Navigating Trauma Through Reflective Practice with Dr. Nicola O’Sullivan

Emotional wellbeing in child protection

The intersection of personal experience and professional practice in child protection work stands as one of the most compelling yet under-explored areas in social care. Dr Nicola O’Sullivan’s conversation with Colby Pearce in this Secure Start podcast episode offers profound insights into this territory, illuminating how our personal histories shape our professional approaches – sometimes without our awareness.

Nicola speaks candidly about her own journey, acknowledging that her early experiences of familial and medical trauma unconsciously drove her toward caregiving roles. This unconscious motivation initially created blind spots in her practice, something many practitioners might recognise in themselves. As she eloquently puts it, “I wasn’t so aware of the connection between my life experience and my finding myself in a caretaking role, and so this often got in the way of me being effective in my work.” This level of honesty opens up vital conversations about what truly draws people to helping professions and how unacknowledged motivations might impact service delivery.

The concept of defensive processes emerges as a central theme throughout their discussion. Rather than viewing psychological defences as obstacles to be eliminated, Nicola offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective: “Please don’t drop your defences. You need them until we have something that might offer something better or something different.” This compassionate stance acknowledges that defences serve important protective functions, particularly in high-stress environments like child protection where workers regularly encounter profound trauma. The key, Nicola suggests, is not elimination but awareness – understanding our defensive processes and recognising when they might be interfering with effective practice.

Perhaps most valuable is Nicola’s exploration of systems psychodynamic theory as a framework for understanding organisational dynamics in social care settings. This interdisciplinary approach integrates psychoanalysis, group relations theories, and open systems perspectives to illuminate what happens beneath the surface in helping organisations. By paying attention to unconscious processes, power dynamics, and institutional defences, practitioners can better understand why certain patterns persist despite best intentions. As Nicola explains, this approach helps us track “processes in the work between workers and between workers and families and workers and organisations.”

The discussion around supervision proves particularly relevant for anyone working in trauma-exposed settings. Nicola advocates for supervision that acknowledges the intersection between personal experience, professional role, and the work itself. Good supervision, she argues, requires a clear model (she uses the Seven-Eyed Model), regular meetings, safety, and attention to both professional development and personal experience. Most importantly, supervision creates a containing space where practitioners can process difficult emotions rather than avoiding them – a critical point when we consider that avoidance only increases anxiety over time.

For those new to the field, Nicola offers wisdom that resonates deeply: “Go gently, try not to feel so much shame about your own history, and find people who are wise and kind and open and curious and uncertain.” This advice acknowledges both the vulnerability and strength inherent in bringing our whole selves to this challenging work. By privileging learning from experience over theoretical knowledge and finding generous, experienced practitioners as mentors, new workers can develop the self-awareness necessary for sustained, effective practice in child protection and social care.

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About Nicola

Nicola is a Lecturer, Clinical Supervisor and Social Care Consultant, and has worked with children and families in community and residential settings for 24 years.

Nicola’s work has included overseeing the provision of residential and community-based services to children and families involved in child protective services.

Nicola also works intensively with foster carers to support their provision of care to children and young people. Over a five-year period Nicola studied at the Tavistock and Portman Trust NHS, London. There she completed a Professional Doctorate in Social Care and Emotional Wellbeing.

Nicola completed post graduate training in clinical supervision in 2021 at Dublin City University (DCU). She provides therapeutic support to Sexual Assault Unit Teams across Ireland in the form of professional therapeutic reflective practice spaces to frontline practitioners.

Nicola consults to senior managers in organisations nationally and internationally, and provides individual and group supervision to social workers, social care workers, forensic teams, and frontline workers at all levels in community and hospital settings.

Nicola works clinically in frontline practice with foster families.

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Transcript:

Colby: 0:00

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.

Nicola: 0:03

I know about my motivations, I’m aware I’m kind of watching out and I have the right support in place. One of the things I’ve come to understand is that you know often the intensity of the work that people do and the strength of emotion associated with that work can disrupt people’s capacity to think, and emotions can be so intense and disturbing and unbearable that me and other people that do work we develop defensive processes to deal with the emotions, and so I’m always quite careful about.

Nicola: 0:35

It’s not my job ever to go in and say get rid of these and here’s a better way. What I hope that I can offer is a safe, consistent frame in which we can make sense of the work.

Colby: 0:47

So welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a respected member of the child protection and social care community in Ireland. Before I introduce my guests, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m meeting on, the Kaurna people, and the continuing connection they, and all Aboriginal people, feel to land, waters, culture and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. My guest this episode is Dr Nicola O’Sullivan. Nicola is a lecturer, clinical supervisor and social care consultant and has worked with children and families in community and residential settings for 24 years. Nicola’s work has included overseeing the provision of residential and community-based services to children and families involved in child protective services. Nicola also works intensively with foster carers to support their delivery of care to children and young people in need.

Colby: 1:58

Over a five-year period, nicola studied at the Tavistock and Portman Trust NHS in London. There she completed a professional doctorate in social care and emotional wellbeing. Nicola also completed postgraduate training in clinical supervision in 2021 at Dublin City University. She provides therapeutic support to sexual assault teams across Ireland in the form of professional reflective practice spaces for frontline workers. Nicola consults to senior managers in organisations nationally and internationally and provides individual and group supervision to social workers, social care workers, forensic teams and frontline workers at all levels of community and hospital settings. Teams and frontline workers at all levels of community and hospital settings. Nicola works clinically in frontline practice with foster families. Nicola has a special interest in wellbeing, racism and emotional and relational health in health and social care settings. Nicola is a visiting lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, munster Technological University, cork and the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Welcome Nicola.

Nicola: 3:14

Thank you, Colby. A bit nervous after all that.

Colby: 3:20

That’s OK. Hopefully we can put you at ease once we start getting into it and talking. Now I just was going to let you know that I introduced myself as living and working and coming to this meeting on Kaurna land, and Kaurna are the local Aboriginal people of the Adelaide Plains where I live here in South Australia, and this is something that we customarily do when we meet and it is really a show of respect to the local Aboriginal people and Aboriginal people in Australia more generally, acknowledging the 40,000 to 60,000 year history of Aboriginal settlement in Australia. Thank you, so the podcast is a little bit of a mixture of kind of getting to know you a bit, better questions and then more direct questions about your work. So I guess the first question that I was interested to ask you, Nicola, and thank you very much for coming on the podcast probably should have said that a little while ago, but the very first question I wanted to ask is how did you come to be pursuing this path in your work?

Nicola: 4:45

How did you come to be pursuing this path in your work? Thank you so much for having me. First of all, it’s nice to be here. Well, I suppose it’s a long story, but the short version. I did experience trauma as a young child, both familial trauma and serious medical trauma. Unlike some of my colleagues in this field, I have chosen not to speak about it in great detail in public, because of my work mostly, but I suppose both of those experiences shaped my drive to care and pushed me towards, initially, the path of a residential care setting, childcare setting.

Nicola: 5:21

Yes, I’ve been driven since leaving secondary school without a very good education because of acute illness, to study and progress, and I think I measured myself against that, and at my most vulnerable I probably still do so. This was my unconscious driver. I wanted to be known as Nicola, the intelligent student, the hard worker. Clever Nicola instead of poor Nicola, did you hear about her, but I have to say Colby. Clever Nicola instead of poor Nicola, did you hear about her, but I have to say Colby. I wasn’t so aware of the connection between my life experience and my finding myself in a caretaking role, and so this often got in the way of me being effective in my work.

Nicola: 5:58

And it reminds me of a paper actually by Vega Roberts called the Self-Assigned Impossible Task. And it reminds me of a paper actually by Vega Roberts called the Self-Assigned Impossible Task.

Nicola: 6:05

She talks about the idea that you know me and maybe most of us are attracted to kind of working in particular settings because they offer occasions to work through kind of unresolved personal issues.

Nicola: 6:19

And I suppose if we, if we take it that that’s correct, then practitioners like me with similar internal needs find themselves in similar health care settings and I think that the needs that we bring kind of interact with the needs that the families bring and but that but there’s a problem with that and I think there was a problem with that for me.

Nicola: 6:40

You know, to understand children and families, I needed to have some empathy and to be trying to consider the young person’s experience. But if that pain I think in my case and in others perhaps closely resembles the workers own pain, so if the pain in the child closely resembles the workers own pain and conflicted past experiences, then their experiences at work may constantly threaten their capacity. And so that’s that, that was my sort of experience. So I think it was of great importance, you know, for me to have some insight into my reasons for choosing the role and setting, and for me that was a kind of a key factor in my work and one that I didn’t come about to thinking about until about 11 years into my work so, in continuing in kind of blind sort of pursuit in the health and social care field, I arrived at the Tavistock in 2012, immediately after completing a master’s in child protection that previous June, on a mission, kind of to get a PhD.

Nicola: 7:42

I wasn’t really thinking about what it might mean to travel to England to do this.

Nicola: 7:46

I didn’t think about the Tavistock, what this place came to mean to me. It was interesting because all of my learning really has involved a kind of combination of attending college and working full time. And actually I remember speaking on the phone to the course professor, the late Andrew Cooper, and he said to me you know, nicola, this is a very different type of learning, you know involve a lot of thinking and reflection. And I said thoughtlessly yeah, that’s fine with me, and I just signed up and so I began the professional doctorate journey and I suppose that was life changing journey and I suppose that was life-changing.

Nicola: 8:27

Um, I brought with me, to be honest, a lot of kind of unconscious items, you know, early, early kind of experiences. Um, I suppose I brought my role as a mother, my grief and loss as a daughter, my working in a former mother and baby home in Ireland and my lack of thinking about that and I guess I managed those hidden thoughts and anxieties but they did manifest in an overconfidence and a motivation to work hard and get out of that place as quickly as possible, without anyone really seeing me at my most vulnerable.

Nicola: 8:53

Um, yeah, but I suppose despite that, I met some very patient doctoral supervisors who who gently and very kind of tactfully, you know um, supported me to get to know that part of myself and I suppose I’m telling you all this because that kind of teaching and learning experience is quite unique and it allowed me to look at myself in many ways and to kind of get to grips with myself, um, and I would say that it has brought me safely to my current path. So I feel like a kind of a more solid, safe practitioner because of that experience. I know about my motivations, I’m aware I’m kind of watching out and I have the right support in place, um, and I think it’s so necessary when we move into this working space with other humans, um, that we, that we have those kind of pieces of ourselves somewhat intact. You know, um, but I have to say that if I knew what was going to happen in that journey in the tab of stock, I probably wouldn’t have gone okay, really yeah yeah, because I suppose it was painful.

Nicola: 10:01

It was a painful journey. I learned things that I didn’t really want to know.

Colby: 10:07

It’s interesting I have. There’s two kind of threads that I’m picking up or that I’m reflecting on as you talk about that. One is that certainly research has indicated that the helping professions do attract people disproportionately who have experienced their own early adversity growing up. The other thing that strikes me about what you’re talking about is, in this space, in the child protection and out-of-home care or more broadly, the child welfare space, there is a definite need for practitioners to be self-aware, and that process, I guess, of self-awareness, as you’ve beautifully described it, can be a painful one and one that is defended against, I guess, to the detriment of practice potentially. Yeah, and you’ve mentioned there were people that you studied under, academics that you worked with. Were there any particular professional influences that you look back on and think that they’ve really made a positive contribution to your work and the direction that you’ve taken?

Nicola: 11:37

Yeah, I mean, I think most definitely and I suppose probably my doctoral supervisors, dr Tim Dartington and Professor Andrew Cooper, and for the very reasons I spoke to you know to you about moments ago, and I suppose Andrew in particular passed in 2023. And I was a student of Andrew’s and of the professional doctorate in social care and social work and when I met him in 2012, I’d never heard of him, I’d never read any of his work and I would say I arrived from Ireland as a as a sort of a younger woman who was quite watchful, elusive and quite a complex human being, and I was very preoccupied with kind of wanting a student card, a timetable and all the other things to sort of legitimize my role and so gain some control in the environment. But I have to say that Andrew’s response was very kind, very gentle and kind of full of a type of compassion that I valued but, also found challenging.

Nicola: 12:36

I thoroughly enjoyed his writing. He wrote a beautiful paper called Hearing the Bluebirds Sing.

Nicola: 12:43

And he said that he chose to become a social worker himself as a way of continuing to try and heal his whole family and to continue his parents work of healing and sustaining communities, and for me, the idea that one would find themselves in this work at that point because of their own personal experiences, particularly in the family system, was, believe it or not, a brand new idea to me. And Andrew and Tim in particular, I, I think, stayed the pace with me and they very sort of gently um, as I said earlier sort of sort of helped me to to come to see some of my own experiences and to see, I think, what I bring with me now to my work is they saw my strategies, you know my defensive strategies that you spoke about as Ways of being creative, and they appreciated them. So often now in my work, I bring, I bring these ideas. I’ll say things to parents, as you know, like please don’t drop, please don’t lose your defenses. You need them, you know, and it’s very important that they’re intact until we have something that might offer something better or something different. So, and I think you know, it continues to be a kind of an unknown thought to many social workers that I work with today and social care workers, and this idea of what brings them to the work, their kind of drive and something that they sometimes discover in the process of work discussion groups that I facilitate with them.

Nicola: 14:09

And the other key point I think that I learned from some of this work is the idea, a kind of a deep understanding of the idea of using ourselves as a resource in the direct work with service users and what does it mean, and the idea that it’s a sort of an embodied thing, if you like, and and the need for us, I think, as practitioners, to attune to the flow of the emotional transactions between ourselves and our service users and colleagues which I think are constantly occurring kind of underneath the surface of the relationships, whether we kind of recognize them or not.

Nicola: 14:45

And that form of experiential learning has influenced me hugely and inspired my research study with child protection social workers at the time.

