speaking scenes (analysis, paternal epic of cars and trucks) to try to support my child’s becoming, with all of the forces and institutions ranged against such permanent suppleness, rather than escort a fatal movement toward having only become? I don’t want to model male frustration, or patriarchal divisions of labor (I am the primary book reader and storyteller, though not exclusively). I don’t want to transport him to a clanking world of hard, cold, male machines in which problems are attacked with tools. But I also want to listen to the contours of his joy and to the fullness of what he might be asking of me, and telling me, when he asks for this, though a fullness that already includes internalized conventions and limits on what is imaginable.
I guess it’s at this point that I will confess, like something deferred far too long in analysis, withheld in shame or displacement rather than healthily passed over for new ways of speaking and feeling, that I had a brother who died very young, after first being in the hospital in a vegetative state for something like a year, growing without living (I can’t hold on to any of the facts—when he lost air and turned blue, how exactly it happened, when he was born, when he eventually died), when I was myself quite young. Even the structure of that sentence is an enactment of deferral, which I realized as I composed it, was pleased to retain as a syntax, and was overglad to acknowledge immediately afterward as a second microconfession whose admission distracted from the first.
This death was not spoken of in my family, pre- or post the divorce that came right after it. So intensely was it not held and shared as family history that I would go years without remembering it had happened; then it would suddenly come to me and I would seek verification from a parent, then years of no longer knowing would resume. How does this, whatever this can be said to be, live, survive—all my verbs are embarrassingly legible—in my sight as I gaze at my son’s sweet listening face, in my ear as I hear his intense request for more story, in my speech as I try to devise another problem and its solution?
I have contended with this entombed experience for almost two decades of analysis, much of which was spent overspeaking and reading the undersaid and unexamined. I quickly grew worried that this foundational trauma was acquiring a second fatal gravity in my analysandery—it was too easy to give this unimpeachably disastrous familial event total explanatory force: it was why I wrote poetry lying down, like the etherized patient in the opening of “Prufrock,” it was why I had romantic male friendships with men who weren’t as self-impeded from living (of course they were in ways I selectively unsaw), deputized them to live for me, and usually had the friendships end, or die. It was why the word blue is tattooed on my bicep in red, and why blue and red, deoxygenated blood and oxygen-rich, thought vs. speech, course as figures through my first book of poems. And so on.
*
When my analyst invites transference obviously, especially when he speaks of himself as a male figure who rhymes inaudibly with the father role, I note it but am still powerless against it (but why fight it, why work to have power at all?). Crudeness works, works better than subtlety (as far as I can consciously tell) because it is the fact of giving rather than the thing given that matters. He is telling me what my story is telling him I need him to know I need. When this happens, I am torn between believing such experiences are part of a movement toward greater health effected by the timing and dosage of interpretive care and, conversely, that they are only respites from the most acute suffering, also known as the quotidian, and that there is no talking cure or even stable palliation possible.
With the help of my wife, I did find the potter’s field where the hospital had my brother buried because my parents were too devastated to handle any funeral arrangements. I stood over that earth with so many unknown below it while my vision went aqueous and blurred and, later, convinced my divorced parents to come there with me, together, for the first time. Was this progress or a one-off ritual of acknowledgment my many families (four more marriages and five half-siblings followed my parents’ divorce) had denied themselves? Had analysis made it possible or my romantic partner? Did these questions matter anywhere near as much as what I did with it and continue to do, up to and including finally feeling capable of having a child after having militantly, melancholically felt it was off-limits my whole adult life? Yes.
My present analyst, a year and a little into talking with me, knows almost no more of these things than you now do. He doesn’t know about my trip to the cemetery as the first family member to visit my brother’s placeless place, or what was in the letter I wrote my parents when I asked them to come there with me. He probably couldn’t pull my eldest sister’s name or the names of the brother substitutes who are no longer my friends. He pronounces my son’s name as the British would, not as I do, sometimes seconds after I’ve said it (should I say something? I haven’t). All facts past and present, and feelings about them, rapidly get pulled to the Kleinian “here and now” of my relationship with him, its vocabularies and ploys and projections. He wants to tell the same story no matter which details I provide, which makes him sound more like my son than my father. It can be frustrating feeling like he doesn’t hold my history because he inhabits our mutual present so intensely, and it can make me worry that I’m less doing psychical work than co-writing a bad Beckett play (but isn’t that psychical work?). I’m also grateful for it, for its artifice and provocative boundedness as I pay an ear to be a voice, a voice to be an ear, and inhabit a weird relation available nowhere and nowhen else though just as unimmune to history.
