The improbable relationship

Brian Gannon

"At the end of the day you only have each other. The staff are lovely but they’re paid to be here and there’s no getting out of that.” – Bryony, a young person in care (in Emond, R, 2002, 38)

"Do you only do this because you get paid to do it?” is one of those challenges which “test” us in the early stages of a relationship with a young person. The incipient relationship is one which the youth doesn’t seem to want to start as much as we do. We are tempted to disclaim this mercenary motivation on our part. “Of course not ...” we consider answering. We want to protest the quality of our product, but the kid is not buying. If we say that we’re not in it for the money, we lay ourselves open to a whole Pandora’s box of equally doubtful motives; if we say we are, we stand guilty as charged. Unless we are volunteers, it is true that we can only enter into this relationship because we get paid to do it. The adult client who deliberately seeks out the services of a helping professional both wants the relationship and understands having to pay for it; the young person has not asked for the relationship and is suspicious about our being paid for it. This is just one of a number of paradoxes inherent in the child and youth worker’s attempts to “relate to the reluctant”. (Brendtro, Brokenleg & Von Bockern, 2002, 71)

"Is this relationship for real, or do you have an ulterior motive? Are you using this relationship for something?” Again we want to say “Of course not, this for real, this is you and me ...”, but there’s no way of getting past the implausibility of the two of us getting together spontaneously or legitimately. We have little in common. Our ages, our interests and our ways of life are (literally) streets apart. And the suggestion that the relationship is instrumental is a tough one. However much we try to make out that we are just hanging together, the fact is that we would never have met had it not been for some situation which our program was called in to work with or help with. We wish that we could disentangle ourselves from the school or the cops or the shrinks or the program, but we are hand in glove with one or more of these groupings in the plan to build or improve or change or fix something about you and/or your family. And we’re not sure as to whether to tell you this at this stage for fear of your throwing out the baby (our infant relationship) with the bathwater.

"Is this a special and personal relationship? Is this only you and me?” The quick-and-dirty answer here would be “No. You are just one of several kids and families with whom I am working right now.” We also turn to the various structural definitions of relationship in our literature and we know that our best shot is not to be in relationship with the child at all but with his or her existing relationships (Anglin, 1991), to be, in the Minuchin (1974) sense, joining the youth’s matrix of relationships rather than setting up this one-on-one thing. It gets even more complex, for in program settings this youngster will not only be sharing me with others; he or she may also have to juggle with different versions of me – me as an activities group leader, me as a senior staff person in this unit, me as father, mother or sibling in my own family ... and me as the individual and special person busy committing to this relationship. So we fiddle with the semantics so as to be able to say “Yes, this relationship is special, unique ...”

"Are we 'even-Stevens' in this relationship – or will you be pulling rank on me?” The power issue in this kind of relationship is a tough call. Enough that sheer size and age slots us readily into parent-child, adult-youth, teacher-student moulds. But the unlistened-to, unheard, disempowered, abused youngster has strong misgivings around power differentials. We want to promise space and time and margins for this kid, but we know that within civil, school and program boundaries – and even for his or her own protection and security – there will be limits set and no-go zones declared. And as I am promising respect and significance, I know that youngsters in loss and crisis, suffering overwhelming confusion and anger, are already in positions of such vulnerability and disadvantage as to have few bargaining chips on their side of the table.

"Are you in it for the long haul?” “Of course,” we begin ... “Can I trust your investment and commitment – or is this relationship just temporary?” These questions are getting to us. The kid is still asking, still looking for reassurance, still weighing the pros and cons of the deal ... “System” kids get to recognize the smiles and kindnesses reserved for the newcomer, the hearty welcome, the “you'll get along fine” attitude, all of which can evaporate by breakfast-time on Day Two.

“What I’ve missed in my life is people sticking by me, people who are on my side when I need them to be, next week, next month ...” Fleeting reassurances are not reassuring.

And what do you bring to the table? Have you anything new to add the mix of my life so far? Somehow, back when, even my own family fell off their side of the equation and I’ve reached the point where I’m not even sure what I want any more. Ideas like “belonging”, “caring”, “relationship”, “support” and so on don’t really cut it for me. I’m not sure what these words mean, and right now I’d settle for a half-time job, a warm coat, my mates, some glue ... We pat our pockets and wonder what we really do have to offer ... we who are foreigners and strangers.

And given all of the above, at what point do I forfeit my relationship status? How conditional is all this bonhomie? The pattern for me so far has been that there’s an invisible line to be crossed where I suddenly find myself out in the cold again. Worst thing is not knowing from the start whether there’s a line, and if so, where it is. When there are relationships with terms and conditions it’s not so much a case of me-the-kid trusting you-the-adult; it’s me that I can’t trust because I know I’m likely to slip up – and that’s exactly when I need to know you’re still there for me!

