Young Brian: A Lesson In Forensic Thinking

Maybe you’ve got a kid somewhere in your life who impressed you in some quirky way.

For me that was young Brian. His mum brought him in because he had developed these huge panic attacks and nightmares about dad who he’d always got on really well with! Just to mention dad’s name would set Brian off into a mild panic attack with shortness of breath and sweaty palms.

And, at night, Brian would wake screaming. Mum would race in and Brian would be beside himself saying that he’d just seen dad standing in the doorway looking at him.

When Brian was asked why he had become so scared of dad, he’d get quite agitated and blurt out “’cause he hit me really hard”. It turns out that three years earlier dad had spanked him for throwing a stone at a car!”

But now this is where Brian was something special. He became very forensically interested in why, 3 years after the stone throwing incident, it should come back to haunt him, when it hadn’t been a problem till now?

With mum’s help we dug deeper. Brian’s parents had separated not long back so could that be the reason? Was he attempting to get his dad back? “No”, said Brian “if I wanted dad back I wouldn’t have awful nightmares about him, would I!” But mum said she was very upset when dad had spanked Brian for the stone throwing AND she had been very upset when they separated.

Brian and I came to think there could be a link because mum had yelled at dad to get out and Brian could remember her saying, to get out “and never darken these doors again” – now, that may be a common thing for an adult to say but a weird thing for a child to hear. In the black and white mind of a primary child, the world has goodies and baddies, as mum was obviously a goody, dad had to be the baddy.

So Brian and I worked out that if dad was the baddy, all the love he had for dad had to be turned upside down to hate, and the only thing he could remember to hate was the spanking he got over that stone throwing. All the hugs and bike rides and wrestles he enjoyed with his dad were pushed right out of his thinking and he focused hard on his hate. Brian had now conjured up an image of dad as an ogre that preyed on him day and night.

Once Brian was able to grasp how his mind had been playing tricks on him, then normal remedial methods could work and we gradually started some desensitization – starting with taking a phone call from dad, to meeting with mum and dad at Coffee shop for a smoothie, to going surfing just with dad – we were away!

With a co-operative mum, a forensically talented son and a patient dad their relationship headed north in a real hurry. I haven’t seen them for a while, but now he’s a teenager, I’d imagine that his room would be such a pigsty, no intruder could get through his doorway anyhow.

Good kids, loving families go through tough times but they do come out the other end, so hang in there better times are just through that doorway!