Perhaps most of you don't know this, but I am a psychoanalyst that works mainly with children. I also have adult patients but since I got my University degree I've been working 80% of the time with people under 15-16 years old. I have around three years of professional experience under my belt and about 7 years if you count all the time I've been working on children environments.
It was on April 13 that a book where all those who participated put their heart into it.
This is a book made of childrens stories, but it is aimed at parents, and it was written by 17 psychoanalysts from all over the world. This book means to help out parents onboard difficult topics and talk them through with their kids and help them process them such as death, separation, adoption, diferentiation, anxiety, self-care, and many more.
Indeed a book like few out there, especially since it is meant to by read by parents by themselves, kids by themselves, and both together. The language and the words used is simple and yet effective, and it is written in a simplistic yet familiar way, with each author conveying the book a bit of themselves, their style, and their specialty.
It was a few months ago that someone who met me through my master's degree studies, asked me to get involved in this project where we aim to make psychoanalysis more known in Mexico and LatinAmerican countries, and the point of the book was to talk about topics that Latin American kids go through very often and for which most kids are not prepared, and neither are the parents (if there are any). This project sounded amazing and despite the fact that I love writing, this was my first involvement in a project like this one. After a bit of research about the publishing house and the editor, I did little thinking and decided to get onboard. I can't express how good of a decision it was.
The topic for our short story was fully under my discretion, and since I have been involved with the topic of "adoption" over the past few years and I;ve been close and working with kids who went through this situation, I decided to write my short story about that topic.
My first contact with kids who lost parental care was in an adoption house called Casa del Sol (House of the Sun in english). This is a space that still exists even though I did my some professional practices for the university in 2015. I mention this because in Mexico it is very easy for places like this one to lose funding or to run into legal problemas very often and they have to shut down, leaving most of the kids to be in charge of the DIF, a corrupt an underfunded government organization that tries to place the kids into foster homes, something that happens rarely. In Casa del Sol I was involved in therapy and accompaniment (in psychoanalysis we don't have therapy, we have accompaniment, because psychoanalysts are only there to help the patient discover their path, we don't guide them through our own, or guide them through what we believe is their path, we just help them find it) of many kids that suffered from abandonment, or that went through physical or emotional violece, sexual abuse, and labour explotation; in most cases, the kids suffered from more than one of these situations.
As long as I keep it anonymous, the moral code of the psychoanalysts allows them to speak about their cases, both to teach other people about the situations and also to develop something that is called study cases.
When I was in Casa del Sol, I got to work with a boy whose mother was a prostitute; some times, that mother would take the boy to work because she didn't have anyone that would take care of him while she worked. Her clients, with severe mental issues, used to burn his little legs with cigarettes and some times even sexually abused him. Like him, there were many more kids that went through similar situations, and I was close to some of them.
Another case that really struck me and left a mark on me was when I was working in The house of the Adolescent (La casa del adolescente in spanish), a safe space for adolescents are hosted by the government. These kids are mostly criminals but since they are not old enough to go to prison, this is where they end up. The thing that struck me the most is that a portion of the kids living there were not criminals under 18, but also youngsters that got there for various reasons such as abandonment, sexual exploitation, violence, or sexual abuse.
When I was in La casa del adolescente I worked very closely with a 15 year old girl who grea up being constantly abused by her father. One day the girls took the matter in his hands and decided to tell her mother on his father, with the hope that she would end her child's suffering and stop the father from all the abuse that happened for years. The mother got angry at her, decided to hear no reasons and that her daughter was lying. The mother kicked the girl out of her house under the argument of "Puta, facil y pecador que tienta al padre", which means *Whore, easy woman and a temptation for the father"
I have tons of stories like those two, and I cannot tell you how sad, impactful and emotional it can be listen to them, full of terror and anguish from the little kids that tell them half in pain and half in shame. If we haven't been through a situation like this one, it is extremely hard to understand what these kids went through and what they are still to this day going through, and we might even think that some of the stories are made up. When I was younger my University peers even though that these kids used to invent parts of the stories to get sympathy or to play with our mind. They were too young to know better.
These two stories, added with a couple others left a mark on me, which is why I picked this topic, and I was really inspired to write about it and try and help guide children who are going through this, and parents whose kids are or were going through this.
My short story is called "Dreams that become a reality, and realities that become dreams".
The story is about a kid who was abandoned by his mother when he was just a couple of months old. During his childhood he lived in an orphan house where he went through terrible and unspeakable things that mark him forever, and despite not knowing why all that happened to him or how did he ended up in a situation like that, he endures it. He eventually gets adopted by a loving couple that embraced him with open arms and turn his life 180 degrees. The best part of the story is that he is the narrator of the story and, despite him having a loving family now, his past never stops tormenting him and always returns, making him question many things, things that go through the mind of a kid that lives through hell and finds himself one day in paradise.
The moral of this short story is that we cannot forget the past, but we can indeed work with it and on it, so that all the suffering past and present, the anxiety and anguish that haunted and still haunts us, are less painful.
