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It must be terrible for parents like Lizzie’s, to ‘watch powerless’ as their ordinary 18-month-old toddler goes into a devastating developmental reverse such as this. We learn that both her parents and professionals wonder whether her (apparently) chronic and severely painful digestive problems and food allergies, which lead to serious skin reactions, have played a significant part in Lizzie’s shut down. Physically, both internally in her stomach and bowels, and externally on the surface of her body through her skin, she has been suffering chronic pain. So this certainly seems to be a wise hypothesis about a possible cause of her drastic emotional withdrawal. Lizzie may well have had no other way to cope with the pain than to (re-)turn to the self-soothing defences against pain of very early infancy.
In particular, the fact that touch may have become associated with pain because of her allergic skin conditions, is very sad as it leaves Lizzie isolated with her pain. The usual forms of instinctive parental attempts to comfort a distressed child including cuddling, holding and gentle touching may all have become associated with further pain. When the skin becomes raw, it is natural for all of us to shy away from being touched. We want to be left alone. However developmentally, in such a young child, this kind of wholesale retreat from contact
can become a blind alley, shutting the child off from all the developmental possibilities that come from relatedness.
It is good to know that Lizzie’s parents are having fortnightly sessions with a psychotherapist as they will need a great deal of support so that they can keep trying to relate to her, in much the same way as the therapist tries to relate to her, almost as an ‘act of faith’ believing that there is still somebody in there, inside Lizzie’s autistic shell. Indeed, Lizzie’s withdrawal from human contact is very similar in nature to the withdrawal of a snail into its shell as soon as danger is sensed. The perseveran