and reach thousands of daily visitors
14 MAY 2010
NO 1577
WRITING 50 YEARS AGO ...
The adults on the team
So much for the visible setting, but of even greater importance to a maladjusted child are the adults who will share this house with him for several years.
The heads of psychotherapeutical residential establishments for children often despair of fnding sufficient numbers of trained staff members. They are always searching for someone who has strength of personality, a good intellect, and insight into himself and the children under his care: a person with ego strength and wisdom, who has become aware of the influences of his own unconscious experiences and urges and is able to apply these experiences in therapeutic education in a residential setting.
Such people are extremely rare and if we are lucky enough to interest them in our particular field, they join the small circle of those satised to give a few years of their professional life to such work for others. These latter may be intelligent men and women with love for children, willing to try out new ideas and perhaps already with some intellectual knowledge of the depth of their own reactions, motivations, anxieties, and aggressions. Whether they have already applied all this to themselves enough to be able to give out of their maturity of personality something to emotionally-disturbed children is another question.
Life in a community of maladjusted children opens the newcomers’ eyes with frightening clarity to their own not fully-developed personalities, and the task of helping themselves, at the same time as facing and helping children whose symptoms and problems are often near their own, can be a terrifying experience.
The day-to-day work with the children has to be done, and those in responsible positions in the establishment try to coordinate helping each staff member towards the development of insight into himself and the children. Often this demands more than the staff member is able or willing to give. He may feel that the person in charge is looking deeper into his personality than he is willing to allow whilst he is serving him professionally. He becomes aware of being observed too deeply and searchingly for his own particular personality with its limitations to be able to cope with and puts up a defence against it.
During this initial period the new staff member may hate those who, already at ease with themselves and the work, try to help him towards an understanding of himself and the children. He feels that he must leave a platform of make-believe strength and maturity and is afraid to reach out and face the challenge of his own readjustment. The continuation of the work on each child and the experience with every one of them project his own personality problems back to him with ruthless continuity. Many are afraid to make this step, when jobs are so plentiful in which there is no need to battle with one’s self. Others find an enrichment of their own life through learning to understand themselves and, because of this, helping others, which makes life more worth living.
As already suggested, there are really two therapeutic problems in any establishment which sets out to treat maladjusted children: the children who need to learn how to live, and the adults who are to help them. If we are to stand side by side with these children and guide them through their difficult phases (and it is important that we do so, rather than stand on a pedestal above and seek to impose on them a pattern we prefer for their lives) we must first come to terms with ourselves.
We are generally attuned by conventional, educational, social standards and family background, to a certain line of conduct, a reasonably rigid code. In a normal childhood, we presumably entered the stage of adolescence doubting whether all which surrounded us in our environment was acceptable to us, but against a stable background we worked through our objections and our difliculties and became mature enough to understand and live with the moral pattern of our society. If we seek to help maladjusted children to make the same steps towards stabilization, we must humbly realize that social developments and the moral code are not static. We must also be prepared to realize that the young people with whom we deal have had setbacks in developing from the early period of their lives and have failed to find the safety and security to enable them to fit into the pattern thrust upon them by society. Many of their actions and reactions in their daily lives will appear to us, with our code and our acceptance of the social standard, irrational, abnormal and irritating. In reality, because of their early experiences, these actions and reactions are not abnormal, but simply the logical defence mechanisms against an inability to think from a safe, socially-acceptable premise.
These defence mechanisms against frustration (the symptoms of emotional disturbance) are apt to threaten our own security. Anti-social activities by those under our charge undermine our position in the eyes of our world and impose an intolerable strain upon our own balance. Our tendency is to criticize instead of sympathizing, to censure instead of tolerating, because we ourselves are frightened by these demonstrations of fear.
We must try to create a permissive atmosphere
which allows these symptoms a chance to be worked out in order to find
the underlying problems and at the same time make sufficient demands
upon the child for him to substitute acceptable, rational behaviour for
the socially-unacceptable mechanisms he has put up in his own defence
against a hitherto unsympathetic world. This regulation of attitude
makes great demands upon our own equanimity and control. If we have not
learnt to cope with our own frustrations, to come to terms with
our own world, we will not find ourselves able to cope or able to help
those in our care.
F G. LENNHOFF
Lennhoff, F.G. (1960). Exceptional Children:
Residential Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Boys at Shotton Hall.
London. George Allen and Unwin Ltd. pp. 45-47.