Nicola: 14:53

Um, I think the idea of psychoanalytic theory, um, because I was at the tavistock um helped me, I think, to understand more about interactions and relationships. I came to understand my own Irish culture, the painful history of childhood in Ireland, the chronic treatment of women, especially unmarried mothers and babies, my parents and grandparents, history and their painful experiences, and I suppose I was confronted with my own ignorance about history and so I think I bring that to to the work that really influenced me respecting history, and it’s interesting how you introduce the podcast and I suppose I have a much greater appreciation for what came before us and I didn’t quite kind of have that, you know, kind of have that you know. Currently, I would say that I’ve enjoyed thoroughly learning about supervision and having completed training in 2021 and to supplement my doctoral research and on reflective practice, and I have to say I love the writing and work of Dr Aisling McMahon, especially a beautiful paper she wrote on reflective touchstones that foster supervisor humility. I love this idea and I think something else you know in thinking about this is that I’ve that, I have to say, is my journey in learning about racism and anti-racist practices and anti-racist supervision practices, about racism and anti-racist practices and anti-racist supervision practices, and that that kind of learning has been influenced by a lot of people, but especially Dr Amina Adan, ngozi Cadmus and others, and I feel like I’m on a steep learning journey about my whiteness and my privilege and my own racism, and and I’d say that’s a project that’s kind of ongoing and it’s deeply challenging but it’s necessary. I love Ngozi’s TED talk and her sharing of information on LinkedIn. I think it’s super important for us white professionals. We have a responsibility to consider it and to think about it in our own position in society. So that’s ongoing and then kind of finally, I suppose, suppose, without breaking the confidence of you know one or two of the foster families I work with. I work with a relative foster family at the moment and, to be honest, I really I very much appreciate their honesty with me. You know they tell me what I do, what I say. That really bothers them. They tell me when I get it wrong and I’m really challenged to notice the ways that I what I say isn’t helpful and also the power, kind of, in my words.

Nicola: 17:27

So a lot I suppose you know there’s a lot that’s influenced me kind of historically and very present, you know, in the present day.

Colby: 17:37

I remember, as I was listening to you speak, I remember an idea that I had very early in my career and which ran counter to my professional training as a clinical psychologist, and the first place I chose to articulate that idea was at a job interview with our local child protection service, and I can’t remember the question, but the answer that I gave was one about. I think the question must have been about managing the emotional load of the work or something similar to the work that we do. So all of my training was about being objective and having a professional distance from our client, and I didn’t find that to be helpful in the least. That idea Well, not particularly helpful. I, very early on, cottoned on that. It was our own reaction, our own emotional reaction to our clients was a significant resource and it’s actually proven to be a massive resource because in my work it’s helped me to be able to express in my words, in my ideas, in my writing, a deep understanding and empathy of the children and young people and adult stakeholders in their life. And I also the other thing that when you were talking about your university supervisors and I don’t want to go too much into it, but I thought it reminded me of the therapeutic relationship, at least as I see it, which is one of a gradual exposure to connection contained in a sensitive, responsive and understanding growing environment.

Colby: 20:06

And um, I think you may well have seen the podcast that I did uh with john whitwell a couple of weeks ago, where he talks about um winnicott’s idea of the growing environment. Well, he, john, was talking about the growing environment. I have a very similar metaphor that I use, but talking about Winnicott’s ideas that the growth is in the child. It just needs and you could extend that to the growth is in the person. They just need the right environment and that, in a sense, is a large part of our job.

Nicola: 20:44

Yeah, I mean, that certainly rings true for me. That’s how it felt. You know, it felt containing, it felt like a holding environment.

Colby: 20:53

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I read your paper a week ago that I’d asked you to send through to me a little while ago when it came out. It was very interesting and I could see, obviously, the psychoanalytic influences in your work. And in your paper you refer to psychodynamic systems theory, which was new to me for some reason. I hadn’t seen it expressed like that. But I wonder if you would mind, at least for my own edification, if not for others who may listen to this podcast explaining in your words what psychodynamic systems theory is, and I’m hoping I’ve got that the right way around.

Nicola: 21:44

Yeah, systems psychodynamic theory, yeah, yeah, um, yeah, I mean I suppose it’s not the only model that influences my work.

Nicola: 21:54

So just to say that, and I think that, um, I find myself kind of constantly moving between like up close, being very close to people and their experiences, and so so, in that way, I’m very interested in the attachment literature, you know, or your area of expertise, and I think that I’ve always been interested in stories.

Nicola: 22:17

So I love the story of John Bowlby and I love what drove his motivation, you know what drove him to write about separation, and I think that kind of speaks to my love and very deep interested in people’s experiences. And I think that human stories are vital in imparting key clinical messages about human development across the lifespan. But I also see that human stories help us to understand in a broader and deeper way the institutional spaces and the practices within them. So, um, so I’m interested in the up close and personal and here’s where I think attachment theory is helpful, of course. But I also find myself moving out again more broadly and connecting um with the kind of systems and society in which we work and live, and so that sparks my interest in systems psychodynamic theory.

Colby: 23:06

It’s an.

Nicola: 23:07

It’s an interdisciplinary field that kind of looks at that integrates three disciplines the practice of psychoanalysis, the theories and methods of group relations, so the ideas of group, group work, groups, and open systems perspective, so the idea of the, the unit as a system.

Nicola: 23:24

And I think for me me it provides a way of thinking about kind of the energizing or motivating forces resulting from the kind of interconnection between various groups and subunits of a social system. And so practically I think I’m interested in connections and interactions and also what happens beneath the surface, especially what drives people and what are the parts of the organization that function to block connection. And I think that psychodynamic theories can be very useful in helping us to understand organizational processes. I think they can be helpful in understanding, helping us to understand the roles people take up and the tasks associated with those roles. So system psychodynamic offers us quite a lot to kind of hook into and sort of helps us to sort of unpack things.

Nicola: 24:12

And, um, it brings together for me I mean maybe other people who are, who are much more, um, you know, learned on system psychodynamic theory will have other things to say but for me I think it brings together the person, the organization, the group, us as group cute group animals if you like and the roles we take and the tasks associated with those roles. And I think we often use psychoanalytic theory in ordinary health and social care practice. You know, for example, we often refer to parallel process, transitional objects, transference and counter transference, projection, and I’d like to think that I work hard to bring these ideas kind of out of the clouds, so to speak.

Colby: 24:52

You know, try and helpfully track processes in the work between workers and between workers and families and workers and kind of organizations yeah, it’s interesting listening to you to talk about it because it’s it’s my thought really goes to the relationship between psychodynamic process and trauma-informed practice, the process of really looking into people’s deeper motivations or their inner world and how that is influencing or impacting the way in which they approach life and relationships. So, yeah, there’s very much an alignment between the practice of practising from a psychodynamic point of view and I have a saying about trauma-informed practice which is goes along the lines that it’s it’s less about developing strategies to address behaviors of concern and more about understanding and responding to the reasons for those behaviors, and so I think there’s very much that alignment between the two.

Nicola: 26:18

I think as well, though, as I’m thinking.

Nicola: 26:21

You know, what I feel is important to say, too, is I feel kind of deeply aware and sort of deeply motivated to not to be careful about how we use these kind of theories, and you know, I think about my own experience and had Andrew and Tim sort of Sort of pounced on me with all of these theories and sort of you know showed, showed me my defenses much too quickly and ran off, you know. And so I do think about the pace of this stuff, the gentleness and the respect with how we use the information that we have. And actually, you know, I feel a bit nervous sometimes about trauma-informed work that are we making sure that as practitioners we have appropriate supervision and actually paying as much attention to ourselves and our own processes as we are to the people that we work with? And I think for me.

Colby: 27:27

I’m always sort of keeping an eye on that. If you like, use the term dose and keep that concept very much alive in my mind, because the dose needs to be small and gradual and it needs to be contained within a, within a working relationship. So it was a, it was going to be a question without notice, but you but you’ve partly answered it because, as you were talking, I was thinking about the ethics of approaching this work and, in a sense, how do you describe the work to an organisation that would engage you, so that they are forewarned in a way or aware of what the work would look like?

Nicola: 28:27

Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the kind of work that’s happening.

Nicola: 28:32

I think I’m always thinking about being careful and being steady and I love, I love what you said about the doses in the right amount and in a contained environment with the relationship. I just love that and it speaks to me and one of the things I’ve come to understand is that you know. I’ve come to understand is that you know, um, often the intensity of the work that people do and the strength of emotion associated with that work can disrupt people’s capacity to think, and emotions can be so intense and disturbing and unbearable that me and other people that do work and we develop defensive processes to deal with the emotions. And so I’m always quite careful about.

Nicola: 29:15

It’s not my job ever to go in and say get rid of these and here’s a better way. I think what I hope that I can offer is a safe, consistent frame in which we can make sense of the work, and I do that with the support of my own supervisors, who are kind of keeping an eye on my blind spots and sort of watching my pace with the work. I think that’s very um important. I think the defensive processes in practice serve to protect workers and sometimes foster carers and children themselves. Um, and I think, from the workers point of view, if they did not have these defenses, they couldn’t endure the work. But the absence of understanding them and the need to kind of lower them when appropriate can disrupt practice.

Nicola: 30:02

And I suppose that’s what I’m interested in kind of thinking about very gently and very carefully, of course in the context of a relationship, and I think it’s very important to think as well that, um, you know, some people just don’t want to reflect, some people don’t want to do it and some people are not ready to do that. And I have to say, if I had gone to the tavistock five or six years earlier, I would be one of those people you know, and so I think, when we’re ready, sometimes we come to that and sometimes we don’t. And yeah, I’ll stop there.

Colby: 30:34

It’s such an interesting field and I think that self-awareness again we come back to the idea of self-awareness that we were talking about a little bit earlier and it’s not, as you say and I really like this it’s not about getting rid of your defences, it’s just being aware of them, and I probably have approached my career on a slightly different tack, but very much, I mean, it was memorable. Let me just say I didn’t get the job, by the way, but I think there are other factors at play there. But I’ve always found, as I said earlier, our own experience as being a very rich source of understanding of others. And, as you say, the work is difficult, the work is confronting.

Colby: 31:45

A lot of people go into child protection work with the intent, the idea and the intent that they’re going to help families and the intent that they’re going to help families and so what workers are required to do in terms of ensuring safety of children, it kind of well, it can run counter to the very reasons that they get involved. And you’re probably aware and this is where this you know very much there’s a lot of attention, at least here, being given to kind of moral fatigue, the idea of moral fatigue, the idea of working in an area and performing in a way that runs counter to your own values and those reasons why you entered the work. And yeah, you would need your defences, definitely in those circumstances. But what we don’t want is a situation where people stop thinking about what they’re doing Exactly and stop thinking about their own place in that dynamic.

Nicola: 32:56

Yeah, and I guess I think that’s where the use of some theory and also the use of kind of a good supervision or reflective practice model can help, if and when it can be taken up. And yeah, yeah.

Colby: 33:12

Yeah, so I guess. Just I don’t want to ask a question that kind of goes over some territory that we’ve already gone over, but are there any further comments that you would make about how you see reflective supervision practice, including perhaps from a range of theoretical stances, but particularly from the psychoanalytic systems one, are there any further comments that you would make about how that benefits people working in this space and ultimately the clients who they’re delivering a service to?

Nicola: 34:00

Yeah, I mean I think it’s important to say, first of all, you know that getting in touch with our emotional experiences at work and also having a sense of what’s just happened in a practice encounter, it does require capacity to kind of and stamina, and and it does require us to get in touch with and kind of stay in touch with some very difficult thoughts and emotions.

Nicola: 34:21

And in a paper that I wrote I’m not sure if this is the one you read, but with some social care workers I talk about this in much more detail. But essentially what I kind of suggest is that in moments of great distress, including survival and the bereavement of the kind that we’ve written about in this paper, in that paper it’s very hard to connect with experience, sense of it, and to trust another with that experience. And I think the workers capacity to engage with their own emotional experience is complicated by what Bion refers to as this idea of attacks on linking, and this is kind of the process that we use to destroy thoughts, thoughts and feelings associated with frightening experiences, and it incurs, it sort of usually occurs when the experience kind of severs the capacity of us to think about them and and that often happens with the death of a baby.

Colby: 35:13

Hmm.

Nicola: 35:14

And in that paper I speak about how, creating a space to think and to bring the work in written form and to sort of present the work to a gentle and welcoming and kind group where the focus is not on a solution but on deepening and expanding the practice experience. I think that can offer something Very therapeutic and safe. Yeah, and I think what I have found is that it can lead to a deeper understanding and meaning around the work.

Colby: 35:49

Yeah, yeah, it’s all right. I mean, I’m of uh, constructs or concepts that are um, that are floated around, I guess in the in the childhood trauma and and child and family welfare space, but one of them, um, is the idea of modelling the model, and I’ve been talking about it for a long time. I’m not sure if it’s in the first edition of my attachment book or not, but I’ve always been very much drawn to ensuring that my practice and the way in which I interact with people is very much aligned with how I want those people to then, in turn, interact with other people. So if we want people to interact with others with whom they’re working in a therapeutic way and establish a therapeutic alliance with them, in some senses the supervision arrangement that we have with them, or the supervisory relationship, is going to overlap with a therapeutic process, perhaps significantly.

Nicola: 37:12

Yeah, I think, to have a safe kind of space that’s kind and gently challenging um practitioner can bring their work and make sense of that work is priceless and and I I feel that it’s directly connected to the child’s and family’s experience, exactly exactly as you say.

Nicola: 37:29

Um, yeah, it’s very important, especially, I think right now I think we live in a left dominated brain, sort of a left.

Nicola: 37:39

Yeah, it’s very important, especially, I think Right now I think we live in a left dominated brain, sort of left brain dominated society where it’s all about tasks and procedures and processes and where there’s more opportunity to distance ourselves from children and families than ever before and we’re at risk of acting and staying out of touch with reality by discounting the reality of other people’s experiences and of our own experiences. And I think that the result of that is that the meaning of the work progressively becomes less clear and we find it very difficult to find reparative opportunities. And it’s these opportunities that fill our cup, that make us feel a bit better about the work and make us feel a bit better about ourselves in the work. So supervision and kind of safe reflective practice um is very important there and and good supervision in wilfred beyond’s terms and you’ve mentioned it, you mentioned earlier, mentioned it, you know, when we started is psychologically containing and and provide practitioners kind of solid support.

Colby: 38:36

Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? When I think back over the supervision experiences I’ve had over the years, and especially in psychology in Australia I know it’s different in the UK and in Europe really moves quite significantly away from psychoanalytic thinking into other areas Now. So, nicola, I was wondering this is kind of bringing together a few questions and ones that I’ve given you notice of and perhaps not given you notice of, but bringing the threads together. I’m wondering if you were invited by an organisation to come in and offer or deliver supervision to staff, when you’re meeting with the individuals who are seeking to engage you, what would you say to them is, uh, the supervision approach you would take or recommend? What would it look like?

Nicola: 39:53

um, so it depends on the organization, of course, that goes without saying. Um, it depends on the context and the role and the task associated with with the job. But you know my sense. What I think I’d find myself saying is that supervision should be regular. It should occur in a safe space, whether it be online or in person. I believe it should happen with the supervisor has had some supervision training. I think it should include attention to the workers’ professional development, their personal experience and their working role and associated task. What I would say to workers I think this is really critical is that when we are at work, especially in the human services, we bring all that we are to that work.

