D’s Reader Story, Belfast

D is a quiet, reflective person who has experienced deep traumas during his time in prison, and afterwards. D is very intuitive and began the sessions by telling me ‘I don’t read books. I read people’. D believes he has ‘no capacity for emotion’, having been stripped of it in prison.

D will often pick up on a word in the readings which flips the narrative in a new way, offering a new perspective. Two weeks ago we talked about emotion during our reading of Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. ‘I have no sense of emotion – I get what Christopher [the autistic central character] is going through… I understand it’, he said. I asked D, ‘when was the last time you felt anything like happiness?’ After a contemplative pause, he quietly answered, ‘I look forward to this… to coming here every week’.