I am no scholar of poetry, but I do remember that my grandmother (who was), often quoted the famous line of John Keats: “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” I have certainly always felt that way. Sometimes even a glimpse of something beautiful, an orchid, a painting, a photo, an exquisite dress or a well-made cheese, can lift a flagging spirit. Although I deeply love music, if I had to choose, I would say my sense of sight might be my most precious. Fortunately, I have not had to choose, although advancing age admittedly dims them all.
As with many things, there is a downside to this powerful experience of sight. The visual also cuts both ways for me, meaning that scenes that I have seen, like horrifying videos of murder and torture, burn themselves seemingly indelibly into my mind’s eye and can haunt me for years. That is why I have learned to get most of my news from radio and podcasts.
Although I preach about generating hope, lately I have to keep reminding myself to remember my own words and stay positive. The trauma/neglect brain can readily default to the old bleak view, those lonely old circuits never being completely extinguished. That is another reason why we need others, which is also unfortunately what is not remembered in such moments, when our tendency may be to hide out. Fortuitously however, my dysregulated sleep enables me to catch inspirational podcast stories that I might otherwise miss.
Times being as they are I also remember my grandmother’s quoting William Wordsworth “…the world is too much with us…” Certainly true for me if I am not careful these days. More than perhaps ever, I cannot afford to slide into the mire of despair. Just when I needed it most, I happened upon the story of a young artist named Bianca Rafaella. Her story compelled me out of the depths.
When Bianca’s mother was pregnant with her in 1992 in London, she contracted a parasite called toxoplasmosis which is of minimal consequence to most healthy adults, but a serious condition for those who may be pregnant. As a result, Bianca was born blind, or what is known as “registered blind.” She had a tiny bit of blurry, staticky vision that flickered and might momentarily hover and disappear. The right was different from the left, so her spatial perception and balance were skewed, and any vision at all was in the immediate range of about one meter or less. All her birth records and subsequent legal documents classified her as blind.
Bianca’s parents despaired and went from specialist to specialist urgently consulting as to what if anything could be done for her. They finally encountered one doctor who was the gamechanger. He said the words that became the lifeline for the young parents and later Bianca. He said, “See what she can see, not what she can’t see.” Those words became their north star.
Art
In art, I was always fascinated with artists like M.C. Escher, and his seeming optical illusions of figure and ground. Their focusing on the positive or the seeming subject of the image, creates one picture and focusing on the negative or apparently “empty” space creates another entirely. The positive and the negative space combined to make a fascinating and sometimes quite beautiful whole. I liked his brain-twister drawing of a hand drawing itself drawing itself…When I learned the sensorimotor definition of “mindfulness,” it was quite similar: one part of the brain engaged in the sensory experience, and the other observing the experiencing brain and body. For me a, never a meditator, this was an important learned skill. And one of the ways we know that the brain is recovering from trauma, is because the observing, thinking prefrontal cortex goes offline during trauma, and again when a trauma state is activated or “triggered.”
Similarly in Gestalt psychology and Imago Relationship Therapy, both loosely based on the 1935 writing of German philosopher Martin Buber, the focus is on the “space between.” Relationship is about navigating the opening between two beings, which in relationship is certainly not “empty space.” It is filled with meaning, form and substance. Like neglect trauma, it is not nothing! Anything but.
In reconstructing the narrative of childhood neglect, we are searching for and excavating missing experiences, not making something out of nothing, but starting with what we can see, and searching from there. That is what Bianca and her family endeavored to do. Bianca’s mother was a painter and she “always wanted to be like mommy,” although I don’t know much about her attachment story.
At age 11, Bianca was sent to a special boarding school for blind kids. She became an accomplished braillist, learning to see much with her fingers. But she had a very hard time at school. She does not say why in the interviews I read, but much like myself at about the same age, she became severely anorexic. She had to go home, where the family went in search of treatment for that. It took a long, long time, she struggled with severe anorexia, off and on for some years. I felt an immediate affinity with her for that. And she began to paint.
Visibility
Much of Bianca’s language as she describes her work, reminds me of how I describe neglect trauma. She said she “hovered between visibility and disappearance.” Ghostlike, I always felt rather like that, wondering if I existed. Or was I a shadow, smoke, or nothing at all. Bianca’s minimal vision, being impressionistic, variable and often abstractly disconnected, fractured, reminded me of how dissociative memory can be. Although she does have some irregular and inconsistent sense of color and light, amidst what she called the “visual static,” primarily she works from “accessible sensory recall, supplemented with a vivid imagination.” Painting became an active pursuit, and her work is quite remarkable. (You can see it and find out more about her on Instagram, or at https://www.biancaraffaela.com). I especially love her paintings of flowers, which she knows intimately through touch, and exquisitely portrays their texture and shape.
Bianca studied in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, graduating with honors in 2007. In 2016 she graduated from Kingston University London, with a First-Class Honours degree in Visual Arts. She was the first registered blind student to graduate from Kingston. From there she tried her hand at fashion design, but found that the fashion world pitched her back into her anorexia which had continued to plague her off and on. She similarly made an attempt at architecture, but ultimately returned to painting, which like her mother, she has most loved.
There she has remained, Now happily married to a man who also is also her business partner, assistant and all-around champion, living in London. Interestingly, what finally healed her of the persistent anorexia, was her pregnancy with her first child. Losing control of her body and its shape bringing such an awe inspiring and joyful result, perhaps love, was apparently the “cure.”
In 2025, Bianca Raffaella was awarded Overall Winner of the Women in Art Prize. She was also the recipient of Women in Art‘s Printing Prize. She continues to advocate for accessibility in the arts, has shared her insights as a speaker at the Goethe Institute’s Beyond Seeing project and as a panelist at the Tate Modern’s Please Touch the Art. She is a member of Layers of Vision and in 2025, participated in an All-Party Parliamentary Group for Eye Health and Visual Impairment, developing policy recommendations to guide the improvement of access and inclusion programs for BPS people in UK-based museums.
Reward
In last year’s Boston Trauma Conference, Harvard attachment research Karlen Lyons-Ruth gave an eloquent keynote lecture on attachment trauma and most specifically early childhood neglect. She talked about how exquisitely intergenerationally transmissible neglect trauma is. One of the conference attendees asked her, how do we begin to break the chain of intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma and neglect. Her first response, to the complex question, was to acknowledge everything they did “well!” Much like John Gottman’s advice to couples, “Catch you partner in the act of doing something right!” Like the Pavlovian concept of operant conditioning, when we reward the desired response, it is re-enforcing, it is likely to be repeated. We are hard wired for positive re-enforcement, and being pack animals, when we complete an act of altruism, we are rewarded with a dopamine hit.
So, what am I trying to say? Well, the negative space is very much part of the picture, no doubt. I am the last to ignore the agonies micro and macro that devastate us, our clients, and people near and far. Like Bianca and her family, we must start with what we can and see where that takes us.