Nicola: 40:36

And it’s to say that we leave our personal lives at the door and much research shows us that this just doesn’t happen, especially in the spaces when we’re working with trauma and we’re meeting people with similar, who look similarly to our own loved ones, who act similarly to our own loved ones children, nieces, nephews, parents, partners. But in supervision spaces, we are interested in the intersection between the work itself, your personal self and your professional role. Often supervisees will say to me you know, is this therapy? And here’s where a good supervision model is very important. And the supervisor’s own supervision, supervision, consultation is really important.

Nicola: 41:18

We have to keep our eye where it should be. We can’t be going off track and the model keeps us safe, safe and secure in that space. We are interested in the intersection between the personal and the professional and the work itself, and therapy for those of us who’ve had therapy focuses on us as a person, on our personal experience. Yes, of course the work might come into that, but you see, the main focus is on our own personal kind of emotional, psychological journey the supervisor if, of course, the personal experience often comes into the space, but the supervisor’s job is to focus on how and why it’s connected to the work.

Nicola: 41:59

And that’s where the supervision model is is really critical and supervision should be underpinned by a model that’s known very explicitly by the supervisor and the supervisee. Of course I personally use the seven eyes seven eye model by Peter Hawkins and I find that really helpful because it also places an eye on the context in which the supervision takes place. So you can see how this connects with my like for the system psychodynamic thinking. Of course I bring my own theories and influences, but the model keeps the supervision focused and really on track, in my view.

Colby: 42:41

It’s very interesting and I think what it really reinforces is that there is so much more to supervision than people generally perhaps think or expect supervision to be Listening to you. I think it’s very important, before you accept or get involved in supervision processes or a role sorry that there is preparatory work and ensuring that everyone understands their roles and what’s going to happen. And, interestingly, I’ve had said to me at the end of supervision sessions that that was very therapeutic, yeah, that that was very therapeutic, yeah. And when I’ve heard that said, I guess I have thought isn’t that interesting, that’s very interesting that that’s the person’s reaction to it, yeah, I think therapeutic process. So imbues my approach that even when I’m delivering supervision or even when I’m training, I guess there is that intent to hold people collectively in a safe and containing space and allowing that allows, in which they feel safe to connect and reflect.

Nicola: 44:26

And I I mean people pick that up, though. I mean I really like that and like people know that, don’t they? So when they’re saying you know that felt really therapeutic, I wonder I don’t they. So when they’re saying you know that felt really therapeutic, I wonder, I don’t know. But I wonder, is it that they’re saying I feel connected to, I feel safe, I feel heard, I feel seen and like that’s such a gift, isn’t it? You know, and one of the things that supervisees say in supervision, research is, of course, you. This will be familiar to us the the relationship matters, you know, that’s right. The alliance with the supervisor, that really matters.

Colby: 45:03

Yeah, so drawing together some more threads. One of the things that I notice in child protection is the we’ve talked about defences. In psychology, and particularly in psychologists who work with anxiety, we would refer to it as avoidance. There’s a lot of avoidance and in fact, there’s a lot of sanctioned avoidance avoidance so there are the safety actions and the safety behaviours that are engaged in.

Colby: 45:46

The child protection area is often driven by avoidance and I think, as clinical psychologists as I am, and in other professions as well, one of the psychology 101 things that we should know is that avoidance only makes people more anxious. Is that avoidance only makes people more anxious? And I reflect that back with you know, when people stop thinking about the work that they do because of the impact perhaps that it’s having on them, then they only become more anxious about the way that they do. If you subscribe to the theory, which has been well known for a very long time, that avoidance only compounds anxiety and that, as it is in the therapeutic relationship, but in the supervisory relationship, in the work that we do, it’s only through gently approaching the personal experience of the work, much the same way as how the most effective way of dealing with phobias. You don’t overcome phobias by avoiding them. You overcome them by I don’t know phobias by avoiding them, you overcome them by.

Nicola: 47:17

I don’t know. I’m afraid of spiders.

Colby: 47:21

So I would say when people say, well, what about spiders?

Colby: 47:24

And I would say, well, you’ll always be scared of spiders, but you can make the problem with a phobia the different. And look, I come from a country where everything is trying to kill you, remember, we’re not like we haven’t had some pat here. Um, we, you know, even in my garden now there is likely to be a brown snake, the the second most deadly snake in the world out there. The good news is they’re perhaps more scared of us than we are of them, although you know, some people find that hard to believe, I, whenever I see them, uh, they’re always heading away from me these days, um, but any, but yeah, so um.

Nicola: 48:09

I mean, one of the things I was just going to pick up on what you said there in terms of anxiety is, I think, one of the tasks for us, and especially now, I think, more than ever, anxiety, as I think one of the tasks for us, and especially now, I think, more than ever, is to understand the source of the anxiety. I think traditionally we we would often think about the source of the anxiety as being about being so close to child abuse and that we would call that kind of primary anxiety. We, you know, it’s just, it’s the anxiety about to do with the kind of task that we have A gorgeous paper written by, based on a study by Isabel Menzies back in the 1960s. She talks about the kind of primary anxiety associated with the task of nurses. I think now we have other forms of anxiety in, especially, social work and social care practice, and I think we it’s anxiety to do with being inspected. I do think we need to be inspected.

Colby: 48:56

Don’t get me wrong, but I think we it’s anxiety to do with being inspected.

Nicola: 48:57

I do think we need to be inspected, don’t get me wrong, but I think we have tipped. The balance is tipped and my concern is that we have workers who are more worried about if they’re inspected than worried about the family, and that kind of secondary anxiety is a should be a real concern for us, because what we see is that that is now organizing the behavior of the worker, and then the other piece that we have to be concerned about is the scapegoating Workers are very worried about. If something happens, in my case it’s going to be in the media. I am going to be persecuted and I’m going to be scapegoated, and we have lots of evidence of that. So for me, one of the questions would be where’s the source of the anxiety coming from? And for a lot of us it’s coming from above and below, and I think it’s a desperate place for them to be in. Often, um but that.

Nicola: 49:47

But that doesn’t mean that they’re not good at their job and also, for some of you know, for many of them, they enjoy it yeah, yeah, anxiety is um such a I.

Colby: 49:59

I think of anxiety as something that is potentially limiting and, to the extent that people are limiting, about the way in which we experience and approach life, relationships and roles. So, yeah, that anxiety that you refer to of being scapegoated is absolutely prevalent here in my local jurisdiction. Just from our conversation, I would anticipate it would be prevalent in many, if not most. But I would also I’d say one other thing just in a final point from my end about anxiety, which is that, like defences, anxiety is not something that we should be getting rid of. Everyone experiences anxiety. Anxiety can be quite a helpful emotion. As I say to my client group, it stops us from doing dumb things but put us at risk. So it’s a normal emotion. It’s a natural emotion, but when it’s a problem is when it impacts adversely on the way in which we would naturally, helpfully and as part of a good life approach. Yeah, life and relationships and roles. Yeah, life and relationships and roles. And if I was too anxious, of snakes, my garden would be a jungle and there would be more snakes

Colby: 51:52

living there, true. So we’ve had a lovely chat from my perspective and hopefully from yours too, nicola. But a couple of just final questions that I meld together.

Colby: 52:11

One of the reasons why I’m doing this podcast and selecting the people that I am to be on it is to kind of capture the wisdom of people who’ve been working in this space for decades often, and because I particularly reflect on new practitioners starting out in the field and their experience of the work, and also the client group and particularly the children and young people experience of them, the workers. So I’m wondering if there was any particular things or wisdom that you wish you knew and you’ve kind of touched on this a little bit earlier in the podcast If there is any advice that you would give to your younger self or any wisdom that you would give to your younger self and melding that into another question and that you would probably give to other professionals starting out in in this field I think I would say to myself, my younger self, you know to go, go gently, you know, try, try not to feel so much shame about your own history and find people who are wise and kind and open and curious and uncertain.

Nicola: 53:39

I find people who are generous with their and open and curious and uncertain. Find people who are generous with their own vulnerability, who will be able to meet you gently and carefully. And find those people, and I think I would also say to my younger self always be generous in your work, take risks, believe in your own sense of things and make use of that, your own internal sense of things, and make use of that. Um, for new practitioners, I think I would say find generous practitioners who are experienced and kind say beware of using professional social media platforms too much.Nicola: 54:12

They can potentially make you feel ill-equipped and we lose a sense of ourselves often when we scroll too much on these sites. And I would say privilege learning from experience over knowledge about something. And I would also say find a good supervisor. Ask them about their influences, like you’ve asked me this evening, and check what makes them tick. And don’t forget you can always change a supervisor, and actually having a supervisor for years and years might feel comfortable, but it might not necessarily be good so it’s good to to shift, shift about and change do you think that it’s not?

Colby: 54:54

it’s nice to be to have a supervisor who challenges us a bit.

Nicola: 55:01

Absolutely, absolutely, and I think it’s the role of a supervisor. Yeah, I think it shows interest.

Colby: 55:08

And as a therapist I think as well. Yeah, it shows interest In my own work with our children and young people who are deeply hurt in relationship. I see my role as one of challenging them a bit by gradually, gently exposing them to relational connection. That’s where growth comes, not just, I guess, in the containing environment, but the containing environment supports growth, but a little bit of challenging in that environment does as well. It’s like the fertil fertilizer, I guess.

Nicola: 56:02

Definitely. I mean, I would say, you know, having spoken about Andrew and you know said very nice things I would say the other feeling that I had a lot of the time was this deep sense of discomfort at what he was trying to get me to kind of see, yeah, and it’s one of the things I value most lovely.Colby: 56:23

So in my therapeutic work I try not to ask a lot of questions, but particularly at the very beginning of my work where I may ask a few more questions, or if there is a an event, something that’s happened that I do need to ask a few questions about, I tend to be more reflective and just make observations of what I’m seeing, the child experiencing. But when I do ask what feels like a lot of questions to me, and perhaps to them as well, I always say well, I’ve asked you a lot of questions. Do you want to ask me a question? What question? They always ask me how old I am. They often ask me how old I am.

Colby: 57:12

I was giving my age in months until someone worked it out. Now I do it in dog and cat years, which leads to quite a bit of laughter and working out of their age. But this is particularly so. This is with adults as well. When I’m asking them a lot of questions, I ask them if they’ve got any questions for me. So, have you got any questions for me? Or, time being, as it is perhaps something that you’d like to ask me before we finish off.

Nicola: 57:48

Yeah, well, I thought about this. I mean, I have a good few questions to ask you, so maybe we could reverse sometime and I could be interviewing you. Yeah, I think I would like to know what are your influences, your major influences, but I’d also really like to know so I don’t know if you can answer them both, but I’d also really like to know you know you’ve been in this field for a long time what would you say sustains you?

Colby: 58:21

what would you say sustains you? Yeah, that’s a very. I think the relief of suffering is the sustaining motivation. What sustains me in my capacity to continue with the work is my family, my wife and my children, which is not to say that I find the work easy. I don’t, and in many respects, the longer you work in the field or in certain respects, the harder it becomes, the more you know what you don’t know. So I meet regularly with Patrick Tomlinson I don’t know if you know him, you probably do. He’s very active on LinkedIn, which is where I made the connection with you and I also, I think, this podcast, this podcast has really become my way of meeting and experiencing connection with people who have similarly worked in the space for a long time and feeling shared experience, acknowledging the shared experiences that we had.

Colby: 59:56

So I think one of the things that I say to my client group is that not all problems can be fixed, but if they can’t be fixed, it is really important that they’re understood and that you feel understood in relation to it. So I think, again, it’s the personal and professional relationships that I have that sustain me and as I’ve been 30 years working in this space 35 if you include the research that I was doing before that. Yeah, more than ever, I’ve felt the need for connection with like-minded and like-experienced individuals. In terms of my major influences, probably the major influence would be Bulby and his work and related people, and something that you’ve touched on, which is my experience of the work, has been my greatest influence. As I said, it was very early in my career in answering a particular question that I was very conscious and very conscious thereafter of paying close attention to the person in front of me and also my reaction to that person. So I agree, I think experience is our greatest teacher and greatest influence.

Colby: 1:01:43

Thank you, thanks for that it was a long one.

Nicola: 1:01:51

No, I really like what you said about you know, we may not be able to solve this problem, but if we can understand it, if that person can feel understood, it’s so helpful, know?

Colby: 1:02:02

yeah, I love the way you phrase that, so thanks, yeah it’s one I trot out to children who don’t want to go to school most regularly.

Colby: 1:02:14

Yeah, we understand that you don’t like school, but you have to go to school Not said as bluntly as that. But yeah, that is an example of something that just comes up all the time with children is that, yeah, they often don’t want to go to school, but there is a legal requirement in Australia, and I guess in other parts of the world as well, that their parents are required to make them go to school. So, anyway, look, thank you very much, nicola, for agreeing to come on. I’m hoping that that was as positive and enjoyable an experience as it was for me speaking to you, and I’m really pleased to have made the connection in person, after messages backwards and forwards and comments on LinkedIn posts and the like. So, yeah, thank you again and yes, if you ever want to do a reciprocal interview, I’d be happy to do it, but I’m a very wordy person, so you might need to leave a little bit longer.

Nicola: 1:03:29

Thank you so much for having me and thank you for your interest and your attention to my work. That’s just such a gift. So thanks, thanks.

Therapeutic Culture: Building Healing Environments for Traumatized Youth, with John Whitwell

Creating Therapeutic Environments for Traumatized Children: Lessons from the Cotswold Community and Beyond

The journey towards healing for children who have experienced significant trauma requires more than just care – it demands thoughtfully designed therapeutic environments that understand the unique needs of emotionally unintegrated young people. In a revealing conversation on the Secure Start podcast, former Cotswold Community principal and therapeutic foster care pioneer John Whitwell shares invaluable insights from his decades of experience creating such environments.

The transformation of the Cotswold Community from a punitive approved school (similar to a juvenile detention facility) to a pioneering therapeutic community offers powerful lessons for today’s residential care and foster care providers. This radical shift in the 1960s, led by Richard Balburnie with consultation from child psychotherapist Barbara Docker-Drysdale, required dismantling entrenched systems of control and punishment while building a new culture focused on understanding rather than managing behaviour. As Whitwell explains, “It probably took about three or four years before a therapeutic culture was really established.” This timeframe provides a realistic perspective for contemporary organisations undertaking similar transformative journeys – meaningful cultural change requires sustained commitment and doesn’t happen overnight.

Central to the success of the Cotswold Community was the establishment of a clear primary task: helping emotionally unintegrated children. These children, though physically older, functioned emotionally like much younger children with little capacity to manage their behaviour and profound difficulties communicating their needs appropriately. The primary task provided a touchstone against which all decisions could be measured, from maintenance responses to property damage to how drivers interacted with children during transitions. This clarity of purpose ensured everyone in the organisation, regardless of role, understood their part in the therapeutic process.

