The Voice of the Xenolith by Cynthia Pelman Read Free Book Online

therapy was one of those things that helped. She talked a lot about ‘next steps’, and she often told me that we would only take tiny steps; we could stay on the same step for a long time, for as long as I wanted to, and we would only change one tiny thing each time, and if that was too much we could go back to the previous step.
    And she said, over and over, that I would be the one to choose whether to take a next step or to wait a while on the same step. So she would never force me to do anything, and she always made me feel safe, like I was in control in some way.
    I knew what she meant about steps, because I used to spend so much time on the steps of our old house, especially on my special step, just where the staircase turned a corner and people downstairs couldn’t see me.

    When I think about it now, now that I am not a selective mute person any more, I think her strategy of small steps worked because it allowed me to get over my fears very, very slowly.
    There were two main things we worked on, and she described them to me as if they were two separate staircases to climb. The first staircase was about people and the other one was about places.
    The ‘ people staircase’ was about slowly adding to the number of people who would hear me speak. So I started off speaking only to my parents and my grandmother; then I spoke to Mrs. E. alone in the room, and then, after a really long time, I started to speak to one or two other carefully-chosen people. The aim was to help me to eventually be able to speak in front of anyone who happened to be there, and in front of the whole class.
    The ‘ places staircase’ meant that I had to get used to talking in many different places, and not just at home. So in therapy I first learned to speak to Mrs. E. in her office, and then I had to extend it to other places: outside her room (for example in her kitchen) and later outside her house, and eventually in the playground, and finally in the classroom. One step at a time, one staircase at a time.
    I sometimes think about that time. To this day I don’t know why it happened, why I didn’t speak. But I do know that there isn’t an easy answer, and it wasn’t one thing that set it off. It’s not like I had a trauma, or a bad childhood, or a life like Maya Angelou. I had a very nice life and I still have a nice life. But even now, now that I can talk at school, I still don’t really like to chat, and I don’t do small talk. It is just not me.
    But what I do know is that Mrs. E.’s Strategy of Small Steps did help me get rid of my selective mutism.
    Don’t think it is a magic cure. Don’t think that after I finished going to speech therapy I never felt the pull of silence.

    And now I was back with Mrs. E. after all those years. Her house looked the same and I immediately noticed the same sharp, sweet wild honeysuckle smell. She had placed the perfumed candle on the windowsill, in exactly the same place she used to put it when I was little.
    And there was something else which was entrancing, and I don’t know why I hadn’t remembered it from my visits to Mrs. E. all those years ago, because I recognised it immediately: she had a stained glass window panel in her front door, and when you walked into the house there were colours all over the wooden entrance hall floor. It felt like you could step into the pools of coloured light and disappear there if you wanted to.
    What she said to me this time was, “I don’t know if I can help, I don’t even know if there is any problem to be solved here, but do you want to give it a go and see if we can find out together?”
    To give her credit, Mrs. E. never said she knew something if she didn’t. She had this thing she would do, a mannerism which I always associate with her: she would put her hand to her chin and tilt her head to the side and look up, and she would say ‘I wonder…’ and suggest that we try to find out together whatever it was she was wondering