Chapter 4: Skin Hunger

One of the most powerful parts of this chapter for me was Dr. Perry’s initial interpretations of Virginia, Laura’s mother. I was so impressed with how he honored Virginia and her undeniably important role in Laura’s life and recovery. The stark contrast between the two pages that described the various invasive medical procedures performed on Laura, her doctors’ resistance to searching for any psychological explanations for her poor health, and her overwhelming medical history and the single sentence that portrayed Perry’s approach to Laura’s case—reading the intake report and deciding to simply introduce himself to Laura and her mother—left a smile on my face. While he was clearly interested in Laura’s medical history, he did not burden himself with a preliminary analysis of the ins and outs of the seemingly endless hospital records and chose instead to focus on Laura and her mother as humans deserving of a compassionate introduction. This set him apart from every other medical professional Laura and Virginia had interacted with and laid the foundation for an empowering therapeutic alliance.

I considered our readings from the week of the 20^th on engaging parents as partners in the therapeutic process (Cates, Packman, Paone, & Margolis, 2006; Kottman, 2003). Instead of actively including (or even making basic attempts to engage) Virginia in her daughter’s treatment, the various professionals that worked with Laura pathologized Virginia as an inadequate mother, ignored her, and even discouraged her from interacting with her daughter. Simple attempts to demonstrate basic compassion, engage Virginia as an expert on her life, or identify her strengths as a mother early on may have put both her and her daughter on a completely different and smoother path to recovery. Perry demonstrated these essential skills from his first interactions with Virginia and Laura and went above and beyond to understand Virginia’s background and tailor treatment to her unique needs.

This is the first chapter in which Perry extensively highlighted the importance of caregivers in a traumatized child’s development and journey to healing. His focus on helping Virginia process through her own experiences of childhood trauma and neglect and learn to facilitate nurturing, loving interactions between herself and her daughter resonated with me. I thought about the parents who want nothing more than to provide their children with a different childhood experience than the one they had growing up and are dead set on not repeating the patterns of maladaptive caregiving behavior, abuse, or neglect that they experienced at the hands of their own caregivers. While this is an admirable perspective and many parents are able to raise their children differently than they were raised, the past often remains stored in the deepest, most unconscious parts of our psyche. Logically deciding to be a different kind of parent is simply not enough, which was illustrated clearly and empathically in this chapter with Virginia. Reading about Perry’s referral of Virginia and Laura to Mama P was a deeply emotional experience: this treatment approach was restorative for both Laura and her mother, who needed the same nurturing, curative love and care that her daughter did.