Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  This time I nod. ‘That’s right. You know how to smash people and it makes you feel good. There’s a power in that, a power that comes from knowing you could smash someone if you wanted. If you decided you wanted to smash me right now my face would be a bloody pulp before anyone could pull you off, right?’

  He does that little eyebrow-raise thing; he’s loving this.

  ‘So you’re right, I was scared. But answer me this, if being so hard is so great, why is your life such a pile of shit?’

  He stops smiling and the look is back in his eyes again. ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

  ‘You heard me. If everything’s so great, if you got the whole thing wired, how come your life is such a pile of shit?’

  And bang, he’s out of his chair again, fist raised.

  ‘What the fuck do you know about my life?’ he says.

  I just look at him. ‘I know you don’t get to be in my room unless things are pretty bad. What do you think, I spend my days talking to whiny little babies who feel sad? You only get into my room if you’re way out on the edge. I see the worst of the worst, Conan, and that’s what you are. You’re the hardest of the hard and you’re so messed up you think punching me is going to make you feel better. You punch me and all you’re going to feel is shrink snot and blood on your hand. All the shit that chases you round is still going to be there.’

  He backs down a little. Who says flattery gets you nowhere?

  ‘This is bullshit,’ he says.

  ‘Well, go then,’ I say, waving at the door. ‘I’m not twisting your arm.’

  He frowns. ‘What?’

  This time I frown. ‘I mean if you wanna go, then go.’

  ‘You’re not going to make me stay?’

  ‘Hell, no. I lost every fight I’ve ever been in, you think I’m going to try and stop you? I might be a shrink but I’m not stupid.’

  It’s a high-stakes game with kids like Conan. I’m betting that I’ve got him hooked. I don’t know why I feel that way, but I do, so that’s where I’m laying my chips.

  ‘Fuck,’ he grunts and then slumps back down into his chair.

  ‘So what do you want?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You want something.’

  ‘Nah,’ Conan sneers.

  ‘So why’d you stay?’

  ‘Aahh, man,’ he says. ‘You’re fucking with me.’

  I shake my head. ‘No I’m not. You can leave any time you want. I’m not sticking your butt in that chair. So what do you want?’

  ‘I don’t want nothing.’

  I shrug. ‘Bullshit, you’re still here.’

  Now, I’m not trying to piss him off, but I am trying to provoke him. If I was to play the touchy-feely counsellor role he’d chew me up and spit me out in a second. He’d think I was just another do-gooder, and he’d be right. Junkyard mongrels and poodles ain’t never going to be a good match. Like I said, it’s a high-stakes game, and you gotta piss about as far up the pole as you think you can get.

  ‘Fuck this shit,’ he says and gets out of his chair. He stomps to the door, opens it and just stands there, like he wants to leave but can’t. Which is how it is for Conan. He wants to leave, but even more than that he wants to stay. He’s torn between the Darklands and the light.

  His is a terrible kind of limbo.

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘I know more about you than you think. I know why you want to leave and I know why you want to stay. Your whole life you’ve had to fight to survive. It’s dog eat dog in your world, and you’re good at it. You have big teeth and you bite as well as you bark. Most of the time you tell yourself that’s just fine, and most of the time it is, but sometimes it isn’t. And when it isn’t, it really isn’t. When it’s bad, it’s really bad. Maybe from time to time you look at other kids, kids with homes and mums and dads, and you wonder what you did to deserve the life you got.’

  All the while he’s standing there, listening, not getting angry, just listening. We’re into a rhythm, which is good, but if I screw it up, if I get it wrong, he’ll write me off as quick as a blink.

  ‘Most of the time the drugs make that go away, but when the drugs wear off, it’s always waiting. And you’re sick of it, you’re tired of always having to be this way. So maybe there’s a little piece of you that still believes it can be different. Maybe there’s a little piece inside somewhere that still has hope. That’s why you stayed.’

  I stop speaking and look at him.

  ‘Nah,’ he says, but it’s automatic, there’s no force behind it. If anything he just sounds tired.

  ‘If you want, I can help you with that shit. I can show you how to come back over here with the rest of us. That’s what I do, Conan, and I’m good at it. If you didn’t think that you wouldn’t have stayed.’ Except already I’m kicking myself, because I used the words I shouldn’t have used: I can help you. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  ‘Fuck this shit,’ Conan says, and stomps out the door.

  I listen to his footsteps down the hall, kicking myself. I had him up until that point. You never say those words to kids like Conan that early in the game. It’s way too much, way too soon. The secret is matching and pacing. Too slow and they’ll think you’re a dick, too fast and they’ll leave.

  Conan did come back a few weeks later, and we bumped up against each other on and off for a couple of months. Most times our sessions ended in a similar way, but he still kept coming back. Then, for a variety of complex reasons his placement broke down. The professionals involved had differing ideas about what to do next. There were meetings, politely heated arguments and exchanges of letters. Then, against the advice of a number of people, myself included, Conan went home to live with his mother.

