Tiger Swallowtail, Snow Angels and the Perks of Being a Wallflower

I've been promising to write about the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower for some time now; it seems like I've been waiting for some way to easily transition into it.

The other day, I was sitting in a session with a weekly patient who was reporting on a bad week. For a moment, she picked up that I had broke attunement with her.  Unfortunately, by the time I could interject that there was a tiger swallowtail fluttering against my fourth floor office window, the butterfly was gone.  

This sighting arrived as quite an out of the ordinary event.  We do see some butterflies in Toronto, although not nearly as many as we once did.  I'd seen a black swallowtail in our vegetable garden (I do live in the suburbs) a few weeks before, but this was the first time this summer that I'd seen a tiger swallowtail.  I wondered what it was doing, remaining in my line of sight, for a long, lingering moment, in this uncharacteristic location.

My patient lost her Mom when she was young; on some level she lost her mother at an even earlier age, because the mother of her infancy already suffered from a serious, intermittently and progressive debilitating disease.  Her mother's symbol of hope, during her prolonged illnesses, the young woman sitting across from me shared, with considerable emotion, was the butterfly.

From butterfly sightings, I'm going to take you to snow angels.  I'm going to do that, because there's a scene in Perks of a Wallflower where the main character, Charlie, feeling alienated, leaves a party and starts making snow angels on the cold winter ground.

 A few days later, while I attended a talk on pivotal moments, Jim Duvall made mention of one of his clients, and about their story about making their own snow angels as a reparative and transformational act.

I'm not going to delve into synchronicity here, or into the symbolism of butterflies and snow angels.  I like Jung and I've done my own Jungian analysis, but I want to go somewhere else with this post.

For the same reason, I'm not going to say a great deal about the movie.  It's from a book, written in 1999, that has sold around a million copies, and the writer, Stephen Chbosky, had a major input into the movie.  It's about kids growing up in Pittsburgh just a little later than when I grew up, so I'm quite familiar with the ethos and the music and culture of the time.  The movie is engaging in its human dimensions and achingly believable at times.  I enjoyed the film, which didn't try to be more than it’s meant to be, and - in doing so - felt very true to the rites of adolescence.  I should also mention that this is a movie where we sense that Charlie may be suffering from more than the harshness of life's passages.  It becomes increasingly likely that he is suffering from a mental illness, an inherited burden from the past... 

One of the thematic anthems of the movie is the song Asleep by the Smiths:

This could ostensibly be a song about suicide, and it would not be possible to listen to it without considering this as a theme of the song.  And yet, as I experienced the song with fresh ears during the movie, I recognized that it was also a song about hope, about dying deeply, in order to experience transport to a better place in the living world.

So that’s a particular thing about psychotherapy.  Some of the best therapists around have the ability to go to the edge with their patients, to ride the torrential waves of passionate transference and countertransference into powerful corrective experiences.  It takes a great deal of natural aptitude, and it can only happen with a very special therapist.  When it does, powerful shifts may ensue, and accelerate the healing process by months or years.

For your interest, here’s the official trailer for the film:

It’s worth watching the evolution of the storyline between Charlie and his English teacher.  Support and validation do not necessarily need to be direct; sometimes an oblique approach is best.  There’s a constant presence here in Charlie’s life, and a tacit belief in his future, which supports him through his passages of loss and loss of innocence.

One of the fascinating phenomena of our modern time is the ability to compare our reading experiences with those of other readers.  A growing venue for this endeavour is through the website Goodreads.

While on Goodreads, I discovered several reader conversations on the book version of Perks.  One long thread discussed whether Charlie suffered from autism, while another asked what kind of mental illness was at play in his life:

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/728045-what-kind-of-mental-issue-does-charlie-have

I was at first surprised to see how many readers mistakenly entertained the diagnosis of autism, even more surprised than I was at the idea that such debates could captivate the imagination of so many book readers.  I recognized the nature of diagnoses, and their rise and fall.  Where the diagnosis of schizoid character structure was once very central in understanding mental illness, autism and Asperger’s have very much now captured the popular imagination.  Who says that how we diagnose and conceive of mental illness is not subject to cultural and social and theoretical trends?

I was pleased that enough readers correctly identified Charlie as suffering from Complex-PTSD or Dissociative Identity Disorder.  It seems more difficult for us to accept those disorders which admit we are susceptible to abuse and trauma.  Somehow, it’s easier to think in terms of genes and neurological failings than it is to conceptualize mental illness in terms of responses to overwhelming pain and intolerable levels of affect.

The movie is clear about what’s going on here.  We are informed that Charlie was sexually abused as a child.  We know he frequently checks the clock, to see if he has lost time during dissociative episodes.

In a powerful scene, we see structural dissociation at play, where the normally gentle and soft-spoken Charlie comes to the defence of his best friend, who is being bullied by a homophobic classmate.  Charlie comes to with bruised and bleeding knuckles, once his fight EP (see ANPs and EPs from earlier in the blog) has receded and his ANP is present again.

Charlie is finally hospitalized, at the end of the movie, where his kind and attentive psychiatrist patiently encourages him to face his pain and his memories.  She emphasizes the necessity of this, through a soft expression of contact that conveys conviction and compassion. We know she will, like his English teacher and his friends, go the distance with him.  This hospital is quiet, and the environment feels nurturing and healing. 

As I watched the ending, I found myself wondering how Charlie would fare if this was Canada, in 2014.  Would he simply be over-medicated and mis-diagnosed?  Would the message from his physicians be to avoid his pain and acquiesce to a compromised life of numbness and under-achievement.

We talk a big talk here about anti-stigma.  Is that our way out of having to actually treat serious conditions like Complex-PTSD and Dissociative Identity Disorder?  Is anti-stigma really a way around abandoning the seriously wounded and betrayed members of our society, who refuse to present with simple “mood disorders” meant to respond to medications and short courses of manualized therapy?  Do you think that Charlie (or Stephen Chbosky, whose story it perhaps conveys) could have been treated successfully in Canada, even in a private setting?

As you finish reading this post, I wonder if any of you have ever found it difficult to refer a patient with a post-traumatic or stress-based condition, or a dissociative disorder, for definitive care? 

And how about butterfly sightings?  Have you ever had a similar moment of grace, or of finding nature in tune with an ongoing therapy. Has some magical moment left you with a sense of the greater harmony underlying all life.

Finally, are you practicing trauma-informed care yet?  Or considering it?  Or simply hoping to hear more about it?  We will be having a free workshop on trauma-informed care as part of our ongoing Wednesday Evening programming, this February, taught by Dr Catherine Classen, from Women’s College Hospital.  It’s our hope that our education series will continue to provide you with tools and knowledge to assist your self-care and your care of patients like Charlie, who so desperately and deservedly ask for your help.