When JK Rowling’s Harry Potter arrives in the Weasley’s cluttered kitchen after his years at Privet Drive several things happen all at once. The smells and sounds of Mrs Weasley’s kitchen first confuse then delight Harry as we imagine some long-gone memory deep in his nervous system is reprised. Mrs Weasley ‘clattering around, cooking breakfast a little haphazardly’ may signal safety to his limbic system and his amygdala – automatic, incessantly firing – might dial ever-so-slightly down based on her cues and vocal tone. As he goes up to his room with Ron and dares to share, for the first time, something of his visions of Voldemort (crucially naming him) some of the airlessness and intimacy of his nightmares could begin to reorganise on exposure to the light.
I’m not suggesting a sleepover with a friend as a treatment-plan for trauma but to remember the people and places who have provided safe havens and landing pads back then throughout our childhood can be crucial supports to our here and now therapy journey.
For me it was boyfriends' mums. Late night, after gigs and on the pretence of making a tea I would sit at their kitchen tables and have the kind of chats I wouldn’t have with my own mom. I imagine the parent was usually relieved we were both safe back home and I was probably a little drunk and I would sit at those tables and try out observations and confessions that were loose and clumsy with these older women who were long-suffering and probably really, really tired. They weren’t my parent so I had the space to fall, unformed, into conversations with the liveliness and looseness of the evening still about me. I remembered surprising myself by how much I talked. Where what Dr Tara Porter calls ‘outcome-parenting’ makes for pointed, invested questioning (and defensive replies) this brief was broader, a witnessing she likens to ‘wallpaper' – non-judgemental, peripheral listening egged on by the odd nod and chuckle of a bemused, benevolent other. Very occasionally they offered advice but those aren’t the bits I remember.
Frequently today when I am working with a client whose story features neglect and abuse it’s important for me to ask, who else? Who else was there? Neighbour, teacher, babysitter, friend? A character in a book, a superhero, an avatar, an online world? A den, an allotment, a pet? These are the pinpoints of warmth – possibly boring, maybe fantastical, ordinary or everyday – that can be gainfully kindled in therapy as ‘evoked companions’ (Daniel Stern). With the support of a therapist and using whatever fragments are retrieved, creatively we can uncover wallpaper and lovingly repair dens.
Traumatic memories are formidable opponents. Somatic, non-linear, implicit, buried, they embed four times as fast as a positive memory and frequently present as symptoms not memories (Janina Fisher). But just as the body remembers trauma, so too does safety have somatic anchor points – touchstones that we can find and retrieve if like good detectorists we scan for their sonars and echoes.
Literature is peopled with them – not the main characters rather the solid outfielders, the background characters, furnishing the margins – in the pages of Mrs Phelps’ library in Matilda, heard through Pheoby’s generous ear in Their Eyes Were Watching God, on 28 Barbary Lane's ‘well-weathered, three-story, brown-shingled’ co-op in Tales of the City where the smell of marijuana was a sensory beacon for the loose, the defiant and the lost. It is important to remember these people and places as later when, if we’re really lucky, we get to become secondary characters and tea-brewers to someone else's loose or lost.
Thirty years on it's the kitchens I remember the most. The smell of burning toast, china mugs, the worn lip of a wooden table where the varnish had rubbed clean and, of course, the night – when intimacy is easier. These are my early somatic signals to relax – to dare to care less and yield more than in all those other places I was bound in and I held myself up to. I have watched clients of perfectionist parents, critical and self-monitoring, light up as they describe the jumble and clutter of a childhood friend’s house. For the daughter of a hoarder it was an aunt’s bungalow that was clean and orderly that allowed her to soften and land in our therapy room. Grandparents feature frequently. Teachers too. Scents can call us back. Fairtytales. Quilting, clay, crochet.
I was at a party recently and a lady told me that after her mum’s funeral she received a card from an old East End school friend. They hadn’t spoken for 50 years and she barely remembered this once-was-friend; for a couple of months they had been pals and she, a frequent visitor to their house. But this lady’s mum and her fishfinger suppers had held great importance for this girl when all of her other bearings came suddenly unmoored. Primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy posits we humans need a wide range of caregivers – a diversity of alloparents and alloplaces – to thrive, particularly when we hit obstacles.
‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ – George Eliot, Middlemarch
I suspect most of us will never know the importance we might have held for another long after their names and faces have faded from our memory. Our names will be teeny tiny lines in the film's closing rolling credits. It is the therapist’s privilege to return to seemingly unimportant tombs, to take the time to stop, be curious, remember and revive these very ordinary, everyday treasures.
