Challenging Last Resort Thinking: Why Some Children Thrive in Residential Care, with Dr Laura Steckley

Reimagining Residential Childcare: Insights from Dr. Laura Steckley

The latest episode of the Secure Start podcast features Dr. Laura Steckley, a leading academic and researcher in therapeutic residential childcare from the University of Strathclyde. With over three decades of experience spanning practice, teaching, and research, Dr. Steckley brings profound insights into an often misunderstood area of child welfare. Throughout the conversation, she challenges the prevailing ideology that residential care should be viewed merely as a “last resort” option for vulnerable children.

One of the most compelling arguments Dr. Steckley presents is that high-quality residential childcare can be the optimal choice for certain children in specific circumstances. She points to research showing that many children who have experienced both foster care and residential settings actually express a preference for residential care. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that family-based care is universally superior. Dr. Steckley explains that for children who have experienced relational trauma, the intensity of a family environment can be overwhelming and even threatening. The pressure of intimate family relationships can trigger loyalties to birth families or activate unprocessed trauma, making foster placements difficult to sustain.

Residential care offers unique advantages that Dr. Steckley illuminates throughout the discussion. The presence of multiple carers provides children with diverse relationship opportunities – increasing the likelihood that a child will connect meaningfully with at least one adult who, in the words of Urie Bronfenbrenner, is “irrationally crazy about them.” The structure also allows both children and carers to have necessary breaks from one another, preventing the relationship burnout that can occur in family settings. Additionally, the power of the peer group in residential care provides therapeutic opportunities that simply aren’t available in foster homes.

The conversation takes a particularly fascinating turn when Dr. Steckley discusses her extensive research on physical restraint in residential settings. Rather than viewing restraint as universally negative, her research reveals nuance – some children report that certain restraint experiences actually improved their relationships with staff. Dr. Steckley introduces containment theory as a framework for understanding how adults can help make “the unmanageable manageable” and “the unthinkable thinkable” for distressed children. Physical restraint, when done as an act of care and protection rather than control, can sometimes provide the physical containment that helps a child regulate overwhelming emotions.

Throughout the discussion, Dr. Steckley emphasizes the importance of understanding shame in children’s behaviour. She suggests that shame may be the most “uncontainable” emotion, often manifesting as rage or shutdown. This connects to her point about the importance of staff receiving adequate containment themselves through supervision and support. Without this, staff cannot effectively attune to children during escalating situations – precisely when attunement is most difficult but most crucial.

Perhaps most powerful is Dr. Steckley’s assertion that “in the daily minutiae of good care is where healing and developmental ground is regained.” This simple yet profound statement emphasizes that the day-to-day interactions, the consistent care, and the accumulated positive experiences are what ultimately help children recover from trauma – not just specialized therapeutic interventions. This perspective elevates the importance of residential childcare workers and recognizes the complexity and value of their work.

The conversation concludes with a discussion of the famous “still face” experiment, highlighting how children become dysregulated when adults fail to provide emotional attunement. This serves as a powerful metaphor for how professionals must remain emotionally present and responsive, even during challenging interactions with traumatized children. The insight that children escalate their behaviour when seeking attunement offers a radical reframing of how we might respond to difficult behaviours in care settings.

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About Laura:

Dr Laura Steckley leads up the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde and so has the very good fortune of doing teaching and learning with residential child care practitioners.  She has worked in direct and indirect practice in both the United States of America and Scotland. Her teaching, research and knowledge mobilisation are mostly addressed to residential child care practice and education, with a particular focus on physical restraint.  

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Transcript:

Colby: 0:00

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.

Laura: 0:03

The world needs people who care about these kids and are finding their passion for how they can make a difference in their lives, working in a place that is kind of the receptacle of last resort. I have been attentive to evidence to the contrary Good, high quality residential child care is the best choice for a very small number of children in very specific circumstances. So even for kids who don’t end up going back home or back to foster care, some of them go on to build a healthier, more rewarding family life in their adulthood as a result of the residential child care experiences they’ve had. I think multiple placements is one of the most damaging things that care systems do to children and young people. But to be able to have breaks from each other as part of an alternative experience of care, I think is really valuable.

Laura: 1:08

Also, having such a range of people with whom that child can have different kinds of connections or there’s at least one person there who can start to see the beauty in the child. That Bronfenbrenner quote of one at least one adult who’s irrationally crazy about them. We’re creating the conditions for children to experience themselves differently, and activities are about the best way to do that. Physical restraint is the most extreme form of containing physically containing then it may also be like therapeutically containing, and that also came through in the data the research did. There were kids who talked about purposely orchestrating events, such so they knew they would get restrained to either let anger out or to be held while they cried In. The daily minutiae of good care is where healing and developmental ground is regained.

Colby: 2:13

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a highly experienced academic and researcher in therapeutic residential child care. Before I introduce my guests, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m coming to you from the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and then acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna 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 Laura Steckley. Laura leads the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde and so has the very good fortune of teaching and learning with residential child care practitioners. She has worked in direct and indirect practice in both the United States of America and Scotland America and Scotland. Her teaching, research and knowledge mobilisation are mostly addressed to residential childcare practice and education, with a particular focus on physical restraint. Welcome, laura.

Laura: 3:38

Thanks, Colby.

Colby: 3:41

Now I always like to ask people was there anything else that you’d like to add to that short bio?

Laura: 3:52

Yeah, I wanted to keep it short and snappy. Direct care, um, training management, um, all of that, um, some of the bureaucratic admin stuff, um. And then came to teach and do research at the university of strathclyde in 2003. So I started working in resi in 1990. It’s been at it for quite a while. Hopefully there’s a kind filter on the Zoom today, but yeah, I’ve been at it for a while, but it’s yeah, it’s still been my main focus and passion really as an adult, you know in my professional from from pretty much the start yeah, yeah, and a concept that we concept or construct, that we spoke about during a pre-meet a few weeks ago was that of pracademic.

Colby: 4:56

So you, yeah, you fit, you fit the the profile in terms of having significant practice experience and having the good fortune to be able to research, and yeah, further study work and I’m interested in practice Like that would be another way of saying what my research and teaching interests are.

Laura: 5:18

And yeah, I’m really interested in practice and I think it’s a forever rich, complex, rewarding area to support, to study, to try and and develop in terms of workforce in Scotland, and Scotland’s been a good place to be doing that for sure yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people will Scotland, and I did mention that you’d worked in the US as well, but you obviously don’t have a Scottish accent.

Laura: 5:49

Yeah, yeah, no, scotland’s been a good landing place for me, so I was already working in residential when I moved here, but I moved here in 1999. So I’ve been in Scotland. For what is that then? In?

Colby: 6:04

the beginning of 99.

Laura: 6:06

So that’s 26 years, yeah so. But as I just mentioned a little bit ago, scotland has pretty high aspirations around care more generally the the alternative care, you might say, of children and young people, including residential child care, and I suspect we’ll be getting into some of the challenges around that coming forward. But, um, it’s not perfect here, most definitely not, but um, but the aspiration is there, which has been a really good landing place for me. It felt like the stars aligned.

Colby: 6:43

Yeah, speaking to other guests, it sounds very similar. Yeah, yeah, so residential childcare. Tell us about how you came to be working in this really important and, at times, controversial area of childcare practice.

Laura: 7:03

Actually, before I answer that, I’m going to give a little anecdote On the MSc in residential child care. It’s primarily managers but some frontline practitioners, and because there’s a big component of the use of self and who you bring to the encounter with a child, or who it is of yourself that you bring um to the class, to the studies, um, we start the whole year with this um activity called river of life um and people choose what they want to share, but they chart what, the key things that have happened in their life that brought them to this day where they’re embarking on a master’s level.

Laura: 7:44

For some, like they haven’t had good experiences of education in their past, whatever, but what’s brought them to have that level of commitment, to be working in residential child care and to be doing this work, this educational work in relation to that, and for many years. Well, we’ve been doing this for now 20, 22 years maybe it’ll be this september. Um, it’s extremely rare and most years no one says. I wanted to be a resi worker when I was a kid, right, and many people didn’t even know what residential child care was myself included, or residential, didn’t know anything about it and, like so many others, I fell into it almost accidentally. And this is a common theme across that and what that does to our workforce in terms of how it shapes professional identity, which we may or may not get into. There’s so much we could talk about today, but, um, so I, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, that was going to be an attorney, and I, I like arguments, not like hostile argument. I like building a strong argument. Um, from a young age and I was interested in courtroom dramas as a kid.

Laura: 9:05

So I did an undergraduate degree and in the United States you do four years undergraduate and three years law school. So I did my undergraduate degree focusing on what would get me into law school, and I did a degree in political science, or a major as we call them, and I found it really just just despairing, actually, the grimness of the political realities of the world, which are only getting worse, I think. But I also took an ethics class that I loved, and so that was in philosophy, and so I took another to get my humanities requirements out of the way. But I just kept taking more and more, and so I did a second major in philosophy and I have to tell you that equipped me more for residential child care than any of the psychology I took, maybe because of the type of psychology that was being taught at my university.

Laura: 9:59

And when I finished the four years I knew I wasn’t mature enough to go to law school like self-discipline and all that and so I thought I need to just go be in the world and work, and a friend of mine had gotten a job in a residential treatment center and she’s like we need staff, as you do, and she’s like maybe you’d be good at it. And so I’m like I don’t even know what that is Like. So I went along and she had told me a bit about the work before I went. So I kind of thought about you know what that might be like and what, how I might approach things. And I did well enough in the interview to get a job, although maybe they just needed a warm body, I don’t know.

Laura: 10:41

And I swallowed the hook, man. I just it was so frightening and intense. But every day was different and it was meaningful and I loved the teenagers. They were difficult and didn’t always feel love for them, but overall I loved working with teenagers. I loved working as part of a team and it didn’t take long before I realized the world didn’t need another lawyer, do you know? But the world needs people who care about these kids and are finding their passion for how they can make a difference in their lives.

Colby: 11:16

So that was that was the path for me into this work so when you, when you were working initially in residential child care, um, cast your mind back, what, what influenced the way in which you went about the work, would you say. Were they, what? Were there people that had influenced you? Were there? Was there um particular theories or bodies of work that um that you came across that were of influence to the way you went about being a residential child care practitioner?

Laura: 11:52

It was a bit more theoretical. In the States At least they espoused or claimed to follow, positive peer culture was the first place I was in and I learned about the power of the group and that has influenced me ever since. And Scotland, maybe the UK more widely, is a bit afraid of the group. It feels like afraid of groups of children, especially teenagers, and we don’t harness and we’ve also become much more individualized collectively, I think, at least in western society since my, since the early 1990s. So it’s not just the UK probably, but yeah, so we struggle to harness the power of the group, I think now, but it’s still there and I still kind of push against it.

Laura: 12:36

Ruth Eman’s work who would be another great person to have on the podcast is brilliant. She um for her phd. She lived in a residential child’s home as an adult. She didn’t pretend she was a kid, but she also was very clear I’m not a member of staff, I don’t have keys. She had a bedroom like the other kids had bedrooms and did an ethnographic study of um the children’s culture outside of the staff gaze. She couldn’t do it outside of the children’s culture outside of the staff gaze. She couldn’t do it outside of the adult gaze because she’s an adult right and they tested her. You should get her on because she talks about how they tested her to see if she was going to like take things back to the staff. And she was really clear like if it’s serious imminent harm kind of stuff, we got to take that back, but otherwise so they would test her and stuff. But she did a brilliant and she’s done brilliant work ever since then.

Laura: 13:29

So, I’ll talk more about her with you, maybe after, but anyway. So the power of the group. I think the other big thing was the move from the United States and a treatment focus which was more deficit based, more medicalized orientation to the work. That was so pervasive that I didn’t recognize it as such because that’s just how we all thought. And that was the wider culture to residential child care in Scotland which felt sorely lacking in theory, not that we were actually using theory as well as we should have, but really understood care well, understood care better than in the United States. And I think care is the way to go. Not that there isn’t a place for a treatment orientation, but I think it’s where, in the daily minutia of good care, is where healing and developmental ground is regained. And that relationship within which that care takes place and those relationships even John Toronto’s work as a political philosopher about the marginalization care and the fact that we need to bring it to the center of society’s concerns all have played a big part. And that’s just a little bit.

Colby: 15:25

When you were talking about the difference between what happened in the US and what you were observing in Scotland. It made me think about treatment as being something that you do, too, and care as being something that you do with.

Laura: 15:38

Yeah, if you’re doing good care. Yes, and we didn’t always. Even once I got to scotland in 99 and I didn’t get a job for about six months and and I think when I had um submitted applications and even did an interview, they were like, they were like I’m not sure about her, you know, because I was coming from it’s such a different orientation but a place took a chance on me and um and you know, I worked then in scotland in care um for a few years four years, something like that before then going on to work at the university.

Colby: 16:16

So yeah, yeah, and and I recall from our conversation, um, during our pre-meet, that you have some things to say about what children say about their experiences in residential care. I wonder if you’d be happy to share some of that.

Laura: 16:34

Sure, so yeah, so in both the United States and in Scotland and I’m aware from the literature, many places in the world residential child care is very much treated as a last resort and there’s this underlying belief that sometimes not even adults are not even aware of, or that they don’t scrutinize if they are aware of it, that like that’s the worst thing for a child, and so working in a place that is kind of the receptacle of last resort.

Laura: 17:11

I have been attentive to evidence to the contrary and and there have been some interesting studies, none of which that I’m aware of have focused in on which is better and under what circumstances, and maybe I’ll put my cards on the table, to use a poker metaphor I believe residential child care is the best.

Laura: 17:35

Good, high quality residential child care is the is the best choice for a very small number of children in very specific circumstances, and so, um, in 1998, barry Jim Brody did a really significant study and that wasn’t their focus, but that was kind of, and that’s how it seems to be coming through in the research. That was kind of a side thing that they included. Jim Anglin, who’s a North American, his seminal grounded theory study has a batch of and what’s happening in these studies is kids who’ve experienced both foster care and residential child care have had things to say and often it’s been a majority have had a preference for residential child care. Um duncalf in the uk. Um is a care leaver herself and she did a big um quanta or a big um questionnaire type study and quite a lot of people responding had had experience of both and a high proportion preferred residential child care to to nearly half experience. The placement is very positive and 78 preferred residential, 78 percent preferred residential child care and 5% indicated they preferred foster care.

Colby: 19:11

Why do you think that is the case?

Laura: 19:14

There’s more recent ones, but I’m less on top of them anyway. So I think again, if it’s good quality residential childcare and it’s the right child’s circumstances, certainly the pressure of the more intimate familial relational demands that we naturally make of one another as part of being in relationship with one another would be experienced by some children in a foster home as even potentially intolerable because of the loyalties or ambivalence the loyalties to their family of origin or their ambivalence about these kind of relationships, because of the damaging experiences they might have had in similar type of relationships that haven’t yet been cognitively processed, digested, um, and so that’s, I think, why foster care goes wrong a lot. I also think foster carers are often put in horrible situations, you know as well, and I think we do damage to adults with this as well as damage to kids by placing them on for ideological reasons that foster care is better because it mimics family more.

Laura: 20:33

But I think residential child care has more resources, even though it’s poorly resourced in most countries, has more resources just in the sheer number of adults. And if there’s a good culture or there’s good training and ongoing as well as entry-level training, then I think as well as just like activities, the power of the group, all of that kind of stuff, and sometimes it can be a bridge back to either family of origin or back to and I’ve worked with kids where we provided bridging experiences which England I don’t know if he coined the term, but uses that very well in a seminal study experiences that then enable them to access the kind of normal experiences of either going back to their family or of origin and and or foster family and being able to have more normal family life. Um, but I don’t think there’s enough recognition of what some kids need to be able to do that. And then there are other kids who either aren’t able or don’t want to have that as part of their childhood. They might go on to have that in adulthood, to have that as part of their childhood. They might go on to have that in adulthood.

Laura: 21:47

I’ve had a student who looked at outcomes of the placement that he had worked in, but these people were in their late 20s and early 30s and one of the most significant outcomes that they identified this whole dialogue around the whole way we use outcomes. They were defining outcomes themselves, which was a really powerful but small study, and they said you know, I parent my children differently because of the way that I experienced relationships with the adults in this home and the reparenting they didn’t call it that as compared to how my parents parented me Like. So even for kids who don’t end up going back home or back to foster care, some of them go on to build a healthier, more rewarding family life in their adulthood as a result of the residential child care experiences they’ve had. We have some small bits of evidence from small scale study and anecdotal evidence as well, and the reason why we don’t have more evidence is because we’re not designing research. That’s asking the right questions and that’s a funding issue, but yeah, anyway. Yeah, I’m not good at short answers, sorry.

Colby: 23:04

No, no, that’s okay. It has often been said of me as well. I can write succinctly. When I used to do a lot of court work, I had a bit of a reputation for giving long answers, but amongst the lawyers, that is, I’m glad I’m not with a kindred then yeah, yeah, so, um, but yeah, you said a couple of things there of of interest to me.

Colby: 23:31

Um, I’ve long also felt that there are there are young people who find being in a family, young people in the out-of-home care system who find being in a family emotionally unsafe and threatening.

