Why do you sympathise with Helen,who at five, suffered terribly?

I can feel badly for her but I cannot understand how she felt. I, like most other people, could communicate by age five. I could only imagine how difficult things would have been for her.

I struggled–not that struggling helped matters, but the spirit of resistance was strong within me; I generally broke down in tears and physical exhaustion. If my mother happened to be near I crept into her arms, too miserable even to remember the cause of the tempest. After awhile the need of some means of communication became so urgent that these outbursts occurred daily, sometimes hourly. ch 3