Perhaps most striking in Whitwell’s reflections is his emphasis on understanding behaviour as communication. When children acted out, Barbara Docker-Drysdale encouraged staff to look beyond the behaviour to find the communication breakdown that preceded it. This approach, revolutionary at the time, has now become central to trauma-informed practice in out-of-home care. Equally important was Docker-Drysdale’s gift for symbolic communication through play, helping staff connect with children’s inner worlds before acting out behaviours emerged. This dual focus on communication – both understanding what behaviour communicates and developing alternative communication channels – remains fundamental to therapeutic work with traumatized children.

The integration of consultants into the daily functioning of the Cotswold Community underscores another crucial element of successful therapeutic environments. External consultants from various disciplines (child psychotherapy, organisational development, education, psychiatry) provided regular, frequent consultation to staff teams. This consistent outside perspective helped staff maintain a therapeutic stance when facing challenging behaviours that might otherwise have overwhelmed them. The consultancy model created spaces for reflection rather than reaction – a principle Whitwell later brought to therapeutic foster care at the Integrated Services Program (ISP).

Whitwell’s gardening metaphor beautifully captures his philosophy of therapeutic care: “Part of what we’re doing is emotional gardeners. We’re trying to create conditions to enable these plants, these children, to grow.” This perspective recognizes that the potential for growth exists within each child; the adult’s role is to create the conditions that allow that growth to emerge naturally. This stands in contrast to approaches that focus primarily on outcomes, which Whitwell likens to “showing a packet of seeds with pretty flowers a picture of what they need to become” rather than attending to the soil, light, and water they need to flourish.

For those working in out-of-home care today, Whitwell’s experiences across both residential and foster care settings offer timeless wisdom about creating therapeutic environments. The elements remain the same: clarity of purpose, understanding behaviour as communication, integration of consultancy and reflection, ongoing training and development, and an unwavering belief in each child’s inherent capacity for growth. By attending to these foundations, we create the conditions where healing becomes possible, regardless of the specific setting where care is provided.

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About John

John was formerly a UKCP registered Psychotherapist and a full member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation (BPF). John was also the Chair of Trustees of the Gloucestershire Counselling Service and Trustee of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the Mulberry Bush Organisation. Between 1985 and 1999 John was the Principal of the Cotswold Community, a pioneering therapeutic community for emotionally unintegrated boys. Thereafter, between 1999 and 2014 John was the Managing Director of Integrated Services Programme (ISP), the first therapeutic foster care programme in the UK.

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Patricia Sheridan

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Richard Rollinson

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Transcript

Colby 00:01

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Secure Start Podcast.

John 00:06

And I think it probably took about three or four years before a therapeutic culture was really established. Their unintegrated personalities meant they needed a very integrated environment to hold them, contain them, to manage them. I often use gardening as an example that part of what we’re doing is emotional gardeners, that we’re trying to create conditions to enable these plants to grow, these children to grow. The conditions that we create are vitally important. Once we’ve got those conditions right, growth will occur. Winnicott actually described that the growth inside a bulb. I mean the growth is there within the bulb. You’re creating conditions for that growth to occur and I feel that’s very crucial in creating therapeutic organizations that we have to realize that the growth potential is there within the person and our job is to create the conditions for that.

Colby 01:07

Welcome everyone to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a highly respected former leader in residential and therapeutic foster care in the UK. I say former because he is now retired and has been for the past 10 years. Nevertheless, I could not pass up this opportunity to talk with him and anticipate that listeners will enjoy our conversation too. Before I introduce my guest, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m meeting on, the Kaurna people, and the continuing connection that they and other Aboriginal people feel to land, waters, culture and community, but also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging.

My guest this episode is John Whitwell. Now, john was formerly a UKCP registered psychotherapist and a full member of the British Psychotherapy Foundation. John was also the chair of trustees of the Gloucestershire Counselling Service and trustee of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust and the Mulberry Bush Organisations. Between 1985 and 1999, john was the principal of the Cotswold community, a pioneering therapeutic community for emotionally unintegrated boys Integrated Boys. Thereafter, between 1999 and 2014, john was the Managing Director of Integrated Services Program, the first therapeutic foster care program in the UK. I’m very much interested to hear John’s views from working across these different types of out-of-home care. I hope you will enjoy our conversation too, so welcome John.

John 03:08

Pleased to be here and having a chance to talk with you.

Colby 03:12

And just because you are from the UK and we’ll hopefully have people listening from other parts of the world, that little intro that I gave about the Kaurna people and the local Aboriginal people is something that is more and more characteristically being done in Australia at the beginning of meetings. It’s a sign of respect and acknowledgement for the long history of Aboriginal peoples’ ownership of Australia prior to white settlement. So, john, I really enjoyed catching up with you a couple of weeks ago and getting a bit of a sense of what our conversation would look like. I really want to start, because our audience, of course, didn’t have the benefit of being part of that conversation.

John 04:13

Can we just start with the Cotswold community and perhaps if you could give me a brief description of the community and your role there over time, Sure Well, the Cotswold community was an unusual place by UK standards in the fact that it was based on a 350-acre farm and the reason it was there was that it was an approved school from 1942 till 1967. And approved schools were basically like junior borstels or young offenders institutions. The boys were sent to the approved school by the courts for offenses that they’d committed and they actually had a had a term of um, I think it was probably up to two years, and they could earn their way out earlier, very similar to the prison system, but for good behaviour. But the approved school system in the UK was coming into disrepute and more and more research was showing that, far from rehabilitating young offenders, they were actually leaving approved schools and having a higher rate of reconviction than they were before going. And then there were various scandals which hit approved schools as well, which hit the headlines of abuse in approved schools. So the writing was on the wall for their future.

And it was at that time that the organisation that was running the approved school it was a charity called the Rain Foundation decided, when the headship became vacant, to really go for a very radical change, a very brave change really and a pioneering change, and they were supported by the government the British government in doing that, because the British government were already working on abolishing the approved school system and creating something else. So they were interested in this change taking place at the Cotswold school to see, to give them some ideas about how things could change nationally. The crucial thing in that process was appointing Richard Balburnie as the principal, because he was very, very clear what he wanted to create and he needed to be sure that the Rain Foundation was going to back him 100% in that, and also the government as well. And it was needed because I think everybody knows that if you change an institution radically, you’re going to have a tough time. And he didn’t have the luxury of closing the place down and reopening with new staff and new children. I mean, basically he had to bring about change on the hoof with whoever was there, and that’s a really hard thing to do. And it was very graphically described in the book by David Wills called Spare the Child, which came out in the early 1970s a Penguin paperback. So it was actually very available in just about every bookshop in the country and and very readable too.

Um, I think, I think that’s one of the crucial things I’d say about um, therapeutic communities and therapeutic organizations is that they need to have good leadership with a good understanding of the task. And, sadly, one of the things that I’m going off on a bit of a tangent here, but one of the things that I saw happen in the 80s and 90s in the UK that organizations were worried about the kind of financial situation so they started to appoint more business people in leadership roles and that often proved to be fatal because, with all the best women in the world, those people didn’t fully appreciate the fine balance that there is in running a therapeutic organization and how quickly it can go wrong. So, coming back to the Cotswold school, so Richard Bell Burney, um, overnight abolished all the things that had been keeping the thing ticking over previously, like corporal punishment just stopped. And these things don’t seem like big deals now because we don’t have them, but at the time it was a very big deal and the staff were not in favour. In favour, the staff were afraid that if someone abolished all the kind of punishments in the place which was, in their view, keeping things kind of steady, it was going to be chaos. And actually it was chaos for a while because the staff weren’t behind the changes and most of the young people, the boys who were here then took it as weakness and spent an awful lot of time running around and on roofs and so on.

So it required a lot of support from the organisations involved, particularly the charity and the government, not to pull the plug on this when they saw things going a bit awry and realised that this was something you had to go through, and I suppose it. I’d rather likened it to what happened really with the uh collapse of the sort of berlin wall and the collapse of sort of communist regimes in europe, that everybody initially thought this was fantastic and then chaos ensued and then people started to want to go back to the way things were before, because at least it was the devil. They knew. Yeah, and that was one of the processes and one of the difficulties in the change that took place at the Cotswold School. But Richard Balboni was was very clear in the direction he wanted to take things and I think it probably took about three or four years before the therapeutic culture was really established.

It involved bringing people in. He had to sort of sift out through the staff that were there, those that were going to be positive about the change he wanted to make. It was also crucial for him to bring in Barbara Docker Drysdale as the consultant child psychotherapist, and she was already well established and well known in the uk through her work in starting and running with us and the mulberry bush school, which, I’m pleased to say, is still going very strongly and uh and and he’s doing great things one of the very few places that probably almost the only one, that survived from the sort of 1940s and 50s and has continued and managed to adapt and change and and still keep its its primary task. Incredible it is. It’s quite, really very remarkable.

Um, but barbara, dr drysdale and richard balboni had worked together before and and so he knew that she was going to be very much on board with what he was wanting to do. And, of course, her understanding, through her own work as a child psychotherapist and a cooperation with Donald Winnicott, meant that she was able to bring in the philosophy and the practice and the understanding of of working with emotionally unintegrated children. And these are children who are, have got no very little capacity to manage their own behaviour, are very chaotic Inside. They’re really very small children indeed, even though they might be 11, 12, 13 years of age and very, very difficult to look after in group care because they are very disruptive. Naturally their need for attention often comes in out in such negative ways, which is difficult for staff to cope with, because it tends to bring about sort of quite quite a negative reaction rather than an understanding reaction as to where they’re coming from.

Yes, so building that culture took quite a time and it did mean having to use the term it sounds a bit kind of brutal but weed out those staff that weren’t really weren’t really aligned with that um, but that was done and with, as I say, with the support of the uh managing organizations behind the cutsaw community. So the farm uh was quite important. I mean, in the approved school days it was used very much to send boys out to work on the farm, but really that changed dramatically for the Cotswold community as a therapeutic community it provided a very positive environment. I mean, when you’re surrounded by the sort of chaos of children, to actually look out the window and see somebody doing an ordinary job, doing ordinary things like plowing a field or or bringing in some cattle. It’s kind of just kind of brings you down back to earth, literally back to earth and, and some of the boys also enjoyed helping out on the farm. They weren’t made to do it, they wanted to go and help feed the cattle or be involved in the lambing season or helping to stack bales at after harvest and things like that. I mean they. It was something that was an additional part to the life which made life interesting. And of course most of the boys who came to the cotswold community came from city, inner city areas, and so for them it was a big change and initially they possibly found being in the quietness of the countryside quite difficult, but that didn’t tend to last long because they made sure it wasn’t very quiet for very long anyway. So the Cotswold community was a completely kind of integrated environment.

The boys lived in four separate households small groups by those times I mean in groups of up to 10. Nowadays 10 is regarded as quite a large group. It was interesting then we were actually bringing groups down from the size of 20 during the approved school times to under 10. And the households that they lived in were quite self-sufficient. They had their own staff teams, they cooked their own food, they did everything together. They also, I mean, had their own garden and territory which was theirs, which they looked after and their space. There was a school there as well.

So the boys went to school within the Cotswold community. It was completely separate from the households. They walked to school. They had their own school groups. The teachers who worked with them in school also came and helped out in the households, some for some time in the week and again. Crucial, the crucial part of all that was really good communication between all parts of the organization, and that’s what a lot of the boys, their unintegrated personalities, meant. They needed a very integrated environment to hold them, contain them, to manage them. So if there was something went wrong in the school, it was vitally important that that that information came back to the household straight away and vice versa so the people working together.

There wasn’t. It wasn’t. It was trying to reduce the possibility of splitting between different parts of the organization. And again I get, I see in in the UK today. I mean, it’s very easy for a child to have a problem in school and for the parents not to know for weeks, and vice versa as well. The school doesn’t know that this child is coming into their school every day and is having to deal with huge problems at home. The Cotswold community had to avoid that and it did so very well. There was a lot of time spent in discussions and meetings between all the different staff and that’s something that Richard Balbirdi knew was very vitally important and encouraged.

One thing I haven’t really focused on and mentioned is the importance of the organisation having a clear primary task. Yeah, that was something that Richard Balburnie brought to the Cotswold community and the clear primary task was helping emotionally unintegrated children. The reason that was important was because there were many other groups of people working in the community. There were obviously administrators. We had a maintenance team who looked after the place and helped fix broken windows and stuff like that. We had the farming staff. We had people who helped to come in and cook and clean and so on. All those people also had to take on board the primary task and realize so. The maintenance team, for example I use this as an example could feel very fed up that they just repaired a window and the following day had to come back and repair it again and understandably they could feel frustrated by that. But they also had to and were helped to understand that this was the nature of the work and it was nothing personal. No one was attacking them, but they needed to get behind all the work that was going on and when there’s damage it’s really physical damage. It’s really quite important that it’s fixed quickly because if you just leave it it just builds up and you get more and more, as we know, as we see in society generally and interestingly, if I can switch to ISP very briefly, one of the things that the lack of the primary task in some groups there was very clearly shown to me early on by the drivers at ISP.

Isp, because it had to, unlike the Cotswold community, obviously wasn’t on one side and it had to help ferry children around to get to school or get to different sort of parts of the care that they needed, had cars and drivers who would help take children somewhere. When I went there, their reason to be was keeping the cars clean and they would get furious if and they banned children taking drinks or food into the cars because they just didn’t want this. I had to, didn’t want this, I had to.

One of the things I had to do is kind of say to them look, your task isn’t to keep cars clean, your task is to help these children, who are finding transitions incredibly difficult to get from a to b and get to be in a reasonable emotional state. And it might be to have a contact meeting with their birth family or something really important like that. And it might be to have a contact meeting with their birth family or something really important like that. And they might be quite worried about it and what’s going to happen. So it might be really important that they can take some food in the car during the journey, because we know that emotional, integrated children often find that a great comforter. But that’s just another. I mean it. It’s kind of, in a way, a small example, but how important the primary task is because it gives you something to measure things by and refer things to. So if you’re having a problem with a staff member who isn’t really getting it. You can remind them and say clearly why it’s important we do what we’re doing.