  I don’t believe he’d made anywhere near enough progress to do that, and I believe there is a good chance that sometime in the next five or so years he will kill someone. It will either be in some stupid spur-of-the-moment fight, or as part of a poorly planned aggravated robbery. Either way, I think he’ll get angry and someone will die.

  One day soon I expect to see Conan’s face on the front page of the paper.

  THE LITTLE GLASS GIRL

  IF YOU WANT TO truly understand the man, first you must understand the child. This is a fundamental axiom of the Darklands. We are all of us products of our upbringing, for good or bad. The places we learn to walk and talk are also the places we learn to love and to hate, to hope and to despair. The experiences we have in childhood shape the way we experience the world for the rest of our lives. These places become part of our very bones.

  Over the years I have seen a great many damaged children. Many of their stories blur together, and some I have all but forgotten. This is a good thing. You can only carry so much of that stuff around. Occasionally though, some of them stick.

  Like the little glass girl. She was 10, a skinny little blonde thing. I didn’t actually work with her; instead I’d been asked to consult with another agency because she’d been sexually abused by her older brother. I was involved in the assessment process with the family and my role was to look at the sexual-offending dynamics.

  They were a tricky family to work with because the parents were terrible liars. There were a lot of people involved: me, a couple of other psychologists, two social workers and a couple of lawyers. Everybody believed the parents had a major alcohol problem, but, perhaps not surprisingly, the parents denied it. Everybody also thought the father was sexually offending against the little girl as well, but we never had any definite proof.

  The older brother was 14, and not the most absorbent towel on the roll. It was hard to tell how much of that was due to his mother having a few quiets when she was pregnant, a lifetime of low-level neglect, poor genetic stock, just a bad deal or most probably a combination of all of the above.

  He’d been using his sister as a sexual plaything for years, and the things he’d done to her had been horrific. He’d done everything to her that can be done. He didn’t waste any time e
ither, he’d just bash her if she didn’t do what he wanted when he wanted. He’d also abused several of her friends as well. When her parents were out drinking they’d left him in charge of the little kids. Her life had been an endless conveyer belt of parental neglect and sexual abuse.

  There was one particular scene I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday. We’d just had a particularly frustrating session with the parents. I’d been pretty hard on them and they’d lied all the way. There was no way I could ever prove it, but I knew. The father knew that I knew as well, and he didn’t seem to give two shits. I can usually find something to like in just about everyone, but I couldn’t find anything to like about him.

  We had finished the session and were walking back out into the waiting room. The little girl was out there sitting on a chair. She wasn’t doing anything. She was literally just sitting there. When the father came out he called out to her, and she got up and came to him.

  The scene in my head is her clinging to his side and him bending down to give her an awkward, stage-managed hug. And the thing which sticks, the image which will not go away, is that it was as if she was made from glass, brittle and jerky, as if a breath of wind would shatter her. As if she’d fly apart with just a touch.

  She was so pale and fragile it made me stop in my tracks, and right in that moment I saw her world: darkness, even when the sun was shining. Darkness and prying fingers. Violated over and over till she forgot what it was like to feel any other way. Pain and fear, day after day in an endless repetitive dance.

  I have never forgotten the image of that little glass girl. She haunts me.

  We could at least do something about her brother, but the father has managed to slide out from under it so far. Still, all things come to those who wait. At least I hope so anyway.

  So what is it that turned a little girl made of flesh and blood into glass? In essence, our fears take on a physical form; they become a part of us.

  Brains are complicated and miraculous things. The more we find out about them, the more miraculous they seem. Brains are not so much one uniform system as a series of interconnected systems, each with different roles. They also develop in a predictable way, from the most primitive systems to the most complex. During this development there are critical periods where the brain requires specific signals to progress. These critical periods are windows of vulnerability where the brain is most sensitive to environmental influence.

  It is also important to understand that the brain works in a use-dependant fashion—effectively the more a system is activated, the more the resultant pattern of activity will be ‘hard-wired’ in. Practice, it would seem, really does make perfect. All this makes sense since the brain systems are trying to adapt the best they can to the environment. In essence, the brain starts to build a hard-wired map of how to respond to the world right from the start. Over the lifespan, development continues but unfortunately the primitive systems—which are the first to develop—are pretty much set in stone from the start. What that means is that if your early development involves trauma, then that will cascade down to influence the development of all the other systems.

  If the primitive parts of your brain organise themselves around trauma, so too will the subsequent systems that develop. War babies will forever be so, long after peace has broken out.

  We’re all aware of the ‘fight or flight’ response, which is a ‘normal’ reaction to real or perceived stress. This response effectively generates a state of physical and mental hyperarousal. Heart rate increases, as does blood pressure and respiration. There is a sudden release of stored sugar, an increase in muscle tension and a psychological tuning out of all noncritical information. All this is mediated through a complex interaction of various sites in the brain, the autonomic nervous system and the immune system, and is essentially our body’s way of going to war, of hyping us up to survive the imminent danger.

