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Adam is a twenty-five-year-old young man. He has been under a lot of pressure from his family to meet someone for an arranged marriage. When stressed, Adam can become quite agitated. He stops speaking for days and wants to be alone.
One morning, Adam grudgingly entered his therapy room for a regularly scheduled cognitive development session with his therapist and a seventeen-year-old young lady who is also a student in the session. Adam makes no eye contact with the therapist or with the other student. He says nothing, does not respond to comments or questions from the therapist. He sits slouched in a chair with his arms folded and his head tilted downward, looking at the floor.
The therapist says to Eva, the young lady in the room, “Let’s try writing.” She answers, ‘No, not with that pencil. The eraser is gone. Not that one either. One of the children bit them off and ate them.”
Suddenly, Adam sits up. He says, “I didn’t do that. I did it when I was a young boy. It was bad. My mother would not give me food when I did it. I don’t do it anymore.” Then he sat back in his chair and returned to his silence. After a few minutes, while staring into space, he mumbled out loud to himself, “I wonder if my mother loved me?”
During a discussion I had with Adam’s mother, she told me that when she is upset, she finds it almost impossible to speak and usually goes to her room to be alone. “I feel awful for days or even weeks. I can still be bothered years later when I remember a mistake I made as a child.”
Copyright © 2025 Shlomo Chaim
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