Colby 19:46

Yeah, it’s interesting hearing you talk about the primary task and I’ve always thought about the primary task as being that that one thing that all the rest of your endeavour is is kind of supported by or rests upon, and I’m hoping we’re aligned in that, in, I guess that definition and I think you’re Right, the point that you make, and there’s so many points, there’s so many things I could pick up on from your description of the community, but I think the alignment of the staff to a common purpose. It’s still very much important to ensure that in any endeavour that is being undertaken in this space, in the out-of-home care space, that there is alignment of the major players. In doing that it doesn’t take much to trigger or otherwise bring about a return to chaos. I think of the primary task in the work I do, john, as being connection, our connection, our relationships, our reparative relationships with the young people.

But it’s followed very closely by consistency, because what we know about our client group, about the young people, is that their first learning environment, or even environments, their history of inadequate care, of difficult care, of early adversity, was characterized by inconsistency, inconsistent parental responsiveness, because, generally speaking in this space, parents, it’s not the case that the children were never cared for, but it was. The care provided by parents was inconsistent, often due to the other factors at play in their lives, the things that were getting in the way of them being the best version of themselves as a parent. So I think alignment is crucial. Any misalignment, as you described, with ISP, with the drivers, that can just be that one thing that the young people might have the thought you know, I knew it, I’ve had all these people being nice to me or responding to me with understanding, but yeah, but this one experience can then become generalised to I knew it, you’re all the same. You know my beliefs, my understanding of how relationships work, have been confirmed just by this one experience with the driver.

John 22:51

Yeah, yeah, and I agree very much so with what you’re saying when you said about the primary task and where it originated from. I mean, I don’t know that these people actually did it, but one of the other consultancies that was vitally important for the Cotswold community was from the Tavistock Institute and that started with Ken Rice, ak Rice, who was very well known and well, very well known, and he wrote the first working note of the Cotswold community with, with a kind of organizational structure, because in order for the Cotswold community to work as a therapeutic community, it had to change the whole way the organization was structured, because, because as an approved school it had been very top down, with the headmaster being all powerful over everything. Richard Bell Burney turned that on its head because he really wanted the people who were doing the direct work with the children to have the confidence and the ability to be able to make decisions, to be able to be good role models of being kind of caring, responsible adults in the children’s lives, and the approved school system was the exact opposite of that, because the people who were at the coalface were seen as the kind of least important people in the organisation, whereas they became the most important people in the organisation really for the therapeutic approach to work. And Ken Rice started that. Unfortunately he died two years after doing that, so his consultancy ceased.

And then that was taken over by Isabel Menzies-Lykes again who is a very well-known organizational consultant. Who’s a very well-known organisational consultant. She’d done a very well-known study on nursing in hospital and how anxiety was managed by nurses in that organisation. It’s still a classic work and she worked with the Cotswold community for about I suppose it must have been about seven or eight years and then that was from the Tavistock was taken over by Dr Eric Miller. That line of consultancy was vital because it wouldn’t have worked, I don’t think, had it been just Barbara Dr Drysdale on her own working away at the day-to-day interaction with children. That was vitally important, crucial. But if the management structure had not been around to support that work it would have just come undone very quickly. So the two threads of consultancy, the two aspects, were so crucially important to the success of the Cotswold community.

I can’t stress that enough and I personally learned a huge amount from both consultancies really, and Isabel Menzies-Lyne for example.

I’ll give you an example of some of the things that she focused on. She was a great believer in the value of scarcity, um, which now may seem a bit of a contradiction in terms of what we’re talking about, but she believed that, as in families who have to work together when they haven’t got infinite resources or infinite money, so as a therapeutic community we’re in the same boat and we sometimes had to face the fact we couldn’t do everything we wanted to. We couldn’t have as many staff as we wanted to, we couldn’t have huge amounts of money for having banquets every night, I mean, and how we worked at that scarcity was really really important for the children that they they were a part of figuring things out like, okay, we would like to do this, but actually we can’t, so what can we do with with the resources that we’ve got? And it was a really important kind of learning experience for well for us all, really, not just the children, I mean.

As adults, we were kind of learning all the time through through that um so I I really valued uh isabel menzies lives work on on the importance of scarcity and how you manage it you.

Colby 27:13

I mean again, there’s so much I can pick up on. Um, it’d be interesting, I think it’d be interesting for our listeners to hear how much contact staff were having with these external consultants and so you know, at what frequency and regularity was that contact happening? And I think also I want to put this into the same question, although they might be best treated separately. I’ll leave it to you. But what was the prime? You’ve referenced the therapeutic approach. What was the primary therapeutic approach that they were supporting?

John 28:01

Okay, we’ll take Barbara Do docker, drysdale first, because she was the probably the main consultant for the community. Um, bearing in mind we had four households. She, she came, she did. She didn’t do a long day Probably. She came for about five or six hours three days a week and saw each of the staff teams once a week.

But she also had time to see individuals, some individuals, I mean, not everybody. You basically had to queue up to see her, so to speak, individually, but you might get a chance every two or three weeks to see her for an individual consultation. And the consultations were quite brief. I mean there were no longer than probably half an hour for individuals and for a group no longer than an hour, which you know is quite, is quite brief. But she had also her that that suited her style, because she was, she was probably quite a directive consultant, which maybe you sound a bit unusual for a, for a child psychotherapist, who, who might be characterized as somebody who who sits in silence most of the time. But she wasn’t like that and that was probably quite important in the early days. If you were going back to when she started with Richard Bell Burney, she really had to be quite definite about what was needed to be done, and that meant probably saying and talking more than probably most consultants would normally do. But this was about establishing initially the culture.

Colby 29:47

Yeah, so three days a week for five hours or so she was there. By today’s standards, that’s a lot of contact and involvement with the organisation.

John 30:03

And she also met with the education school staff as well. So many groups had a chance to meet with her and it was all part of everybody getting on board with the primary task. There were other consultants who came in less frequently. I mentioned the Tavistock Institute. They would probably come and spend a day with us once a month, okay, um, we, we also had a, an educational psychologist, who worked with the education staff team, and that was probably also once a month, um, and we also had somebody with a difficult role, a person called Dr Faye Spicer, who was a psychiatrist, who came in and it was an unusual kind of role for her to take because it was a kind of on that sort of medical, psychiatric boundary, bearing in mind that there would be times when we as an organization would be quite worried about the, the risk we were taking with a particular child who was perhaps exhibiting some very extreme behaviors, and we needed we needed to work on this and discuss this with a psychiatrist who could help us look at what, how to manage that risk, what was the, what was the reasonable risk to take?

Colby 31:30

um, and and and that again was probably once a month really, um, sometimes a bit less it’s a well-supported um team with, with different functions, from care staff to teachers at the school, everyone in alignment.

And I’ve often said and this is part of the reason why I’ve developed programs for professionals, for carers and for schools is well, it’s the actual reason why I’ve done all that is because I think the best outcomes are achieved by getting alignment in all the major domains of a child’s life, or at least as many major domains of the child’s life as you can get that alignment.

You mentioned that it took about four years, though, to and that would be a struggle that a lot of contemporary residential care providers would identify with which is getting all the staff in a program, I guess singing from the same hymn sheet. So I think there are probably factors there, with it having previously been, I guess what, in my parlance, would be a reformatory and staff that had a different role and then having to take on a more therapeutic role. That may well have elongated the process. But I think that challenge of getting everyone, as I said, singing from the same hymn sheet is still a contemporary challenge. And I wonder, do you think that the frequency of involvement with Barbara and with other consultants, what role do you think that had, in terms of facilitating alignment, aligned focus on the primary task.

John 33:42

Yeah, I think it was, uh, exceedingly important. I mean to give you another example um, the frustration sometimes that a group living household staff team could feel when they were dealing with, um, some sort of very, very challenging behavior, with the best will in the world could lead that team to believe that they just need to get rid of this child to make everything all right, because this, this one child is, is is absolutely taking everything apart. So the staff team would go to mrs drysdale, barbara drysdale’s consultancy, in a, you know, in a frame of mind that wasn’t very therapeutic, in all honesty, was probably thinking to survive, we’ve got to get rid of this child. Can you support us do this? I mean, they wouldn’t come out as clear and sharply as that question, but everything they would be presenting and what they got back from Mrs Drysdale invariably was no, we’re not going down that road.

What we are going to look at is actually how things develop like this, because one of her key principles was that the acting out of children was down to a breakdown in communication and that invariably meant that it put pressure on the adults to help the child to communicate, not to complain about their acting out, but to come back to the origins of it, and usually there were things which we as adults had missed, um, and it could be something fairly obvious, like some contact with a birth parent that had really upset the child and bottled it up and then exploded exploded over something quite trivial.

It might have been just an ordinary frustration which, instead of just being, you know, exhibiting frustration, had become a huge explosion. Frustration had become a huge explosion and then when you actually got to talk with the child about that, they would probably relate it back to something that had happened a few days before, which which people had missed at the time and hadn’t realized. Now it’s that sort of thing unpicking, unpicking things to and, of course, it’s tremendously good for learning as well. I mean, it does bring people together, and I’m going to say the role of consultants go back to your question, I think is very important in helping people to understand that and keep on task. Really.

Colby 36:12

So it’s interesting to hear that because, just as an example, what I’m referencing is Barbara Dockerdryer-Stiles’ reference to communication. What I’m referencing is Barbara Dockerdrysdale’s reference to communication Because I think, 30, what are we now? 30, 40, 50 years later, people are again, or maybe still, talking about behaviour as communication, and whether that’s exactly the same as what Barbara was talking about or a little bit different. But there is very much in the therapeutic community, in out-of-home care these days, there’s very much a focus on understanding what the child is telling us through their behavior, telling us about their experience through the behavior. So less of a focus on the behavior itself and more of a therapeutic response to the reasons for the behavior.

John 37:20

Yeah, the other aspect of communication I haven’t mentioned, which Barbara Dockers Drysdale, in her writing, demonstrated that she was very, very gifted at communicating with children symbolically through their play, and that’s something that she helped to develop in the community so that she would encourage different play materials to be available and so that when the focal carer to a particular child had individual time with him, they would often be playing it might be in sand with various toys, um, and helping to sort of see the world that the child was creating and and kind of respond in in a sort of sympathetic way, you know, in a, in a way which isn’t taking over from the child very much, not that but can get alongside um, and it’s quite quite a skill that, and I think, well, I’d say it’s a gift almost, because I’d be the first to hold up my hands that I’m not great at symbolic communication, um, whereas someone like barbara drisdale was just brilliant at it, and when I saw her with children, I mean, you know, it was like she was kind of entering at another level in terms of communication.

So that was an example, I suppose, of being able to not wait for acting out for the communication but to sort of get in and understand the inner world of the child through play.

Colby 38:58

Yeah, absolutely, john. I feel like we could talk for hours about the Cotswold community. I’m aware that I also want to talk to you a little bit about your other major role of your career Before we move on to a brief discussion about ISP overall. How would you describe your time at the Cotswold community?

John 39:24

Initially it was very, very hard and I nearly didn’t survive it, I have to say, um, because it was I. I went to the cotswold community thinking I was quite experienced because I’d had three years working in a probation hostel, only to be completely flattened by the fact that I knew next to nothing about a more psychodynamic approach. I was having to start again, and the other difficulty for me was being assigned to a household that hadn’t achieved a therapeutic culture and we were struggling to. We were struggling in all honesty. So my first year there was a tough one. It did me some good, I have to say, looking back, because it helped me appreciate how easy it was to slip back from a therapeutic culture into something that wasn’t. You know, groups are fantastic when they’re very positive and they bring everybody forward and take everybody along. But there’s also a very negative side to groups as well, and if a group is in a downward spiral, everybody gets infected by that. So that was a really crucial lesson for me to learn very early on, and I spent a lot of time making sure we never went down that road again. Um, I mean, I suppose everything I did subsequent to the Cotswold community was based on what I learned there really. So, having the privilege to work with the consultants we had, I can’t think of another environment in the UK that I would have had that experience. So yeah, it was very hard but very, very positive and enabled and gave me a real sense of direction in terms of what I wanted to do and which certainly helped me when I moved across to ISP.

And perhaps I should just say briefly the reason I decided to move partly from the fact I’d reached the age of 50. I thought if I’m going to do anything else in my life, I have to go now, otherwise I’m really past my sell by date. But also I began to feel there were lots of pressures on coming which I thought were going to make residential therapeutic work harder in the UK. I mean, staff were increasingly working shift systems. There was a lot of anxiety about risk taking Understandable, because there’d been some pretty awful things happened in residential institutions in the UK over the years. But it’s it just felt that the reaction to those awful things were just going to make it more and more difficult to, in my view, to do the work.

And I’d go as far as to say that had the Cotswold community been thought about in the 1990s. I don’t think it would have happened in the UK. In all honesty. The UK, in all honesty, um, certainly I think Richard Bell Burney and Mrs Drysdale because they were so kind of determined about what they were doing, I think might have struggled to get the backing of the organizations that they were able to get the backing of at the time when they started. I may be wrong about that, that’s just my personal view, but anyway it led me to think about moving and I saw an opportunity with the integrated services program which had been started by foster carers in 1987. So I went there in 99, so it had been going for a good few years already, and they were looking for someone to take on the overall management of the organisation who had experience, because they tried the Twice.

In my working life I’d taken over from the charismatic founder directors. My role in life was not to be one of those people but to be the next generation, um, and so it was interesting. I didn’t I didn’t actually at the time consciously do this, but when I look back I think, well, that can’t, that can’t have been accidental that I ended up in two organizations as as the next leader from the founder director and ISP had had two goes at recruiting somebody to take on from the founder director and both had failed. So they were looking for someone who had more of a track record in therapeutic care and that’s why I got the job track record in therapeutic care and that’s why I got the job. It was a difficult job to take on because it was a very different organisation to a therapeutic community.

Naturally, for carers it’s more fragmented. I mean the carers, the care is going on in everybody’s individual homes and and so whereas we had the benefit at the Cotswold community of everybody being together on one site, and so you I described earlier, you could aim for good communication between all parts of the organisation almost instantly, that wasn’t the case with ISP. So we had to work at that was one of the things we really had to work hard at improving communication.

And one of the syndromes of deprivation that Barbara Docker Drysdale identified was the archipelago child, and these are children who’ve got pockets of functioning amongst a sea of chaos, and the therapeutic task with these children is to help to grow the pockets of functioning so they start to gradually join up and the sea of chaos diminishes. That all sounds very sort of graphic and and a bit, a bit poetic but it is. But it is basically what we’re trying to do and it can take a few years with a child to achieve that anyway. But I saw isp was like that. Isp was like an archipelago child. There were picket, there were pockets of good practice going on, but there was also a lot of stuff that needed sorting out.

Colby 45:41

Yeah, and I found my task was really how can I help build on the good things that are, that are that are there, and it took a few years, uh, to achieve one of the reasons why I was so keen to speak to you was what lessons you or or what understandings did you garner or attain while you were at the Cotswold community that were of a benefit to a therapeutic foster care service?

