been places like this before. If you thought you were special, you’re not. My other psychologist’s name was Dr. Brown. Adele Brown. But she wasn’t brown. She was pink. Whitey-pink. Ugly whitey-pink. She was ugly. You’re ugly. I think you’re ugly, too.”
“I see.”
“And at ugly whitey-pink Adele Brown’s, I could do whatever I wanted. That’s what she said. That I could do whatever I wanted. So that’s what I can do in here, too.”
“You’re telling me you want to do whatever you please,” I said.
“Yup. And I’m going to. And you can’t stop me.”
“You can do as you please in here as long as it doesn’t involve destroying things or hurting yourself or me. I would stop you then. That isn’t allowed here.”
Cassandra looked at me, a rather evil glint in her eye. “You can’t stop me doing anything, if I really want.”
“If it’s necessary, I can,” I said quietly, “because those are the rules here and they’re here to protect us. So I won’t allow you to break them. But I am quite certain that isn’t how we want to spend our time.”
“You couldn’t stop my daddy. He’s bigger and stronger than you.”
“You feel your daddy is very powerful and he can do what he wants. But if he were here, he’d have to follow the rules, too. In here I don’t allow anyone to destroy things or hurt people.”
“My daddy’s the Hulk! Boom!” she cried and threw her hands out expansively. “Nobody can stop him when he turns into the Hulk. He’d beat you up in a minute! Boom! When he gets angry, he goes from being ordinary to being huge. A huge green monster. All his clothes rip apart.” She leaped from the chair and demonstrated by pretending to tear off her clothes. “Even his underpants rip apart. Then you see his big green weenie. His weenie would hit you on the head and you’d fall down dead.”
“That’s what you picture happening,” I said.
“Yeah!” she cried enthusiastically, leaping around. “That’s what I want to happen. I want to see you dead.”
I smiled slightly and didn’t speak.
“That’s what would happen!” she said, as if I’d rebuffed her. “My daddy would kill you with his dick.”
“You seem excited by that idea.”
“Yeah! You’d be dead! My daddy’s so much stronger than you! Then I’d stomp up and down on your guts!”
“Cassandra, sit down, please.”
She didn’t. She continued jumping up and down.
“Cassandra, sit down, please.”
She continued to jump. However, the quality of the jumping changed almost immediately from frenzied to defiant.
I watched her. Part of the reason I’d asked her to sit down was to help her keep from being swamped by what I sensed were very strong, scary emotions, but partly it was also to see how in control of her behavior she actually was, how much of it she was directing.
Quite a lot, it seemed. She jumped boldly a few more times, staring me right in the eye, challenging me to stop her. When I simply sat but insisted again she also sit down, she gave two or three more jumps to save face, then stopped and sat down.
Silence followed. Cassandra looked at me. Again I noticed what extraordinary eye contact she had. When caught in her gaze, I had almost a sense of violation. I found it hard not to want to escape it.
A dominance technique? Had she discovered this was a good way to gain power over others? Or was it more self-protective than that? Was she watching me so carefully because she felt the need to anticipate what I was going to do next? I didn’t know.
More silence. Cassandra kept watching me.
“Know what? I don’t like you,” she said finally.
“Yes, so you’ve said. Why is that?” I asked.
“I don’t like the way you look. I think you’re ugly. I’m not going to work for you. I’m not going to do anything but sit here.”
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that because it will certainly be very boring sitting here every day, doing nothing,” I replied.
“I’m going to do it because it’ll make you mad,” Cassandra said. “Whatever you want me to do, I’m not going to do it. So you might as well know that now.”
“You sound very concerned about who’s in control here.”
“I’m not going to listen to you either.”
“Once I had a boy in here whose name was Liam. One of the first things he told me was that I couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want. He wasn’t going to do any work for me. He wasn’t going to listen to a single thing I said.”
Which was a story. I’d never had a Liam. But I’d found one of the best techniques for approaching problem areas was to ascribe the difficult behaviors or incidents to someone else.
“Liam thought that if he was – ” I continued.
“I’m not listening to you,” Cassandra said. She put her hands over her ears.
“Liam thought that if he knew everything that was going to happen, then – ”
“I’m not listening,” she said, hands still clamped over her ears. “La-la-la-la-la!” she started to sing in an effort to drown out my words.
“Yes, you’re right. If you don’t want to listen, I can’t make you listen. Just like I can’t make you talk, if you decide you don’t want to talk. You decide things like that. And as I said yesterday, we will not do anything that feels too scary or too difficult. If it feels too scary to listen, then we’ll start with not listening.”
Cassandra exploded up gleefully, throwing her hands in the air. “So I can do anything I want in here! You just said so yourself! I can do anything and you can’t stop me.”
I sat back and smiled with what I hoped was a very patient smile.
“I’m going to draw,” Cassandra announced. “That’s what I want to do.” She flounced around the table to where the paper was kept on the shelves behind me and took a handful of sheets. She returned to the table, opened my box of tricks, and took out the smaller box containing the crayons and marking pens.
Then a pause.
She pushed the first sheet of paper over in front of me.“I want you to draw first. Draw a squiggle.”
“How do you mean?”
“Draw a squiggle, so that I can draw. That’s what my other psychologist did. She always drew a squiggle and then I would make a picture from it.”
“I see,” I said. “So you want me to do the same?”
“That’s
