Dibs: In Search of Self

by Virginia M. Axline

But we are not looking for a miracle. We are seeking understanding, believing that understanding will lead us to the threshold of more effective ways of helping the person to develop and utilize his capacities more constructively. The inquiry goes on and on and we will continue to seek a way out of the wilderness of our ignorance.

If he wanted to sit there in silence, then we would have silence. There must have been some reason for what he was doing. I wanted him to take the initiative in building up this relationship. Too often, this is done for a child by some eager adult.

response? A child is only confused by questions that have been answered by someone else before he is asked.

One of my objectives in building up this relationship with Dibs was to help him achieve emotional independence. I did not want to complicate his problem by building up a supportive relationship, to make him so dependent upon me that it would postpone the more complete development of his feelings of inner security.

He needed to develop strength to cope with his world, but that strength had to come from within him and he had to experience personally his ability to cope with his world as it was. Any meaningful changes for Dibs would have to come from within him. We could not hope to make over his external world.

I did not want to direct it into any single channel by praise, suggestion, questions. I might miss completely the essence of this child’s total personality if I jumped to any premature conclusions.

Now that he had encountered concrete evidence of his changing world it would be important to work with his reactions to it — not with reassurance, not with lengthy explanations or apologies, not with words, words, words, thrown at him as a substitute, but with the experience he might now have to take a measure of his own ability to cope with a changing world.

Sometimes it is very difficult to keep firmly in mind the fact that the parents, too, have reasons for what they do — have reasons, locked in the depths of their personalities, for their inability to love, to understand, to give of themselves to their children.

Asking questions in therapy would be so helpful if anyone ever answered them accurately. But no one ever does.

When a child is forced to prove himself as capable, results are often disastrous. A child needs love, acceptance, and understanding. He is devastated when confronted with rejection, doubts, and never-ending testing.