Colby: 23:48

They just the level of closeness that we expect of people, and it’s tragic to think that they might go through any number of family-based foster placements before, at some stage, someone decides well, they’re not really getting on at all in foster care, so we’ll have to invoke the option of last resort, as you say. Whereas if you actually thought about the experience of the young person, thought about the experience of the young person, so, rather than making an ideological decision that the best place for children to grow up is in a family environment and that’s a general ideology, as you say if you actually just treated each child on a case-by-case basis and thought about the particular characteristics of each child and what their needs might be, there are likely to be a proportion of young people that you would, from the outset, choose residential care for. Yep, and what I also heard you say and I often think of the impact of relational trauma as being like a phobia. Yeah, and what’s the best treatment for phobias? Graded exposure. The thing that they’re phobic of is relational closeness.

Laura: 25:16

And so we put them in situations where it’s too intense, too fast and we actually deepen the phobia or we deepen the hurt, and I think multiple placements is one of the most damaging things that care systems do to children and young people. Yeah, we’re totally in agreement about this. I would add. For that to be possible, though, people who are making placement decisions need to understand what residential child care can offer, understand what can happen or what does happen in good residential child care, and then residential child care needs to be supported to do what it can do so well, and those two things are really precarious at best when they’re when both of those things are kind of functioning, but often people have no idea, and so all they have is that ideological thing to fall back on, because they just don’t know.

Colby: 26:14

Yeah, yeah, I am concerned that if we maintain the idea that residential care is the care option of last resort, then it’s hard. It’s difficult for me to conceive of that. Policymakers would fund it well yeah, exactly so.

Laura: 26:32

It’s this vicious or vicious circle or self-fulfilling prophecy, like it’s and, and, yet and. And. This is why, in Scotland, it’s a good place to be, because the current Scottish government does have an investment. It can’t back up that investment with the kind of resources that are actually required, or it? I mean, there’s always money, but who has the money? Like it’s not, like they’re swimming in it. They have it. They have to make decisions, and I certainly don’t think residential child care is the only thing deserving of resources, right, so I wouldn’t want to have to be the person making those kind of budgetary decisions, but there is that aspiration in the Scottish government. There is an awareness of residential child care and of care more generally. This has been one of the great things about living in Scotland, especially as compared to the United States, is the Scottish government, and Scotland is small enough that policymakers do really listen and you have access.

Laura: 27:37

I’m part of CELCIS and the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, and CELCIS has changed its name, so it’s no longer the Center of Excellence for Looked After Children, but I can’t remember the exact bits now, but CELCIS is one of the many ways that Scottish government communicates, and then I’m part of CELCIS, and so I’ve watched the Children’s Act get influenced by care experienced activists and CELCIS was a bit a part of that in the background experienced activists and CELCIS was a bit a part of that in the background, and that activism informed some of what came out of the Children’s Act 2013, I think, such that children’s age of leaving care got extended to 21, with support of through care to 26. And there was a very much relational face-to-face impact between the then head, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish government and care experience people that you know, and the promise also came out of all of that too. So, yeah, yeah, small is better sometimes.

Colby: 28:50

Yeah, I think so, and you also mentioned before about children going back to birth family, and you mentioned bridging and spoke about James Anglin. There’s a name I’d like to get on my podcast as well.

Laura: 29:08

Oh yeah, wouldn’t that be great.

Colby: 29:10

So we’ve talked a little bit about how residential care if you think about trauma creating a phobia where the phobic object is relational connection, that’s where children feel most unsafe and the best treatment for that is graded exposure. So you gradually re-expose them to relational connection. With birth, family connection. I often think that residential care has the opportunity to lead the way in terms of birth family reconnection, because there’s less agendas when you’ve got a professional workforce working with children. It’s much more vexed if it’s family-based care, if it’s foster care or, you know, if it’s kin as well, where oftentimes the kinship carers are quite negative in their disposition towards the parent on the other side of the family, so to speak. But even foster carers can be very unforgiving of birth parents. So I think so birth family reconnection, I think is something that residential childcare can lead the way. And I guess this kind of leads me into wondering about what you’ve discovered, about what else you’ve discovered about how residential childcare can offer things better things or offer things in a better way than other forms of out-of-home care.

Laura: 30:52

Well, right on that point that you’re making, I think sometimes the care that they give to families as well, and helping families make sense of their child’s behaviour, for example, creating spaces where children and their family members can start to have that graduated kind of reconnection, so, and I think you know, often it’s less threatening for the family too that these, especially if there’s a school on site, then oh, my child’s at school and they’re just the staff at the school. I think that makes it even easier. But even in a care home or they refer to them as houses in a lot of places here because of the negative stigma attached to care home but so in houses here, like it’s still a house, that is kind of professional versus the foster care, so kinship care, so yeah, I definitely think there’s that. I think I think the power of the group, as I’ve mentioned having, I can remember, being able to endure and actually be really present and, um, really tolerant and creative and bear quite a lot of rage or difficulty, sometimes into three or four in the morning, having worked a double, you know, having started the morning before whatever, or just the energy of like camping and like many days because I knew I was going to go home and go right, and so I think there’s something about. And for kids too to have a fresh face, like with all the shame. I think shame’s a part. So I think there’s phobia, but I think shame’s an interesting part. We talked about that earlier and I haven’t read the thing you sent me, I just remembered. But um, but to be able to have breaks from each other as part of um, as part of an alternative experience of care, I think is really valuable. That’s just not structurally possible in a foster home or in kinship care. I mean, the break is from the family of origin and sometimes there’s to-ing and fro-ing that happens there. That can be helpful but often isn’t. So yeah, I think there’s that.

Laura: 33:22

And also having such a range of people with whom that child can have different kinds of connections, or there’s at least one person there who can start to see like the beauty in that child that Bram from Brunner quote of one, at least one adult who’s irrationally crazy about them. And for some kids, what’s happened to them and their way of coping and defending themselves has become such a rejection of the world and ways of please reject me, kind of to keep you away from me that it can be really hard to see that child’s beauty or wonderfulness in whatever form that it manifests. And the large you have a large enough group of people and once that starts, then that can spread to other people and so, while we all sometimes have to try to look for it and have to pretend isn’t the right word, but when it’s difficult you kind of have to shift to where there’s this really genuine, authentic reflecting back a child’s goodness to him. The bigger the, and we all need that experience in our lives, not just as children, but we need a lot of it as children.

Laura: 34:38

And then, if you’ve had really hurtful experiences, you need more of that and I think I think that’s something that isn’t really talked about, but I was very aware of it in practice when I had those moments where that happened and I was able to do it. It sort of just happened at first and then I became aware of it, was able to do it, and I think like that would be an example of like people who don’t understand residential child care wouldn’t even be able to muster that up. But that happens within good teams and really good teams who are cooking on gas. They talk about it and like who is connecting with with this kid just now? Who is able to reflect back to this kid? His goodness? Um, it’s probably not happening all over, but there’s.

Colby: 35:21

So there’s so much in what you say I mean um.

Colby: 35:24

It puts me in mind of the my own observation, across 30 years of practice in child protection, out-of-home care and related endeavours, which is that our children don’t just.

Colby: 35:39

I often think about the one good adult research and I think, yes, absolutely we need to have. As Yuri Brompton Brenner said, you know you have to have one of those adults in your life, but I do think the more good relationships that children have, the better. So I think you know our child protection system is very much focused on whether you’ve had a bad experience with parents here. So what we’re going to do is line you up with some new parents and you’ll have experiences with them that will, that will remediate, that will repair the the damage that is done there. And you mentioned earlier about how foster carers often get um hurt themselves through in in this um system and and largely that’s because, from my point of view, that they’re sold. They’re sold a bit of a dummy really, about what, what, what is possible, what, what, they, what they can, what can be achieved um and what will be demanded of them.

Colby: 36:52

Yeah, yeah. The reality is that there’s so much more that needs to happen to help a child or young person recover from that early relational adversity.

Laura: 37:09

Yeah.

Colby: 37:10

I’m not particularly au fait with the power of the group that you know when you’re yeah, and I wondered if you might just uh say a few words about that and what you mean for my benefit. If not, you know other other listeners as well okay, gosh, where to begin?

Laura: 37:27

I think I’ll start by saying, like, anytime you have a group of people, or even just two people, and probably intrapersonally as well, there’s always dynamics that are happening within a group, and I think being able to channel some of that is useful. But I also think so my first experience was with a model called positive peer culture. Experience was with a model called positive peer culture. So and this is about the power of peer relationships to foster positive change, so much so that, like we were encouraged and sometimes even corrected to, if we didn’t do this, instead of, like, directly confronting a kid’s behavior, you would sidle up to a different kid and say I’m interested in the fact that you’re noticing so-and-so, struggling with this authority problem and you haven’t yet called a group. And the whole day, even in education, like if something was happening, any child could call a group or adult could call a group, but ideally you want the kids calling group and then they circle, they stand up and they circle up and they’re like I’m calling this group, Colby, because I see that you’re struggling with your authority problem with Mrs Smith and I think we can help you with that. And there’s this whole list of problems. That, on the one hand, is good because it gives kids a way to identify things and a language for it. It’s pretty deficit based because it’s all problem based. But, um, and then they talk and they swear at each other and they fall. But do you know, and these kids were so insightful and so, and they would listen to each other in a way that they don’t listen to adults, right. So there’s that like, and that happens anyway.

Laura: 39:15

I mean, that was a very structured, facilitative approach. That was sometimes amazing and sometimes it felt a bit dodgy. No required qualification for us to be doing that and like the power of that. You really had to be good at it and you had to have an understanding and a value base because, yeah, you could use a book group to bully a kid, for example, a kid who’s given you problems or whatever. So there was all that, plus I would and I’m going to draw on Jack Phelan He’d be another great person to have. By the way.

Laura: 39:56

He wrote this really small article a while back and he’s now got a book out that I haven’t read yet but is on my list. But this little nugget was this thing called experience arranging and he was like child and youth care work isn’t all the things we think, it is, it’s experience arranging. That’s what we’re doing. We’re creating the conditions for children to experience themselves differently and activities are about the best way to do that. Especially if the activity is fun enough or engrossing enough, then it drowns out that background narrative of I’m a bad kid or I’m too cool for this or all of the stuff that gets kids in the way of being able to experience, say the restorative foster parents that you mentioned before.

Laura: 40:45

So group activities if and again it requires skill and fortitude to do well can really enable children and, like for my master’s dissertation, which was the school football team that played against other special schools, and the way these boys some of them had already got aged out, as we used to call it the way they talked about those transformative experiences of the school football team and they never at that time would have been able to access a normal mainstream school or league.

Laura: 41:21

You know, football team because of the behavioral difficulties was like life-changing for them and um, they, they could have that as part of a group and um, like, they could remember Colby, like remember that game where we played against and then they named the other school and I was coming down the line and like this was a few years prior and and then he just knew I was going to pass it to him and he was right there and and the excitement and everything. It was just amazing. So I guess that is what I mean about the power of the group and for a lot of our kids they don’t have the normal experiences of group that kids, which I think is reducing for all kids right now. To be honest with you, Sports and band and all of that. The funding for all that is is not good, but, um, yeah, that’s what I mean yeah, thank you, that’s.

Colby: 42:17

That’s a wonderful description and, um, it put me in mind of sports teams yeah, as you, as you were talking about it and then. So it was nice that you you finished up the talk giving a sports example and I love what you’re saying, what you’re attributing to Phelan. I totally you will never talk a child out of believing that they’re bad.

Laura: 42:45

Yeah, you’ll never talk them out of it. They have to experience themselves.

Colby: 42:48

They have to experience themselves in a different way. Never talk about it. They have to experience themselves in a different way. They also.

Laura: 42:56

You’ll never, you’ll never talk them into trusting people right until they can until they have the experience, and that’s the minutiae of care of really good care the little drips of care that that that’s where the restoration happens. Not that the therapy hour doesn’t have its place, but yeah.

Colby: 43:16

Yeah, recent guest, Adela Holmes, who set up Hurstbridge Farm, a residential therapeutic community here in Australia. She was talking about getting the you know what comes first the cart or the horse, in this sense that we often expect children to behave and as a reward for that, we will give them good relationship.

Laura: 43:42

Yes, yes.

Colby: 43:44

Yeah, and it’s outrageous, isn’t it? And it has to be the other way around. Yeah.

Laura: 43:49

Yeah.

Colby: 43:51

Now I want to. People are going to wonder a bit about this little segue. Your research interest has been in restraint. One of your great I know this, I’m not sure if you’ve mentioned it already, but one of your great theoretical passions is containment theory, containment and restraint yeah, yeah, so I can remember, because I I did have to restrain children, um, young people really.

Laura: 44:28

I’ve mostly worked with young people. I remember like something is going on here that is powerful and I don’t understand what it is and I need ways of understanding this. And it really troubled me, like, and I became the in-house trainer in in one of the places in Colorado for for crisis, for you know, restraint and all of the stuff that went around trying to avoid getting into restraint, um and so. So physical restraint for anybody who’s watching that doesn’t know exactly about residential child care and physical restraint it it doesn’t just happen in residential Chicago, it happens across a lot of strata of society. But in residential child care if a child poses serious, imminent harm to themselves or someone else, um, and the adults responding have no other way of of making it safe. They sometimes have to hold a child against his or her will and it can be really horrible for everybody. People can get really hurt.

Laura: 45:39

So I did a study in 2000. It probably started in 2003, and it went on for a long time, partly because I collected so much data. I had to do justice to all of that. So I published from that data for a really long time, and it took a good few years to collect the data around people’s experiences of restraint. And I also then came to be aware of containment theory as a way of, first, of a way of understanding what was happening in the data, what I had experienced, as a way of understanding what people were saying about their experiences adults and young people and children and then containment theory just has become an organizing frame and a way of seeing the world generally. For me it’s not the only way, but it is a big one and the end of seeing residential child care practice more widely. So, um, so I’ve done some other research in relation to physical restraint and it’s recently been announced, so I can say here, that the Scottish government is funding a 30-month project that I’m a part of, leading up around mainly research but also some knowledge mobilization, and it’s not just we research and then we give the knowledge, like we’re mobilizing knowledge from the residential child care sector while at the same time giving knowledge back. So there’s this flow of knowledge between us that’s being mobilized in the best interest of children, young people, around reducing, where possible, eliminating, restraint. But here’s the other thing, and again I’ll put my cards on the table, but also ensuring that when not ensuring because we can’t raising the likelihood to the greatest extent possible that when restraints do happen they are experienced as an act of care and protection by the child or young person.

Laura: 47:41

And actually that first study, there were children and young people who said some restraint. So I asked a question like how did the restraint affect your relationship with the people who restrained you? And then adults, how did it affect your relationship with the kid that you restrained? And adults all said either it damages it or they’re kind of neutral about it. But children and young people over a third said in some cases it improved the relationship. Okay, and I was doing the interviews both at the same time.

Laura: 48:19

I didn’t do like children first and then adults or vice versa. So I started asking adults, once they had exhausted what they wanted, to tell me what about the other side of the coin? Is there ever a time that it’s had a positive effect and a really high proportion once, given the question and maybe some permission where, well, with some kids like, there’s a relief or you know so, um, so I think when kids are at their most extreme states of distress, rage, um, all of the things that happen in the lead up to a restraint can be understood. And now I’m going to shift to containment theory. So I’m going to give the very boiled down version. So containment theory is really about what makes the unmanageable, unbearable, intolerable, uncontainable, containable, manageable, bearable, tolerable and that like and that like. That’s the way in, that’s a boil down and most people can recognize states of being uncontained and that’s another way in. So if you’ve ever yourself been so such strong feelings that you can’t think straight, feelings that you can’t think straight, um, then that would be an example of being uncontained.

Laura: 49:44

And beyond, who’s the father containment theory? Um, so it’s actually a developmental theory that we develop the capacity now here’s the other little boiled down way and to use thinking to manage raw experience and emotion. Right, so, to be able to use thinking to make it containable, manageable, um, and we all have moments or periods of time, individually and groups, have this, where it where we lose that or where it’s lost a bit and we’re not thinking very clearly as a team and we become punitive. There’s lots of ways we can identify this in our own lives, and so physical restraint is the most extreme form of containing, physically containing. But if there is all the other things, the relational part, it’s handled in the most child-centered way possible up to and during the restraint and then post the restraint, then it may also be therapeutically containing and that also came through in the data.

Laura: 51:01

So containment theory will be very much a part of the the um study that’s about to start. That it’s more than a study because it’s also got some knowledge mobilization in it. But um, but there will be others other elements to that as well. But certainly there are a lot of things that happen for kids that are uncontainable, right, but also for the adults. So if adults are going to be able to buy and also talked about, like the mother absorbs the child’s uncontainable empty stomach, uncontainable empty stomach or just dysregulation, we’ll use dysregulation because that’s identifiable For Brian it was.

Laura: 51:44

The mother would absorb that and give it back in a more containable form the clean nappy, the full stomach, the rocking, and there is something very physical, I think, about our needs for containment. That’s very challenging. So staff do their version of absorbing it and then giving it back in a more manageable form, which could be something as simple. As you seem really upset about that, let’s go for a walk. There’s a bit of containment in there. But they need contain because there’s a lot of things that happen in the work that raise anxiety, that are hard to manage, that, things that are frightening or concerning or um, and not just the children’s behavior but the fact that you work in a field that’s last resort and stigma that can go with that, organizational policies and practices that aren’t so helpful.

Laura: 52:40

There’s all sorts of things that can cause scandals and history of institutional abuse.

