and reach thousands of daily visitors
23 June 2008
NO 1312
Feelings
Feelings in disturbed children have not
developed in the same way as the feelings of normal children. Disturbed
children have to learn to recognize and to distinguish their feelings;
workers need to help them with this learning, but to do it with great
tact and without intrusiveness. In some children one overwhelming
feeling of anxiety seems to be so great that it has drowned out almost
all others. In a few even the recognition of anxiety seems to be
unbearable, and they have retreated into extreme withdrawal. After the
worker gets acquainted with disturbed children for the first time and
begins to see behind their peculiar behavior and to understand why this
one perpetually plays with a piece of string, that one walks and talks
rather like a robot, a third dashes breathlessly from one toy to the
other never stopping to play with anything, and a fourth hits out at
other children without seeming reason, he will slowly become aware of
their pervasive anxiety, or better said, their lack o f trust. The least
trustful children do not seem actually to feel anxiety; they simply
withdraw into themselves. It is only after they have developed a
relationship with someone, and have a little experience of trust,
that they seem also to be able to encounter anxiety as a feeling to
re-experience the anxiety that they have avoided by withdrawing. Less
withdrawn children who attack other children or who suddenly scratch and
bite a worker without seeming provocation are also responding to anxiety
or to the lack of trust but in another way, as are the children who run
away, set fires, or steal, and even those who bully others and try to
manipulate adults.
The worker thus learns to look for anxiety behind the compulsive playing with string of one child, behind the continual slapping of himself of a second, behind the mechanical behavior of a third, and behind the "misbehavior" of a fourth. These are frightened children, but, equally, anxiety is so much a part of their lives that they often do not realize that they are anxious. Sometimes they can recognize their fears, and talk about them, only after they have partially overcome them. The worker must realize that such anxieties can be overcome only slowly, as the child gains trust in the world around him and also in his own powers. What the worker can do about them is to notice the times when the child seems particularly anxious – when he withdraws more, or is more restless, or attacks, or simply displays fears of certain objects or people – and then to reassure him that he will be safe, that the workers will care for him.
Genevieve Foster,
Eleanore
Kroner, Nancy Trevorrow Carbonara and George Cohen
Foster, Genevieve W.; Kroner, Eleanore R.; Trevorrow
Carbonara, Nancy and Cohen, George M. (1972). The worker and individual
relationships. In Foster, Genevieve W.; VanderVen, Karen; Kroner,
Eleanore R.; Trevorrow Carbonara, Nancy and Cohen, George M. Child
Care Work with Emotionally Disturbed Children. University of
Pittsburgh Press. pp. 37-38.