*
Apologies for trying your patience, but this is how the story typically starts: “Tom was painting a painting of a lilac rabbit when the roadside assistance phone rang. It was a purple Maserati Ghibli, who said, ‘Is this Tom the Tow Truck? Please help me, I spun out on a patch of ice and flipped into a ditch on the side of Turquoise Highway and my engine isn’t working.’” My interjecting son: “And there were so many other problems!” Any problem, including all the speech and silence that attend it, opens onto all the other problems. How can a theory of the family-based subject, produced only by such subjects from Freud on, yield a better theory, better story, a better family, father, son? And what would better mean beyond the imperfect mitigation of historical violence and rigid performance? I don’t know. I only know that I hate the family and love the one I’ve made. And must live in both the form and the burning instance. Confronting that history and present, which includes confronting evasions of that knowledge, feels useful even if there are intense limits and prohibitions on that use. There and then, here and now, parents are the intimate ambassadors of the world.
CLINICAL CONFLICT II:
The Former Child Patient
In a classic riddle, a boy and his father get into a car accident and are rushed to the hospital. The emergency surgeon looks at the child and says, “I cannot operate on this boy; he is my son.” In 2022 the confounding element has been so deflated that its original premise must be explained: only men can be surgeons, only women can marry men, and only boys can be cast in paradigmatic thought experiments. The gotcha moment of this reactionary parable is intended to be softly feminist: the surgeon is his mom. Despite its participation in a more rigorous tradition of thought, the Oedipus complex makes some of the same mistakes: the father—though murdered—is a subject, the mother—whose desires figure nowhere in the schema—is an object, and the boy is the locus of psychic activity.
My most vivid memory of the family’s desktop computer was using it to Google the Oedipus complex after my father introduced the concept at dinner but refused to explain it. Just as Madame Bovary was taken to trial for the sexual excess of a suggested but unwritten sex scene, this particular moment was similarly charged through the act of his withholding. As soon as I understood the basic premise of the complex, I ran back to my parents’ bedroom eager to prove its inaccuracy.
As a child I was incredibly attached to my mother, securely if not for her concession to my dad’s solicitations to play wife and lover at the mutual exclusion of mother. To this end, I had many babysitters, some of whom I desired, some of whom I felt I had to take care of—likely in reaction to perceiving, but misunderstanding, our class difference. Even if I logged most hours with my mom and her maternal proxies, my psychic development was disproportionately inflected by my dad, who drew me into competition for my mother. When my mom left my company to enter my dad’s, I typically fell into fits of intense, almost physically intolerable homesickness—a condition that followed me to camp, boarding school, college. Rarely and in moments of extreme distress I would allow myself to ask my mom for comfort, at which point I could sense a conflict of loyalty obscuring her will. However my mom responded, it was informed by the need to perform a primary loyalty to my dad. But even without a detectable hierarchy in the quality of her response, I could sense that my dad had already won. His access to her was more capacious: it was sexual.
As a kid, I imagined cutting off my dad’s penis. More recently, I have contented myself with the notion that my father’s tragically limited concept of sexual difference makes him incapable of truly good sex, and therefore his penis is entirely irrelevant. I don’t think my father has any concept or memory of this dynamic, and I would say that is due to the way that psychoanalysis has oriented his attention to the past; my dad experiences the world first and foremost as a son. Even our family is experienced—or mythologized—as a successful break from the repetition of the dynamics that ruined his. Analysts have said that there are always several generations in the consulting room, but the slinky of forebears is often reduced to their influence on the patient. My paternal grandmother will be remembered as a classically “cold mother” whose failures have been distilled into a handful of anecdotes meant to explain my father, retold with little to no curiosity about her family.
