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There's a moment in Netflix's Sex Education, when seventeen-year-old Aimee Gibbs (Aimee Lou Wood) really brings home how difficult it is trying to talk about trauma. It's her first session with therapist, Jean Milburn (Gillian Anderson). Invited to recall her sexual assault, she gets as far as the bus and the man and then seizes up. It's too much. She does say she no longer enjoys her body. She can say she can't stand being touched. Her relationship with her boyfriend is broken. It's as if this lively, vivacious, sex-loving teenager has had her spark snuffed out.
If you want a book explaining exactly what children and adults like Aimee are going through, what it's like to be robbed of one's life-force, one's spark, this is it. Renowned child psychotherapist and attachment expert, Graham Music, literally gets to the heart of the matter. Because trauma and neglect, he explains, with reference to the latest research, is literally written in our blood; it affects the whole pyramid of body systems from genes to the tiniest cell organelles to whole muscular-skeletal, nervous, and organ systems. As Milburn tries to stress to Aimee, therapy is a safe space to talk. But as Graham Music describes through compelling stories of work with individuals like Lucca, Khenan, and Mendy, “safening” involves creating a space robust, attuned, and compassionate enough that both body and mind can dare do something else besides protective dulling or total shutdown. And this can take time, patience, and resilience. Music uses a language at once commonplace and theory-rich to describe the great variety of ways we clam-up, zone out, and shut down, as well as to reveal the ways we can be vitalised and invigorated, given the right facilitating environment.
Respark is divided into four distinct parts. Part one starts by describing our life spark as an ever-shifting energy-force oscillating somewhere between stasis and allostasis as we work, in the service of our survival, to maintain an optimal sel