ABSTRACT
Dana was ten years old when I first met her, just turning eleven, tall for her age and very pale, excruciatingly poised and polite, with frightened-rabbit eyes behind large horn-rimmed glasses. She spoke in that adult, thoughtful way of some children from drugabusing families — “parentified” as they used to be called, “codependent,” in the expressive popular term of the times. It was the school counselor, responding to a plea from Dana's fifth-grade teacher, who initiated the referral to the clinic. “It isn't her work,” the teacher told me over the phone. “She's very bright, and her work is perfect — too perfect, that's the trouble. But she can't open her mouth in class, and she doesn't have a single friend. And the way she looks at the other girls, it breaks your heart. I've seen this before, Doctor, and I'm telling you, when she's a teenager, she's going to crack or explode, one or the other. She wants to be my friend, and honestly, I just don't have the time. But she's got to have something. And the family, it just really breaks your heart.”