But over years of hearing about her failures, I’ve come to understand something that reframes the nature of my original competition with my father. The primal jealousy may have in fact been my father’s. I had access to something he didn’t have, which was an extremely warm mother—both a charismatic magnet in her own right and a reliable first responder. In calling my mom away from me, toward the exclusive role of wife, my dad was asking my mom to reorganize her commitments in such a way that she could somehow satisfy his childhood and adult needs at once, but only at the exclusion of satisfying mine. This is a dynamic I first understood when we got a family dog, who never outgrew his dependence on my mother’s care. Like my dad, the dog was highly neurotic, needed a lot of special attention, and was obsessed with my mom. My dad detested the dog.
I began seeing an analyst at nine after becoming obsessed with rules and maintaining an impossibly straight center-part. My analyst, Dr. K, was an older Chilean woman whose fame was triangulated by her husband, a prominent Austrian analyst, and her former patient Elián Gonzalez, a Cuban child found floating in an inner-tube off the coast of Florida after his mother died in transit. His case could not be more interesting to an intellectual; it had border conflict, communism, a custody battle, and a child literally at sea between two families. I felt motivated, if not pressured, to entertain this powerful woman for forty-five minutes, multiple times a week—not only because I sensed that her regular intake of clinical content was of higher quality than my own then-poorly conceptualized pathology, but because I was the third member of my family to establish a relationship with her.
Her husband was, and still is, my father’s mentor. My older sister had seen this analyst between the ages of five and seven, during which she desperately wanted to be a boy. From an unmediated standpoint, the facts of the case were that my sister wanted to be a boy and that my sister was miserable. Though it would be easy to establish other causalities now, I was at the time provided with a condensed narrative of the treatment that went something like: our male cousin had dropped dead, the family was beset by grief and by litigation that was a misguided proxy for grief, and that my sister, not fully understanding what happened, became the boy whose loss she understood to be the source of great pain in the family.
The first time I saw the analyst was in a fourth-floor attic up three flights of stairs lined with erotic figurative art. The only one I vividly remember was a snake on the verge of entering a woman’s vagina. Her legs were spread in a gesture of ambiguous consent. It might have been Eve. I specifically hated ascending the stairs when my mom would accompany me. It felt like my secrets had been siphoned out by this soft-spoken wizard and framed on the analyst’s wall. I had always envied my father’s patients who entered through a separate side door into a home office in the basement. He knew them much better than me, they had the right to speak freely to him. But I did not feel that my relation to Dr. K. was a privileged intimacy in any sense. I sometimes slept on the floor during our sessions to escape the anxiety of having to perform.
I don’t remember much of the treatment, except that I tried desperately to appear smart and feminine. At that point my sister had not only returned to her original femininity, but was outwardly happy. I knew that my sister had been encouraged to wear girls’ clothes, so I tried my best to include something—a single rhinestone—on my clothing in order to bypass what I understood, correctly or mistakenly, to be a kind of conversion therapy. One day I admired an Escher tessellation in which a fish gradually becomes a flying goose and Dr. K. said that maybe I was in the process of feeling myself changing. It felt so basic and embarrassing. After I left her office, I collapsed in tears on the ground outside next to a gopher who descended into its hole. I felt intensely jealous of that creature. I wanted badly to die. The dots between my meticulously parted hair and suicidal ideation are hard to connect. There are things I understand now that I had no concept of then. In the car that day, I switched the gear into reverse while my mother was driving, so then she literally reversed course and took me back to Dr. K., who made some calls and sent me to a psychiatric hospital.
Now, as an adult, I would say that I was sent to psychoanalysis because my dad did not resolve his own experience with his parents in time to become one himself. I don’t blame him. The timeline of sexual reproduction does not bend to anyone’s readiness, and I think that even now, in his seventies, he may not be ready to give primacy to a different vertical intimacy. In some ways Dr. K. was the perfect interlocutor. I toggled between the kids’ office upstairs and the adult office on the first floor between the ages of nine and twelve as an expression of my adolescence and ambivalence—about growing up, about becoming sexually active. But since struggled to understand my life enough to represent it in language, I have a weak memory of what happened in the clinical encounter.
