Into the Darklands

by Nigel Latta

  If an infant monkey falls out of a tree it will first squeal to get its mother’s attention, but after a few minutes it will go quiet. If Momma doesn’t come straightaway best shut up or something else might hear you. Best to play dead. The monkey has a Plan B, and so do we.

  Attachment is the DNA of the Darklands. Simply, we all have a mental map of relationships built up over time through our experiences of interactions with other people. Remember from the previous chapter that our brains develop in a use-dependant fashion. The more we activate a particular system the more likely the resultant response will become ‘hard-wired’. Playing guitar is clumsy at first, but with practice it can become almost like a reflex.

  The way that we ‘do’ relationships develops in much the same way. Over time we develop a map of what to expect from other people based on the way we are treated. Our developing brains begin building this map right from the word go, and it forms the basis of how we conduct ourselves in the world. If no one comes when you cry, crying soon stops.

  Clearly families play a huge role in this process. What we learn when we’re little stays with us till the end of our days. If you’re lucky you have parents who love you, who are empathetic and who treat you well. These children grow up in a soothing and calming environment with brain systems that essentially hard-wire in the map that other people are dependable and caring. Kids from families like this grow up to be generally happy, well-adjusted, secure adults capable of giving and receiving love. They are more confident, more relaxed, do better in school and usually don’t get into much trouble.

  If you’re not that lucky then your brain wires in different kinds of relationship maps. Let me tell you about three different boys I’ve worked with, all sex offenders: Larry, Curly, and Moe, and maybe that’ll help to explain all this a little more.

  Larry first.

  He’s 14, and even though he’s in a power of trouble, he doesn’t seem that upset. In fact Larry doesn’t seem that much of anything. It’s like sitting in the room with a kid whose battery has run down. He got to see me after his eight-year-old sister, Shelly, disclosed that Larry had been touching her. Turns out the family had known this about a year ago but no one did anything about it. The only reason something happened this time was that Larry’s sister told someone at school.

  Larry is hard work. It’s not so much what he does, it’s the fact that he doesn’t do anything. I tell jokes, swear entertainingly, talk shit, push him, everything I can think of, but nothing gets a response.

  To understand why Larry is this way, you have to understand his family. He’s the oldest of three children and his parents are ‘white trash’. They lived in a scungy state house that was far scungier than it needed to be. Little things like mowing the grass, cleaning and taking out the rubbish didn’t rate very highly on their to-do list. The place had the distinctive low-level stink of chronic neglect.

  Dad was a professional sickness beneficiary and Mum was his business partner. I don’t recall what his particular sickness was, but my best guess would have been terminal ‘just-don’t-give-a-fuck-itis’. He seemed more lazy than sick to me, still, what do I know? I’m no doctor. I’m sure he was probably very ill and that the 15 or so years he’d sat around on the sofa watching Sally Jessy Raphael, drinking taxpayer-funded beer and smoking taxpayer-funded cigarettes were probably completely justified.

  Parenting was not their strength. Their idea of parenting seemed to pretty much end with conception. Their kids were almost feral. They were dirty and unkempt, and their rooms were about as inviting as a cardboard box under a motorway overbridge. They’d never done anything bad enough to rate coming to the attention of social workers until Larry’s little sister told a teacher at school her brother had been touching her.

  The place makes me feel dirty just looking at it.

  ‘So,’ I say, sitting on a vinyl kitchen chair (this is a trick a social worker told me early on—fleas don’t live on vinyl), ‘Tell me about Larry.’

  Mum and Dad are sitting on the sofa, the television’s on but turned down. The kids are long gone, spread to foster homes all over the city.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dad asks.

  ‘Well, what does he like doing?’

  Dad shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, does he like music, or sports, or what?’

  Dad looks at Mum. ‘What does he like doing?’ She shrugs and gives this funny little smile. Dad looks back at me. ‘He doesn’t tell us much.’

  ‘What about his friends? Does he have any?’

