The Unheard Voices

Adults often believe that their comprehension of children will take away the hurt that children bring into therapy. The unheard voices of our children must in themselves be understood. Another pathway exists: to remain in the verbal silence, learning from each child just how that child speaks. Voices from young children express themselves in behaviors, in how their bodies move through space, and in felt attunement between adult and child. Because the child’s interior world has come about through the feeling tones of rapport, that same rapport is where their voices live.

Language serves as the mediator, the dynamic that encodes one’s own meaning-making, files it into a me-driven order, and builds a history from this authorship. But how do we express ourselves prior to the development of language? The history of ourselves preceding this mediator is enveloped in sensations and feeling states that, though they do not register in word order, are held as a vital story-of-origin, where the impetus for a separate self is stored in a much large platform of knowing an ‘us’ in order to find a ‘me.’ We might say that each of us has our very own creation myth that, for better and worse, serves as the boldness of our own evolution. Language is alive and stunning when we keep it in its subjective development, as the result of image-building rather than the go-to resource of communication. When we believe words will create understanding with little relational meaning in place, we are in error. If we can place language as a mighty tool in a much bigger panorama of development, we might be more willing to submit to its lesser importance as a means of expression from children. This will hopefully assist us in crediting just how young children do communicate. 

When the child therapist understands each child’s approach to being heard, the therapist commits to giving voice and congruency to the child’s own connections. In this mutual relationship of trust, the child’s own interior story, his own myth, becomes real to him. And in this space, healing occurs.