Laura: 52:47

All of that stuff can in a very unconscious way create anxiety that then compromise adults’ ability to be good containers for kids through their relationships. If we can help that and if that containment gets stronger, that therapeutic relational containment and the rhythms and routines and positive symbolism and all that stuff symbolic communication then I truly believe in. There’s some anecdotal evidence and another project I’m a part of is beginning to produce other kinds of evidence that it can reduce restraints through because that stuff is being contained earlier in whatever process of escalation might’ve occurred, that sort of thing. So that is a very messy attempt to offer an introduction to like what the two are and what they have to do with each other. Yeah, we’ll start there, or we could even end there when I first started getting excited about containment theory, I kind of felt like I was not a sole voice but one of a very few voices and you know banging on about this, and I knew that most people were hearing something different than what I was intending, because of Restrictive practices.

Laura: 54:08

yeah, Exactly of the negative connotation and I’m like well, holding environments Winnicott’s holding environments is kindred like. They’re very and beyond containment. They’re very, very close and I often use the two almost interchangeably um, but holding therapies, especially like um, the, the attachment holding therapies that foster klein was doing in the united states. I just didn’t want that to get conflated, because that’s very contentious work, that um, kids were deliberately provoked and then held, and because I was like, yeah, with physical restraint I thought I can’t go that way. So I just kept banging on about it and I I have to say in scotland containment theory is getting traction. It’s becoming part of people’s vocabulary in a way that is useful in helping them understand their own needs to be able to meet the needs of children. It’s not uniform across the whole country or anything, but it is definitely getting traction and it’s exciting when students are like, oh, like anything that has explanatory power, and people are like, oh, this helps me make sense of stuff, and then they start using it in very enthusiastic ways. We’re that and that’s.

Colby: 55:22

That’s been very rewarding, for sure yeah, previous podcast guest, lisa etherson, has um. She’s the person I was telling you about, who, who has developed shame containment theory yes, yes, that’s the thing I need to read that you said yeah, yeah well, yeah, yeah, read it. Uh, it is. It’s very interesting. I hope to have her back on shortly. You know, before we move on from that.

Laura: 55:50

Sorry, just it just occurs to me that shame is probably the most uncontainable emotion, and so I immediately can see a link there, like shame is so intolerable of all of our emotions that we usually shift it into rage or we shut down. And so being and part of containment theory is about making the unthinkable thinkable and the unfeelable feelable, and so, and I think shame is one of the most important unacknowledged, unaddressed aspects of what’s going on in practice. So, from my practice interest, um one of the projects I’m working on, we’re beginning to look at shame and how we can make that more recognizable and dealable with um, so the fact that she’s linked that with containment actually sparked something for me, in a way that when we talked about it before it hadn’t, it hadn’t set legs in.

Colby: 56:53

So that’s yeah, that’s really interesting what you interesting what you said could have came out of Lisa’s mouth, then Really, yeah, based on my experience of listening to Lisa talk about it, yeah, absolutely that it does get shifted into rage, and you do. You then do think about some of of our you know our significant social problems in society, in society that are anger and rage based, and, um, and the importance of understand for me, the importance of understanding where that comes from. I think it’s probably just misattributed to as just being to do with toxic masculinity, for example, or you know one’s own, you know cultural factors around male aggression and so on, when male aggression, a significant component of it, for example, is this uncontained or can be uncontained shame related to that and until we get to grips with that yeah, until we get to grips with it, we won’t fully get.

Colby: 58:11

we won’t get as far with dealing with some of those social ills that revolve around male aggression in particular.Laura: 58:19

Yeah, and understanding it.

Laura: 58:23

Yeah, understanding it isn’t justifying it in any way. Understanding it can lead us to better solutions, yeah, and it’s in everybody’s interest. The other thing about containment containment doesn’t just make it go away, and so, like the previous ways that term has been used, I think there isn’t much thought about what happens after you contain it, like that’s it done, happening at work, and you have a really good containing supervision. You don’t come out of that supervision with your anxiety taken away. You come out of that supervision with greater clarity of thinking. You come out of that supervision with a greater sense that you can manage what previously felt more unmanageable, and you come out of that supervision maybe with a bit more hope and and um things that you can do. And so, yeah, I think that’s the other thing I wanted to say about containment theory it doesn’t make it go away, it just shifts it to something more manageable, clear thinking, all that kind of stuff. But boy don’t we need that in society. Or, after a really difficult shift, the whole range yeah and and, uh and super.

Colby: 59:41

I love what you said a little bit earlier when you were talking about it, about the need for staff to be contained to, and it’s been a it’s been a consistent theme that’s come up in this podcast over the past 19 odd guess 19 guests that I’ve had on um, most of them talking about the need for a containing supervision arrangement in order to yeah, yeah, the other thing, just talking about restraint and some children, I can, you know, looking back at my own practice over the past 30 years, I can easily think of the kids who actually sought out physical contact, part of safe care, and safe care practice in out-of-home care not just, I guess, in therapeutic residential childcare but in foster and kinship care has perhaps led us away from the role of touch, the role of holding, and we have children who haven’t been held.Laura: 1:01:00

Right Physically.

Colby: 1:01:01

Physically held for years and years and not everybody.

Laura: 1:01:06

Sorry, I’m getting excited.

Colby: 1:01:08

No, that’s okay, I was just going to say 1995, I had a paper published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry about the importance of physical touch on mental health and wellbeing.

Laura: 1:01:22

Yeah, yeah, you know, not everybody needs health when they’re at their most uncontained or when they’re uncontained generally, but a lot of us do, and a lot of kids do. You add to that, though, that being touched and held like you might need it, but you also need for it not to happen, or you’re, whether it’s phobic or what meaning it has for you after um, after people have have um been exploitative around that or hurtful around that, so, um, so that’s this whole another layer of further anxiety that staff are um undergoing and the the research did um there were kids who talked about purposely um orchestrating events such so they knew they would get restrained to either let anger out or to be held while they cried they were a minority, but they were, it’s still significant and or witnessing that and thinking that’s what was happening for another kid. And there are people who have really had a problem with that being in my findings, or with kids having anything positive to say about it. You know, like the positive impacts on relationship being in my findings, um, and I think you got to create a space for all of people’s truths to come forth and then try to make sense of that truth in a way that doesn’t distort it. But um, yeah, but here’s the.

Laura: 1:02:53

The other thing is catharsis, like our bodies have a somatic reaction to the emotional dimension and we haven’t really dealt with the fact that a child’s body will have needs during that, not just this abstract emotional need through talk dealt through talking but adults as well.

Laura: 1:03:17

And so what’s going on there that we might be brave but also really careful about to try to better meet kids needs? So again, so that either restraints aren’t needed or when they do happen, it’s experienced as an act of care and protection. Do you know, and I think the thing I’ve become very interested in very recently is that attunement, so that achievement and the ability to reflect back what you’re tuning in on when you’re in that escalating phase, maybe going up to a restraint, like how capable are most people of doing that when actually they’re either shutting down or having to manage their natural desire to either shut down or their natural defense, or to shift to rage or whatever it is that’s happening for them, but to actually be there for the child and be attuned to that child, and yet I think that might be emotional availability and attunement in those peak moments are the hardest thing.

Colby: 1:04:40

But maybe the most powerful thing to avoid it going to the kind of brutalizing restraint that kids have described in my research and in many other places.

Colby: 1:04:45

Other research and the promise and that sort of thing, boy, that’s advanced practice, isn’t it? You know, laura, there is so much we could talk about. I know, I’m sorry, just what you were saying. Then a couple of things, though that I reflect a couple of my own reflections on that. And it goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning of this talk, which is that for for a cert, for for certain children, resident residential care is the best option for for certain children, it aligns with their needs, but in order and and then, and at that time I reflected, you reflected, and I reflected too, that we need to get away from these kind of ideological approaches to the care of the children and actually understand what each child actually needs. Yeah, yeah. And similarly, you’re not saying that restraint is a good experience, far from it. You’re not saying that restraint is a good experience for all children, but there are children who will seek out that physical contact, that physical containment, because it meets a need for them.

Laura: 1:06:00

Yeah, and we have to figure out how to deal with that, or we’ll do much greater damage to those kids. Even though they’re a small minority, they matter, you know, and people aren’t making that up.

Colby: 1:06:12

No, and we need to. So again. I mean one of the I think the broad messages of this conversation has been that we need to understand our subject more, more and more. And it’s through understanding our subject that we can tailor our responses better and more therapeutically to them.

Laura: 1:06:37

Yeah, and I, when I first started working in that first residential treatment center, I knew very quickly I did not know enough to be doing that work and I didn’t get the sense that people around about me knew enough either. Like, yeah, and I now I feel that even more so. Do you know? Like, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know, kind of thing Like there’s and it’s such complex work, it’s such complex work, yeah.

Colby: 1:07:06

Yeah Well, I better let you go. You’ve got your day ahead of you, I’ve got my evening ahead of me. But one last thing I would love to speak to you again, and I would love to speak about the topic of attunement, and me too.

Colby: 1:07:24

Let’s do that I I thought I would just leave you with one one thought, one reflection. You know the, the um, the still face experiments, yeah, you’re familiar with, yeah, and there’s the famous that there’s a, there’s kind of like a famous video that you can lift off of the internet yes, I use it in my teaching yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, at where it’s what’s one, it’s the all one of the authors of it. Um, he’s kind of narrating the, the video, you know the one yeah, I mean everyone.

Laura: 1:07:57

I can’t think of his name.

Colby: 1:07:58

No, I’m having a mental blank. Now everyone, um, when I because I use I use it in my training as well I get, I get people to. I’ve warned people, it’s very distressing, bloody blah. But what I want you to do is notice what is the mum’s first response to the baby yeah, so that what when she comes out of still face? So, um, if people are don’t know what we’re talking about, you can go. If you, if you go onto youtube and do and type in still face experiment, you’re likely to get the video we’re talking about anyway. So you know mum, mum’s playing and interacting with her child, and and and they’re, you know they’re in sync, they’re attuned to each other, and then mum looks away, as you know, and she looks and she looks back and she’s um, still face. Now, this is, this was advice that was doled out, you know, and maybe still is that you know when a child is escalating, what you should do is just give them no emotional reaction at all.

Laura: 1:09:10

Yes, and that probably has caused some restraints, even in my own practice, and you know, and some people then maybe even become more wooden as part of their coping because they don’t want counter-aggression to be coming through, or they naturally shut down when they’re feeling threatened.

Laura: 1:09:29

Right, and at those moments that child becomes, we are, we are so much on the same wavelength with this because I teach about this in my and that child is like I need you and reaching that baby, right, and the baby becomes completely uncontained, so much so that she loses her physical posture, she even becomes contained, uncontained physically, and that it.

Laura: 1:09:58

And then you could link it with shame too, in terms of like being cast out and like the deep, fundamental, like sociological understanding of shame, and that a relational repair or the minute, the because you said but what does the mom do as soon as she’s allowed to come out of still face? It’s that relational repair or that connection that she immediately connects to that child. So if we can stay connected to that child during that escalation, we may have a much better chance of it, of that child not becoming more uncontained, rather than and our uncontainment may look different as we become more wooden, trying to be professional, and certainly when I start working in the field, it was like being professional meant being detached, especially in provocative situations, whereas it actually might help to say, god, I’m really frustrated right now and I don’t know how to help you, absolutely so the child.

Colby: 1:10:54

The child will be when you, when you give them nothing, they will escalate, because they’re looking for you to feel what they feel Exactly. They’re looking for attunement. And you give them nothing and they just keep escalating. And the poor baby in the still face, she’s just escalating. But then I think about mum. What’s mum likely to be thinking at that time? So, mum’s, as you watch her, and it gets closer to when she can come out of still face, she just starts blinking really rapidly.

Laura: 1:11:25

Does she, she does, she blinks a lot Nice observation.

Colby: 1:11:28

And then she comes out and I say to everyone in the talks that I give you know what’s mum’s first reaction? And they say say she’s happy, and I, and so I play it back and I play it again and her first reaction is well, starts with the blinking of the eyes before she even comes out, and her first one reaction she comes out is oh my baby.

Laura: 1:12:09

Out is oh my baby my baby, there you are, ah, mommy’s here, yes, yes, but she starts at attunement. She’s because it’s not hard for her, because she feels terrible. The baby feels terrible, and so does she yeah, because she she becomes more uncontained or more dysregulated. Um, as the baby goes up, she has a similar and yeah, and it’s like, oh, and then they both and the baby goes whoop straight back.

Colby: 1:12:30

As soon as mom sounds her self-distressed, baby goes whoosh.

Laura: 1:12:36

It’s before she even goes into that little bit and their bodies are having this dance of attunement and this relief almost. I always think of it as she’s relieved to be able to get out of that still face and stuff. Yeah, yeah isn’t that interesting. We both use that um and had similar things that we see, because that’s not what they were. They were studying baby sociability but, you know, whatever lens you’re looking at it through, you might see and have different ways of understanding what’s happening there.

Colby: 1:13:07

Yeah, yeah, well, I like looking at theories and coming up with a different theory about the theory, and we all have them right like yeah yeah, and people who are a theoretical.

Laura: 1:13:20

They still have theories about like what this child needs a swift kick up the backside. That is their working theory.

Colby: 1:13:27

They might not be aware of it, but we all have them yeah yeah, we might as well get better and better at good ones and using them yeah, it took us a while to talk about containment theory and people that know you might think well that you did well there, but we didn’t talk about attachment and, uh, people might think that’s remarkable of me in the, in the circumstances, um, I’ll leave you with this. There’s a pro, there’s a prologue to each of my editions of um, of the attachment books, the, the. There’s only two editions, but the first one, it’s a tale of three mice. The second one it’s a tale of four mice and they’re both attachment stories but they’re both skinner’s operant condition paradigm and I’ve been waiting for someone to take me to task for the last 15 years or 16 years.

Colby: 1:14:22

But because our children are very much like the intermittently reinforced rats in Skinner’s experiment. So anyway, I’ll leave it with you to have a bit of a look at what I’m talking about. But again, me, everyone you know, looked at Skinner’s work and it was all about, you know, consistent reinforcement and you know, and optimal for learning. And I looked at it and thought, no, I want to know about those kids that couldn’t rely on the. You know, those rats that couldn’t rely on the rat.

Laura: 1:14:52

Yeah, yeah, that was a more powerful memory was the inconsistent yeah, yeah, that’s like our kids.

Colby: 1:14:59

Yeah, that’s like our kids, it’s like our kids. Yeah, anyway, it was lovely to speak to you. Let’s do it again another time.

Laura: 1:15:08

Yep, I’m happy to follow up with some of those things we talked about and connect you with ruth, maybe yeah, yes, yes, I want send me the, send me the names, please. Okay.

Colby: 1:15:19

Okay, thank you, bye-bye, bye.

The Science of Prevention: How We Can End Child Maltreatment, with Benjamin Perks

The Importance of Attachment and the Science of Prevention in Child Development

In a recent podcast episode, Benjamin Perks, Head of Campaigns and Advocacy at UNICEF, shared profound insights about child development, attachment theory, and the global effort to end child maltreatment. His personal journey from growing up in residential care to becoming a leader in child protection provides a powerful narrative that underscores the importance of positive relationships in childhood development.

Ben emphasizes the concept of the “Four S’s” – secure, safe, seen, and soothed – as essential elements that every child needs to flourish. When children receive these four elements from their family, they develop resilience that protects them from adverse experiences in other environments. When family support is lacking, schools become the critical secondary buffer. The ideal situation, according to Ben, is having all three systems – family, school, and community – committed to ensuring every child experiences these four essential elements. What makes this particularly significant is that we are the first generation in history with the knowledge and resources to ensure universal access to these developmental necessities.

The podcast highlights the alarming prevalence of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and their long-term impact. According to the Center for Disease Control in the United States, each adverse childhood experience significantly increases the risk of negative outcomes across 40 different well-being indicators, from addiction to poor mental health to involvement in crime. This intergenerational cycle of trauma creates what Ben refers to as “relational poverty” – the inability to form healthy relationships due to lack of early relational skills development. This pattern is observable not just in humans but across species, where similar patterns of attachment and development have been documented.

One of the most compelling arguments Ben presents is that child maltreatment can be ended through a public health approach similar to how child mortality was dramatically reduced globally. In the 1980s, when 14-15 million children died annually from preventable diseases, a targeted approach implementing four simple interventions (vaccinations, oral rehydration salts, growth monitoring, and breastfeeding promotion) reduced child mortality by 61% over a decade. Ben proposes that with similar determination and a few key interventions, we could achieve comparable results in reducing child maltreatment.

These key interventions include universal access to evidence-based parenting programs, extended parental leave, universal preschool from age three, and widespread public education about child development and trauma. According to the UN Special Representative on violence against children, while child maltreatment costs societies up to 12% of GDP through various social costs, implementing these preventative measures would cost less than 1% of GDP – making it not just a moral imperative but an economic one as well.

The podcast also explores the complex nature of intergenerational trauma, including collective trauma experienced by communities that have faced historical oppression. As Resmaa Menakem notes, people maladapt to contexts that are passed through generations; the context is forgotten, but the adaptations become culture. This perspective helps explain how trauma patterns persist in communities long after the original traumatic conditions have changed.