  But this isn’t the only response to threat we have. There is also the ‘freeze and surrender’ response. This is the most dominant coping mechanism in children. Essentially the child ‘unplugs’ from the outside world. This makes sense if you think about the fact that young children aren’t really built to fight or flee. For them, it is far better to shut down and hope no one notices them. Again there is a complex neurobiology that mediates this response involving a series of brain systems. One of the important components of this response is the release of endogenous opioids into the system resulting in an altered perception of pain, sense of time, place and reality. Compared to the ‘fight or flight’ hyperarousal response, in the ‘freeze and surrender’ response there is actually a decrease in heart rate and blood pressure, sometimes to the point of fainting.

  ‘What did she do when you were raping her,’ I asked a man who’d sexually violated his seven-year-old stepdaughter over several months.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘She didn’t move, didn’t speak. She just lay there.’

  ‘And what did you tell yourself that meant?’

  He shrugged. ‘I thought she didn’t mind.’

  Play dead. Sometimes if you’re little, that’s all you can do.

  For children who have been traumatised the response can persist long after the actual threat. The child can remain in either the ‘fight or flight’ response or the ‘freeze and surrender’ response for some time after the actual event. In addition for days, weeks or even years afterwards if the child is exposed to triggers or reminders of the event, the threat response can be evoked. What’s more the triggers can generalise to include things that were not originally considered threatening, for example from the actual abuser’s face to any strange male’s face. What a happy world that must be, to be plunged into the trauma response at the sight of any strange man. Yet this is exactly the life of many children.

  And still it gets worse, because if the trauma persists for long enough, if it’s chronic as opposed to a one-off event, the brain can recalibrate itself so that the trauma response becomes the resting state. These children aren’t just sparked off by triggers, they are effectively permanently triggered. These kids have higher resting pulse rates than other kids, and higher blood pressure. They are hypervigilant and hyperactive. They startle easily. They often present as being impulsive and emotionally unstable. They have significant behavioural problems and are often seen as naughty and oppositional. They are given all kinds of labels: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Conduct Disorder, and Mood and Anxiety Disorders.

  Call them what you like, but these are the kids trying to watch a cartoon on the telly, or do their homework, when all the time the very cells of their body are screaming run run run…

  So if a child’s early years are spent in the Darklands, the condition becomes wired in. What started as a response to something real can become a hard-wired map that tells the child everyone and everything is a threat. Their brains are different to other children, and as a result they experience the world in a vastly different way. At that point, it really is all in their heads.

  I work with many boys sent to me by social workers to address their ‘anger problems’. These boys will pound on anyone for any reason. They come with a long history of bleeding-knuckle schoolyard fights. They also almost always come with a history of having witnessed their mothers being beaten by fathers or boyfriends. They come with heads full of memories of blood, screaming and terror. By the time I see them all that stuff is wired in; their brains have incorporated those early experiences and generalised it out so that anyone who looks at them the wrong way evokes the helpless rage they felt when they couldn’t protect their mum.

  And so when they react, it’s not in response to what’s happening now, it’s in response to the stuff that’s been wired in during all the awful years when they had to cower in corners listening to their mother scream as she was beaten. Their rage would consume the world if only it had big enough teeth.

  Now imagine that child fully grown. Imag
ine the cascade of effects down through that child’s life; imagine the domino effect that follows on all the way from the cradle to the grave when the very cells in their body are telling them the war is still raging. Imagine what that child might look like in 20 years, standing in some bar. Imagine how they might interpret a sideways glance or an accidental bump?

  Let me be clear, I’m not saying having a shit life makes you do shit things to other people. It doesn’t. That’s a choice we all make. If Conan had pulped my face that time, he would have been responsible for that. It would have been his choice and he alone should have had to bear the consequences for it. But it’s important for me to understand what might be happening inside him to make him feel like that’s the only choice he has. The roads we travel as children become the maps we use to navigate life.

  And for some children the journey is so harrowing it turns them into glass.

  CHILDISH THINGS

  THERE IS A CAVE in France that contains one of the oldest known images of a human being. There is a child’s handprint on the wall which is something like 10,000 years old. Now here’s the kicker: you could pluck that child from that cave, 10,000 years ago, give him a bath, a haircut, a clean set of clothes and an education, and he could grow up to be a heart surgeon or a rocket scientist. While it sounds like a lot, 10,000 years isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things, and while technologically we might have moved on, physically and psychologically we’re still pretty much cave dwellers. Our brains are still basically the same brains we had when we were huddled round the fire. We’re really just sophisticated monkeys wearing designer clothes and sending text messages.

  If you want to understand more about how people do bad things, you have to understand a little about monkey business, you have to understand the process of attachment. This is the code that unlocks many of the secrets down here. Attachment makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because it provides a highly vulnerable newborn with a set of instructions for getting a parent’s attention. Squeak if you’re hungry. Shriek if you’re scared.