and reach thousands of daily visitors
9 SEPTEMBER 2009
NO 1485
Anxiety
Why should it be so difficult for people to engage with each other? The clue lies in the idea of the primary task (see Chapter 3) and in the anxieties associated with the task. If we think about the real purpose of children's homes and other residential homes, or of family centres, or psychiatric units, we are always face to face with anxiety: the primary task of such units usually involves some element of engaging with those who have been rejected by society and who feel a profound sense of failure and inadequacy and helping them to regain some self-esteem and to recover as people. For the staff, there is often a high degree of anxiety associated with such a task: anxiety that the young people will go out of control and hurt themselves or someone else, that parents will injure or even kill their young children, that troubled adolescents will 'go mad' or kill themselves, etc. These are genuine anxieties and belong to society as a whole, but are implicitly taken on by staff when the organisation accepts the referral: this acceptance of anxiety comes about partly because at an individual level people's motivation to do this sort of work involves some readiness to engage with other people's emotional pain and partly because at an organisational level accepting the referral means taking on the anxiety that comes with the task.
However, these anxieties can be very powerful indeed and can operate at both an unconscious and at a conscious level. Staff can feel that, if they are to survive at all, they need to evolve some degree of defence against feeling the anxieties. The people living and working in such organisations not only have their own individual defences, they also tend to pool them into collective defences which they employ (largely unconsciously) to protect themselves against the deeper anxieties associated with their task. This is really a form of collective neurosis – as if to say, 'we can't cope with the implications of this, so we'll try not to think about it, but we'll busy ourselves with other things that we can cope with'. Thus, two important things happen at once: first, people get out of touch with the real anxieties and therefore with the real pain of the experience of those they are trying to help; and second, they also take on new (and largely distracting) secondary anxieties arising from the defensive activities. At one level, this is how people end up putting disproportionate amounts of energy into displacement activities such as folding sheets and blankets, filing endless report forms on inconsequential matters and setting down petty rules to which children must conform if they are to receive 'privileges'. The fact that some of these activities may have been embarked on as a defence against the real anxieties means that, however well such activities are implemented, there will still be something hollow and unrewarding about completing them.
At a broader level, this phenomenon also explains how it comes about that large organisations avoid defining a real primary task for institutions, because they cannot face the anxiety entailed in undertaking such tasks. In one sense this is quite understandable, since the situation of some of the young people needing help is often so dreadful as to be almost literally unthinkable, but in another sense, if the agencies as a whole cannot face these realities, it will be all the more burdensome and problematic for any individual worker or small team to try to do so. This difficulty may also explain how child care organisations sometimes arrive at policies which overlook the real needs of children, because they cannot face the anxiety involved in the proper management of a child-centred policy. A potent example of the latter has arisen during recent years over the issue of physical contact. Physical contact between children and between the children and their carers, has become more highly-charged than ever, with workers fearing the misinterpretation of their actions and the increasing awareness of sexual abuse both inside and outside institutions. This is a situation which understandably creates enormous anxiety for the employing organisations, but the ways in which this anxiety has been handled have varied greatly from one authority to another (see Ward 1990). Thus some authorities have drawn up rigid rules forbidding physical contact between children or between children and their carers, while others have taken a much more realistic line and refused to be driven into such a corner.
ADRIAN WARD
Ward, A. (1998). The
difficulty of helping. In Ward, A. and McMahon, L. (Eds.). Intuition
is not enough: Matching learning with practice in therapeutic care.
London and New York. Routledge. pp. 60-62.
REFERENCES
Ward, A. (1990). The Role of Physical Contact in Child
Care. Children and Society, 4, 4. pp. 337-351