John 46:18

I think there were a whole variety of things. Really, one of the first things I think one of the first things that ISP had a difficulty with me when I first arrived was that I wasn’t prepared to give instant answers to things. They had a culture of expecting, whenever there was a problem, that the founder director would give them an answer straight away. Sort it out didn’t have to be the right founder director would give them an answer straight away, sort it out didn’t have to be the right answer, they would just get an answer.

Yeah, when I came in, people would be banging on my door or phoning me up and saying what do we do? So I actually I don’t know. Let’s think about it. And that was a complete culture shock for them. I mean, I think initially they saw me as a complete idiot who didn’t know anything. But fortunately again I had the support of the board of directors and the chairman of the board said you know, he said I, I just I just gave three cheers when you, when I heard the word, the words, I don’t know. It’s the first time that I’d sort of heard it. That was kind of one thing, that capacity to stop and think and reflect, not react instantaneously.

Colby 47:37

So mindful practice, the opportunity, stopping and thinking about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

John 47:43

Yeah, and this was trying to get that through to foster parent carers as well, because, um, I mean, there was much in the practice of foster carers which was, which was very good and and and you would certainly probably put it in the bracket of being therapeutic. They wouldn’t necessarily know that they were doing that. Um, and that was one of the things I wanted to sort of build up in the organisation was the whole training programme for foster carers whereby they could appreciate what they were doing and also understand some of the behaviours they were dealing with, because they also suffered the same things that we did at the Cotswold community, where a child would, instead of lapping up all the great care, would throw it back in the carer’s face. Instead of lapping up all the great care would throw it back in the carer’s face and, and that lack of gratitude for being looked after is something that I think a therapist has to learn that you’re going to have to weather those sort of storms without expecting to be thanked for it. So, linked to that was also the importance of consultancy.

Now, isp, when I arrived, there had quite a number of therapists working there already, but their role was entirely to see individual children for individual therapy when it was needed. The change I started to bring about was using those therapists in a different way as well. Where they could, they could be involved with the staff team discussions. They could also because there are many children who might people might say, well, they really need to have individual therapy, but the child is nowhere near wanting it or ready to use it. But the carers would benefit greatly from having a regular time with a therapist to help understand what was going on, as indeed the residential workers at the Cotswold community did, and so that was. That was a really important change I made. It did mean we had to expand the therapy time in the organization to allow for that, because there were still children having individual therapy as well, but a much more.

It was the development of the network around the child, of all the different people working. I mean obviously crucial to that were the foster carers, but there’d be the social workers in the organisation, the therapists. We also had and developed what we called advisory carers. These were people who’d been experienced foster carers who were able to take on a role supporting newer foster carers based on the on hard-won experience, because one of the things that foster carers really got very fed up about was being talked down to by social workers, as they saw it, who’d never once in their life had a child, never once looked after a child, and felt that they were being kind of seen as second-class citizens professionally, um, whereas we were making them, they. These were absolutely vital, crucial to the child developing, and the network around the child was also a network around the foster carers to support them in that crucial role. And these are the advisory. Foster carers knew that. I mean because they’d done it and that was.

Colby 51:03

That was both as a culture of continuous growth through education and support from significant others.

John 51:18

Yes, yeah, the training program in both the Cotswold community and ISP was was really vital.

I mean because we would take I mean at the Cotswold community we were taking in quite young staff who’d not necessarily been very experienced and we had to select them very carefully to have the potential to learn and they had to come into an environment which was going to support them, because they weren’t at that time.

I mean, I know things have changed since, but at that time there weren’t qualifications which meant someone could walk straight in and do the work. We had to provide that training environment there and, in a way, the same for the foster carers we had to provide enable them to develop the tools that they were going to need and the understanding they’re going to need. So we had a, we had a three-year training program for foster carers, um, and we had a whole range of of of trainings that we would expect them to go through and to embrace and um, and that was. That was something that really took a while to develop, but gradually, as people saw the benefits of that and they saw the way children were growing and developing themselves, I mean they got a lot of positive feedback.

Colby 52:36

It reminds me of something that you talked about in our previous, just initial meet when you talked about our mutual connection, patrick Tomlinson, who introduced us, and you telling me about how he kind of organised training for staff at the Cotswolds community, and if we had more time, if we had another time, it would be really good to have a bit of a chat about that from your end.

Of course I can also speak to Patrick about it. Hope to have him on the podcast as well. So much to talk about, john. I feel like I could sit here for hours, but unfortunately I don’t have those hours and we’ll need to kind of make some final comments. But before we do, you did refer earlier to the advice that you would give to leaders in residential and foster care endeavours these days, but I wonder if you might just quickly say again what advice from your long career working in both aspects of out-of-home care that you think is probably a bit like the primary task, the most important thing, piece of advice that you could give them. Sorry, that’s probably a bit of a question without notice.

John 54:13

It’s quite a difficult one, I think the thing that really comes to mind and I can remember actually, you mentioned Patrick, I remember talking this over with Patrick quite recently and that is we know that outcomes for children are really important. So what I’m going to say is not in any way denying that, but my worry in the last few years in the UK has been the focus on outcomes to such an extent that I think there’s been a misunderstanding, because all that I learned at the Cotswold community and subsequently at ISP is about if you get everything in place, if you successfully create this therapeutic culture, the outcomes will come.

Colby 54:59

The outcomes will develop.

John 55:00

Yeah, and I think the focus on outcomes. My worry is it’s a. It’s a silly example, but it’s a bit like I often use gardening as an example that part of what we’re doing is is emotional gardeners that we’re trying to create conditions to to enable our these plants to grow, these children to grow. The conditions that we create are vitally important. Once we’ve got those conditions right, growth will occur, and it’s a bit like a gardener picking up a packet of seeds with pretty flowers on and showing it to the seeds. This is what you need to do, this is what you need to be like and expect this to, whereas I mean you know it isn’t going to be like and expect this to, whereas I mean you know it isn’t going to be like that.

Winnicott actually described that. You know, you could, that the growth inside a bulb, I mean, is the growth is there within the bulb. It’s not. You’re creating conditions for the for that growth to occur and it’s a bit and I feel that’s very crucial in creating therapeutic organizations that we have to realize that the growth potential is there within the person and our job is to create the conditions for that. And it’s not easy and there’ll be many things to test you along the way, and you need to also have the support of other organizations around you to do that. That is kind of, I think, one of the most important things I’ve learned, would say I love it yeah, bruno betelheim, if I can just very quickly say just something’s come to mind.

Bruno betelheim was asked by somebody what is a cure and he said, well, it’s. It’s doing the best you can every day, and then it might add up to something and you might then at the end of the process say that’s a cure. But at the time you don’t know, you’re just doing the best you can every day for as long as it takes. And I thought that’s I like, that. I thought it was pretty good.

Colby 57:02

It’s a great metaphor and reminder Just before you leave us. John, if you could give your younger self, just starting out your professional journey, some advice, share some knowledge with them that you wish you could have had advice you could have had or knowledge you wish you could have had as well, what do you think it would be?

John 57:32

Well, again, that’s difficult Because I sometimes say to myself, if I knew everything I knew now, would I go back and do the same thing again? Because sometimes ignorance is bliss. And when I kind of stumbled into doing therapeutic work, I didn’t fully, in all honesty, I didn’t fully appreciate what I was getting into and some of the things that I, some of the knocks I had to take and the tough times I had to put through my own family. You know, I think would I do that again? I hope and think I would.

But you know, sometimes you take a leap of faith and for me, when I was working at the probation hostel, I came across this book by David Wells that I’d mentioned before, called Spare the Child, which was about the change coming at the Cotswold, that was taking place at the Cotswold community, and I just had a wow moment, thinking this is all the things that I’m aware of in our hostel that we’re not doing. We’re just we’re not getting below the surface, and I really wanted to do that. Little did I know that getting below the surface was going to be really tough and would really impact on me, and there were times when I really felt like giving up, but it really was worth it. I guess when I look back and I’m pleased I did it. Sorry, it’s not really the right answer to your question, but it’s what comes to mind.

Colby 59:00

Yeah, it’s an answer. So look, john, that was a very enjoyable conversation and very enjoyable to hear more from you. I will include, when I distribute or advertise this podcast, the link to your website, which has lots of valuable information for people working in the sector to access and look. On behalf of our listeners and also myself, thank you very much for agreeing to do this podcast, for being on, and hopefully you might agree to doing it again sometime in the future.

John 59:48

No, I’m very, very pleased to, and thank you for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure and I hope I’ve said something that’s been quite useful for some people.

Reunifying 1,200 Children: The Connecting Families Story with Sally Rhodes

Family Preservation Through Trauma Informed Practice

Family reunification is one of the most challenging yet rewarding areas of child protection work. In this powerful conversation between Colby Pearce and Sally Rhodes, we gain insight into how one practitioner’s passion for keeping families together has led to the successful reunification of over 1,200 children with their families over two decades.

Sally Rhodes’ journey into family preservation work began in her childhood, influenced by her father’s stance against injustice and her early exposure to children living in institutional care. This formative experience sparked a lifelong commitment to questioning why children were separated from their families and exploring better alternatives. Her professional path took her from residential care in 1985 to intensive family preservation services, eventually leading to the establishment of Connecting Families in 2004 – now South Australia’s largest reunification service.

What makes Connecting Families so successful? Sally emphasises the importance of a team aligned in values, approach and commitment to social justice. Unlike competitive tendering processes that disrupt continuity of care, Connecting Families has built a stable team of practitioners who have worked together for decades, creating a collective wisdom that grows over time. This consistency allows them to develop deep expertise and speak with an authoritative voice when advocating for families within the child protection system.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the conversation centres on how practitioners approach cases involving denied child abuse, particularly unexplained injuries to infants. Traditional child protection approaches often demand admissions as prerequisites for reunification, creating a significant barrier when shame, fear of criminal charges, and potential social ostracism make such admissions extremely difficult. Through her Churchill Fellowship, Sally studied the Resolutions Approach developed in the UK, which offers an alternative pathway focused on building safety without necessarily requiring full admissions.

The parallel between team dynamics and therapeutic relationships with families emerges as a powerful theme. Just as practitioners create psychological safety for vulnerable families to engage meaningfully in change processes, teams need to establish the same conditions for themselves to navigate the challenging terrain of child protection work. This secure base allows practitioners to be vulnerable, make mistakes, challenge each other’s thinking, and ultimately provide better support to families.

Perhaps the most profound insight from Sally’s decades of experience is the long-lasting impact of child protection decisions. “Think very, very carefully about what you write, what you decide, because it has consequences,” she advises, acknowledging that with greater knowledge and experience, she would now make different decisions in some past cases. This humility and willingness to evolve one’s thinking over time reflects the continuous learning journey that characterises effective practice in this complex field.

For those working in child protection, family preservation, or any helping profession, this conversation offers valuable reflections on creating practice environments that balance rigour with compassion, accountability with understanding, and ultimately prioritise keeping families safely together whenever possible.

Listen here:

Watch here:

About Sally

Sally has a Master of Social Work, and a Graduate Diploma in Family Therapy.

Sally, commenced working in residential care in 1985, then followed her passion for strengthening families through working intensively in family preservation services.

In 2004 Sally established Connecting Families, a therapeutic Reunification and Family Preservation service, which has grown to 17 practitioners.

Sally is trained in Narrative Therapy, Marte Meo, Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy, the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics, and Signs of Safety.

Sally was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to work in the UK with the Resolutions Approach – Working with Denied Child Abuse.

Connecting Families is now the largest Reunification Service is South Australia and, together the team has safely reunified over 1200 children, and prevented the removal of many more.

In Connecting Families, Sally has selected practitioners who share her commitment to social justice and human rights, and ethically driven practice.

Sally provides training and consultation to Government and Non-Government organisations and remains a strong advocate for vulnerable families.

Sally has been integral in leading the development of a Partnering for Safety approach to child protection through training and consulting, and is passionate about family led decision making and bringing the child’s voice into child protection work.

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Adriana Dias

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Lighthouse Foundation

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Transcript:

Sally: 0:01

I think I always knew this, but I know it far more powerfully now, is that the decisions that we make, the things that we write, the recommendations that we make about families have long-lasting impact. So, therefore, think very, very carefully about what you write, what you decide, because it has consequences, and I know that to be so true now that I probably didn’t know as strongly back then.

Colby: 0:40

Hi and welcome to the Secure Start podcast. Hi and welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a highly respected practitioner in my home jurisdiction. Before I introduce my guests, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that we are meeting on the Kaurna people, and the continuing connection they and other Aboriginal people feel to land, waters, culture and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. So my guest for this episode is Sally Rhodes. Welcome Sally, thanks Colby. Welcome Sally, thanks Colby. So Sally is, as I said, a practitioner in my home jurisdiction here and we’re both used to paying our respects to the traditional custodians of the lands we meet on. So, for those who may be listening or watching overseas, this is a customary paying of respect to those traditional owners.

Colby: 1:56

Now Sally has a Master of Social Work and a Graduate Diploma in Family Therapy. Sally commenced working in residential care in 1985, then followed her passion for strengthening families through working intensively in family preservation services. In 2004, sally established Connecting Families, a therapeutic reunification and family preservation service, which has grown to 17 practitioners. Sally is trained in narrative therapy, matrimony, dyadic, developmental psychotherapy, the neuro-sequential model of therapeutics and signs of safety. Sally was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to work in the UK with the resolutions approach working with denied child abuse. Connecting Families is now the largest reunification service in South Australia and together the team has safely reunified over 1,200 children and prevented the removal of many more. In Connecting Families, sally has selected practitioners who share her commitment to social justice and human rights and ethically driven practice. Sally provides training and consultation to government and non-government organisations and remains a strong advocate for vulnerable families. Sally has been integral in leading the development of a partnering for safety approach to child protection through training and consulting, and is passionate about family-led decision-making and bringing the child’s voice into child protection work.

Colby: 3:38

Wow, there was a lot there, sally. Obviously I’m going to need the editor, all right. Obviously I’m going to be the editor, all right. So, sally, um, I guess, uh, I just really want, um, for our listeners to hear more about you, um, as a person and also as a professional. So my first question to you is how did you come to this field of endeavor?

Sally: 4:04

yeah, well, you know I I had cause to think about this last year when we were celebrating 20 years of connecting families, and I actually really stopped and thought about how did I get here, really? And, um, because nothing’s ever by accident, is it, you know? And so I started to think about my childhood and where I grew up and what my influences were. And you know, it occurred to me that my dad was a really big influence in my life in terms of thinking about injustice and standing up for the oppressed. He always stood up for me, you know, which was something that was. I was a bit of a naughty kid, so you know, I used to get in trouble at school a lot and he always wanted to know.

