People in the helping profession use all kinds of fancy words to describe what’s going on with the people they
help. Sometimes it is useful to have a special word that sums up a problem. Having a word for it tells you that you are not alone, because, well, there’s a word for it, so, somebody else must have experienced something like this, too. There’s some hope in that. Words can also feel like a plain cardboard box in which you are supposed to fit all the mountains and rivers of your world. Grief, for example. That word is just too short for the wide, yawning mouth of loss we face when someone we love dies.
Other helper-words are meant to help us not react too strongly. They help us inhibit our disgust. We pack up the unsavory feelings about what’s happening in that plain cardboard box of a word and bring it to those helper-people who might know what to do with it.
Like the word encopresis. But encopresis isn’t even a plain word. It’s mysterious and vaguely sophisticated. It sounds like a kind of Italian dessert. Or maybe even a Spanish dance. Or an expensive hair product.
But it isn’t any of these things.
Encopresis describes what happens when five year old Felicia, who is mostly not using any words at all these days, starts defecating on the floor in the kitchen and the living room instead of in the toilet. Felicia hasn’t used many words since she saw her father die suddenly at home last year. It was time to start kindergarten this fall, but that didn’t happen because of the encopresis.
Our Carson Art Therapist went to Felicia and her mom’s home for a session together. The Art Therapist invited the mom and Felicia to draw together. Felicia crawled up into her mother’s lap and they drew together, hands and colors weaving a dance that left its colors on the page inside the shelter of their arms. All at once, Felicia got up and left the room.
The Art Therapist believed that Felicia was simply signaling that she was finished. However, Felicia came back with a soft blanket, which she arranged on her mother’s lap. She crawled onto the softness, picked up her crayons to continue drawing for the rest of the session, responding in color to the therapist’s gentle prompts.
Felicia’s mom says now every night they take that blanket and they hold each other. And there hasn’t been any encopresis since the day they drew nearer one another.
By JAC Patrissi
