The Therapeutic Garden is designed to help traumatized children revise
body-based meanings at the root of their difficulties in order to relieve
their mental suffering and promote psychological growth. The Garden
also serves as an educational tool, demonstrating to mental health professionals
how the use of landscape, designed for therapeutic purposes, enables
a child to enter the deepest reaches of his/her inner self.
It has been noted that for every mental knot there is a corresponding
body knot, and vice versa, since the mind and the body are not two,
but one.
To unite body knots, or traumatic "body memories," the child
should freely enact body symbols while participating within a healing
therapeutic relationship. But the typical consultation playroom is limited
in terms of space and materials available to facilitate the full engagement
of therapist and child. The consultation room does not include a hill
to climb, a tree trunk to embrace, a pond into which a child can sink
his hand and feel the bracelet water forms around her wrist, a cave
to experience either as a safe haven or a domicile for some demon. A
consultation room does not provide the vivid orchestration of colors,
textures and smells we find in nature. The Therapeutic Garden is an
original attempt to fulfill these needs.
The Concept of Body-Based Meanings in
Development and Psychological Treatment:
Each of us has observed a child climb to the top of a rock and with
body erect, experience the power of the meaning "up." Or we
may have observed a child crawl into a "cave" formed by the
branches of a bush and experience the body as a protective enclosure
within which the child finds refuge and fends off attack.
In these examples, the body's "memories" are available and
participate in meanings the child experiences. But when trauma strikes,
the child's mind draws a mental boundary between the mind and the body,
splitting off bodily meanings from awareness. Why are mental boundaries
drawn to split off body experiences?
Whenever some trauma has affected the body and person with whom a
child holds a special bond, the body image of the child is affected
as if the trauma impacted his/her own body, its safety and integrity.
In order to escape the mental pain aroused by trauma and stored in body
images, a mental boundary is constructed splitting off body images.
While the boundary is successful in isolating painful, embodied meanings
from awareness, the meanings are neither experienced, nor revised, but
remain underground, unnamed, and forever active.
Consider the following clinical anecdote. When John was seven, his
older brother was killed by a drunk driver while riding his bicycle.
Although John mourned the loss and could talk about his brother, he
gradually displayed behaviors that puzzled but did not concern his parents.
He found it difficult to sit still, he hoarded pencils with erasers
worn down, and on one occasion placed pencils on the road for cars to
run over. Now twelve years old, his behaviors were bringing complaints
from school. He was not only restless but also very disruptive in the
classroom; his grades had dropped significantly; and recently he threw
rocks at passing cars from the playground. In the principal's office,
John displayed neither anxiety nor an understanding of the seriousness
of his actions, commenting only that he was "lobbing missiles like
I saw on TV." John's emotional detachment surprised the principal.
When his brother was killed, John's mind gave body-based meanings to
the tragedy, but his mind also drew a mental boundary splitting these
meanings from awareness. As the anecdote illustrates, although underground,
the embodied meanings eventually expressed themselves in antisocial
behavior.
Are only traumatic events given meaning with body symbols? Studies
make clear that during the first years of life, a child is busy constructing
body-based meanings: for example, caressing the cheeks, lips, and hair
of parents as well as the fringes of a pillow; slapping a dish of applesauce;
closing one's mouth tightly when mother is trying to feed; smelling
a parent's unique fragrance; sensing the bladder distended or relaxed;
hobbling, falling, getting up and holding on; stacking blocks and knocking
them down. Gradually thousands of such body experiences are clustered.
By the age of two years, each cluster forms the basis for non-verbal
meanings; for example, safety/integrity; balance/imbalance. Slowly throughout
childhood and adolescence, each meaning is metaphorically extended and
translated into symbols (images and fantasies) eventually including
linguistic metaphors, (e.g., "I feel on edge today").
Body-based meanings are also experienced in adulthood accompanied
by fantasies and words. In an interview a woman noted, "The skin
on the back of my neck bristled with excitement as the parade passed.
When I was a toddler I loved that my grandfather always took me to band
concerts." And a man reported, "I saw a squirrel writhing
on the road. It had been hit by a car. My stomach churned like it used
to when my parents had those arguments." These adults are clearly
aware of, and benefit from, embodied meanings that contribute to a fuller
understanding of a current experience.
How are painful embodied meanings that have been split off from awareness
brought into awareness? Traditionally, the view in psychoanalysis has
been that meanings are brought into awareness when the therapist interprets
verbally the child's fantasies, motives and behaviors, providing insight
that lifts meanings into consciousness. In recent years, with the development
of the relational point of view in psychoanalysis, a shift has occurred
away from emphasizing verbal interpretations and toward emphasizing
interactions between therapist and child within which meanings are constructed
and revised. In the relational view, the child manipulates the therapist
to become a figure and voice representing his unconscious embodied meanings.
As child and therapist engage each other within the metaphor set by
the child, the embodied meanings are gradually enacted, elaborated and
revised. And throughout this process, the child observes and identifies
with how the therapist enacts the meaning and resolves its dilemma (a
process analogous to that which takes place in typical development between
child and caretakers).
Repairing Body-Based Traumatic Meanings
with the Aid of the Therapeutic Garden:
The concept that emotional conflict is resolved through negotiations
between child and therapist suggests that the therapeutic setting contains
symbolic equivalents of a caretaker-child relationship. For example,
the therapeutic relationship includes consistency, empathic attunement
and acceptance of what is otherwise alienating. But if treatment is
to help the child recover and express body meanings, the therapeutic
situation should expand the spectrum of contours, textures, colors,
and fragrances made available. In so doing, the therapeutic situation
becomes more like the setting in which meanings are originally constructed
by mother and child.
The Institute for Child and Adolescent Development in collaboration
with Douglas Reed Landscape Architecture has made such a therapeutic
situation available by designing a microcosm of nature. A plot of not
quite one acre in suburban Wellesley extends a traditional treatment
room into the landscape of a Therapeutic Garden. Together, the Therapeutic
Garden and the treatment room form a unique and original laboratory
in which embodied meanings of traumatized children are not only treated
but also studied. Valuable research data is being gathered, adding to
our knowledge of the role played by "body memories" in the
formation of childhood disorders. Concepts and techniques are being
developed for therapists who, sensitized by our findings, will give
increasing recognition to the importance of addressing non-verbal meanings
in the treatment of children.
As a microcosm of nature, the Therapeutic Garden is formed by a topography
of ridges and a ravine, carved and contoured by a running stream that
unifies the themes of the landscape and invites child and therapist
to embark on their journey to heal the body and the mind. Beginning
with a bubbling spring at the threshold between the consultation room
and garden, the stream meanders as a rill through the lowland, past
promontories, inlets, bluffs, a cave, a mount, and an island, and finally
spills into a pond. Natural phenomena are powerfully expressed in a
variety of land forms, water bodies and native plants. The unique sequence
of sensory and symbolic experiences provided by this "natural"
world invites and enables the child to journey into the outer reaches
of his/her inner self.