Ben’s’ own healing journey demonstrates that recovery is possible at any age. After recognizing the impact of his childhood experiences on his adult life, he underwent therapy that transformed his world “from black and white to color.” This personal transformation enabled him to break the cycle of insecure attachment with his own son, demonstrating that with appropriate intervention, intergenerational patterns can be disrupted. His book, “Trauma Proof: Healing, Attachment and the Science of Prevention,” combines scientific research with personal narratives of healing from around the world, offering both inspiration and practical approaches to addressing childhood trauma.

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About Ben:

Benjamin Perks is the Head of Campaigns and Advocacy in the Division of Global Communications and Advocacy at the United Nations Children’s Fund, based in New York. He leads public and policy advocacy on the development and protection of children. He previously served in human rights diplomacy roles as the UNICEF Representative and UN Resident Coordinator ad interim to both the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Montenegro. In both capacities he advocated for reforms to fulfil international human rights commitments and realization of the Sustainable Development Goals. He has served in Georgia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, India and Albania. He coordinated the Back-to-School campaign in the Northern Afghanistan which brought 3 million children, including 1 million girls, into school-most of them for the first times in their lives. He has led work on demobilization of child solders, deinstitutionalization of children in state care, addressing child poverty, pre-school expansion and disability inclusion.

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Transcript:

Colby: 0:01

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.

Ben: 0:04

This teacher took me under her wing and made a connection with me, and I say in the book that she’s the first adult that I think I really had a proper conversation with. If you grew up without family, your relational skill you have relational poverty. Your relational skills are poor often. Poverty, relational skills are poor often. So family is the primary buffer in that, when family is not able to provide that buffer, school is the next best option.

Ben: 0:34

And what’s really important in relation to my work is that we got the first generation history that can ensure that every parent is able to give the child the four S’s and that every school is able to do that too. But we now know that with three or four, similarly, with three or four simple interventions, we could dramatically reduce child trauma, child maltreatment, risk of trauma. I also think that child maltreatment is something that drives a number of social costs. According to the special representative of the Secretary General of the UN on violence against children, he says it costs us up to 12% of GDP, but the interventions I’m suggesting we make globally available will be less than 1% of GDP. We must be the last generation to see violence against children, maltreatment and trauma as being insurmountable social problems.

Colby: 1:33

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and my guest for this episode is a global leader in child development and protection. Before I introduce my guests, I’d just like to acknowledge the Ngarrindjeri people of the Lower Murray Lakes and Coorong, on whose land that I’m coming to this podcast from, and I’d like to acknowledge the continuing connection the living Ngarrindjeri 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 Benjamin Perks, benjamin Perks.

Colby: 2:28

Ben is Head of Campaigns and Advocacy in the Division of Global Communication and Advocacy at the United Nations Children Fund, based in New York. He leads public and policy advocacy on the development and protection of children. Ben previously served in human rights diplomacy roles as the UNICEF representative and UN resident coordinator at interim to both the Republic of North Macedonia and the Republic of Montenegro. In both capacities he advocated for reforms to fulfil international human rights commitments and realisation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Ben has served in Georgia, kosovo, afghanistan, india and Albania. He coordinated the Back to School campaign in northern Afghanistan, which brought three million children, including 1 million girls, into school, most of them for the first time in their lives. He has led work on demobilisation of child soldiers, deinstitutionalisation of children in state care, addressing child poverty, addressing child poverty, preschool expansion and disability inclusion.

Colby: 3:47

Ben is Senior Fellow at the Jubilee Centre at the University of Birmingham in the UK, which researches education policy on character, social and emotional development of children, and he is an Associate Faculty Member at Oxford University Department of Social Policy and Innovation. Ben is recognised as a public speaker and campaigner on child development and protection. His book Trauma Proof Healing, attachment and the Science of Prevention is out now.

Ben: 4:22

Welcome, ben. Thank you very much, colby. It’s great to be with you, connecting from New York to you in Australia. I’m very glad to be on your podcast.

Colby: 4:34

Yeah, thank you, owen. Thank you very much for agreeing to be on, and I was just wondering and I give all my guests this opportunity is there anything that you’d like to add to that bio of your work?Ben: 4:48

yeah, a couple of other things. I I lead globally for the un on international day of play, which is a new ua, the outcome of a new un resolution, and obviously play is central to child development and child protection. So I’ll be talking about that, I guess, a little bit in the conversation today. But also just to add that everything I talk about today and everything that I’ve written in my book is in a personal capacity. I’m not speaking on behalf of the UN or UNICEF or anybody apart from myself today, so I just wanted to to be clear on that as well. Yeah, excellent.

Colby: 5:23

Terrific. So, ben, tell us how you got into this work that you’re, this really important work that you’re doing and have done across your career.

Ben: 5:34

I think there are three kind of major turning points. I think the first one is that I was in. I grew up the second half of my childhood in residential care in children’s homes. I was in. I grew up the second half of my childhood in residential care in children’s homes. I was in Birmingham and in London. I lived a lot on the streets, I ran away a lot, I was involved with gangs and other kinds of kinds of activities. And then suddenly at 16, I had the opportunity to become an activist in London for the rights of young people in care. And that’s my first job, my first serious job at the age of 16, a full-time activist. Um, so, so that was how I became a campaigner. That’s how a campaigner was born, I think.

Ben: 6:15

And then, secondly, a few years later, when I was at university, it was very rare for somebody from a children’s home to go to university in the UK. Uh, in those days it’s still quite rare, but it’s uh, the prospects are a little bit better now than they were back in my day. But I was really passionate at university about Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement and Gandhi. I read endlessly about their work to change the situation of segregation and structural racism in the United States. Also the effort of Gandhi to build a movement against colonialism, the passive resistance and all of this very well-disciplined campaign work, and that made me really think that I want to dedicate my life to real change, not performative work but real change that delivers outcomes. And one of my heroes in the civil rights history of the United States was a guy called Ralph Bunch who was a big figure, an African-American guy who became a big figure in the early days of the United Nations and he became kind of a hero to me and I then thought about a career in the UN.

Ben: 7:29

So at the end of my first year at university I somehow managed to organise to go to Croatia and there was a middle of a conflict Croatia and Bosnia and Croatia. I somehow went on the bus to Croatia and kind of talked my way in to a role, a temporary role, in UNICEF, and took a year out and worked on that and I was hooked. So I I had very much of like a bog standard UNICEF kind of career. I I did very well I, when I finished my master’s degree a few years later I went back to the organization and, you know, worked my way up towards being a head of office and all of that.

Ben: 8:12

But finally when, when I became a head of office, you know, in a formal diplomatic UN role I was at a meeting where there was a conversation about deinstitutionalization and somebody was talking about attachment research and I heard it for the first time. I was sitting there and I realized the guy who was talking, the professor, was talking about the outcome, the adult outcomes, of insecure attachment in childhood relationships. All of that and I saw myself in everything that he was saying. So I went into a period of therapy for a year and then I became a passionate campaigner on issues like child trauma, attachment, and that’s the journey that brought me to write the book and that added another very personal stream of work to the work I’d already been doing on children’s rights. Very long-winded answer, but those three points were crucial in bringing me to where I am now.

Colby: 9:13

Yeah, that’s awesome and I also am a little bit interested in attachment as well and written a bit about it. But do you remember the name of the fellow who who, um, first introduced you to attachment?

Ben: 9:28

but that’s yes, you know, I’m getting to an age where I think that I forget things, so it’s uh, it’s uh, it’s professor from uh university of nottingham, and it will come back to me during the course of the conversation and I’ll probably blurt it out when it comes back to me okay, awesome, so I’m just queuing your recall for that, perhaps at a later date.

Colby: 9:50

You’ve talked a bit about influences in terms of your circumstances and the roles that you’ve gotten into. Are there any people that really stand out for you as having played a role and been a big influence over your career development? And you’ve mentioned attachment. Maybe you can tell us why you think attachment is so important in your work as well so well in terms of, um, in terms of people that have influenced me.

Ben: 10:23

I write a lot in my book. My book tells lots of stories of different people, but I write a bit about my own as well, and one of the things that was transformative for me was I had a teacher when I was 15. I’d been thrown out of school. I had a best friend who’d been killed in a knife fight. I I had, uh, I was in a very tense inner city poverty care, you know situation, no parents or anything like that. But this teacher, um, somehow, in this, in his school for kids that have been kicked out of school, this teacher took me under under her wing and made a connection with me, and I say in the book that she’s the first adult that I think I really had a proper conversation with as a child.

Ben: 11:08

I was 15. And her name is Jan Report. And when I had this moment, when I listened to this professor from Nottingham giving this talk about attachment, at the end of it I went into this process of therapy. But I also tracked down my teacher in that process, because I wanted to go back and tell her what I’d done with my life and I would have done none of it without her. And so I went back and met her, having not seen her since childhood, and that was incredible. And now now every year when we go back to the UK, we go and see her. I took my son to meet her last year and so so that’s a really pivotal person.

Ben: 11:52

I also had a great social worker. At one point there was a good residential social worker in the children’s home. I had a couple of good friendships when I was young and also eventually also became kind of connected to a family that had reached out over some campaigning work that I was doing. I think that makes all the difference, because if you grow up in a without family, your relational skill you have relational poverty. Your relational skills are poor often and so you know, because you just don’t. It’s like a muscle. You have to grow relational skills and I hadn’t so many things that people learn in a family. I hadn’t really learned them.

Colby: 12:35

I grew up in a, in a survival mode, um, but somehow I managed to have these friendships and uh, attract this support and engagement, and I think all of it meant the world to me and I wouldn’t be here today without those people yeah, that’s an awesome story and it puts me in mind of two things the, the idea that comes from the one good adult research, that that all the child needs is one adult who believes in them, who’s’s there for them, who truly listens to them and helps them. And then there’s the other idea, which is that it takes a village. Now, I think both of those concepts they may be seen as being mutually exclusive, but I think that they sit comfortably alongside each other. The one helps the other, particularly the one good adult helps the other. I do think that when children grow up in adversity relational adversity the more good relationships they have, the better the outcomes.

Colby: 13:40

And I was speaking to someone relatively recently and apologies if you’re listening, and it was you and I can’t remember who it was, but he talked about that it takes a village. The construct at the very beginning was referring to, or at least meant to take into account, peer relationships, so that the important role of peers in children’s up, children growing up and and and I can see how that fits with with social learning theory, for example. So I guess, attachment theory what is it about attachment theory that has influenced your, your career since that introduction?

Ben: 14:24

I want to come back to what you were just saying about peers, community, trusted adult and then lead that into the conversation about attachment and how that influences my work. So I think that you know Dr Daniel Segal and Tina Penny Bryson have this brilliant expression of I think it comes from them the four A’s, sorry, the four S’s. So it’s to be secure, safe, seen and soothed. And the idea is that for children to flourish they need to have those four S’s. If a child has them at home with the family, that’s really important, particularly for early development, uh, early childhood development, to set that secure base and safe haven. We know that early experiences we don’t remember things that happened to us before the age of two, but they are disproportionately and massively influential on the way we see the world for the rest of our life and for the opportunities that we will have and the constraints that we will have.

Ben: 15:32

So that’s really important in the family.Ben: 15:34

But if a child is not safe, seen, soothed and secure in the family, then if they have the four S’s in school, that can help to some extent to heal and prevent them going on a trajectory that is driven by trauma and toxic stress and help them to build relationships and so on.

Ben: 15:58

That’s why the teacher was so important to me by reverse, if children are safe, seen, secure and suited at home and then they go to a rough school, that resilience that they get from the forest is at home will protect them from the trauma of the school or a war zone or a gang infested neighborhood. So family is the primary buffer um in that when family is not um able to provide that buffer, school is the next best option. Certainly it’s the community um. But the idea, the ideal world is you want to have all three of those things family, school, community, committed to, intentional about ensuring that every child is secure, safe, safe, seen and soothed. And what’s really important in relation to my work is that we are the first generation in history that can ensure that every parent is able to give the child, the four S’s, and that every school is able to do that too, and we know that that can be achieved for a fraction of what is lost by not doing it. That’s how it influences my work, yeah.

Colby: 17:12

Awesome. I understand from your work you have a powerful belief that we can end child maltreatment. Tell us a little bit more about why you think that to be the case.

Ben: 17:27

Let me tell you another story that brings me back to this. In 1980, and I talk about this in the book in 1980, in University of Birmingham in the UK, an American public health professional delivered a paper in which he argued that we could I think 14 or 15 million children die every year from preventable disease that if we could just do four things if we could vaccinate every child globally, if we could provide oral rehydration salts to treat diarrheal diseases which can be deadly, if we could monitor the growth of children and if we could promote breastfeeding, then we could dramatically reduce that. Unicef and WHO got hold of that paper and had a really complex internal conversation with many people against the idea, but some of them championed the idea of making this a reality. And over the next 10 years they mobilized a coalition of royals, of heads of state, of community organizations, of religious leaders all around the world and they increased vaccine coverage, for example, from 15% of the world’s children to around 85% of the world’s children and in the decade that followed, child mortality under five mortality reduced by 61%. Everybody thought they were crazy in the beginning. Everybody thought that this was insurmountable, but they did it. And if you look back on every single um global achievement, whether it’s a massive expansion of education, whether it’s massive expansion of availability to um, to to clean water, or prevention of child labor or child marriage. There has been a really audacious drive to do that.

Ben: 19:21

Um, child maltreatment is something that is a problem everywhere. It’s not just in the global south, it’s a problem everywhere. But we now know that with three or four, similarly, with three or four simple interventions, we could dramatically reduce child trauma, child maltreatment, risk of trauma, toxic stress, all of that. Things like universal access to evidence-based parenting programs, a minimum package of parenting programs that we now know, through systematic review, can improve child outcomes, reduce risk and maltreatment and even improve parental mental health outcomes. Secondly, parental leave making parental leave a universal norm, dramatically increasing parental leave, recognising it as a public good. Thirdly, ensuring that children from the age of three in preschool are in schools where they are safe and secure and seen and soothed.

Ben: 20:22

And fourthly, making people aware. If you think about it, people are aware of influenza or the common cold or how to manage a knee injury. Right, they know this stuff. It’s part of family conversation, it’s something that’s common knowledge. Really, child maltreatment, trauma and all of that is no more complex than the transmission of influenza. It’s not more complex. It is shrouded in taboo and stigma and shame and myth. But we can break all of those myths. We can break all of those constraints and make it something where everybody’s aware of the basics to underpin those changes.

Ben: 21:01

With those interventions, I believe we could dramatically reduce child maltreatment. I also think that child maltreatment is something that drives a number of social costs, right From addiction to poor mental health, to risk of being a perpetrator or victim of all kinds of violence, from gang violence to political violence to domestic violence. It puts us at risk of poor health and poor learning outcomes. And all of that, according to the special representative of the Secretary General of the UN on violence against children, says it costs us up to 12% of GDP, but the interventions that I’m suggesting we make globally available will be less than 1% of GDP. So we lose trillions by not addressing problems before they occur at scale, and that’s something I think we’re the first generation to be able to do that, and I think, because of that, we must be the last generation to see violence against children, maltreatment and trauma as being insurmountable social problems.

Colby: 22:09

Yeah, yeah, that’s terrific. While you were speaking there, my mind was going to what the universal parental education would look like, what the intervention into schools might look like. I wonder if you would comment on each of those things.

Ben: 22:39

Sure. So in terms of the parental parenting programs, they can be delivered in a number of ways In some countries because they already are available in about 25% of countries targeted not universal Right and what? The most common format is a home visit. That home visit often it’s bundled with a health visit, and so a home visitor comes and talks to you about health things like vaccines and nutrition, but also talks to you about play, engagement, positive discipline and all of that, and often a minimum package of that. A few visits in early childhood and then, like booster sessions, critical milestones like before adolescence can make all the difference. You know as an attachment expert that Bowlby and Ainsworth said that when a parent is able to either process their own insecure attachment or come up with a strategy for parenting, they’re much less likely to transmit it. And who and oxford university and unicef and others have done a vast systematic review with um hundreds of random I think 460 randomized controlled trials all over the world and found that parenting programs really make a difference. So there should be a minimum package of visits, but then progressive, in the sense that those that need more support can get more visits. This can also be backed up by things like group sessions. In South Africa, for example, they have group sessions for parents, but also grandparents, to talk about how they can ensure the best outcomes for their children. Also, apps are beginning to show real breakthroughs. There are some apps. I think there’s an app in India that reaches 20 million people. Unicef has an app called Bebo. There are many different apps which are actually really helpful for parents who are trying to access evidence based information. So I think you can have an ecosystem that has all of these things, with quality control supported by organizations like UNICEF, who and others.

Ben: 25:11

In terms of parental leave, I think every country in the world should be having a very minimum WHO standard of six months for the birth parent and four months for the other parent, but it could be all foster parents as well, or adoptive parents. I think it should be much more. The Scandinavian countries are showing a really good model for that um. I think that’s really important. Then, having family-friendly workplaces attached to that is also a part of that, that package.

Ben: 25:29

And then schools really having um systems in place where teachers would create a system where where where children are seen and safe and secure, and where teachers are aware of trauma. They’re aware of the prevalence of trauma, because in an average classroom of 30 kids, half of the kids have experienced an adverse childhood experience, a risk factor for trauma and toxic stress. So you know, this idea from the past that you know it’s one or two kids in a class that are in touch with the social work system that are the really vulnerable kids is wrong, recognising that it is across the board and what we need to do is make sure that kids have a strong sense of belonging and uh, um and you know uh, connection with a teacher and, as you mentioned earlier, peers.