  Once again Dad looks at Mum. ‘Does he have any friends?’

  Again with that odd self-conscious smile, the kind of smile you make when you fart expecting it to be sneaky but it comes out like a little trumpet. ‘He does hang around with one kid,’ she says, ‘but I can’t remember his name.’

  ‘How’s he going at school?’

  ‘Umm, OK, isn’t he?’ Dad says too quickly, looking at his wife for confirmation. Dad hasn’t got a blue clue how Larry is doing at school but he doesn’t want to look bad.

  Too late for that, I’m thinking.

  ‘Who is his form teacher?’ I ask.

  ‘Uhhh…now what was her name?’ Dad asks Mum. ‘Wasn’t it Mrs Brown or something?’

  She says she’s not sure.

  The truth is I already know Larry’s teacher’s name, I just wanted to know if they did.

  ‘OK, so where does he sleep?’ I ask, meaning which room in the house does he sleep in.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dad says.

  I look at him for a few moments, waiting for him to fill in the blanks. Unfortunately it seemed that blanks are all he has. ‘So…’ I continue, ‘when you say you don’t know, you mean you don’t know which room he sleeps in?’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Dad, glancing at the telly. ‘He was sleeping in Shelly’s room for a while.’

  Shelly is the little sister he abused.

  ‘And now?’

  He shrugs. ‘I dunno. He was out in the garage for a while, wasn’t he?’

  Mum squeezes out her little farty smile again.

  I’m frowning now, because I want them to see how hard I find this to understand. ‘So he’s 14 and you don’t know if he even sleeps in the house.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ says Dad, and he’s looking back at the TV. Sally’s on.

  And right there was a snapshot of Larry’s life. His parents were too dysfunctional and wrapped up in their own shit to even take time out from Sally Jessy to talk about what had happened in the family. Over time it emerged that Larry and his sisters had been living in a house where about all they got from their parents were occasional crap meals. There was an almost total absence of emotional connection between the parents and their children. He’d never known what it was like to have someone look after him, he’d been alone practically from the moment his little feet hit the ground.

  And what does that do to a kid’s internal working model, his map of how to do relationships? Technically we call it an insecure-avoidant attachment style, but in short it teaches kids that there’s no point in trying to form emotional connections because the other person doesn’t give a shit. That kind of child sees everyone as being emotionally unavailable and so very quickly stops bothering to reach out to other people. Most of the time these kids appear depressed and flat, but occasionally the frustration and rage bubbles over and they explode. These are the kids who in the middle of a bright blue day will rain down a storm of violence on some unfortunate victim. They’ll explode for no apparent reason and then quickly retreat back into their usual depressed, shut-down presentation.

  The Larrys of this world are hard work. It’s like talking to a block of wood. His map says I’m not going to be there for him, so he doesn’t bother thinking about engaging with me. The Larrys of this world don’t care about other people for the same reason. Larrys take a long time to relearn that some adults can be trusted and that some of us really will help. They have to learn that there is a point t
o thinking about other people’s feelings. Unfortunately that process often takes years.

  Now for Curly.

  Curly was 12, and had forced two younger male cousins to perform oral sex on him. He was a firebrand. Within less than 10 seconds of meeting him he was starting to piss me off. It was so quick that I knew pretty much straightaway what kind of kid I was dealing with. Curly has an insecure—resistant attachment style. Our jails are full of big Curlys. He wasn’t there yet, but he was on the fast-track.

  When we got back into the room and sat down I surveyed the family. Mum and Dad were both there, although they looked less than happy about it. Dad had a look of resignation and Mum looked positively pissy. Curly slumped in his chair, picking at a thread.

  I gave them all the usual stuff I do at the beginning of a session about confidentiality. ‘So,’ I say after the housekeeping’s done, ‘where’s the best place to start?’

  It turned out the best place to start was for Mum to have a major go at me over everything that had happened since they first found out about Curly’s offending. She went off.

