What were they trying to fix?

Many children’s distress is invisible. This is the work of a young girl who spent much of her early childhood only being able to express her pain through self-harm. The blood flowing out of her did the crying for her. Instead of seeking intelligence behind her behaviour she was sent to a detention style boarding school where they attempted to suppress and deny her pain by relentlessly punishing her for her “bad behaviour”. She was told to scrub the toilets and follow the rules, but no one enquired where her agony came from.

The legacy of such controlling intervention was a sense of emptiness and impoverished self-esteem. She wanted to show the rocks within her as the burden, the words attached to her as other people’s dislike. But in the emptiness something remained safe; it was the quality of her heart.