Colby: 26:28

the peers thing is really important in adolescence because, of course, in adolescence, it’s peer relationships that are the most important thing for children yeah, yeah, thank you, and um, have you had an opportunity to observe or otherwise get a sense of what the uptake of these measures might be across Western and non-Western countries, jurisdictions, western and non-Western?

Ben: 27:01

countries, jurisdictions. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm, very little resistance to parenting programs, which is interesting because a parenting program often is like going into the house, going into the home, but there’s a lot of hunger for parenting skills. You know, I think increasingly the world is talking about the fact that many of us grow up with intergenerational issues of trauma or or neglect at home. Um, and then even people that haven’t got that want to know what’s the best way of securing the best future for their kid. So I see a lot of um support and interest and very little resistance. I I speak to people that I interview, people in the book that are receiving parenting programmes, people that deliver them, for example, and there’s a lot of interest and I think it’s just a question of making it a normal thing, normal part of childhood, a normal part of parenting, the way that vaccines is or the way that schools are.

Colby: 28:02

Yeah, sometimes I talk about how birds don’t have bird parenting experts that teach them how to raise their birds, and neither do wolves or, you know, even the other great apes. So there is that view that parental advice and guidance is really not necessary, that we are meant to be the most sophisticated, uh, of at least of the great apes, if not of the whole entire animal kingdom, on this. How, why, why can’t, why do we need parenting experts? We, we’ve, you know, we’ve been parented ourselves. We’ve learned from the things that our parents do well and the things that our parents don’t do so well. Um, and we, we must have a, an inbred instinct, just like other members of the animal kingdom. Do what? What would you say to that?

Ben: 29:14

well, they do research on rats I think it’s. My community does research on rats and what they do is they see the same patterns of poor attachment in other animals and they see that those that are licked and groomed by their parent have much better outcomes, are much more likely to go out into the world and be a success by rat standards, right, and so it’s the same as humans. You know it’s the same as humans. We know that humans that don’t grow up with a strong sense of being safe and loved are more likely to have poorer interpersonal relationships, are more likely to do poorly in school, to be addicted, to have all of these problems.

Ben: 30:03

You know the Center for Disease Control in the United States, the major public health institution, has an index of 40 different well-being indicators, from suicide to osteoporosis to addiction, everything, everything, and there’s almost a step increase every risk of negative outcome for every adverse childhood experience a person has had. So somebody that has been suffered emotional neglect emotional via verbal violence, for example, and physical violence and witness domestic violence, for example these are four things quite common, all of them very common is multiple times more likely to have a poor outcome across all of those 40 well-being indicators. So that’s why really I think we do have an instinct, that’s why really I think we do have an instinct, but for maybe at least 40% of us, that instinct is driven by intergenerational trauma, toxic stress, neglect and violence.

Colby: 31:18

And we, now that we know because we didn’t know throughout history, now that we we know, we should be able to stop that cycle and make people you know, ensure that people can flourish yeah, it put me in mind of when you were talking about the rats, because when I’m delivering training, I’ll uh, I will talk also about another group of rats, the rats that were in skinner’s operant conditioning experiments. And people go oh, aren’t you supposed to be an attachment person rather than a behavioural person, when, in actual fact, there should be a lot. In my view, and this is what Bowlby did there should be a lot more cross-fertilisation of ideas and theories and knowledge, rather than siloing of ideas and theories and knowledge, rather than siloing Skinner with his rat experiments and the operant conditioning paradigm. It was really quite interesting because, though he didn’t go down that path at least not that I’m aware of there is a group of rats and pigeons in his research that are very much like our children, who’ve experienced grossly inadequate care, and they’re the rats and pigeons who are in an inconsistent reinforcement paradigm. They got their needs met inconsistently in response to a gesture, and the gesture was to either peck a button or push down on a lever, and the operant conditionings paradigm teaches us a lot about learning and adjustment in those circumstances. So and I also, while you were talking, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a previous guest. It may actually have been a YouTube video, I’m not sure which.

Colby: 33:07

But talking about these now, I’m hoping I’m not going to butcher it, but I think they were mosquitoes. You can put mosquitoes into a jar and they try to get out of the jar. You put all these, but if you, and if you so, they kind of go up and down in the jar. Now, if you put some clear film halfway up the jar, that prevents them going all the way to the top and and getting out after a while, you can take the clear film away and they’ll never try and jump out of the jar. They just go up and down, and that’s really interesting, I guess, until and you think, well, you know, they’ve just learnt that that’s as high as they can go.

Colby: 33:58

Well, this is where it gets really interesting, which is that their offspring also only jump as high. So their offspring don’t go out of the, notwithstanding that there’s no longer a clear film to stop them from getting out. They only go as high as their parents do, and I think that’s. You’ve spoken a little bit about the cost of child maltreatment, but that seems to bear quite significantly. Uh as well. Uh, on that, that issue, that, um. You know, what are we transmitting down through the generations?

Ben: 34:39

the, the positive psychologists, I think, would describe what you’ve just described as learned helplessness, seligman would. That’s what happens. I think that happens often with communities already beaten down. Yeah, I think that. Yeah, I guess that it’s obvious now from psychology, from neuroscience, from population level data, that a lot of these things are intergenerational, that you know they are acquired characteristics from you know that are transmitted through the culture of families.

Ben: 35:28

And, of course, resmei Mannequin, who’s a leading scholar on mental health and race in the United States, says it really well. He says that you know that people respond. He’s talking often about racism and slavery in the United States, but people respond. He’s talking often about racism and slavery in the United States, but people respond they maladapt to a context that’s passed on through generations. The context is forgotten and it becomes the culture, and I think that’s something that is often seen in communities that have been oppressed and affected by collective trauma, if they don’t have the, the holocaust and slavery and also the situation of the native American Indians and the boarding schools, which would have a lot in common with um, with with the um, aboriginal, uh and Torres Strait Islander community in Australia I hope I’m saying that correctly in Australia, um, I think, I think there’s a there’s also. We think, as well as thinking about individual, um trauma, we also need to think about communal trauma.

Colby: 36:48

Yeah, yeah, and I think the the other thing that was, I guess. Well, the thing that was going through my mind as well in relation to the, the mosquito story is I is that we can’t do nothing If we do nothing. It just gets, as you say, transmitted, transmitted through the generations. But if we can but it might be too simplistic to say this but if you can change the course or the trajectory of one generation, then you end up with perhaps a multi-generational change of trajectory. So when you talk about we had the opportunity to end child maltreatment, and the impact of doing that and the importance of that endeavour really is not just for those children and young people who otherwise would have had quite an adverse experience growing up, but you’re changing the trajectory for their life partners, their children and their grandchildren. So yeah.

Ben: 38:06

So if you look at an issue like crime, if you go to most juvenile justice facilities, the young people that are involved in crime continuously, and serious crime, over 90% have four or more adverse childhood experiences.

Ben: 38:29

If you could, um prevent adverse childhood experiences before they occur, um, from what we can see, it would have a dramatic increase on propensity to commit crime, to be involved in violence, to take risk, because risk is related to the adolescent brain.

Ben: 38:49

You know it’s adolescent brain development, right? So you have. If you have this toxic combination of poor attachment and trauma in early childhood crashing against the really complex process of adolescent brain development, you have this really high risk and almost all children at very serious risk of being exploited or being involved in crime or violence are coming from those kind of backgrounds. If you speak to people that dealt with the Epstein case the girls that were targeted or if you look at radicalisation, or look at the kind of people that end up in far right groups or people that end up addicted or victims of grooming, almost exclusively coming from very high ace backgrounds, if you could eradicate most forms of adversity by ensuring that children have the four S’s in both the family and school and community early on, then you’re going to completely transform all of those risks across society, making society a much better place for the future and for future generations.

Colby: 40:08

Yes, yeah, and one of my earlier guests was Graeme Kerridge, who has had perhaps a not dissimilar career history, as you have, except in other organisations, but he was very interesting. We’ve had a number of people who have an economics background on this on this podcast, who, um, who moved into the, this social care, uh, into the social care arena and but anyway he, graham carriage, was very interested in human capital as part of his economic background and again, this really ties in with what we’re talking about. This idea of human capital is the human capital gains of reducing or eliminating the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences is significant. Yeah, yeah, you’ve mentioned your book. Well, I mentioned it first, but then you mentioned your book a few times Trauma proof, and let me read the healing attachment and the science of prevention. And let me read the Healing Attachment and the Science of Prevention.

Colby: 41:33

I think I’ve butchered it every single time. I’ve tried to say it. But tell us about your book. Tell us. You’ve mentioned stories. I’m getting really excited about reading it now. So there you go. I haven’t read it yet, but I only just recently learned that it was already out, so I’m looking forward to it. But tell us a bit about your book and who you think it would be of most interest and usefulness to.

Ben: 42:07

Well, the first thing is I probably need a new title if it doesn’t slip off the tongue so easily, because it won’t get that kind of contagion, don’t worry about it.

Colby: 42:18

It’s not unusual for me to struggle with verbal fluency. It’s pretty, it’s a bit embarrassing being both verbose and not particularly verbally fluent.

Ben: 42:34

Oh, you’re doing fine, yeah. So I wanted to write a book that would present this argument that you could end child maltreatment, and you bring all the data together, the economics of it and all of that and all the science. So I talk about the history of attachment theory and, and, uh, the evolution of aces and our understanding of toxic stress, um, some of the economic arguments about return on investment. That comes from james james heckman at university of chicago. Loads and loads of science, but I also do lots of storytelling. Um, when I went to the agent and the publisher and said I want to do a book about how you end child maltreatment, they said that’s great, but you need to include something else as well, which is you’ve got something to say about how people heal, right, how you healed and how others heal. So it has to be about healing and prevention and attachment. So the book, in addition to putting forward the idea that we can end child maltreatment, it also argues the case that we can heal at any age. Almost everybody can go through some kind of healing process and, as a result of that um have a much better quality of life. So every chapter tells a story of somebody and the stories are from all over the world, um. So the first part of the book is really focused on kind of the, the, the, the prevalence of uh, child maltreatment, the parameters of it, what we know about it. The second part is really focused on parenting and talks about parenting programs and parental leave, but through stories. So, for example, the one on parental leave. I do a comparison between two different families, one in Alabama in the United States, where they have really harsh policies on parental leave, and one in Estonia where they have the most progressive policies in the world, and looks at what happened to the parents through both different processes. Then there’s a part about schools and community and crime. And then there’s a part about collective trauma, societal issues like myth and stigma and taboo. And the final part is really my call to action on what we should be doing about all of this. And it tells something of my own story as well.

Ben: 45:06

My own story about intergenerational the issue of healing and intergenerational trauma is kind of this you know, I lived most of my life as an outwardly successful person who was really not having um. You know the quality of life I would have because of the way that I felt inside, which is completely normal if you grow up without parents. You know, viol, the quality of life I would have because of the way that I felt inside, which is completely normal if you grow up without parents. You know Viola Davis says you grow up with this sense that you’re wrong Not that you’ve done something wrong, but that you are wrong and living with that inside me the whole time, while being outwardly successful and doing well and suppressing it. You know, it was something that I kind of thought was normal and then, when I realized that I lived with all of that trauma inside of me, um, I went through a transformation, through healing, uh, seeing a therapist and changing my life. It felt like the world went from black and white to color, and then when to colour. And then when I got married and we had our son, I held my son in my arms and I just instinctively knew or felt that what happened to me as a child was completely unimaginable to myself. The cycle had just broken. I got what you experts would call an insecure attachment, like I would walk to the end of the earth to protect, love, nurture my son. And that’s something that I thought very consciously of because I’d had to go through a lot of work to become, to become the kind of person that could instinctively feel that um.

Ben: 46:56

So that’s my healing journey, but I talk about lots of other people’s healing journeys as well. There’s a guy that was a gang member in Glasgow who was in prison and went through a process of change. There was a, a woman here from new york that was born into um to a crack affected family. Her parents died, which is very young, um, and she had a teacher that helped her and now she’s a big-time campaigner in washington dc for disadvantaged kids.

Ben: 47:23

All these amazing people, scottish member of parliament, um, who had post-natal depression, who talks publicly about it. All these different, amazing people. I got to interview them also on the Holocaust and slavery and other things, all of that. There’s a famous saying by the writer James Baldwin and I can’t quote it exactly, I’ll probably butt-tread. But you think your suffering and pain is personal, pervasive, pervasive, permanent, personal to you. But then you read dostoevsky or tolstoy and you realize that a couple of hundred years ago elsewhere in the world, people going through the same thing and like putting together these different stories of healing and trauma from all around the world, completely different cultures, but people going through broadly the same thing, I think was really cathartic for me and I think for the people I interviewed as well, and hopefully it’s uplifting for people that would read it.

Colby: 48:21

Awesome. Where can you get a copy most easily?

Ben: 48:26

Well, you know, it’s on uh. It’s on uh kindle audible audio and a hard copy. It’s available, I think, through most good bookshops where you are in australia. I get feedback from people that read in australia and in most places there is a different version in North America because there’s a different publisher. There’s a different audible audiobook in North America and the one in North America went through a second round of editing, came out a bit later, so it’s slightly different, but they’re probably the same thing. So it’s available everywhere, I think.

Colby: 49:07

I hope yeah, if it’s not, let me know you haven’t gone on done what I did. I mean, not long after my first book came out, I was on the internet to look where it was coming out and what people were saying about it.

Ben: 49:20

Yeah, yeah, I do do that. You know it generally had good reviews so far. This has been a very busy year in my regular job with the UN. You know the UN’s gone through a lot of changes and so I haven’t had as much time as I wish to promote it. But I’m going to be doing a bit more of that now. I hope it just came out at the beginning of this year. It came out in April in North America, so it’s relatively new, yeah, yeah terrific.

Colby: 49:51

It’s been awesome to have you on and have a chat to you, Ben, about your life and work. I’ve asked you a lot of questions. Is there anything you’d like to ask me before we wrap up?

Ben: 50:03

What do you think about? You’re an attachment expert. What do you think about the idea that we could be the first generation to end child maltreatment if we have a public health approach to it?

Colby: 50:18

I think, in considering my response, I think we live in slightly different worlds, and what I mean by that by saying that, is that I think where I live and work and I’m not talking about here in Adelaide, south Australia, I’m talking about the level of where I sit in terms of exposure to child maltreatment I think it can be really hard for people to think and believe or even consider that what we’re dealing with every day, what we’re seeing, what we’re immersed in, I would say, can be ended or at least significantly reduced in some way. I think we all believe that if that happened and that happened and that happened, you know we’ve all got ideas about how you could end it. I think the benefit of the argument that you’re making is that it’s a bit like the difference between thinking and metacognition. So thinking is just thinking, as we always do, the thoughts that come into our head, and those thoughts are very much linked to what’s happening, you know, to our experience of ourselves, of our surroundings, of our life, that our thoughts are very much linked to emotion. Metacognition is thinking, about thinking, and it’s that higher order thinking where we’re noticing what we’re thinking, where we’re noticing what we’re experiencing, and at that level, we are less emotionally attached to what we’re noticing as such, and this is the foundation of certain therapeutic traditions that exist now, the foundation of certain therapeutic traditions that that exist now. And so I think the benefit of what you are advocating and talking about is perhaps, um, you’ve had, you you’ve had direct personal experience and I think direct parent personal experiences is very important but you’re able, you, you’ve risen above in a way. You’ve risen above and been able to take that more, that meta view, um, and I think so, I think probably a lot of people in who work in it, in this, in those systems, I think if they had time to be able to go to a metacognitive place, to be able to, and maybe your book will help, maybe your book will be a source of tremendous comfort and inspiration for the workers on the ground.

Colby: 53:32

That’s who I’m really referring to and who I count myself one amongst, is the workers on the ground. I think the book, as you describe it, perhaps will present some hope that there are things that can be done at a systems level or a government level, a country level, an international level, that can make a meaningful impact on child protection. So that’s how I would say it is that I think. I think it’s. It’s probably hard for the people at the coalface to, but uh, but necessary for them to feel like something can be done, because when you’re at the coalface you just think, oh, it’s very hard, yeah that’s a brilliant point.

Ben: 54:31

I gave a talk recently at oxford and do a lot of practitioners there and I was describing this public health approach that I’m promoting. They said, well, what about the family that doesn’t respond to parenting? Or what about this? You know this or that, and they won’t get it? And I think it’s not.

Ben: 54:49

I think what you’re doing with the public health approach is a long-term process. Yes, right, like you, you started off in like 1980 where people thought it was normal, insurmountable, that millions of children died and then, gradually, as pieces were built on the audacity of saying that we can end this, there was a whole system, a public health system in place. Uh, that could protect you, I think. I think it’s like that. I think that you’re, you’re gonna, you know you’re gonna have, with a kind of really public health approach, you can have improvements across the board over time, but you’re always going to have those hard to reach kind of parts of the community that need more work. And I think it’s a long-term process where you change the whole culture of society around the issue over a generation. Yeah, I think that’s the approach, but we have to start the work.

