Cha P’s Reviews > The Silent Patient > Status Update

Over time you would lose contact with the origins of your trauma, dissociate the roots of its cause, and forget. But one day, all the hurt and anger would burst forth, like fire from a dragon’s belly—and you’d pick up a gun.”

the emotional effects of psychological wounds on children, and how they manifest themselves later in adults. Imagine it—hearing your father, the very person you depend upon for your survival, wishing you dead. How terrifying that must be for a child, how traumatizing—how your sense of self-worth would implode, and the pain would be too great, too huge to feel, so you’d swallow it, repress it, bury it.

No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.” As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic
needs present: to eat, shit, love, and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with pedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child.

When I’m around other people, even if it’s only the bored waitress in here, I feel connected to the world somehow, like a human being. Otherwise I’m in danger of ceasing to exist. Like I might disappear.

“the pain of not being loved”—I saw how it pervaded my entire
consciousness and was at once the story of my past, present, and future.
it was about my father, and my childhood feelings of abandonment; my grief for everything I never had and, in my heart, still believed I never would have