Recently I’ve thought about the trope of looking back in cautionary tales, from the Bible to Greek mythology. Why is Lot’s unnamed wife turned into a pillar of salt when she turns to look back? Why is Orpheus punished with the loss of Eurydice when he glances back at his love as they’re leaving the underworld? Why was I sent to the hospital when I tried to change the car from drive to reverse? In general, it is much harder to posit futures than it is to analyze the past. It almost mimics a law of physics—taking something apart is much easier than creating something new. Analysis seeks to free the present and future from the past that has taken it hostage, presuming that desire and fulfillment will be released when the compulsion to repeat has been broken. The question I haven’t been able to answer is how analysis can look forward, when, in the case of the child, the past is quite shallow. And if we repeat because we cannot remember, and we cannot remember because we didn’t understand at the time, then what does it mean to start treatment before either of those processes has had the chance to begin?
CLINICAL CONFLICT III:
The Child Analyst
“Shhh…¡Cállate! ¡Eso no se platica con los demás… Eso se tiene que quedar en familia!” “Be quiet, you can’t speak about this with others, it has to stay inside the family!” These are the words I constantly heard from my distant and nuclear family. Especially when I tried to reach out to others to discuss the hardships within my family. In Mexican culture, at least in the way I was raised, it was forbidden to talk to others about our trauma and suffering. We had to stay silent, keep secrets, and pass them on to the next generation, hoping that the secrets would never be examined but would be left unopen, like the box before Pandora. Now, as an adult and as a clinician, I think it is safe to say that I’m better able to process the trauma we had to endure as a family. It affected each of us in a different way. But with intergenerational trauma, you are not aware that you are immersed in chaos until you are able to step back and pay attention to what is actually occurring. This is easier said than done, and it requires exposure rather than secret keeping.
During my childhood, I remember hearing, seeing, and living violent discussions with my parents. This dynamic led my parents to be rarely present in our lives, and it was as if they were absent. They appeared as ghosts, and so did the rest of the family members on both my parents’ sides. My parents had very difficult childhoods; they did not experience affection or love from their own parents. As a result, we had difficulty communicating as a family due to my parents’ lack of resources at the time. We sometimes even had difficulty looking one another in the eye—perhaps because we could see one another’s pain and suffering. At the age of seven, I began to see ghosts. In my house, I constantly saw the ghost of a man. When I told my parents, they told me I was crazy. I remember as we were driving back home from locking up our family business, we would always pass by a stadium, and I would look up at the floodlights and see two monsters’ heads. Every time I looked, I was terrified, but I didn’t say a word. Instead, I tried to look back in the car at my family, but everything was so blurry that I preferred looking outside, even if that meant I had to see the monsters. Along with the visual hallucinations, I began to have auditory hallucinations as well.
It seems that when I had these hallucinations, it was better for me to project them on the outside, as a way to feel safe, and also because at the time I had no way of relating them to my family’s painful past. These types of hallucinations continued for nineteen years and didn’t fade away until 2019.
As a teenager my parents slowly began to reveal the family secrets and the trauma in our family history. They confided in me and shared many of the traumas they had experienced as children. During this time, I decided to embrace their past and forget my own present life. This tends to occur with intergenerational trauma: someone or multiple members in the family become lost and let their bodies be hosts for others to process their trauma. At least this is what happened to me, and this is what I have seen in patients I’ve worked with.
For years, I tried to resolve my parents’ trauma without even being aware of what I was doing. I wasn’t able to draw boundaries with them while they told me their stories. They would often narrate their experiences to me but then they would do nothing with the narrative. So, instead, I took the task of feeling for them and tried to symbolize that which they hadn’t been able to do for so many years. This position became increasingly dangerous, to the point where I began to be very aggressive with other people. I stopped living my own narrative and became trapped in theirs, which almost led me to take my own life in order to feel free when I was a teenager. My sisters were also affected by these secrets. As time went on, we began to communicate more as a family, but this communication was empty. Looking back, I can recognize that the things we were all manifesting in our lives were the old secrets of our family ancestors: death by drug overdose, trafficking, sexual and physical abuse, sex work, lack of affection, alcoholism, infidelity, and suicide.