Sally: 4:55

You know my side of the story, which was refreshing and not normal back then, like you know, I’m talking the late 60s, early 70s, and also mum and dad volunteered at a children’s home. It was run by nuns and there were homes it was about four. My memory was that there were like four homes on this property and they had 10 kids each in them and mum and dad would go there on weekends, like rostered on, to support the nuns looking after the kids. So I would tag along. And it just struck me that this was a really unusual situation for children not to be living with their families, and I think that that was my first exposure to it and I was exposed to it for a long time, you know, over three or four years probably that mum and dad went there, that I would go with them, and I knew these kids too. I went to school with a lot of them, so that was that. And then I and I think that sparked something in me that I wanted to do. So I didn’t know what it was, and then I didn’t go straight into social work, but I knew that that’s what I wanted to do. But I went and did nursing first, which I hated, and I left very quickly. And then I went and studied and I found my way.

Sally: 6:24

So this was in northern New South Wales, so not the state that we, you know we currently are in now. This was in a little town called Grafton, but then I moved over here to South Australia in 1985 and I got a job with the Department for Community Welfare, as it was known then, in um, residential care and um. I was 22 and I just thought at that point. I was too young to do sort of generic social work. I, you know, and I wanted to work with young people. That felt the right thing to do. So I, I was there and I stayed in residential care for eight years and I think that experience really fuelled again.

Sally: 7:13

This sort of kids just need not be in these situations, you know. If they can’t, if they, you know, we really should be working to try to keep children at home. So a family preservation service in South Australia started in 1993. That was the first one called Keeping Families Together, and I won a position in that and I stayed in doing that from 1993 to 2004 in various different roles but all like all working intensively with families and either in family preservation or reunification. And then the agency that I worked for, anglicare, lost the tender to continue doing that work and I was approached to set up on my own well, set up to work with the families that had been in our service, because the agency who won them that contract to carry on the work, for whatever reason, didn’t set up and so, fortuitously, these sort of families fell into my lap and and that’s how it started in terms of connecting families, um, just yeah, and then, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. Really, it’s a long-winded answer to your question.

Colby: 8:42

Colby, no, not long-winded, but very interesting. It really goes to show, I guess, that when you, you know how influential our experience is growing up, our experiences in childhood, are in terms of the future course of our life. Yeah, in fact, research that I can remember hearing about a long time ago about who enters the helping profession who enters the helping profession, so to speak, tend to be people who have been in some sort of caring role as they’ve been growing up. Yeah, yeah, as they’ve been growing up.

Colby: 9:27

Yeah, yeah and yeah. I think that rings true not only for myself, but a lot of people I’ve spoken to about this and, interestingly, just to pick up another point that you made in there is that the impact that residential care had on you and on practice and a sneak peek into another podcast episode is that I’ll be speaking to someone who ran a residential care home in the UK for a very long time and then moved across to run the UK’s first therapeutic fostering service, so our listeners can listen out for that as well. So, just moving on, you’ve talked about your dad as being a significant personal influence on you growing up and you’ve probably also referred to your observations of the children and the environment that they were living on as major influences environment that they were living on as major influencers but who were your professional major professional influencers?

Sally: 10:51

would you say, yeah, look, many and varied really. But you know, and I guess I didn’t really, I suppose I did, but I can’t even remember who they might have been, you know, but you know, but certainly when I came to um, a therapist well, psychologist, called Alan Jenkins, um, his partner, maxine Joy, Rob Hall, a social worker, um, these were locally based, Adelaide, um, but I think world renowned really in their craft and their expertise, so, and Alan used to come to our team meetings when I worked in keeping families together and consult with us and I just used to sit there in awe, really, so he was a really big influence to me. And of course, you know Michael White and the whole narrative therapy, dulwich Centre, in terms of, you know, I, and to think more deeply about that, I suppose you know, and so they were a big event. And then, over the years, people like Dan Hughes, bruce Perry, you know yourself, colby, in terms of your writings around attachment and the science of safety, people Like you know, all of that has influenced me and I’ve been.

Sally: 12:58

You know that all of those people that I’ve named, their work and their way of thinking just resonated with my way of thinking and it helped me, you know, move forward in being able to help families, have that breadth of sort of knowledge and expertise, I suppose, to be able to think come to, you know, talk with people with a whole lot of different things in your head and frameworks to operate from.

Colby: 13:27

Yeah, so quite a diverse group there. Yeah, I think you know, thinking about my own professional journey and the work of Michael White and others and Alan and the Dulwich Centre, who I was probably exposed to at a similar time to you when I was a developing practitioner, I think a lot of what I heard from them resonates more and more with me as I move on with my life and career. Certainly the stories that we tell about ourselves I think are are very powerful in the way in which we approach life and relationships.

Sally: 14:28

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think that’s true actually, in terms of for me. You know, probably at the time I didn’t realise how influential they were and that they were and how privileged I was to have them so accessible. You know they’re in my hometown. You know I’ve got video of Michael White interviewing me.

Colby: 14:50

You know it’s precious now to look back on that and yeah, and maybe we need to be, you know, maybe we need to have practised, I guess, for a period of time to be able to join the dots up. I guess, for a period of time to be able to join the dots up, I guess, in a sense, around those early influences and the impact that they’ve had on us and our professional journey and the way in which we approach our professional and personal life. Yeah, it’s very interesting. Our professional and personal life. Yeah, it’s very interesting. I’m also aware, and I mentioned to you, mentioned in the intro that you did do a Churchill Fellowship in the UK and I know a little bit about what a Churchill Fellowship is. But I wonder if you would mind just describing it, what a Churchill fellowship is and what it was like completing it, who you did it with or who you, yeah, work with and how it’s influenced your practice going from there yeah.

Sally: 16:03

So the Churchill Fellowship was actually set up by Winston Churchill really for um, you know, australians to have the experience, to be able to go abroad, um, you know, to um to expand their skills and knowledge in a specific area that they weren’t able to get in in Australia. You know, like, so this was the original sort of thinking around it and that you could then bring back that skill and knowledge to better the community. So that was sort of the broad and I think that still holds true. However, you know, with the modern technology these days you really don’t have to travel. You know you can do it, but you know they’re still offered.

Sally: 16:51

So I, when actually talking about influences, there’s some other people who were very influential in my life before I did the Churchill, and they were the John Gumbelton, colin Luger, susie Essex John Gumbelton, colin Luger, susie Essex three UK social workers, therapists, who worked for the NSPCC Is that right? Yeah, and they started writing about the resolutions approach, which is a way of working with families where there’s denial around and particularly around injury, unexplained injury to infants. So those very, you know, polarising as well as perplexing cases where you’ve got a baby that’s got injury and parents who basically say they don’t know how it happened, and in a medical profession saying, well, this is how we think it happened. And and so you know they become very stuck cases that you know and and I was coming across them in my, in my work of um you know families with with seemingly no other kind of factors that would have caused concern to anybody but a baby that had these unexplained injuries, and so you ended up with a situation that either the children just didn’t go home because of this stuckness around the acknowledgement or they did go home because people just gave up and put them home and so no work was ever done and I didn’t think either of those scenarios were good, basically.

Sally: 18:31

So I started looking for um you know any any ways of working around this really and um, it came across these guys, um and made contact with them in the uk, um by email and phone, and um started having some consultation with colin luger, one of them um, and then the idea of applying for churchill came up. So I did and it’s quite a daunting process really. You know it’s um. They give away about a hundred nationally a year, but in south austral I think the year I went there were nine given away and you have to, you know, put in an application. It has to be very succinct, to you know, to basically explain to a group of people not from this profession. You know a wide range of people making decisions about who gets them and then go to it, get to an interview process, which is, you know, 20 people. There was sitting around a big boardroom table and coming in and actually doing a presentation and then getting questions. Anyway, I was lucky enough to get one. I think it was so interesting.

Colby: 19:44

You know, I think it is interesting, you know.

Sally: 19:46

I think it really piqued the interest of the people who were making that selection. So I went to the UK. I went to Bristol, which is where Colin and John live. Colin has sadly passed away. He passed away in 2015. But you know, obviously when I went he was still alive. But you know, obviously when I went he was still alive and I spent six weeks there in the UK with them doing, you know, travelling all around England because even though they were based in the UK, their referrals came from all different parts of the UK so we would travel to meet with family.

Sally: 20:25

So I watched them, I talked to them, I talked to families about their experiences, I interviewed judges, um, children’s solicitor, uh. I met with some other academics I met with. I met peter dale, who’s another influencer, mel, is people remember now peter dale? Um, he wrote a book called fine. Who’s another influencer? I mean, people don’t remember now Peter Dale? He wrote a book called Fine Judgments. He’s another UK social worker, psychiatric social worker, and yeah. And then I came back, I had to write a report about that for the trust and I went and met with the youth court here in South Australia to talk about it because really if I could get the court understanding it, that was going to help. You know, I did presentations to the department about it and I think it has it influenced me. You know, in a sense around that there were people on the other side of the world thinking exactly the same way that I do.

Sally: 21:36

You know, I think there was something really heartening and a sense of security about that you know, that these issues were were happening everywhere and that, um, that there were people who were turning their mind to. How can we actually help these families stay together, but in a safe in? In a safe way, um, and you know they are the trickiest cases because people do take such a stand about we need to know. We need to know what happened. If we don’t know what happened, how can we ever make this safe? So there’s a I’ve done a lot of talking with people over the years around trying to get them to think about that in a different way and why people wouldn’t talk about it. You know the sense of shame, all of the disincentives to to talk about how an infant got injured. You know the criminal charges, loss of friends, family, whole range of things. You know.

Sally: 22:48

So, yeah, and as far as I know, we are probably the only service that provides resolutions way of working, certainly in South Australia, if not across Australia. I haven’t come across anybody else. So it’s a niche and I think that nicheness you know that, you know helped in terms of gaining reputation across the sector around. You know, here’s some people who will actually work with these kind of families, but rigorously, it’s not fluffy work in any sense. Yeah, and so Colin and John continued to be Colin, particularly up until his untimely passing like he was very unexpected and in terms of him getting sick, that was. But he, I continued to consult with him up until then, and then John for a little while after that as well, and I’m still in touch with John. He’s retired, yeah, yeah, they were great, great influences really.

Colby: 24:09

Yeah, they are difficult cases.

Sally: 24:11

Yeah.

Colby: 24:12

From my own work. While you’re talking, I’m immediately thinking of a couple of cases, one in particular that I became involved in or was asked to become involved in very early in my career and, similarly to you, I was aware that local child protection authorities, the emphasis that they placed on admissions and admissions as being a precursor to looking at the possibility of reunification or reunifying, and I remember even then being very much aware of or thinking a lot about all the impediments to making those admissions and whether, as you say, whether there is actually another way that can ensure safety but doesn’t rely on an admission.

Sally: 25:27

Yeah.

Colby: 25:29

And I think there are ways to go about doing that, and you referenced one of those models or approaches.

Sally: 25:41

Yeah, I think it’s very much a way. I mean they are approaches, but it’s very much a way of thinking rather than a way of doing. In a way, you know there are certain things, steps through the process, but it is. You can’t actually do the work if you don’t sort of think about this in. You know it’s about being able to hold a degree of uncertainty and not knowing.

Sally: 26:05

But, also, you know suspending doubt, like all of these sort of principles of the model really around. You know thinking about denial, like when I’ve done some training on this. You know I remember talking to a bunch of supervisors when I first came back and I said to them I want you to turn to the person next to you and tell them the thing that you are most ashamed of in your life. They all just stood there and stared at me. You know, like I was mad. But you know the point I was trying to make was that’s what you’re asking families to do.

Sally: 26:42

You’re asking them if we take on that belief that, yes, they’ve they’ve unintentionally caused some injury to their child that they then have become aware of. And then you’re asked and they’re so deeply ashamed of that. You know that you’re asking them to tell you a pillar of power in their life what you did. And I just think it’s unless you get alongside of people and approach them with empathy and compassion, in a non-judgmental stance, that’s going to shrink shame and you may get some partial acknowledgement. You certainly get people motivated to make sure that what happened will never happen again, and that’s all we want to do is just to make sure future harm doesn’t occur.

Colby: 27:40

Yeah, I think the shame element is a powerful impediment and the regulation of that shame is a powerful way forward.Sally: 27:50

Yeah.

Colby: 27:51

And I remember something that well. You said something a little bit earlier where you were saying that not only the making of the admission means that not only do child protection authorities know about what happened, but it comes out one way or another that family and friends may also find out more about that. And I’ve done a similar activity when I’ve done training in the youth justice area and I had practitioners come one by one in and disclose similarly to me an act that they were it’s going back a few years ago now, but it was an act that they were ashamed of doing and it may well have also had an offending element to it, and they had to disclose it to me one by one and they had a choice about whether they come in and do that or not. Everyone did it, but everyone seemed to be quite uncomfortable about it. I will note that I was never asked back in service.

Colby: 29:04

I had met one of the person in subsequent training that I also delivered in the youth court, but I was never asked back. And I think it’s when we expect families to make admissions and the whole movement forward depends upon it. They’re not just making admissions to child protection authorities, they’re making admissions, potentially, to their family and friends as well, as you say. So that little activity that you did and that I did and that I did, as uncomfortable as it was, probably still doesn’t really get at what it’s like to make admissions in child protection processes. Because, to make it similar, we would broadcast what was disclosed to the group at least, and to family and friends.

Colby: 30:10

And so, yeah, there are very powerful disincentives to make admissions. And, yeah, I always thought that. I always think that nobody does anything for no reason, and I’ve always applied that in my practice with children, or for as long as I can remember, and I think that in trauma-informed practice it’s all about responding to the reason, and I think, similarly, it is possible to navigate a way forward by responding therapeutically to the reasons for a child to be hurt, without necessarily hanging it all on an ambition.

Sally: 31:04

Yeah, hanging it all on an ambition, yeah, and also, you know, there’s this big focus on acknowledgement and admission or whatever. And you know, and I guess my way of thinking after years and years of working with families in this area, is that acknowledgement of its own doesn’t necessarily bring about safety. You know, people can acknowledge that they’ve done something or they’ve behaved in a particular way.

Colby: 31:31

It doesn’t mean they’re not going to do it again.

Sally: 31:33

So you know it’s not enough, and I think that’s what certainly the you know the science of safety model, you know the principles and practices of that model, and that approach got me really thinking about that as well that you have to be actively demonstrating a change or doing something differently over a period of time. It’s not enough to say oh yeah, you know, yeah, you know.

