by Lorrie Goldin, LCSW 

FILLING IN THE VOID

Several years ago, my friend was hit by a bus and spent a month in a coma. Miraculously, as his injured brain began to recover, he told me that the bus had plowed into a large crowd, with dozens rushed to the hospital.

The number of people affected differed substantially from what his daughter had told me, but maybe I had gotten it wrong. Confused, I googled the date and location of such a massive accident, but nothing turned up.

Initially alarmed by the discrepant stories, I then learned that they indicated neurological repair rather than breakdown. The recovering brain knits fragments and conjecture together, filling in the lacunae inherent in trauma and memory loss to establish a cohesive narrative. The accident had such a significant impact on my friend’s life that it made sense for him to understand it in the context of something even bigger. He’d gotten some of the facts wrong, but the essential truth of the impact remained.

I thought about my friend (who’s fine now) when I read Michael Ondaatje’s novel, Warlight. It is narrated by Nathaniel at two different ages: as an adolescent in post-war London whose parents leave him in the care of an older man and his eccentric friends, then as a 28-year-old working in the Intelligence archives trying to understand his own life by piecing together his mother’s life as a spy.

“I know how to fill in a story from a grain of sand or a fragment of discovered truth,” Nathaniel observes.

This is what my injured friend was doing. It also describes how patients and therapists fashion a meaningful narrative from shards of memory and experience. Here was the familiar territory of the consulting room: of confusion and darkness, latching on to key images and moments, feeling variously enlivened and deadened, drawing inferences that may or may not be true.

Often, we are in the realm of trauma, as we are with Nathaniel, who experiences war and parental abandonment. He also finds this a time of adventure, liberation, and genuine attachment to his oddball caretakers. His abrupt and life-threatening separation from them has an even greater impact than the earlier traumas. The coloration of childhood is complex: it is rarely one unrelentingly bleak monotone of clear cause and consequence.

A decade removed from his childhood, Nathaniel lives a solitary life in the country in a house with a walled-in garden. He also finds himself walled off from his emotions.

Remote as Nathaniel is, he’s acutely aware that something’s missing: “The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.” This brings to mind the unconscious re-enactments our clients experience repeatedly. So many come to us walled off from themselves and from others.

Nathaniel notes, "We order our lives with such barely held stories. As if we have been lost for generations in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken."

To help patients understand the impact on their lives, we, too, explore this murky territory. Together we collect grains of sand into a cohesive narrative, hoping to break through emotional walls and arrive at some kind of meaningful truth.