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4 FEBRUARY 2009
NO 1396
Inner pain
On arrival at the school two things stood out. The first was the bleak environment, both indoors and outdoors. There was little evidence of anything warming, welcoming or beautiful. The indoor spaces were institutional and colourless, without anything real or alive to engage with. The second, more shocking aspect was the way in which the pain and trauma of the children's inner worlds seemed to go unacknowledged and largely unaddressed. They were more hurt than anyone seemed to want to say or see.
On one of my first visits to the school I am invited by staff to sit in on the review of a boy about to graduate. We are introduced and I ask him if it would be alright if I come along. He looks at me. His eyes are terrifying in their emptiness, their inability to make contact. He says it's fine. This is taken by all as permission, and yet I have the disturbing impression that I have not been given permission at all. Because the boy who said yes wasn't there, not truly there. He was somewhere else out of reach, far away behind those deadened eyes.
Many of the boys have eyes like that. It is still humbling and painful every time I look into them.
The review takes place, a room full of adults: parents, social workers, care-workers. They congratulate the boy who isn't there on his success. Plans for his future are made and agreed upon. His mother cries. People pat the boy who isn't there on his back and everyone leaves with their files tucked under their arms.
I felt like I was split in two. My body
was calmly descending the stair, but the rest of me was shattered,
wanting to scream out 'What about the boy? What will happen to that boy
we've left behind, unseen?' Perhaps I entered an inner space similar to
the boy's, where I was somehow able to concoct a presentable exterior,
while silently screaming inside, cut off from a world which walked right
past. But this boy was a graduate. He had met his 'targets'. Was there
something wrong with me? How must it have affected him to be applauded
by the 'care' system for having successfully erected a false self to
conceal the unaddressed trauma, so obvious in his eyes? Were we afraid
of how much he needed from us? As Gerhardt commented:
The paradox is that
people need to have a satisfying experience of dependency before they
can become truly independent and self-regulating. Yet this feels
counter-intuitive to many adults, who respond to the insecure with a
punitive attitude, as if becoming more mature and self-regulating were a
matter of willpower... But it is not simply a matter of will power. Even
if will power is invoked to bring about better behaviour, often this
comes in a form of a 'false self' who tries to live up to others'
requirements to act maturely.
(Gerhardt, 2004, p. 90).
It became a familiar experience in the school, where I tuned into the hurt parts of these boys, the parts too young or hopeless or afraid to speak, while the system seemed to grind on with all its busyness and its good will, somehow deafened to the buried cries. As Anglin writes:
The many activities of
daily life seemed to disguise and cover over this ever-present and
deep-seated pain to the point where one wondered if this 'cover-up' was
an intentional strategy of avoidance. From time to time, what staff
variously called 'outbursts', 'explosions'; or 'acting out' on the part
of residents would occur in the homes, and while it appeared to an
observer that the reaction evidenced inner turmoil and pain, seldom did
care workers acknowledge or respond sensitively to the inner world of
the child.
(Anglin, 2002, p. 108).
It is far easier for me to write about
them than to look into the eyes of our young people and attempt to make
real contact with them. Yet we ask staff to face the dreadful things
those eyes have seen, and the untold damage done. It is clear to me that
if we do not stay awake to what is in those eyes, and the terrible
feelings they evoke, we only create a charade which does harm to staff
and children alike. The question then becomes 'Why do we not want to
see?' Perhaps in our profession we deceive ourselves into seeing healing
when it is not really there because we may feel so unequipped,
internally and externally, to deal with the painful and overwhelming
feelings provoked by what we see.
CAREY MORNING
Morning, C. (2008). Opening the gifts and treasures of
relationship in residential care. Scottish Journal of Residential
Child Care, 7, 1. pp. 45-46.
REFERENCES
Anglin, J. (2002). Pain, normality and the struggle for congruence: Reinterpreting residential childcare for children and youth. New York. Haworth Press.
Gerhardt, S. (2004). Why love matters: How affection
shapes a baby's brain. New York. Routledge.