Colby: 55:41

Yeah, look, and I think that in my own jurisdiction here and many jurisdictions, people at the coalface who are on the ground doing child protection work all the time. Morale is often compromised and there is a risk of people becoming quite cynical about the work, and I think it’s and that’s a shame. It’s a shame for them, but it’s also a shame for the people who come into contact with them and you know the families that are struggling, the children who can’t, for a period of time, be safely cared for at home, and I think everyone gets involved in this, wanting to make a difference. We all want it, but sometimes there’s a risk that it can seem like it will never end and there’s a degree of hopelessness.

Colby: 56:49

I think one of the power, powerful thing, messages of what you’re talking about is we’ve done it, we’ve done it before, we’ve done it in other, in other ways, in another, in other areas.

Colby: 57:02

Of course, we haven’t reduced it to zero, we haven’t eradicated all diseases, but we have had a. We have had a good and sustained crack at a number of things and seen a global, a significant global reduction, if not elimination, of um certain ills that that beset us in this life and why not? Child protection as well. And the other thing I think about that message and I often ask guests this later in the podcast I’ve avoided asking you any questions that might come hard up against your role in the UN and not wanting to be seen as speaking on behalf of the UN and not wanting to be seen as speaking on behalf of the UN. But I think a book like yours should be inspirational at multiple levels of the work and in particular, I would say, at the level of the policymakers, the level of government, the level of the policy makers, the level of government. So I think, hope, hope in a direction to get us out of, away from and towards a better future for our children, their children and grandchildren as well.

Ben: 58:27

Thank you very much and, on the back of what you just said, can I just end by saying massive gratitude to all the people that work in the child protection workforce, both in Australia and all around the world. Yeah, terrific.

Colby: 58:43

Thanks, ben, and hope to speak to you again at another time.

Ben: 58:49

Absolutely Thank you. It’s been a real pleasure. Thank you very much, Colby.

From Winnicott’s Piano to Adolescent Minds: Peter Wilson’s Journey

Uncertainty as Strength: Why Not Knowing Matters

Peter Wilson’s journey into the world of child and adolescent psychotherapy is a testament to the power of serendipity and openness to unexpected opportunities. From his initial degree in industrial economics to becoming a founder of Young Minds and working with some of the most influential figures in psychoanalysis, Peter’s career trajectory defies conventional planning and instead follows a path of meaningful coincidences.

What stands out most prominently in Peter’s narrative is his formative experience training at the Anna Freud Centre in London during the 1960s. This period represented something of a golden age for psychoanalytic thinking, with Anna Freud herself still actively involved in the training program. The immersive four-year experience provided Peter with a thorough grounding in psychoanalytic theory, requiring him to deeply engage with Freud’s concepts and apply them in clinical practice with children and adolescents. This foundation shaped his entire professional identity, giving him a lens through which to understand the complexity of human experience and emotional development.

Peter’s reflections on his time at the Pepper Harrow therapeutic community offer a fascinating glimpse into an approach to working with deeply troubled young people that would be nearly impossible to replicate in today’s safeguarding-conscious environment. The therapeutic community model, with its emphasis on communal living, shared responsibility, and psychological understanding, provided a holding environment for young people whose emotional lives were profoundly disrupted. The fact that staff would physically prevent young people from running away—something unthinkable in today’s practice—speaks to how dramatically the landscape of child welfare has shifted over the decades.

Perhaps most thought-provoking is Peter’s upcoming book with its intriguing title, “The Adolescent and the Psychotherapist: Why I Don’t Know Matters.” His celebration of uncertainty represents a powerful counterpoint to the current evidence-based practice paradigm that dominates mental health services. Peter argues persuasively that the adolescent’s “I don’t know” response in therapy is not merely resistance but a genuine reflection of uncertainty that deserves respect rather than frustration. Similarly, he challenges the certainty with which cognitive behavioral therapy is promoted as the treatment of choice, suggesting that such confidence is not justified by the evidence and may in fact represent a dishonesty about the limitations of our knowledge.

Peter’s critique of current mental health service delivery models cuts to the heart of contemporary debates about efficiency, evidence, and effectiveness. His concerns about the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT) program and the Health and Social Care Act of 2012 reflect a broader disquiet about how market-based thinking has fragmented services and created competition rather than collaboration between different professional disciplines. Most poignantly, he suggests that young people themselves don’t respond well to CBT, preferring the relational, play-oriented approaches that take longer but may address their needs more effectively.

As Peter reflects on his career, his wish that he had been more assertive and authoritative as a younger man reveals a fascinating tension. While he values the humility of “not knowing” as a therapeutic stance, he also recognizes that sometimes more forceful advocacy is needed to challenge dominant narratives and protect valuable approaches to understanding human distress. This balancing act between openness to uncertainty and confidence in one’s perspective represents a profound challenge for all who work in the helping professions.

You can listen to the podcast here:

You can watch here:

About Peter:

Peter Wilson is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist. He qualified in 1971, having completed his training with Anna Freud in her Centre. Since then, he has worked in a variety of organisations, holding senior positions in all of them. These included three Child Guidance Clinics ( now known as CAMHS), two walk- in Centres for young people, a therapeutic community ( the Peper Harow Community) and the Institute of Psychiatry. Peter founded a national charity, called YoungMinds, the purpose of which was to raise public awareness of children’s mental health and to improve multi- discipline services. Peter later became Clinical Adviser at ThePlace2Be, a national organisation providing counselling services in schools. Peter has maintained a small private child and adolescent psychotherapy practice, and now teaches and provides supervision. He is publishing a book in the autumn, entitled ‘ The Adolescent and the Psychotherapist: why ‘ I don’t’ know’ matters’.

Related Podcast Episodes:

Coming soon.

Transcript:

Colby: 0:00

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.

Peter: 0:04

Life is really a bunch of serendipities. It really is. And I went where I was wanted and I spent three extraordinary years working as an unattached youth worker walking around the streets of the city that I was in, getting to know young people At that time. Psychoanalysis was kosher. Psychoanalysis was the way you thought Winnicott and I was doing a social work training at the London School of Economics, but he was just mesmerizing. So we come back to England and I then do the four-year course at the Anna Freud Center in London, which was, if you like, like the kind of turning point of my life, because it was a thorough psychoanalytic training and a Freud was still alive and it was in a kind of heyday, really, by saying I don’t know. That opens up our dialogue. People don’t believe in psychoanalysis by and large they don’t. They believe in what’s obvious, what’s said on top. We’re always looking underneath what’s really going on, and I play piano and I played his piano, but I was good, I played Willie Goldspierre.

Colby: 1:28

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a founder and trailblazer in children’s mental health. Before I introduce my guest, I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I’m meeting on, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna 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 Peter Wilson.

Colby: 2:07

Peter is a consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist. He qualified in 1971, having completed his training with Anna Freud in her centre. Since then, he has worked in a variety of organisations, holding senior positions in all of them. These include three child guidance clinics, now known as CAMHS, two walk-in centres for young people, a therapeutic community, the Pepper Harrow Community, and the Institute of Psychiatry. Peter founded a national charity called Young Minds, the purpose of which was to raise public awareness of children’s mental health and to improve multidiscipline services. Peter later became clinical advisor at the Place to Be, a national organisation providing counselling services in schools. Peter has maintained a small, private child and adolescent psychotherapy practice and now teaches and provides supervision. He is publishing a book in the autumn for him, spring for Me, entitled the Adolescent and the Psychotherapist, why I Don’t Know Matters, welcome Peter.

Peter: 3:33

Hello, thank you very much.

Colby: 3:38

And I should just say at the outset that you’re being a very good sport, not only being on the podcast, but continuing the podcast today, me having made the cardinal error of not sending you the questions beforehand, or at least beforehand long enough for you to consider them. Anyway, hopefully it won’t be too harrowing an experience for you. And I usually just ask my guests is there anything else? Is there anything that you would like to add to that short bio that I’ve just read?

Peter: 4:19

well, I think it covers pretty well much of my life. I think I think it covers pretty well much of my life. I think We’ll have to see. Perhaps at the end I’ll find there’s something I want to say which I haven’t said I have no idea what’s going to happen. So let’s see what happens.

Colby: 4:35

Well, yeah, let’s see Excellent. So, peter, you’ve had a long and very varied career in young people’s mental health and also with the Pepper Harrow community, with therapeutic communities. So I guess my first question to you is how did you get into this line of work? That has been your life’s work.

Peter: 5:06

Oh, completely by accident, I mean pure, pure accident. I mean I knew nothing about psychoanalysis until I was about, I suppose, 20, 21. Um, and I had no aspirations in this direction at all. I mean, I really was quite ignorant. Um, and I had no aspirations in this direction at all. I mean, I really was quite ignorant.

Peter: 5:28

And I went to university and I had my degree in industrial economics, you’ll be pleased to know, of which I knew very little and of which I know very little now. But I did it because I had some kind of ambition to be rich and to be in industry and to be a very grown-up sort of person, as it were. In fact, my life at university was not supremely glorious academically. I spent a lot of time in the drama society. I acted in about 10 different plays, so I was goofing around and very fortunate because in my day only about 5% of the population, general population, went to university. So I was very, very privileged to be there at all. And this was in the when was I that? 1957 to 1960, so you know it’s a long, long time ago. And I, the facilities were extraordinarily, uh, abundant really for me as a young person. So you know, I danced about I, I had fun, I enjoyed myself and all the rest of it and um, and met my future wife. Can you believe, such a young and delicate age that I was so there? I was a minute.

Peter: 6:50

I came out of university and I applied for jobs in industry and can you believe it? I got nowhere at all. Nobody wanted me at all, and my wife suggested I apply for a job as an unattached youth worker in the youth service. I applied for that and can you believe I was unanimously accepted. So there was a complete change of direction and I went where I was wanted and I spent three extraordinary years working as an unattached youth worker, walking around the streets of the city that I was in, getting to know young people and all the rest of it, and I made use of my enjoyment and skill, I think in the theatre. So I formed a group amongst all these kids who were not. The point of the whole enterprise was why aren’t more young people going to youth clubs? And, of course, more interesting young people didn’t go to youth clubs or the delinquent ones, and so I formed a group where I got to know this bunch of kids by just lolling around, and then we formed a youth group and it was very successful and we, we won prizes and and I was enjoying myself carrying on being in the theater and so on.

Peter: 8:11

So there I am, 21 ish, no, 24, something with my twenties and still not a clue. And then I did. Then again, I’m very much influenced by wife in those days. I mean, my wife told me, advised me to go for this job, and I never would have done otherwise. And then she went off to do a postgraduate diploma in the london school of economics and I followed suit and did a comparable course of study of diploma and applied social studies, I think it was. And there, can you believe, I encountered Winnicott. Winnicott was one of the teachers and a lovely man called oh goodness name, name’s gone now. Anyway, there were psychoanalytic, esteemed people on this course which complete will absolute news to me, finish that.

Peter: 9:08

And then we have two next, and the true story it’s not probably the formal story is that I needed to find Holly Golighty. In other words, I needed to find Audrey Hepburn, who was in Breakfast in Tiflis with all those yellow cabs and all that beautiful. And I had a thing Having been brought up on American movies, I had to go to America to find Holly Golightly. She was a total fantasy. My wife has a different story, but that’s my story.

Peter: 9:46

And so we went to New York and my brother-in-law happened to live in New York for one reason or another, so we stayed with him and then I just looked up the Yellow Pages, basically to find jobs. Looked up the Yellow Pages and looked at all of these various jobs and the usual sort of hustle and this and the other, but managed to get a job with the jewish board of guardians, which is a big, major kind of social service facility in new york, you know, and they ran a residential treatment center, yeah, upstate New York, for crazy kids, and they just had a strike and so they’d lost quite a few of their staff. And so there I was, merrily coming along and they took me on. They took me on, so it was pure pure luck, and that was an amazing job because it was working with very disturbed kids. They had about 200 of these kids on a big campus in different cottages up there in in upstate new york. And it was at that time. Psychoanalysis was kosher.

Peter: 10:58

Psychoanalysis was the way you thought this was before its demise. This, this would be what in the 1963 to 64, I think something like that. And so they were great people and I and they had training in their central office in Manhattan and I learned psychoanalysis. I was introduced to this whole new thing. Here I am, whatever I am, in the middle of my twenties, discovering psychoanalysis. I was introduced to this whole new thing. Here I am, whatever I am, in the middle of my 20s, discovering psychoanalysis really.

Peter: 11:29

And then there was a man there, a man called Fred Evans. He was a psychiatrist and he said why don’t you apply to Anna Freud for her training? And I said well, that sounds a good idea. Turns out Anna Freud’s training was in London, not in New York, and I got interviewed. And I got interviewed by two eminent child psychotherapists, augusta Alpert and Mariana Chris, in New York. I was interviewed in New York and they thought I was married at my time and our first child was there. We went back to London. My wife wanted to get back to England because of the culture. The American culture was very different. So we came back with one child and I got married when I was 21. He, he, long, long time time. I’m 21. Can you believe that? I didn’t know what on earth I was doing, but she was beautiful, so there we go I wasn’t much older, peter there we go and I’m still married to the same woman.

Peter: 12:39

can you believe that? Yeah, 64 years 64 years Congratulations.

Peter: 12:45

Yeah, married in 1960. And went on to university. So we come back to England and I then do the four-year course at the Anna Freud Center in London, which was, if you like, the kind of turning point of my life, because it was a thorough psychoanalytic training. Anna Freud was still alive and it was in a kind of heyday really, and there were about eight of us who were in that year and I’ve most of them were American. So then then, so here I am now a psycho and I’m a child and adolescent psychoanalyst, and I qualified in 1971, as you put, and then I waded off into the world. So that’s how I came to be what I am. Actually. I mean, it’s a total hit and miss story, but they’re the best stories really.

Peter: 13:42

I mean, some people the age of five say I’m going to be an accountant or I’m going to be a lawyer I had no idea what I was going to be, but that’s what I became and have became and have become ever since yes, yes over 50 years in this business.

Colby: 13:58

Wow, that’s there you go yeah that’s an extraordinary story and in fact, uh fact, peter, not uncommon amongst my guests on this podcast. So they will say something very similar about accidents, getting into it by accidents and economics as well, extraordinary. I think there’s been at least a couple of people who’ve talked about who’ve come in from a more an economics background into this space. One of my guests was a fellow by the name of Graham Kerridge and he was interested in he’d also studied economics, was interested in human capital and got a job at the Cotswold community. Yeah, and he’s an Australian. He has moved backwards and forwards. In fact he’s eventually ended up in health management and has worked all across the world in that area. But, yeah, up in health management and has worked all across the world in that area. But, but, yeah, but economics. I’m trying to think if john whitwell, who also was from the cotwell cotswold community, might have mentioned economics yeah, yeah yeah, so there you go.

Colby: 15:16

It’s all these maths. People get into psychotherapy yeah, it’s extraordinary.

Peter: 15:22

Yeah good, never have been any good at economics, but there we go.

Colby: 15:28

Yeah, and Richard Rowlandson from the Mulberry Bush. He also talked about, well, his father. He talked about maths. We had some interesting little backwards and forwards about maths on his conversation. But anyway, you’re in the group of. You are good company in both having something of a maths background and also describing how you got into the work as if by accident.

Peter: 15:58

Yeah, I would add that I was a child, adolescent, in the 50s, the 1950s, and actually people have all kinds of views about that period. But in fact in England following the war there were major changes and the establishment of an education system and health service and so on was phenomenal age and I benefited wildly from it. I mean I happened to do well at school. My own, my background is pretty modest. My father was a tailor and I was pretty modest, you know, but I did well, for some reason or other, with my A levels and then got, but only five percent of us got into university. I mean, if we I was just lucky, frankly, the politics of the time, if I were to set out now I’d probably get lost very, very early. But in those days, I mean, I did prosper very much from a very ordinary background. I mean there was nothing privileged about my life at all. I feel very grateful for all of that and I sometimes think, oh my God, you know I mean everybody’s so critical of the past, but that was a good period.

Peter: 17:14

A lovely man called a politician, called can’t remember his name Anyway, he wrote a book called the Age of Hope, the Age of Hope. Anyway, he wrote a book called the Age of Hope, the Age of Hope, and I don’t think we could say the age that we’re living in is of hope at all.

Colby: 17:34

Yeah, quite the opposite, quite the opposite. Unfortunately, you’ve mentioned a couple of names too. So Donald Winnicott is, you know, obviously still quite influential in our thinking, in child protection circles, and you met him. He was a teacher while you were doing your second part of your education. And, of course, anna Freud is a giant of the psychotherapy world.

Peter: 18:05

Winnicott and I was doing a social work training at the London School of Economics but he was just mesmerizing. I mean I was totally ignorant and this man comes on and doesn’t talk in a particularly eloquent way, but he drew a diagram of two circles and called one a bad breast and another one a good breast and he talked about these circles on the board and I really didn’t know what he was on about. But also the little bit I like to say that he and his wife Claire invited our students to his home in the Rottlosh part part of London and I played piano and I played his piano. I thought I was good. I played Willy Holtz’s piano.

Peter: 18:54

I wasn’t very good in those days but he thought he was very nice about it anyway. So you know I didn’t quite know him and I well he’s been such a presence in my life in all kinds of ways and you know he writes so well, although at times you haven’t got a clue what he’s on about, but at times I was right very well, and those phrases like the good enough mother and the transitional space and um, psychotherapy is two people playing with each other, I mean all those kind of ideas just resonate. It was a remarkable man, frankly, and we lack anybody of that significance these days, I’m afraid yeah, his ideas have definitely stood the test of time.

