DIGEST THE NOT DIGESTIBLE: HOW TO “BITE INTO” THE SENSE OF FAILURE
Chiara Salandin
Psicologa Psicoterapeuta c/o Azienda ULSS 3 Serenissima – Terraferma Veneziana. SerD Mestre-Venezia – Area prevenzione, Giovani e Famiglie. Responsabile: Dr. A. Pani.
Tiziana Bonifacio Vitale
Psicologa specializzanda c/o ITFV (Istituto Veneto di Terapia per la Famiglia). Docente Scuola. Primaria.
Tiziana Gavagnin
Psicologa Psicoterapeuta in libera professione c/o Cooperativa Sociale “Villa Renata”- Lido di Venezia. Comunità Terapeutica “Villa Renata”. Direttrice: Dr.ssa P. Cristofalo.
Communication presented at the 8th European Congress on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology and XXX Congress of SEPYPNA, which under the title «Psychological development, psychopathology and human relations today: interaction between the biological and the social aspects» took place in Bilbao on April 26, 27 and 28, 2018.
“Sara is now at school for me …”
It is 5 pm on a September day, the month in which for many children and for many families the everyday life restarts, after the summer break. At that time she would be at school. A sure absence in an equally certain presence. This mother consoles herself and comforts us, welcomed by a group wrapped in a dense silence. Her voice, controlled and warm, fills the room and tells us the urgency to escape loneliness; the comfort of a daily meeting with her daughter, on the grave at the cemetery; the fear of a potential pathogenic pain, which she feels could make her sick; the desire to discover what happened, even in the details, and the desire not to know it at all.
Surviving those who we have engendered and losing a child is unnatural and cruel. A pain which surprises us unprepared, as a thunderbolt. We deluded ourselves: she was getting out of it, it was a happy period, she had new projects and new energies in her life. Nothing prefigured that she would fall in the trap, this time without exit. She proudly extracts a photo from her bag. She wants to show us the face of Sara, her youthful daughter, her beauty. The photo passes form the hand to hand, craddled by all
the parents presented who say: “The son of one of us is the son/daughter of anyone”…