* * *

We stand rather deflated at the threshold of any relationship we enter into with kids and families. Some or all of their expectations may be unreasonable and unrealistic; and our assurances quixotic, extravagant, even misleading. We feel the need to resolve the ambiguities. The values and good intentions which probably brought us to this point suddenly look a little thin. The toys we brought along seem embarrassingly inappropriate. We don’t even know the language.

Until, that is, we see all this developmentally and in the context of ordinary families and children. We realise that all of the children, youth and families we work with, along with ourselves as Child and Youth Care Workers, will have a distance to travel together during the life-cycle of this relationship. As with all journeys, we set off in hope. And as we travel, we change. Our experience is transformed, just as the constructs and words we use to understand and express our experience expand. At the end of one day’s passage we know more about our world, about other people and about ourselves. In a day’s learning and growth our expectations have been rewarded and disappointed, our hopes and despairs smoothed out.

Tomorrow morning we are different people setting off upon a different day. What makes it all different is that yesterday we set out. We are already on the journey by virtue of the fact that yesterday we started.

We worried about all of those questions and the answers we wanted to make. But the terror was not in the words and concepts; it was in the joining, in the fact that we touched hands and started out together for who knows where. Yesterday we didn’t know each other; today we do.

Yesterday’s answers don’t matter today, anyway. I can say to my two-year-old's questioning, “Of course I will love you for ever,” not knowing how that story will pan out in another two or twenty years, but I can make (and mean) that promise. As for ulterior motives, I can have those too. Acting in a youngster’s best interests is an ulterior motive, but it can also be an act of love.

As we stepped through yesterday’s beginnings into the relationship as it is today, so we will eventually step through the whole relationship (however long it lasts and however it turns out) into our own respective continuing lives. However we may have answered any of those original tentative and apprehensive questions about the genuineness and committedness of our relationship, we offered only a mirage, a prototype for special and personal relationships the youngster will establish and live through with other people in the future.

Our unique relationship is an archetype of possible future relationships. And there is no simplicity in these. They are complex, filled with promise and failure, with trust and disabuse, with love and despairing pain, with shame and forgiveness, with angry endings and partings ... but which are subsumed by constancy and limitless second-chances and last-chances. In reality, our temporary and ulterior-motivated relationship is proof of the possibility of such a real relationship in the life of a kid who had despaired of such a possibility. Our positive and potentially facile answers on Day One are only betrayals if we then fail to go on an do this kind of relationship – which means fulfilling the expectations, one by one, to the point that they no longer need to be fulfilled. The fundamental and core question is “At what point do I forfeit my relationship status?” It is only when that question no longer has to be asked or answered that we are, the two of us, free to move on. We cannot terminate until we demonstrate that trust, the right of any child in even the first stages of life, is possible and available and free for the asking.

Waaldijk (1992) offers us this brief dialogue between a youngster and Peter, the humanist careworker:

"Peter, tell me now, how do you look at me? Do you see me just as another case? Or as a dirty thief? Or again as an incomprehensible immigrant child? Or as a hopeless case? Or perhaps as an interesting example of early adolescent ego-weakness?”

Our humanist friend was really embarrassed. The boy asked his questions with a lot of distrust. And at the same time the humanist’s own mind was a chaotic mixture of half a dozen unfinished different diagnoses. The only thing he said, after a long silence was:

"More than anything else, for me you are just Stephan.”

* * *

I remember listening to a molecular physicist describing the problems of measurement of the vast spaces between nuclei and protons and things within a single atom. Similar, he said, to those who venture to measure in intergalactic space, how they long since ran out of metres and miles and light years and expletives ... and how sometimes it might seem just as “logical” to resort to music to capture the limitless distances in space – the way Kubrick, when reaching the technical and speculative frontiers in the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, fell back on a Strauss waltz!

So, we can agonise all we want over these incongruities and paradoxes in our starting relationships, but at some point we will simply have to transpose from weighing up the odds into letting go and trusting, from thinking into doing. To stop our questioning and philosophizing and our verbal egg-dance and just do the relationship. Let’s go waltz.

References

Anglin, James P. (1991). Counselling a Single Parent and Child: Functional and Dysfunctional Patterns of Communication. Journal of Child and Youth Care, 6;4 35-46.

Brendtro, L, Brokenleg, M. and Van Bockern, S. (2002) Reclaiming youth at risk; Our hope for the future (revised edition), Bloomington: National Education Service

Emond, R. (2002) Understanding the resident group. Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care Vol.1

Minuchin, S. (1974). Families and family therapy. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Waaldijk, K. (1992) Being a humanist, day and night. FICE Bulletin. Spring. No. 6 pp. 8-11

This feature: Gannon, B (2003). The Improbable Relationship. Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, 16(3), pp.6-9