  I expect frustration and anger from parents, and I hold no grudges for it, but she was personal and downright rude. To be fair, they had been pushed around the system quite a bit, and I was the fourth person they were having to tell their story to, although she was dumping on me more than I was prepared to allow.

  She kept saying, ‘You people…’ interspersed with a broad range of cuss words.

  I let this go for a bit before I stepped in. ‘Look,’ I said, eyeballing her, ‘I understand you’re pissed off, most families I see feel the same way at the beginning, but I’ve been doing this a very long time, and I’ve worked with hundreds of families in the same hole you guys are in. I know you’ve bounced around in the system a bit, but you need to know this place is the last stop. You don’t go anywhere else from here. This is what we do here, and we do it very well. So you can dump on me a bit longer if you want, if that’s going to make you feel better, but it’s just wasting valuable time.’

  My judgement was that this was a noisy family, and that unless I made a bit of noise of my own no one was going to listen.

  She pauses for a minute. ‘Well,’ she says through tight lips, ‘I don’t mean to get at you but it’s been bloody frustrating with all the bullshit we’ve had so far.’

  ‘I’m sure it has been, but my practice isn’t to bullshit people.’

  ‘We’ve been told before that people are going to be straight with us, and we’ve been let down each time.’

  ‘Yup,’ I say, ‘a lot of people in my job say they’re going to be honest but then they formulate all these opinions about the people they work with and don’t tell them. Like for instance,’ I ask the husband, ‘I bet no one’s ever asked you how come when your wife’s going off you sit there silently rolling your eyes, have they? See, I don’t think she’s the only noisy one in this family but I’m thinking that’s what you want me to believe. Which makes me wonder how come you want me to believe that? It also makes me think that you guys don’t always get along like Charles and Camilla. And I bet no one’s ever asked you how come that is? I’m also thinking that you,’ I say, turning back to Mum, ‘are a pretty angry person a lot of the time, not just over this stuff. You’re pretty scary when you’re riled, you’re hard, and I’m wondering what that’s about.’

  Mum has slowed down quite a bit now. She looks uncertain how to respond, which is a good start.

  ‘Anyone ever said that stuff to you guys?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Well you can sure as shit bet they’ve been thinking it. I don’t do kiss-arse family therapy. Everything I’m thinking you’re going to know right up front. You think you can work with that?’

  Mum nods. ‘It’d make a change to know what other people are thinking about us.’

  ‘Good, and you?’ I ask, turning to the father. ‘Can you work with that?’

  He nods as well. ‘Sure.’

  ‘What about you, Curly?’

  He looks up from where he’s been picking at his chair. ‘What?’

  ‘What do you think about being here?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he grunts, then goes back to picking at his chair.

  ‘It fuckin’ sucks,’ I mutter in a stage whisper.

  ‘Answer the man,’ Mum chides him.

  ‘I did,’ Curly mutters without looking up.

  She looks back at me and shakes her head. ‘You see what he’s like. He causes all this trouble and then all he does is sit there. He won’t even talk to us.’

  ‘Is that how he is with everything or just this?’

  ‘Everything,’ she says.

  ‘You think that’s because you’re so scary?’ I ask her, and from the corner of my eye I see Dad tense up. Curly smirks.

  Her eyes narrow ever so slightly. ‘You tell us,’ she says coolly.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell you guys a bunch of stuff.’

  We talk about more background for a while. I don’t want to box Curly into a corner too soon. He listens as we talk, trying not to make it obvious.

  The tension in this family is clear, all these unspoken currents flowing under the surface. It’s like The Sopranos without the organised crime. At one point when Mum is talking about Curly she becomes tearful. She’s explaining how well he’d been doing at school and how she had all these ideas of what he might do with his life.

  ‘I never even wanted to do that stuff,’ Curly breaks in.

  Mum sniffs as tears roll down her cheeks. ‘You know that I’ve always wanted the best for you. I’ve told you that, baby.’

