Let me again offer an account of two occasions where " hugs" seem to have
been useful. Both these incidents took place in a residential unit- a
Therapeutic Community. The first occasion I recall was when one of my
patients had stormed out of a Large group.(She did storming very well!
Usually it was because she felt too threatened by the material the group was
trying to work with.) On this particular day she had walked out of a grouped
was sitting outside on the steps having a cigarette. It was time for a new
activity to happen- a walk, or something similar. As we went past her she
was clearly longing for someone to tell her to attend an activity- then she
could have continued her sulk, gone home and come back the next day to
continue the fight. And, probably, the battle would have continued. As it
was, I simply tousled her hair as I walked past her to "do" the group walk.
In the afternoon group I managed to find a way of asking her how she had
experienced my touching her .Her answer was "It was the only thing that kept
me here today."
The second anecdote comes from the same place, although at a different time.
This time I was hugged by a male patient who was gay. He had been badly
sexually abused as a young boy, and had worked as a rent boy for a number of
years. For him, physical contact with another man was always sexual, always
abusive. There was an occasion when he gave me a hug, in the context of some
kind of unit activity. I.E. It was a hug within the context of my work. The
hug he gave me I experienced as the hungriest, saddest. loneliest, lostest
hug I have ever encountered. It brought tears to my eyes. Yet somehow it was
the most giving hug I have ever experienced. ( I speak as someone who spent
a very long time in the Charismatic churches, where hugging is rife.) When
we talked about it afterwards he said that I was probably the only man whom
he had had physical contact with where sex was not the agenda.
Now in both these cases it seems to me that physical contact was therapeutic
and healing.One of the things that made it safe for me was that in each case
it was public and could be publicly talked about. I certainly would not want
to do anything similar if I was seeing a client for some kind of one-to -one
work in a private room with no-one else around . But after a long time of
working in psychiatry, I'm pretty convinced that there are places that words
can't go!
Yours Terry
"Words strain,
Crackand sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.
Burnt Norton: T.S.Eliot
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|