On Thursday of last week I received a message about a boy who had done a heroic act; the kind of thing that may not present itself in one’s life time. The kind of thing in which we do not know how we will respond until we are faced with this kind of situation.
He had gone to his class in the afternoon and was walking his bike near the train tracks when he heard people screaming. He looked over to see a young boy in the way of an oncoming train. He dropped his bike, ran over and grabbed the boy before the train hit him. As the young boy struggled and squirmed to get out of his arms and run back toward the train, he held onto him until the train passed.
The work that I try to do with children, more often than not, leaves me with the sense that progress is illusive at best. Over time this has become very discouraging. But meeting with this boy and his foster parents last week taught me something I needed to learn first hand.
Over a period of four years, we probably spent two and a half to three years doing extensive art therapy. I enjoy coming up with interventions that have their base in an intervention that has been shown effective and that can be tweaked to fit the child’s developmental level, mastery and trauma. They grow organically if I am successful in presenting the why of what I am asking them to do. Sometimes this is simple and sometimes it’s not.
I asked him to lie on the floor on a large sheet of art paper and then traced an outline of his body. For the next couple of years I wrote special things about him with in the traced lines of his body. About a year later he was able to tell me what he wanted me to write and then finally, he was able to write it himself. During this time we did numerous drawings with paint or crayons. Why he drew paintings of tables and boxes I’ll never know; why he continued with this theme I’m unsure, but on Thursday I learned that in his woodworking class he made a table and a box and gave them to his foster family as gifts.
I’m told that our subconscious mind does the heavy lifting for us and the process of art therapy can be the vehicle for which we are able to process and understand the deeper levels of our pain and somehow, miraculously, work it out, even when we don’t know what the art is saying. Well, I’ve always been suspicious of this, not something you want to hear from your child’s therapist, but here I have been given tangible proof that the work he did in my therapy office brought him healing.
I turned to his foster mom and told her what a blessing it is that he was sent to live with your family and she said to me, “No, what a blessing it is that we have him.”
I hugged him for what is most likely the last time I will ever see him. I know I’ll be looking out for him at the Boardwalk like I always do when we go, but it is not up to me to say hello.
I just wanted you to know about him.