  There’s a guilt-provoking feel to what’s going on between them I don’t like. So I decide to move it on. ‘When did you first find out about Curly’s offending?’

  Dad speaks for the first time. ‘My brother called me and told me the boys had told him Curly had been interfering with them.’

  ‘What did the boys say Curly had done?’

  Dad gives me the details of what he’d been told. As he speaks his tone is grimly distasteful. Mum sits there winding tighter and tighter. Curly shrinks down in his chair. You can almost hear the secrets in this family straining under the weight of the things being said.

  ‘What did you do after he told you that stuff?’ I ask the father.

  ‘I went and talked to Curly straightaway.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said nothing had happened at first,’ Dad says.

  ‘But then…’

  ‘I just kept on at him telling him that he had to be honest.’

  Mum snorts. ‘Screaming at him more likely.’

  Now Mum’s trying to narc on Dad. Tit for tat.

  Dad gives her a filthy look. ‘Well, I had to get the truth out of him.’

  ‘You didn’t have to yell at him.’

  ‘Someone had to do something.’

  ‘He’s your son for God’s sake,’ Mum says, bursting into tears again. ‘You were treating him like a criminal.’

  Dad rolls his eyes again and slumps back into his seat. My guess is that if they were at home by themselves this would be the point where a full-on screaming match breaks out. All the while Curly’s sitting in his chair with this look of well-worn resignation.

  ‘You watch The Osbournes?’ I ask him quietly.

  He looks up. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Did you see the one where Ozzy was chasing the cat round the garden, swearing and cursing, yelling “Here puss, puss…come here you little motherfucker…Sharon,” ‘ I say, affecting my bad Ozzy Osbourne impression.

  Curly smiles. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And did you see the one where they were chucking ham and shit at the neighbours?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you guys like the Osbournes just without the mansion?’

  He smiles, glancing quickly at his parents then away. ‘Yeah, sometimes.’

  Mum looks at me, icy. ‘We’ve never thrown ham at our
neighbours.’

  I laugh, unable to stop myself. Sometimes you just have to. ‘I’m not saying you guys are meat throwers, I’m just saying you probably fight a lot. I bet if I wasn’t here this would have turned into a full-on argument.’

  ‘No,’ says Mum.

  ‘Of course it would,’ spits Dad, frustrated. ‘All we ever do is argue.’

  ‘That’s not my fault,’ says Mum. ‘It’s his.’

  And she turns to Curly, her tone so vicious it makes him wilt in his chair. ‘If you hadn’t done this none of us would have to be here. What you did was disgusting and now we’re having to pay for it. Not you, us.’ She doesn’t just sound vicious, she is vicious.

  Then, without warning she screams, ‘I’m fucking sick of this. I can’t take it any more.’ Then she promptly storms out of the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Curly’s head drops down as if she just hit him. She may as well have.

  This is Curly’s world. He can be attacked, then have one parent jump to his defence, then have the same parent attack him again. In his world he never knows if he’s going to get a tearful hug or a kick in the guts. There is no emotional consistency. What his parents say and do conflicts almost continuously, vacillating between enmeshment and punitive rebukes.

  As a result he’s a pretty conflicted kid himself. The more I get to know him in subsequent sessions the more obvious it becomes. Every time he found himself starting to like me he’d do something to piss me off. He was a tangled mix of neediness and fuck-you. He could be both at the same time. Kids like Curly expect that all adults will kick them in the guts, so they try and bring it on. Rather than wait for you to get angry at them, they do everything they can to make you angry from the start. When you work with them it constantly feels like they want you and don’t want you all at the same time.

  Kids with this ‘resistant’ attachment style present as angry, anti-authoritarian and oppositional. Their motto is ‘fuck the world before it fucks you’. Our prisons are filled with men and women who grew up in homes like Curly’s. He shares many of Conan the Barbarian’s attitudes and beliefs. Both of these kids work from very similar maps. The nicer you are to kids like Curly and Conan, the more you freak them out and the more they’re likely to react.