With these secrets finally acknowledged, this created a big shift in my family, and my mother and my father finally began to work on their childhood trauma. I began to learn to let go and become the author of my own narrative. We all started to separate as individuals; we were no longer one. This is a difficult task in a family with intergenerational trauma.
*
Before 2019, I was working with a sixteen-year-old boy named Gabriel. When we first met, he would barely utter a word, and his movements and manners when he was walking around the room or even when speaking were almost sloth-like. He was very careful with anything he touched and with the words he would try to say. If Gabriel spoke, his discourse was often disorganized and severely fragmented. Our sessions were mainly filled with silence, but I would have to interrupt the silence at several intervals because it became apparent that silence was torture for him. During this silence, he would hear “cosas malas”—bad things—in his head. I realized that if I made certain noises, such as knocking on the desk, moving my chair, making sounds with my mouth, etc., it would bring him back to the room. During our work, we realized that he also had auditory hallucinations. It was difficult for him to process certain parts of his story or even his emotions that became present as he relived his experiences. As time went on, it became clear that unfortunately he had no figure in his family who could help him to process his experiences, and perhaps that is why he had such a difficult time even communicating verbally or nonverbally at the beginning. There was a loss of love, a loss of meaning that had taken place in his early development.
As I reflect on this period of time now, I can see that I used to dissociate while I was in sessions with him because we shared similar trauma in our families. We were both prohibited from speaking. This was a conflict for me in many ways. Gabriel and I decided to communicate nonverbally, and we slowly developed our new language together. During this process, I realized I was very good at communicating at a primitive level because I too had trouble communicating with others verbally at this time, and this was the only way Gabriel communicated at that moment. We utilized props during the sessions (paper, pencils, music, or Play-Doh), in order to process unspoken trauma.
His family would often try to hide the trauma in their family history. They frequently told Gabriel to put it behind him, without offering any resources for how to move forward. He would communicate to me that he felt alone and guilty when he was getting better. These feelings emerged as he was trying to separate from his mother and become independent. It was not an easy journey, but along the way we both learned from each other how to speak of the unspoken, how to process indigestible content, and, most importantly, how to come alive and be ourselves. During our work, we learned together how to say no, draw boundaries with others, and have agency. We learned by drawing boundaries with each other in our therapeutic relationship. He would often tell me by waving his hand in the air that he did not want to speak further on a particular subject or that he was done with the session. I would draw boundaries with him primarily by setting a specific time to meet, charging an accessible fee, ending sessions strictly and maintaining our routine. I provided the structure within which we could do our work.
At times, it felt like a rollercoaster ride—some external factors impacted Gabriel’s treatment, most of which were out of our control. Nonetheless, during the last few months of my work with him, he went back to high school to get his diploma, and he was beginning to socialize with others and would take two buses alone to come to our session. This was a great achievement: in the beginning he wasn’t able to navigate his own journey but now he was fully capable of it. At first, his mother did not agree to this plan, but gradually she let him participate in constructing his own path. This helped Gabriel thrive and be able to create a mind of his own and live his own life. Our work together illustrated that he was slowly able to process what he hadn’t been able to before.
In my experience, I have seen time and again how families try to evade pain and suffering by keeping silent. It has been difficult working with parents because of the resistance that may come when exploring a traumatic past that hasn’t previously been put into words. Also, it is important to note that once the traumatic experience has been articulated, it does not mean the ghosts will go away, but perhaps they will not present themselves in a haunting manner to the individual. The intergenerational transmission of trauma is very real, but at the same time it can feel very distant, and the family can dissociate from it as a way to keep others “safe” by trapping them in a deadly silence. I have found that constructing relationships within my clinical work has helped create a space to explore shame and vulnerability, which opens the doors to exploring previous trauma not yet spoken of. In my work, I have also realized that humor can be very useful when trying to talk about very dark subjects with my patients and their parents. When I see parents come into the space, they transform into scared children looking for the comfort they didn’t receive in their childhood. And yet, they are also the guardians of their own family’s Pandora’s box. Working with families, my own and those of my patients, can feel like going into an immense, dark abyss, but in this abyss, there are shadows waiting to be seen and illuminated.