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This book is a delight. Delight? How can this be? An odd word to describe a book filled with clinical accounts of children who have experienced appalling trauma - a 10 year-old boy raised by a mentally ill mother whose love for him was periodically shattered by her outbursts of violence; a previously happy and well-balanced 9 year-old girl who had suddenly been gagged and raped by a stranger; a 9 year-old boy who had witnessed his father murder his mother when he was aged 2; a 10 year-old boy who had been subjected to a perverse incestuous relationship with his father from the age of 3 to 8. There are others too, less extreme though deeply troubled, having lost their natural parents and in transition from foster care to adoption.
There is in fact in these clinical stories little of delight. These are children who have been terrified, tormented and tortured - they show none of the spontaneity and joy of growing up, no matter how resilient they may prove to be. And those who care for them can share none of the laughter and hope that parents of non-traumatized children can cherish and enjoy. There is here no pleasure, no charm, and no room for sentimentality.
So where is the delight? The delight resides in the presence of the therapist, Monica Lanyado, the author of this book. At the heart of this book is a woman who fundamentally believes in the potential in all of us - no matter how devastated - to grow, to develop, to find some new opportunity or pathway that can to some degree rectify or change the damage of the past. This is not a naïve belief, for she in no way hides from the fact that all of us carry a dark side that, if exposed, can be foul, perverse and profoundly destructive.
In her accounts of her work as a child psychotherapist, she writes clearly and lucidly of the, at times, awful behaviour of children towards her and of the full gamut of feelings aroused in her. Children who have been disturbed by the abuse inflicted on them invariably turn round in any rel