Daniele
It's afternoon in a brand-new kindergarten classroom. We sit around a table to talk about Daniele, a three-year-old who has just started school. He is severely disabled—a serious motor impairment—and cries and complains often. When his mother begins to speak, the words pour out: three years of life with Daniele, sleepless nights, countless attempts to understand that crying, the terror of not knowing what to do except hold him in her arms. That's the only place, the only moment, where he finds any peace. We don't offer advice. We're here to listen, to give this mother a space where she too can be held, where she can hand over her story to someone else, tell it to herself so she can share the fragments of experience still raw and aching inside her.
Gradually we begin to talk about Daniele's future. School has started, and that means change—we don't know what kind, but it's the thought of a different tomorrow breaking through.
Now Daniele has a much sharper image inside us. A series of snapshots: Daniele crying, Daniele in his mother's arms, scenes she has described. The boy we had each seen in fragments—me during physical therapy, the teachers at school—now has a story inside us too. Some of the images his mother carried have become ours, and the Daniele living in us has grown more vivid, closer, richer and more alive.
Giving Others an Identity
To understand how deeply this matters, we need to think about what shapes identity. It's not only what we carry inside ourselves—our self-image, our self-esteem, our private thoughts. Identity is also made of the images others hold of us. Some of those images don't belong to our memory. We never lived them ourselves. Yet they define who we are.
Let me use my own sons. When they were born, I was there for their first hour. Giovanni was born quietly and slept peacefully. Marco cried loudly, his arms and legs moving as if he wanted to explore the world right away. They're still like that: Giovanni calm, Marco always on the move. Do Giovanni and Marco remember their first hour? No. Yet it's the beginning of their lives.
It sounds strange, but so many foundational moments—our first cry, first steps, first words—don't live in our memory at all. They live in someone else's.
How others remember us shapes how we relate to them. If I carry a bitter memory of someone, my relationship with them will always be colored by it. If I hold warm and tender images of another person inside me, my bond with them will be one of affection and closeness. More than that: the way I see them, the images I keep of them, will give them a certain identity—and that identity I carry inside me becomes part of their own.
This becomes clearer when we talk about children with severe disabilities.
What Identity Does a Severely Disabled Child Have?
What image of himself does he carry? A child like Daniele knows perfectly well the particular way his mother holds him. That recognition is his identity. The same with so many moments of daily life. Change the way you feed a severely disabled teenager, and watch what happens. I think of a boy named Sandro. He'll refuse. He'll cry. He'll complain. The moment his familiar caregiver returns, everything settles. That's his identity. We are made of relationships. The self is always a self-with. It doesn't matter that he has no memory of it. His identity also lives inside me.
Do my sons remember their first steps? That achievement that made them more independent, more eager to explore? They remember nothing. But I carry it like a film inside me: Giovanni reaching for cherries, his excitement, his enormous desire to eat them, and then his first steps. That part of his identity lives inside me. Giovanni will never remember, can never remember this moment, yet it's within him. It was a turning point that changed his life. But the memory—the lived story of that passage—belongs to others, to those who were near him then.
The same with a severely disabled child. His identity is partly shaped by how I relate to him. He carries experiences and thoughts inside himself of which he may be unaware, but which I—parent, therapist, teacher—carry inside me.
This means we all carry inside us, nurture, and help grow the identities of others. Especially those whose lives we share.
So what does it mean to care for the identities we carry within us?
Enriching the Images We Keep
Enriching means not just drawing on our own experiences with another person, but listening—above all—to the stories of others. The parent's story first. We need many stories from parents: about daily life, impressions, wishes, expectations, past and future.
We can never give parents enough time. Then there are the stories we share among ourselves as caregivers. Team meetings with teachers, summaries we write together—all of it becomes precious for nurturing another person's identity. This deserves real time and real space. It's essential care: to tell others about someone, and to listen when they tell us about him. Communication is how we cultivate both our own identity and the identity of the person we support. This creates well-being. It also means we pay attention to the medical and practical tasks that make a person and family feel truly thought about. Regular checkups, meetings with teachers, progress summaries—all of it matters.
Telling Parents What We've Seen
When I talk with parents of children I work with in therapy, I always tell them something about the sessions: an episode, something funny he said, a particular game. Giving parents a different image of their child, a richer identity—that happens through this: what happens between us? What goes on between me and the child? This is why parents hunger so much for these stories. What did he do today? How was it? What kind of day was it? Always the same question, really: "Tell me something. Make the image I carry of my child more vivid. Add to it. Tell me about him." That's what matters to a parent: knowing we're holding him inside us, that we've experienced something with him. So even saying something small—"He coughed more today, he seemed a bit different, but you know when he tries he really..."—it doesn't matter exactly what we say. It's how we say it. It's the desire to share moments, questions, puzzles. It's keeping the child's identity alive. It's like when friends tell us stories about our own children: we drink in those images because they're new to us.
Keeping Identity Alive
If we understand identity this way—as something woven from images that belong to us and images that belong to another—then our role as adults and caregivers isn't just to support a child or person. It's to help build their identity. We are shapers of others' identities. Think of children with behavioral problems: some educators create a connection so strong that not only do the problems diminish, but the young person gains a new identity and learns a new way of being. The same with a severely disabled child. His identity will depend greatly on what we do together, how we are together, on everything we call the self-with. This isn't always easy, especially with severe disability. It demands what we might call a shared "predictive function."
The predictive function is one of the many parental capacities that lets a parent sense what the next step should be for their child. In parents of children with disabilities, this function often breaks down: they don't know what to do, how to hold them, what to offer. Sometimes we caregivers lose it too. We need to recover our predictive function—our ability to change as the child changes.
