John Thompson

About

A moment I have come to expect: someone describes something that happened to them at nine or ten years old, using the same tone they would use for a weather report, and then looks really puzzled when I do not move on quickly. The flatness is itself informative. Childhood wounds are often narrated without any accompanying feeling, because feeling was not available at the time and the account got stored without it. We do not force the feeling back in. We simply stop treating the flat delivery as evidence that it was not serious, which is usually what everybody else has done. My years in hospital and intensive outpatient care taught me to pay attention to how something is said rather than only to what it contains. Tone carries information. If you have always told it flatly, get in touch. Flat delivery is not evidence that it was minor.