Colby: 32:02

There seems to be a belief that an omission is an acknowledgement of a preparedness to change. Yeah, and it may be the case in some instances, but my thinking about it is that the admission is probably not the main incentive to change. Rather, it’s the therapeutic relationship that we develop with the parent-client and our endeavours to regulate shame and regulate them being closed off and rather to opening them to meaningful conversations and what follows from that as being probably the what we should be putting most emphasis on as a starting point.

Sally: 33:16

Yeah.

Colby: 33:17

Parents engaging with the process rather than parents making an acknowledgement. Yeah, yeah.

Sally: 33:26

Yes, certainly, seeing, you know, and because I think that, um, the focus on you know you must acknowledge, and this is not necessarily even in denied childhood, just in anything really you must acknowledge, you know this, or you must acknowledge the harm that you’ve caused your child, or you must you know the the way that that the statutory organisations come to try to get people to do that is just not therapeutic in any way.

Sally: 33:51

It’s very shaming and, you know, potentially quite frightening really for people because they don’t know the consequences of if they do acknowledge you know. So, yeah, I agree, and I think it’s, you know, when you know, thinking about this work, I mean I don’t think I would have known this 30 years ago. You know this has been a process for me also around, just, you know, I remember way back there was a book written by Maluccio and Pine which is around reunification and because people just talk about the stages, you know the steps and the thing, and it’s not like that. You know it’s because of this what we’re just talking about now. You know it’s really around understanding the complexities of people’s lives and experiences and building relationships so that they can navigate their way through that, to come out of that you know in a way that they can demonstrate to people that I A want to be a safe parent and I can be.

Colby: 35:08

I A want to be a safe parent and I can be. Yeah, shame is such a destructive or can be such a destructive emotion, and a process that deepens shame works against a goal of a safe reunification between the child and their parents. Yeah, yeah, I feel like we could talk about it for a long time. There’s some other things I wanted to ask you, though. I wanted you to just you’ve given a little bit of an intro to how Connecting Families came about, but perhaps you can tell me a little bit more, or tell us, the audience as well, a little bit more about the work of connecting families, and you mentioned 1,200 safe reunifications since 2004. What do you think? What are the ingredients for both the success of connecting families and reunification work more generally?

Sally: 36:12

Yeah, I mean that’s interesting, isn’t it too? Because, you know, connecting families in 2004 was me, so, and then by 2006 there were three of us. But the three of us were so Deb Pickering and Sarah Gray, whom I worked with in Anglicare in reunification and family press services. So they were. We’d already had existing relationships and they had the same values and attitudes and beliefs that I do. And because I was just getting inundated with referrals, I just couldn’t and you know what it’s like in private practice, you just never say no to anything so I needed to bring people on to help with that, and so that’s kind of what happened. Over a period of time, more and more people came on board that I had selected based on my previous working relationships with them, knowing what their attitudes and values were to sort of over the time.

Sally: 37:17

So, mac Davis another person from you know when I was in Anglicare, tracy Laddams, who I worked with in residential care. So Tracy and I have been now have a 40-year-long working relationship. Wow, it’s amazing to think about, really. Tracy was in keeping families together as well and then connecting families. And Mac, you know, 30 years, deb, 30 years We’ve been working together for a really long time. The core group of connecting families that has now expanded, expanded 17 in that bio since then with one. One person has left, so it’s 16, um, and they are people that I have come across in my career, um, where, where we have, we’ve gelled and I’ve known that they approach the work the same way that I do Others.

Sally: 38:15

Yeah, so you know, we’ve got a large team now with three men and we did have three Aboriginal practitioners.

Sally: 38:23

We now only have two and I think the reason why we’ve been so successful in the work is because we are a collective voice. You know, when I stop to think about it there’s you know it’s hard work. You know this, colby, you know it’s really hard work and often we are butting heads with the statutory agency, we are butting heads with the court, we’re butting heads with everybody because we might approach it differently and have a different view. And I think, with us being having so many people in the team and we all approach the work in the same way and think about families and that children ought to be with their families, if that’s at all possible and if not, with very close, enduring connection to family, that having many of us speaking that I don’t know what it is, but it just brings about a sense of safety in the team to be able to do that and a sense that you know we’ve got each other’s backs we can support each other and to continue to do the work.

Sally: 39:47

Support each other and to continue to do the work.

Sally: 39:49

So I think you know I despair at competitive I don’t know what happens in other parts of the world, but competitive tendering processes where agencies win a tender to provide a service for three years and then they put it out again and then someone else might win it.

Sally: 40:05

So no one develops long-term practice, wisdom, you know long term, and that you have people that are really passionate about this work. It’s not just a job, it’s not, it’s actually a career, it’s a. So I think that’s what I’ve been able to gather together and when I think about 21 years now, almost, that we’ve been going as connecting families you know that’s a long time for one service and I don’t see it ending anytime soon and so that collective wisdom just grows and grows and grows. And I think that’s why we are successful, because A the values and the attitudes and the beliefs, but also the skill set that people develop over time and then can pass on to each other is immeasurable. I don’t know how you measure that, I don’t know how you replicate it, and you know I feel really lucky to have this group of people around me.

Colby: 41:11

So I think, that?

Sally: 41:11

yeah, that’s why.

Colby: 41:13

I think, yeah, yeah, thank you for that. I think what you’re what I’m hearing you say is the importance of a team that is aligned in their approach to practice and speaks with a consistent voice, and I think there is something very psychologically safe about teams where people are all on the same page and aligned in their practice. People are all on the same page and aligned in their practice. I think, you know, in some respects we celebrate diversity, but also I think we need to acknowledge that teams work well in this kind of way of being aligned and supportive of each other and speaking with a collective voice. I think the collective voice provides is authoritative in the work that we do, and I think you mentioned I go back to one of your responses about the Churchill Fellowship we think about.

Colby: 42:36

We’ve talked a little bit about in our backwards and forwards conversation here, about things that are really powerful in, you know, factors in human behavior and and um, the way in which people approach life and relationships. We thought a bit about the role and importance of shame, um, but also validation. You know, the, the, the experience that, um, that we’re not just the only one thinking and working in this way, that our thoughts and beliefs and approach are valid, are acceptable, are worthy. These are very powerful conditions, I think, in which to, in our shared areas of endeavour, approach the work with as much psychological safety as we can muster to protect ourselves, because it is a difficult area of endeavour and when you’re working over a long period of time, I don’t think you can do it. I don’t think you can do it without depleting yourself drastically if you don’t have a team and peers who, as you say, have got your back but who also believe in what you believe in.

Sally: 44:12

Yeah, yeah, and I think also it can challenge you, you know, because you know I often think about, you know, the work of Eileen Munro and you know her talking about, you know the sort of I can’t remember the actual quote, but the most protective thing is to admit that you might have got it wrong. And I think, and I in child protection work, you know, and I think that having a team around where we can talk about, you know, you can get different perspectives on things. You can be going. You know, am I missing something here? You know, I think that having a collective voice is not just about being, you know, gee, we’re all right, and that’s not what I mean, and it’s really more around saying we want to come at things with rigour. You know, we want to make sure we’re doing things properly and right and thoroughly, and I think when you’re on your own you can lose that objectivity. You know you, basically it’s good to, it’s healthy to have people around to sort of go. Yeah, I’m not quite sure about that.

Colby: 45:31

So we do a lot of co-working in this as well.

Sally: 45:33

A lot of the team, you know, will work with two practitioners. Sometimes we might have a family where they might end up with five of the team because someone’s doing Marta Mayo, someone’s doing Circular Security of the team, because someone’s doing mud and mayo, someone’s doing circular security, tracy might be doing, you know, a relapse prevention plan around substance misuse. So they’re seen by a lot of people in the team and we don’t always agree about where the families are on their and the progress that they’re making, and I think that’s really healthy.

Colby: 46:07

It is. I agree, and I guess most people who talk about teams, I would anticipate talk about the importance of having diversity of background and diversity of beliefs and opinions. And yet I would say that those things are fantastic where there is a secure base within the team. And the secure base is one that regulates shame or is non-shaming. The secure base is one where we feel of togetherness and connection and belonging. And in another podcast shout out to Lynn Pateman, her Success is Never Accidental podcast I talked about how teams are very functional. Teams are very much like an attachment relationship and I think, in order to explore other ideas, to take risks, to explore other ideas to take risks carefully managed risks, to make mistakes, own up to them, learn from them, move on from them you need the security that we’re talking about, the psychological safety that we’re talking about yeah, yeah safety that we’re talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sally: 47:48

I think the um, the preparedness to be vulnerable and know that you can be vulnerable in that space and people will will just um, hold you really in that and and for me it’s very much a parallel process about what we’re trying to do with families is to is to support them to be vulnerable, um, but to feel that that there’s safety in doing that. So, and there’s.

Colby: 48:18

That’s very much aligned with what a, what a an attachment relationship is. Yeah, looks like what attack. What we’re talking about with attachment Attachment is about a relationship in which the person can be vulnerable or is vulnerable and can orient to someone who is able to support them, protect them, respond to their needs and create a situation and a circumstance where the person can grow.

Sally: 48:56

Yeah.

Colby: 49:01

So just moving on, because it’s been a long chat already, although I’m aware that there are podcasts out there that run to three hours.Sally: 49:10

Oh, my goodness yeah.

Colby: 49:13

But I wanted to ask you what advice you would give to your younger self starting out in your professional journey now and you’ve made some reference to it, but perhaps if you could just expand upon that- yeah, um, look, lots of things, probably, colby.

Sally: 49:35

Yeah, look, I feel like I have touched on something, you know, certainly I don’t think I ever thought that I knew everything back then anyway, but I but I would certainly be saying to myself, you know, you’re going to learn a lot along the way. Um, you know that this is, this is continuous learning and continuous growth, and in fact, you’re going to change your mind about things as well, and that’s okay, you know, because you know, some of our ideas are shaped and we haven’t really had enough time to actually think about. Really, really Do I really think that you know? So I think that, and I know we had talked about this once before, but I? I that there’s not a hierarchy of knowledge.

Sally: 50:23

I think, when I was a younger social worker, starting out and this is no offense to psychologists, you know, I think you know, but you know, there was, there was always this thing, and there still is, that psychologists trump social workers in terms of, or then you know, psychiatrists trump psychologists and doctors are somehow the medical profession, are revered and they can never get it wrong. I don’t hold that to be true anymore and that’s not to be disrespectful about any of those professions. I, you know, have respect for all of them, but I have respect for my own and I have respect for the knowledges and wisdom that comes with people who have practised things for a very long time. So I don’t feel so. I think what I would say to my younger self is don’t be intimidated by those other knowledges. They’re valid and they’re, but they’re not the only way of thinking about things, and your way is just as valid.

Colby: 51:35

You know I probably hold.

Sally: 51:37

You know, these days I hold great respect for people, you know, like yourself, like other practitioners, who have stuck it out and have an immense amount of knowledge and wisdom. And you know and I see people in the Department for Child Protection here that have been there for, you know, 30, 35 years and doing a hard job, and I respect them that they’ve stayed there and done that and they have a lot of knowledge. You know so that, and you know it’s okay to make a mistake.

Colby: 52:22

What I really liked. I liked all of that answer, but I think the acknowledgement that you will change your mind, and I think two things about long careers. One is that you’re never going to have the same view. I think or at least it’s healthy to not have the same view a year down the track, five years down the track, 10 years down the track than you have right now. Five years down the track, 10 years down the track than you have right now. You need to be open to that and prepared to accept that with experience and observation, you are going to change your thinking and opinions about things unless you have a very rigid adherence to what you and who would? Who would argue that, uh, it is healthy to maintain a rigid adherence to what you knew when you were fresh out of university or first in this, I don’t know that anyone would um would do that.

Sally: 53:32

Wouldn’t we call that?

Colby: 53:33

stuckness. Yes, you know similarly and I have changed my position on things across a long career, in particular, one area that has been particularly influential with me, for me, two areas actually. One is working very closely with families that are on the cusp of statutory intervention and the validity and importance of intervening in those circumstances where you know it’s 50-50 as to whether statutory authorities should and could get involved. The other area that has been very influential for me is working with care leavers and, in particular, seeing care leavers that I and, in particular, seeing care leavers that I knew as children taken into care. So both of those areas have been very influential in my position.

Sally: 54:46

Yeah.

‘Colby: 54:47

As I’m sure it is with others.

Sally: 54:49

Yeah, yeah, we’ve got a family at the moment in the service. That is for Mac, one of the workers in the team.

Colby: 54:58

fourth generation the oldest of the family. Yeah, yeah.

Sally: 55:05

So you know the dad was an injured infant actually back when, and so we worked with his parents. I was the manager of the team at that point. This is back in anglicare days and then mac had worked with the. This dad’s father was in residential care and then, so mac had met the great well I don’t know, we were just like, yeah, well we’ve been.

Sally: 55:36

We’ve been at this for too long, we’ve been getting to this, but, you know, it was really interesting because this dad, you know, when Mac realised that you know he was who he was, you know we talked about it and I said you have to tell him, you have to let him know that you knew him as a baby, and which he did, and um, and that worked. You know that that was fantastic because they, you know, um, they’ve formed a really close connection actually now and um, and this dad has successfully had his three children returned to his care and is doing really well, you know, and I think that longevity of you know of him, knowing that Mac knew his story, was very helpful, you know. So, whilst it was sad, it was also really it was fortuitous that Mac was the one that you know coincidentally picked it up.

Sally: 56:45

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I do think that those knowing what’s up, you know, I think that’s the other thing, colby, that I think I, I think I always knew this, but I know it far more powerfully now is that the decisions that we make, the the, the things that we write, the recommendation recommendations that we make about families, have long-lasting impact. So, therefore, think very, very carefully about what you write, what you decide, because it you know it has consequences, and I know that to be so true now that I probably didn’t know as strongly back then. Yeah, because you know, I even think back to families where we recommended that children go into long-term care. That would I do the same now? Probably not, you know, even though they weren’t fantastic home situations, they were better than what got provided in the long run. So I’d probably go back and undo some of the things that I If we could, if I could.

Sally: 58:07

Based on the knowledge that I had at that time, I was probably doing what I felt was the right thing.

Colby: 58:13

Yeah, yeah, similarly, sally. That’s, I think, a very powerful and great place to bring our conversation to a close. Thank you very much for agreeing to be on my podcast, and maybe in the future we might get you back to talk a little bit more about some of this and similar.

Sally: 58:40

No, that would be good. Thank you, colby, it was a good conversation.

Colby: 58:44

Yeah, awesome. Thanks, Sally.

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