Colby: 19:44

I just thought of a title for your next book, peter.

Peter: 19:48

Yes.

Colby: 19:50

Winnicott’s Piano.

Peter: 19:52

Yeah, that would be nice, wouldn’t it? Yeah?

Colby: 19:59

I had these moments of inspiration, and then, yeah, and then you spent four years at Anna Freud Centre and she was still alive at that time.

Peter: 20:07

Tell us a little bit about that experience okay, well, I need to say that I was green, young and very beautiful in those days and she was where. She was not a pompous woman, she was not a Melanie Klein. Frankly, she was very different from a client, rather modest woman, but I looked upon her with in awe really and uh, uh and well, I, I, just I. It was such a thorough training in psychoanalysis. I mean, we, we were required to read Freud and it was a theory, the theory group, and it was all looking at Freud in some detail and which I still benefit from, actually the stuff I learned when you’re reading forward. We all, we all took concepts. I took the concept of resistance, I took the concepts of identification and you read Freud all through on those concepts. That was terrific.

Peter: 21:10

Anna Freud’s meta psychological profile, meaning a profile of a diagnostic profile which looks at all the various aspects of a child’s personality. That was part of the breathing. It was called the diagnostic group and we would do, I mean, looking at the complexity of a child’s growth. That was what she was on about and she’s written it in the book called Normality and Pathology in Childhood and it’s there if you want to find out about it. And then I actually became a consultant, which is a rather absurd term, but I was called the consultant of the nursery school because in the center there was a nursery school as part of the center and it was financed for socioeconomically deprived backgrounds. So there was a nursery school and Anna Freud loved the nursery school. She just loved children. She just was a very modest person really and I was somehow the consultant and I used to go down there and be part of the scene.

Peter: 22:21

Every Thursday afternoon two o’clock there was a beer meeting to discuss the children and that was very, that was very, just, very, because we all knew the children and they were. Some were very problematic and some who were very flourishing at such a young age, and Americans who had come to these meetings and the americans love to come and sit at the feet of anna freud and there’s some funny stories about that, but I won’t go into those anyway. So so, and then we had three cases. Five times a week I saw, uh, an adolescent and a latency child, the under five. I didn’t really hit it off with and I don’t think the child or the mother understood what on earth I was doing. That didn’t work out very well. I’m not very good at that, but the other two children and we would write weekly reports of what had happened and that would be reviewed and discussed and so on.

Peter: 23:26

So it was a phenomenal training. It was not the most perfect training. It was not, you know, I could. There were. There were things that didn’t not happen, but by and large it was a psychoanalytic training and it was my turning point. Really it just sort of shaped me. I was now a child and adolescent psychotherapist for the an analyst, but psychotherapy and that’s what I was, and.

Peter: 23:56

I sailed off into the world being one and have been one. Can you believe all my life? Yeah, yeah, yeah it’s very.

Colby: 24:04

It’s definitely a vocation, I think, being one myself. Yeah, if I heard you correctly, you said five times a week you were seeing the young people yeah yeah, five times yeah, that would make you over what sort of period, peter like, how long would you see them at that frequency?

Peter: 24:23

Three years two to three years.

Colby: 24:25

Yeah, and how were endings managed when you’ve had such a significant amount of involvement in a young person’s life?

Peter: 24:39

Yeah, that’s a naughty question because I don’t think endings are ever properly discussed really. I mean there is what you’re supposed to do is to acknowledge what has been done, acknowledge achievements and knowledge limits have happened, and understand the hurt and the anger of something important being terminated. I mean you ought to all do all of that. Truth is probably didn’t do it as well as I should have done really. I mean I was being, I mean all these cases of being supervised and they were very. There was an extraordinary woman called bianca gordon who wasn’t terribly popular but she was a very um particular, looked at detail, was very thorough, and so I did do reasonably well, I think, with the child, the adolescent. I was supervised by a lovely bloke called max goldblatt and I don’t think that was probably handled as strongly as it should have been really. I think I mean, given that I mean I’m not sure, really well, I don’t think. I just know, actually you can’t expect children these days to come five times a week.

Peter: 26:06

It’s just not part of the rush of our society. I think the Anna Freud was still deep in its own history really. It certainly couldn’t be applied now. The psychoanalytic trainings that exist now have three times a week, but very rarely anything more than that.

Peter: 26:26

I think the Institute of Psychoanalysis sees adults maybe four times a week, but anyway but and I think actually, I think, looking back, I think maybe maybe I could have made more of that, we could have made more of that. Maybe it was almost too much, maybe there wasn’t enough analytic scrutiny of what was going on. You get into a kind of lull, you know if it’s every time all the time. So I look back with some kind of reservations about it and I mean I know that Peter Fonagy and his I forgot her name, I forgot it anyway he and his co-worker looked in detail at the work that we had done, all the cases, all the weekly reports, and I think he could see that there were limitations.

Peter: 27:31

I think we did well with the neurotic children, but with the more borderline and the more delinquent I’m not sure we did as well as we might and I think it left Carnegie with a certain sort of questioning about that kind of training, that kind of and of course he has gone ahead now and and spearheaded uh, training which is virtually non-athletic, as I can see anyway, we won’t go into that. But um yeah, but for me it was an extraordinary experience, it really was apologies for the question.

Colby: 28:10

I. I think endings. Endings come into my work quite a lot as well and, um, you can probably tell from oh no, it’s that way from the book title just next to my shoulder. I mean, I’m very interested in bolby’s attachment theory and work very much in consideration of that.

Colby: 28:32

I don’t see children more than once a week but I have seen some children weekly, probably more ordinarily fortnightly, working in a context with young people who come from relational trauma backgrounds and relational disadvantage, and working with them for a long time and I think we become significant parts of their life growing up. And so the question of endings, and therapeutic endings is is quite a vexed one well.

Peter: 29:12

Do you know of any relationship that ends well?

Colby: 29:17

that’s a. That’s actually a very, yeah, a very important point, I think I often think that. So, for example, I observe couples. I don’t work with couples who divorce, but I’ve observed people in my circle who have divorced and observed that they considered that their life would be better away from their partner. Their life would be better away from their, their partner, who and even in circumstances where they they were, they disliked their, their spouse quite a lot. I’ve observed their life. They go through it, definitely go through a period of struggle, and things do go downhill after that because, even if you don’t like someone, there’s still been a significant part of your life, a significant connection. So, yeah, I think you’re right ending well, isn’t it really?

Peter: 30:12

yeah good ending people talk about and I wonder where it is yeah, maybe that’s a another book I don’t mind writing books either.

Colby: 30:23

Actually, I haven’t written one for a while. I I’ve been thinking of.

Peter: 30:26

How many have you written? I mean, that’s really quite something.

Colby: 30:30

I’ve only written these two, but the attachment book. I refer to that as two books because it’s two editions and when I came to update the first edition I liked it so little that I attempted to rewrite it completely and it is very different from the first edition. But my publisher asked me to put respectfully put stuff back in from the first book. So, yeah, so that’s what happened, and I haven’t written anything now for a decade. I should write something again. I’ve got lots of ideas and little time.

Peter: 31:11

yeah it’s not easy writing it’s not easy is it.

Peter: 31:15

Well, I don’t find it easy at all. The only consolation is that people think that I’m easy to read, that I’m you know and that that pleases me. But trying to get it to be like I mean I can only write stuff that I’m you know and that pleases me. But trying to get it to be like I mean I can only write stuff that I understand myself, you know. A lot of stuff I read I don’t understand. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m not sure they know what they’re talking about.

Colby: 31:39

I went through a Nietzsche stage reading Nietzsche’s books.

Colby: 31:43

You did I did and you know, and I took a nugget out of, oh, I took a few nuggets out of them, each of them, and and yeah, when you’re reading Nietzsche from my well, when I was reading Nietzsche, I I think, yeah, I probably understood about five percent, particularly as it went on, I think, the last of his books that he well, very close to the end he wrote, thus spake zarathustra, and I loved that book, but he was actually quite unwell when he wrote that book and uh, yeah, so it was quite, it’s quite a challenging book, but so is dostoevsky as well, and notes from the underground. You know, very short book, only about 70 or so pages, but, goodness gracious, is that hard to read. Yeah, what was that?

Peter: 32:29

what was that?

Colby: 32:31

it’s just the field or dossier’s book. Uh, notes from the underground, yeah, yeah, I similarly have a reputation for being easy to read and, um, I just say to people well, I’m just a simple man with a simple message. I don’t like over and, like you, if I don’t understand it, I won’t write it.

Peter: 32:55

No, exactly, exactly Same as me, absolutely.

Colby: 32:58

Yeah.

Peter: 32:59

I mean, I’ve read quite a lot of Freud and he’s not at all easy to read sometimes he isn’t yeah. So yeah, I tried to read.

Colby: 33:09

Interpreting Dreams a few years ago, did you really? And I gave up. Much to my chagrin, I confess, I gave up. I’ll have another go, another time.

Peter: 33:21

It’s 600 pages. That’s an awful lot.

Colby: 33:30

Peter, yeah, like I said there’s this earlier, there’s loads I could speak to you about. I you founded the, the um you founded young minds in in the uk there, um, I I knew about young minds, I think because I I had come across it at a time when there had been some reviews of probably the first edition of my attachment book that was associated in some ways with the young minds, with young minds activities. But tell us a little bit about young minds and how you came to found found it and what. What was its work?

Peter: 34:04

well, it happened in the middle of my life. I think I was in my very early 50s when I got involved with it. Well, you know, it was quite a leading light, and what can I say about it? I mean, I had been practising in the health service and very aware of, uh, poor resources and and people didn’t really understand what it was all about. And um, and there was a. There was a. It was called the interclinic conferences. Um, in england at that time, where are we now? We’re in my 40s. I can’t remember where I’d be now.

Peter: 34:51

There was a lot of concern about child guidance clinics and them being properly managed and who was managing them. Was it the psychiatrists? Who were the managers, or was it other people? But the bottom line was that there was really very inadequate resources and very limited knowledge of what they did, and so a group of us thought you know, something needs to be done, we need to make more of an effort. And at that time I belonged to a funny little group called the Child Guidance Trust and it was spearheaded by a lovely lady called Robina Addis, who was a rather posh lady, who, in the 20s, with her friends I think they were called the Mayflower ladies, and they went over to America and Adler Alfred Adler, who was one of Freud’s early departures had set up child guidance clinics over there and they learned that and they brought it back and so they started the child guidance movement in the 20s and 30s. Then the war came, but then in the 50s and the 60s they really blossomed and I think there was something like 300 or so child guidance clinics in the country and so and that was the body that was coming, that kept coming together and saying we need to have more influence than we do.

Peter: 36:13

So a long, long, long story. A couple of us did it. We started to approach the department of health and, um, and then it’s, it’s just, and then it’s just. Life is really a bunch of serendipities, it really is, for some extraordinary reason.

Peter: 36:37

I got to know the man in the Department of Health whose responsibility was to oversee expenditure or something like that, and he turned out to be an interesting man. Um, who, who, who, was in analysis himself I mean, can you believe, civil servant in analysis and he, he lived in the suburbs and he came into every time he came to London. He was looking at all these young people and an awful lot of them looked pretty hopeless and miserable and disheveled and unhappy and he said what is the department doing about these people? There are a lot of people looking after people with dyslexia, but what about these people, these emotionally? So he became well, he and I got on for some extraordinary reason, and the extraordinary, extraordinary reason was he liked horse racing, as indeed I did at that time it wasn’t the economics connection that was pretty bad economics.

Peter: 37:40

I can do that, but anyway, he he was. So we got on very well and, uh, he managed to be. It’s a long, long story, but he managed to. At that time I was running the Brandon Center, which was a walk-in center for adolescents and so on, and he managed to find some money that was not being properly spent and gave us a grant which was like magic. It was like pure magic, and so we got on with that.

Peter: 38:07

And then he was in the Department of Health and he was used to going to very impressive people. So he wanted to get in touch with a man called Louis Blom Cooper who was a barrister of high repute and sat on various child abuse inquiries. He was a rather dignified man and he got in touch. He tried to get in touch with Louis Blanc-Cooper, but Louis Blanc-Cooper was in the bath. But his wife answered the phone and I happen to know his wife rather well and she said you don’t want to talk to Louis, you want to talk to Peter Wilson.

Peter: 38:50

And that’s how this chap and I got on with each other and that was that pure piece of utter serendipity. It’s just ridiculous. And then on the back he said well, it’s all very well, you’re running this center in the middle of London, but what about all these young people? What are we going to do with that? So with his support his support he managed to get some money together to actually fund the beginning of Young Minds Enough money to pay for my salary, an information officer and a PA for me £150000 pounds or something. And because of that that’s how Young Minds happened and I became the director and it was a really important course. Two things raise awareness of children’s mental health and improve multidisciplinary services for them throughout the lab. They were the two main things, because at that time if you talked about children’s mental health, people thought what are you saying? They’re all crazy, they’re all schizophrenic. What the hell are you talking about? So we had to define what we meant by mental health and then so I built the organization up and I was there for I don’t know, 10 or 11 years or something like that in my 50s and we built it up and we had a budget of about 2 million, I think by the end of

Peter: 40:20

it and we we organized a consultancy service that went across different parts of the country and looked at the way different departments are organizing comprehensive services. Children’s mental health was not just the business of psychiatry or psychotherapists. It was the business of everybody in the voluntary sector and there were some very good reports. It was a good period. This was in the 90s, in the early part of this century, so that’s how that happened and it was going very well indeed. But then there was this whatever it was a bank crisis or something. Suddenly everything was in crisis because of all these dodgy loans in America or whatever. It was a bank crisis or something. Suddenly everything was in crisis because of all these dodgy loans in america, or whatever it was. Yeah, and everything tightened up. Everything tightened up and, as a result of that, things have not gone very well since. I can talk about that later on.

Peter: 41:21

But that’s what young minds was and it was very alive and I had about 30 staff and it was. It was terrific, actually it was very, but it took a hell of a lot out of me, I must say. You know, I worked long hours. I worried about money all the time. Get to christmas and the financial year is march and you can see an almost deficit where you’re going to get the money from. I mean, it was, and I went all over the country talking and this and the other.

Peter: 41:48

I did work terribly hard, um, and it was, it was good and actually, and we ran a parent information service and people, parents, ringing up about their kids, and that was very well in. It was. It was going very well. I was very with it. But then I got to 65, 65 or coming up to it, and I really I thought I’d done enough and I was pretty exhausted, pretty exhausted, and I was ready to retire, you know, carpet slippers in front of the fire, dozing off forever and ever. But then an extraordinary woman called Benita Refsson, who ran an organization called the Place to Be that puts counselling into schools nationally, came and said would I be a clinical advisor to her organization? And I couldn’t resist it really, and so I did that for several years afterwards. But everything is all by chance really. It really is one chance. Yeah, I feel very proud of it. I’m rather sad that I think all of his efforts have pretty well come to nothing as a result of recent political events in this country.

Colby: 43:04

But we’ll come to that later on, if so be yeah, and you were a consultant, I think, at pepper harrow too, or you were you’re involved in paper harrow.

Peter: 43:15

Yes, there was one frenetic period in my life and I’m not entirely sure I’m proud of it. I was working in six different places during the course of every week omnipotence madness, but that’s. I was working in six different places during the course of every week, omnipotence madness. That’s what I was doing. And Pepper Harrow was another extraordinary thing. It’s a therapeutic community in a big house in the country with, about when I first it was 50 kids first of all, now it’s 30 kids and a staff of about 30 or something of that kind, and that was an amazing experience. I mean, really, really disturbed crazy kids, very delinquent, some borderline and uh, and it was a therapeutic community. So you know, every morning there would be a community meeting, everybody, all the staff, all the kids, come together in informed community and and so the staff operated both as teachers and as as therapists.

Peter: 44:35

It was a whole kind of integrated idea yeah and it was amazing place and the man who ran it had a certain kind of extraordinary charisma as a little guy but very, very determined and and he led it with a kind of passion very strong.

Peter: 44:53

And the dining room was was designed so that all the tables were breast like in shape and the children had a delicious, every lovely field that they wanted. I mean it was an amazing place. It closed because and I was the consultant my basic job was being a consultant to the staff to help deal with the pressure at all, but of course I was in the community and I was known and so on.

Peter: 45:22

So that was incredible and I was known and so on. So that was uh incredible that was Pepa Haro. Yeah, that was Pepa Haro. It was amazing and I’m not sure I was. I mean we’re trying to. I mean I loved them.

Peter: 45:34

I always remember he was determined to try and understand the, the psychopathology of these kids and what was in them and he had, and I think he hoped that I really would be able to get there and tell him, and I don’t think I did. I think I was reasonably useful to staff, but to understand the extremity of their misery and their acting out was was just wild. But it was a wonderful place and it couldn’t exist. It couldn’t exist now because you know, for example, for example, if a kid ran away, staff would run after them and bring them back. Can you imagine? And physically bring them back, physically touching them, safeguarding, and what do you mean? Kids have a right to their right to go off.

Peter: 46:21

We had a scandal in this country where men have been exploiting young girls who’ve been run away from their children’s homes, sexually exploiting them. These kids have been allowed to run out and nobody’s come and found them. They do that because you know to find them, them to bring them back physically, is safeguarding, and so it was a great place and it had passion and commitment and care.

