A mother named Rita shares with painful honesty the story of her disabled son's move away from home into a residential community. It's a step she and her husband have long hoped for—and dreaded. A step some parents have already taken, and others must soon face.
Help was coming, something we'd always longed for, a solution for the time when we could no longer be here." "...but I wasn't ready for this news. An earthquake was happening, shaking everything I thought I knew.
A psychologist, Gian Luigi Visentini, who has spent years working with disabled children and young people, invites us to reflect deeply on something of profound importance—something too often overlooked or unexamined, especially with those most seriously disabled. His words speak to anyone who works in this field: parents, educators, teachers, doctors, friends.
The article is lengthy. We apologize to those who prefer to read quickly. Take it slowly. Read it more than once, carefully, so that the wisdom he offers can become truly yours—if you wish it to be—for the wellbeing of so many of our friends.
Within us live the identities of other people, especially those with whom we share pieces of our lives and time.
If you fear the text isn't for you, or worry you can't manage it, start by reading this paragraph first:
Some of the images his mother carried inside herself had become ours too, and Daniele inside us had grown more vivid, closer, richer and more radiant.
"Welcoming magical thinking and grief." These lines are moving precisely because they speak so plainly to what every parent yearns for their child: genuine attention. And they move us even more because they come from the heart of a professional—a psychotherapist—someone we often imagine to be distant and hardened by expertise. We hope that all who read these words will be able to say with conviction what the psychologist says at the end: "And it is this that makes us all, every single one of us, so full of infinity."
An educator training in Art Therapy, Marta de Rino, helps us understand how art therapy, when guided by a true expert, can support and strengthen people made fragile by disability or illness—how it can awaken and restore life to those closed off or isolated by trauma and unbearable pain.
We don't belong only to ourselves. Our lives, our very identities, grow within us and within others too. We are made of other people.
This article too asks something of your attention and care. It matters greatly that we don't pass over the word "Art Therapy" lightly, tossing it about without truly understanding what it is. We hope this effort will serve our readers in two ways: so that those with disabled loved ones might seek it out for them, and so that volunteers who have been doing this work for years on their own might now commit themselves seriously to Art—with a capital A—work that fulfills the practitioner but even more so the person who has so often felt useless, incapable, without purpose.
Those who enter this space find comfort, a chance to speak with someone who truly listens, an outlet for rage and other powerful emotions that cannot be expressed any other way.
It will be beautiful for both groups to step into a world so little known yet so effective in so many ways.
I won't list the other articles, not because they lack importance, but because they'll be easier to discover on your own.
All I can do is urge you to read deeply, and to overcome your hesitation by sending us your thoughts and reflections—or your criticisms (by mail or email to the addresses on the back cover). Only with your participation can Ombre e Luci truly serve someone.
...an excellent path to self-knowledge ... for undertaking psychological therapy that moves beyond the usual spoken word