Keeping identity alive means keeping the child alive inside us: not static, not frozen, but able to grow, to move toward the next stage. We have a sense of direction for our work. The predictive function must be shared because keeping someone alive requires communication. We can't be alone, and we can't leave others alone. Therapeutic difficulties always arrive with a kind of unpredictability. Our deepest relationships are a mix of repetition and surprise.
Repetition comes from the need for safety. Surprise comes from desire and dreams. Therapy navigates between these two: the security of ritual, the creativity and movement of desire.
Reading the Signs of a Future Time
Don Giorgio Bonaccorso, a Benedictine monk, interprets the Gospel phrase "read the signs of the times" to mean: filter the signs of the past and integrate them with the signs of a future time that each of us carries inside. What are these signs of future time? Our hopes, our investments, our expectations. What we place in a future time leaves its mark and stirs our present. When the children or young people I work with begin to talk to me about the future, about their dreams, I know we're nearing the end of therapy. To read the signs of a future within oneself is one of the most evolved relational skills. But in some children, in some situations, it's so hard to read that sign of what's to come. We often wonder what will change, and parents often bring us their anguish about the future. It's as if their child's future leaves a mark of emptiness, a mark of such pain that it becomes unthinkable. To carry it inside is to tend to this future and to share with parents the uncertainty, the not-knowing. Sometimes it's precisely this not-knowing that gives us deep attention to the present. If I already know everything, if I'm certain what this child will be, if I've already locked the whole relationship into a rigid, suffocating framework, then both he and I are trapped. Identities like pillars of salt, immobile. Uncertainty at least keeps questions open. It places me before the parent not as a magician who can predict a distant future, but as a fellow traveler, sharing the weight of the unknown "signs of what may come."
Welcoming Magic and Grief
Emma is a child with severe motor impairment, severe low vision, severe intellectual disability. Her parents say she reads, answers difficult questions. This is magical thinking—born of suffering. Two weeks ago I saw again Antonio, a teenager with severe spastic tetraplegia, respiratory problems, epilepsy, and severe intellectual disability. I was trying to wake him because he'd fallen asleep. As I was stimulating him, I looked at his thirteen-year-old face, his hair, his rosy cheeks, his eyes (in the moments he looked around to understand what was happening) a beautiful clear green. And I saw him walking, playing basketball, talking—as his mother often tells me: "Sometimes I like to imagine him that way." So many dreams that parents tell us. "You know, doctor, I dreamed he stood up by himself and did everything normally, as if nothing had ever happened." "I don't need him to walk, but if only he could talk—I can see it so clearly, him beginning to speak." I believe we don't understand what grief is when we call these statements "pathological"—"she hasn't accepted this child"—or worse, when we mock them. We don't know what grief is. We don't know how grief needs constantly to be soothed by balm. And sometimes magic thinking becomes that balm. And sometimes it would be important for us caregivers to let ourselves be invaded by these "dream images" too—to imagine how the child, the young person, the adult before us would be. Dreams let us touch everything that "is not," all the absence, and thus the grief, the beautiful thing that isn't there. It's entering, on tiptoes, into that space of grief and understanding how it speaks. So when Cristiana's father—she's five and has just begun to grasp objects and bring them to her mouth—speaks during a team meeting with teachers, his voice shaking: "A doctor told me she'll never write. I think she will," and asks my opinion, I tell him that Cristiana has started to pick things up, to take an interest in the world around her, and that we're here, the teachers and I, to do our best for her, but to take one step at a time. I go through everything we've discussed about what to do with her now. But inside me I hold this father's dream carefully, because it says everything about his grief. Every evening when he comes home from work, he tells us, he takes Cristiana on his shoulders and plays with her until she laughs so hard she can barely breathe. Perhaps when he plays with his daughter, the father carries inside him the image that Cristiana will one day read. For us caregivers, this is a "sign of a future" that's mistaken and misleading. But do we really think this father doesn't know it's impossible? He wouldn't have said it almost weeping. He knows Cristiana will never write. But he knows that to make her laugh until she's breathless, he needs to dream it, to imagine his daughter's future as a happy one, full of beautiful things. And then the present becomes magical too. Cristiana, who recently started putting things in her mouth, runs to meet her father when he arrives, and he picks her up and isn't satisfied until his daughter laughs. Together, they build each other's future.
Carrying and Being Carried
There is always reciprocity between carrying and being carried, first as an interweaving of identities. As a caregiver I build the child's identity, but the child also builds mine, participates in my being-with. Moreover, there's a reciprocity in my ability to carry and nurture others' identities inside me, which is directly tied to whether I feel carried by someone myself. If I believe no one holds me inside them, I need to build walls and ropes and rigid structures of thought and feeling to keep me standing. You can see at once the people who don't feel held by anyone.
Finally, there's a reciprocity created by the workplace itself. Caring for the children entrusted to us requires a workplace that is peaceful and that cares for its staff. Those who lead our organizations have a fundamental responsibility: to create a work climate where every person, every caregiver, is held, valued, and supported. The caregiver who carries the children and their parents inside himself needs leaders who are attentive, who offer the most peaceful and affirming work environment possible. That's it: "Carrying inside yourself the well-being of your staff." This is the foundation that creates a favorable climate for taking care of the children and families entrusted to us. Being held inside by someone—what a gift. Being held inside by someone: that's the message the people we care for expect from us. Because perhaps this is what wonder really is: that we don't belong only to ourselves. Our lives, our very identities grow inside us and also grow inside others. We can say we are made of others. And that is what makes us all, every single one of us, so full of infinity.
From the newsletter "La Nostra Famiglia" (July 2007)