Peter: 46:56

it wasn’t just a child minding place, it was a therapeutic place and some of the kids did remarkably well and some of the kids did remarkably hopeless. I mean, it got nowhere, yeah. So there we go. So I’ve been incredibly lucky, frankly, in having that experience, and that’s simply because I happen to know the founder of the place, a play called Melvin Mose, and for some reason he thought I was very good, so I took the job and it was well paid, so I did it.

Colby: 47:25

So I took the job and it was well paid, so I did it. Peter, I want to pick up on something that you said there as a bit of a segue into your soon-to-be-released book, because you were saying how the chap that was running the place really hoped you could answer the questions that he had about what was going on for the young people, and you’ve got this book coming out with a rather intriguing title to it the Adolescent and the Psychotherapist. Why, I Don’t Know Matters, and I wondered if there was just anything that you could, you felt able to share with us about the book and maybe even a little bit about that title yeah, well, it’s going to be published, apparently in December or over the next year.

Peter: 48:17

It’s going to be published being through all the business contract, more than I say. And well, I wanted to call it, I wanted to call it, I don’t know. That’s what, that’s all I wanted to be, I don’t know. But their editors routledge, um, they said I’m not already happy about that, would they put the book what? What section of the bookshop or the library? And I can see their point of view. Um, but I had a thing about, I don’t know anyway, one.

Peter: 48:48

I went, we went barmy, trying to think of a title. The adolescent, the psychotherapist is not a bad title, but in the end I kept it in. Why, I don’t know matters. And the book basically is a collection of papers that I’ve written in the past. I’ve written about 40 or 50 papers or chapters that have been here and there and I’ve got 10 in there and I think that they’re quite pleased with what they’re giving off, I think, and I think it meets the title of the therapist and the adolescent.

Peter: 49:26

But I don’t know how I had a thing about, and there’s two main reasons. The first is clinical. You tell me anybody who sat down done psychotherapy with adolescents and they are confronted with I don’t know, I don’t know. What do you feel, what do you feel? What do you feel? I don’t know, I don’t know. And I think as therapists we’ve become rather cross. I’m here to know and you’re saying you don’t know. That’s resistance, resistance, whereas in fact it’s much more than that. It’s much more uncertainty about what they feel.

Peter: 50:00

Anyway, they’re not sure whether they should say or not say are they being disloyal to their parents? To talk about this? I mean, there are all kinds of reasons. Be it, I don’t know. And so I think it matters that we respect I don’t know. Also, the other thing is political. There’s far too much certainty that having an influence on policy and it’s my crack and the scientists.

Peter: 50:29

Now, I’m not anti-science or all the rest, wonderful things, but the science of psychotherapy not so good, not so good, not so conclusive as they make it out to be, so that they think cbt is the treatment of choice. This is what evidence suggests. The evidence is not good. It’s not good, it’s a lie. They’re lying about it, in my view, and so they are not saying I don’t know If they said I don’t know, but so far this looks as if CBT can be helpful with certain patients, for a certain type of plan maybe, but they don’t it’s either. They know, and they’ve set up a whole kind of service delivery now which is based on we know, and we will do it this way.

Peter: 51:22

So do it this way, so I, I don’t know matters, and I. A great virtue If I, if you and I. I mean the paradox is I’m telling you what I think I know, but you know if, if we leave it and I say I know everything, then you haven’t got a question to answer because I’ve known it all by saying I don’t know. That opens up our dialogue for for something, and so I think there’s a, there is a, there is a virtue, virtue not knowing. And through not knowing we discover. If you say no, you’re not opening your mind. That’s right. So that’s what that book’s all about.

Colby: 52:12

I was hoping that you would say something along those lines. I remember John Whitwell talking about using I don’t know as a way of opening up reflective thinking about things, and I was also thinking with teenagers that I don’t know. Is there a way sometimes of setting some boundaries around themselves? And if that is possibly what they’re doing, then that’s something we should respect rather than get frustrated with yeah, yeah, no, that’s wonderful.

Peter: 52:58

Talking about Australia, I did a series of seminars organised by Peter Blake, who you presumably know no, I don’t, you don’t, no, really. Organised by Peter Blake, who you presumably know no, I don’t, you don’t, no, really. He’s in Sydney and he’s written an enormous book on child psychotherapy, peter Blake. Anyway, at these seminars, people will present me with these impossible cases and I will say I don’t know and I’m worried that actually that wasn’t the right approach. People want you to have omnipotent answers and I just don’t see it.

Peter: 53:34

I think we have to live with the uncertainty in order to find out a bit more.

Colby: 53:42

So there we are is there any advice that you would give your younger self as a, as a early career psychotherapist, um, from from the position that you’re, you’re in now, or that you would give, indeed, to other, uh, early career um psychotherapists? Child and adolescent psychotherapists?

Peter: 54:05

very. It’s a very, very good question and therefore a very difficult question. Yes, I have been thinking about that. I’m going to give an answer, thinking about myself and maybe particularly psychotherapies. The advice I would give young Peter Wilson is to do something to enable him to be more assertive and confident in what he, uh was doing, and you could say my analysis should have done that, but it didn’t. I mean to speak with more authority, to to be more, um, to be less inclined to let things pass, to basically recognize the wrongness of what other people are talking about and to express my disagreement.

Peter: 55:10

I think, I’m not putting this very well, but I wish I’d had more authority to some deeper sense of authority within myself that I think I have now, which I’ve gleaned from my my life’s experience. But as a young person I don’t think, and I think it’s something about psychoanalytic training, um, that it makes you reflective and thoughtful and all the rest of it, but doesn’t really engineer you to to speak up. I had a farcical experience a long, long time ago, uh, with a man called wallace hamilton and we were involved in um trying to establish a salary structure in the national health service for child psychotherapists, which in fact, we did an amazing piece of work. But as part of that, we were involved with a trade union I forget what it was called now the trade union and they organized some training sessions in how to negotiate.

Peter: 56:24

And we had an ex coal miner I think it was a unionist coma and he was a rough truss sort of bloke and we were videoed in in negotiating relationships. We were pathetic we were. We were leaning back, saying, oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, and just leaning further back, almost a disappearance, whereas we should have been much more assertive, confrontational, authoritative and so on, and I really I would. And I say I mean I don’t have too much to do now with young child psychotherapy, but I encounter them every day and they’re very nice young men but they’ve got no balls, if I can put it that way. They need a bit of punch and they’re also understanding.

Peter: 57:15

It’s that balance between understanding and assertion. And so and I think we do ourselves it’s that balance between understanding and assertion and I think we do ourselves a great disservice as a child psychotherapy profession. The psychiatrists have sort of bred with it. They are the people who know about mental health, they know about mental illness and the psychologists are very, very pushy and very uptight and so on, but the psychotherapists, I think, are a pushover. Frankly, I wish I’d had greater authority as a young man, even at Young Minds, when I was pushing for child mental health. I found my psychoanalytic background. Psychoanalytic understanding was too understanding. People don’t believe in psychoanalysis background.

Peter: 57:59

Psychoanalytic understanding was to understanding people don’t believe in psychoanalysis by and large they don’t. They believe in what’s obvious, what’s said on top. We all looking underneath what’s what’s what’s really going on, but they don’t get there. You need to operate at that kind of level, yeah it is, I is hard it’s the worst of my life. I think I wished I would like that would be something. I mean it’s a good answer, I think, to a good question really, because it’s an honest one, and I do feel I rue that I didn’t have more of that in my life.

Colby: 58:34

But there’s also a wisdom in humility in a sense. I know that sounds a wisdom in humility. I know humility. I know that sounds a bit corny, but it’s as we were talking about in relation to, I don’t know, maintaining a stance of curiosity, yeah. Yeah, not jumping in with the answer straight away. Yeah, maintaining an open space of inquiry, which I think is very much. I don’t describe myself as a psychoanalyst in the same way that you do, but I think that’s really a cornerstone of psychoanalytic work is that it creates space for inquiry and exploration.

Peter: 59:31

Some people just assume that they are to be heard and I don’t think I’ve had that assumption. I mean not that I’ve been effective. I mean you’ve highlighted a conundrum. Frankly, you know that I do believe in not knowing and humility and so on. At the same time, I wish I had been something other than what I’ve been. Not that I’ve been lacking in any assertion, but I could have made more of a difference. I could have made more of a noise.

Peter: 1:00:03

People make an awful lot of noise and people sort of keel over under the weight of the noise.

Colby: 1:00:10

There’s a proverb, isn’t it the rusty? What is it? The rusty gate gets the oil, or something like that. Though, what would you say, peter, if you were sitting in front of the health secretary, and what would you say to them now about child and adolescent mental health and what needs to happen?

Peter: 1:00:34

Well, it’s a bit in my head at the moment because there’s a very good article in the latest edition of the Journal of child psychotherapy and this chap’s written what the state of affairs is in the for a child psychotherapist and basically what he’s actually saying is that two major developments have occurred in the running of mental health services in this country. The one was a the introduction of something called IAPT introduce introduce improving access to psychological therapies.

Colby: 1:01:12

Yeah.

Peter: 1:01:13

And the other one was the children health and social care act of 2012. And he highlights these two things and the two strains which are so important. In the first, in IAPT, it’s all about improving access and apparently improving treatment. Uh, improving access and apparently improving treatment, but it bases the, the, the therapy, on what is called nice, the national institute of clinical excellence. Look at very thoroughly at the end and the evidence from that suggests probably more powerfully, points to cognitive behavioral therapy and that that is the therapy that should be offered for all in all in all, child and adolescent mental health services should be CBT, which is the predominant offer, and that is reinforced by this power of evidence that it works. They’re interested in outcomes. And there’s a whole history about IAPT. It was basically introduced by the Minister of Economics, funnily enough.

Colby: 1:02:35

Again.

Peter: 1:02:39

Again, he was very concerned that so many men were not going to work because they were depressed. So let’s bring in a treatment which apparently works with depression. Get these poor buggers to work. That was the raison d’etre. And it happened to be he had a close relationship with a cbt specialist in the mausoleum hospital and so cbt was presented and now it put it pervades everything.

Peter: 1:03:07

So as a child psychotherapist working in a health service, by and large in the camps, you won’t be if you won’t see a referral out there. As it comes in cbt, be offered it Maybe three or four attempts before it’s given to a child psychotherapist, and that’s absolutely wrong. And the thing about all this evidence is that it doesn’t really take into account the complexity of people’s problems and it’s just it purports to deal with mild to moderate problems. Anybody can do that. Really, you know, to deal with the kind of real problems that we have in in our society you need much more. So IAPT has entered into the realm. The the other thing is this Health and Social Care Act, which actually is coming from a political view that people, we should be in businesses, we should be in competition with each other, we should be efficient, do outcomes and we should compete with each other.

Peter: 1:04:20

We should, and I’m putting that broad as a broad political view, um, but now being applied to that simply means everything is division, everything’s divided. Yeah, people are fragmented. I have a kid. I’m working with a kid and somebody says, well, this kid’s got a neurodevelopmental problem or something. So therefore the kids should go to that service, not be part of the service I’m doing and anyway.

Peter: 1:04:52

So it’s a long, long story and I’m full of it at the moment because it really pretty well renders irrelevant to all the work I do at Young Marts. I mean, they, they they’re very impressed that everybody has more awareness of child mental health, possibly, but I’m not sure that people understand what mental health is. And, um, as far as my whole attempt to bring together the disciplines to provide a comprehensive service, that every discipline is in competition with each other, yeah, being more competitive, and it just is. And we hear people demoralized and their skills devalued. And so what would I say to the health secretary? Abolish the lot. Yes, a weakness is, cbt is attractive because it’s quick, short term and ding, ding, ding, whereas our psychotherapy is longer, it has to take longer, it has to. And the overwhelming thing is the resources for CAMHS for children’s mental health has been reduced. I mean, posts are not being re-advertised. It’s just an appalling situation.

Peter: 1:06:16

Now I feel for the Secretary, the Health Secretary, a man called Wes, something or other, montgomery. I feel for him because the National Health Service is really in a terribly difficult state and I don’t think child mental health is going to be high up on its priorities. And what would I propose instead? Because it is a factor that there’s an enormous need, an enormous demand, and what can people do effectively to deal with it? I understand all that, but the bottom line is people are getting disillusioned. All the CBT doesn’t work for most of these people and everybody becomes disillusioned and I think it does a major disservice in the long run. But what I would advise I’m moaning more than what I would advise but I would advise not to be so reliant on these two policies, to think about other ways of meeting a need. It’s a very, really serious problem really, and families anyway.

Colby: 1:07:23

So I was just going to say you know as much. If it’s worth anything, what 30 years of delivering psychotherapy to children and young people has taught me is that they don’t like CBT.

Peter: 1:07:37

No, they don’t.

Colby: 1:07:39

They much prefer relational, play-oriented psychotherapy.

Peter: 1:07:46

Yeah, absolutely, they much prefer it, yeah.

Colby: 1:07:49

And I remember when I was training. I remember there was and that’s over 30 years ago now, but I remember a relatively recently retired clinical psychologist here in my home state. I remember her addressing our class and saying that all the CBT practitioners in our professions you know there’s all these people that advocate for CBT and say that CBT is the answer, but when they themselves need a therapeutic service, they find someone who is much more person-centred. Analytical Absolutely yeah, I’ve never forgotten that. Analytical, yeah, absolutely yeah, I’ve never forgotten that. Anyway, yeah absolutely.

Colby: 1:08:45

Peter, yeah, we’ve had a wonderful chat and there’s so much more. I’ve really enjoyed it and there’s so much more I can speak to you about. I wondered if there was any question that you’d like to ask me before we wrap up. I’ve asked you a lot of questions.

Peter: 1:09:01

Yeah, you got me there. On the last one. What would you like me to ask? I think maybe. What do I mean by psychoanalysis, Because I always go on about it and I, yeah, yeah, I think that’s what am I talking about. I think I’m a psychoanalyst you’re asking me well, it’s a question you should ask me, but you can ask yourself.

Peter: 1:09:35

It’s a question you could ask me and I would have liked that would have been a difficult question for me, because there’s two question what you could ask me and I would have liked that would have been a difficult question for me, because there’s a. There are two ways of thinking about that. The Institute of psychoanalysis is basically the, the interpretation of the transference of the unconscious, and it’s on the couch, and you hold your position. For me, I psychoanalysis is much more on a live business, looking at the sheer conflict and struggle and yearning and desires and frustrations and what it does to you and how it affects your mood, and it’s everywhere. It’s everywhere, it’s not just on a couch, and that’s what I mean by psychoanalysis yeah, it’s almost like a science in and of itself.

Colby: 1:10:22

It’s the science of the human condition, the scientific inquiry or you don’t even have to use the word scientific, but it’s the inquiry into the human condition really, and it’s not boundaried in the ways that other approaches or conceptualisations are, it’s not limited. It’s because, you know, probably going right back to free association, it’s about an unboundaried exploration of each human life that you come into contact with.

Peter: 1:11:01

Absolutely absolutely.

Colby: 1:11:03

Peter.

Peter: 1:11:05

Was your question. Do I have a question of you?

Colby: 1:11:10

Yeah, well, I often I say to all the I don’t ask a lot of questions in the way I do therapy with children and young people, but if I do find myself asking them a lot, I’ll say to them well, I’ve asked you a lot of questions in the way I do therapy with children and young people. But if I, if I do find myself asking them a lot, I’ll say to them well, I’ve asked you a lot of questions. Is there a question you’d like to ask me?

Colby: 1:11:27

hey, that’s right yeah, and, and usually I can almost predict. I don’t want to say this with any certainty, but I can almost predict what they’ll ask. The first things they ask is how old I am, and they’re not satisfied with as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth, which is what my grandmother used to always say. For a long time I got away with telling them how old I was in months, and then a couple of kids started to work that out, so now I just do it in doggies. I am in doggies good question.

Peter: 1:12:06

My question would be what are you, what are you learning from these interesting podcasts? What are you going to distill from it? Maybe it’s too soon, but that would be. It’s such an interesting project you’ve got going here Aye, aye. What are you going to learn from it? You don’t have to answer my question.

Colby: 1:12:26

I will say one thing. I’ll say a couple of things. One of those things is that I am learning a lot about a whole range of aspects of practice in um, the in. I call the podcast really a podcast about child protection out of home care and related endeavors. So I’m I’m learning things about you know, for, like you know how to run a good child protection organisation, I’m picking up ideas because I’m speaking to people who’ve run them.

Colby: 1:13:08

But the thing that I would really, that is really coming through for me is is the person reflecting on the person in the role? Because I think for a lot of my career I’ve been really trying to understand the person in front of me and what. And I think and I think part of this is because psychoanalysis is less popular in Australia than it is in the UK and Europe. It still has standing there and I’ve interviewed a lot of people from the UK and some from Europe but what I’m getting out of it that I probably knew but didn’t consider enough, was the person in the role, if I can put it that way.

Peter: 1:14:13

Very good. Yeah, I like that yeah.

Colby: 1:14:18

Well, we’ll finish on that point. As I said, Peter, thank you very much for agreeing to come on and also for being a good sport about my faux pas of not giving you more prior notice about what questions I might ask. But yeah, thank you again and good luck with the book, and I really hope that there might be an opportunity for us to speak again.

Peter: 1:14:45

I hope so. It’s been very good meeting you. Thank you for this podcast.

Colby: 1:14:51

Thank you you.