Why Emotional Reactions Are Data And How Organisations Can Turn Them Into Care
Psychodynamic practice often feels like stepping into a storm without a map: strong feelings, risk, chaos and the pressure to manage behaviour fast. Yet what if those feelings are not hazards to avoid but vital data? This conversation with Emma Higgs, a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist and organisational therapist, puts the inner experience of practitioners at the centre of effective care. When we treat our emotional reactions as information about the child, family or system, we stop drowning in distress and start translating it. That move, from overwhelm to meaning, is the hinge between burnout and humane practice, and it changes how organisations must be built.
Emma’s path began in a therapeutic community, where learning wasn’t a manual but a way of living together. In that group life, language was ordinary and raw, and the work was bewildering and formative. She saw how severely distressed adolescents “show” their stories rather than narrate them, and how staff absorb projections of terror, shame or rage. Without a frame, people cope by hardening, blaming or fleeing. With a psychodynamic frame, they learn containment: receive the projection, feel it, digest it and return it in tolerable, meaningful form. This is not about technique over relationship. Relationship is the technique. It’s also why Emma helped build a professional “home” for non-traditional practitioners through APSIOS, giving identity, training and a reflective community to those doing therapy in corridors, classrooms and residential units.
Defensiveness thrives where thinking dies. Social workers, swamped and scapegoated, can become desensitised as thresholds creep upward. Teachers, judged on attendance and attainment, may lean into control and humiliation cycles. Police, rarely trained in child development, meet trauma with their own unresolved trauma. Across these settings, forms and protocols can become armour that distances us from human contact. Emma’s challenge is clear: procedures matter, but only as supports for thinking. Real trauma-informed work means leaders creating spaces for reflection, distributing supervision, and modelling curiosity over certainty. It means noticing when we reach for tick-boxes to escape fear, and instead asking what the behaviour communicates and what it evokes in us.
Containment scales. At the one-to-one level, it mirrors infancy: a baby projects unbearable sensation; a caregiver receives, names and soothes; over thousands of repetitions, a mind grows. At the organisational level, containment looks like clear boundaries with flexible minds, sturdy processes that bend without breaking, and scheduled forums where staff can feel, think and metabolise the work together. Emma likens it to a system with a digestive tract: impact is felt, processed and transformed into guidance, not dumped downward as blame. Groups matter too. Staff groups can be reparative or destructive; the difference is culture. Where people can challenge without persecution, lend each other their capacity to think, and stay connected to the humanity of colleagues and clients, the work becomes survivable and often joyful.
None of this denies science or strategy. It deepens them. Neurobiological insights, ACE scores and risk tools are useful lenses, but they will not transform on their own. Change happens in relationship, where practitioners use themselves as instruments with tone, sensitivity and strength. That requires a home—professionally and internally. When organisations invest in reflective practice, supervision and leadership that can absorb heat rather than radiate panic, they do more than reduce turnover; they deliver care that is accurate, personal and hopeful. Ultimately, the through-line is belonging. Staff need it to stay whole; children need it to build minds; families need it to repair trust. Make room for belonging, and you create the conditions where thinking returns, behaviour makes sense, and recovery begins.
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About Emma:
Emma Higgs is a senior Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist (ACP), Psychodynamic Organisational Therapist (BPC/APPCIOS), and Psychodynamic Psychotherapist (BPC), living and working in North West England. She has extensive clinical experience across a range of NHS CAMHS services, including inpatient settings and Parent–Infant services. Emma began her therapeutic career at Thornby Hall Therapeutic Community, part of the Peper Harow Foundation, where she was first introduced to psychodynamic thinking and practice. Since then, her training in attachment assessment and intervention, infant observation, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has come together to shape her current work. She has a particular specialism in working with looked-after and adopted children (LAAC) and in applying psychoanalytic principles beyond the traditional consulting room. Alongside her private practice, Emma works closely with organisations that support distressed children and families. She has been involved in developing and delivering a wide range of trainings for non-psychoanalytic professionals, helping them to think psychodynamically about their work. This includes bespoke training for social care professionals and the police, with a focus on children’s development and the impact of trauma. Emma is especially interested in how psychoanalytic thinking can be used more broadly within support services, and in exploring the interplay between the internal world, the external environment, and the wider socio-political context. Emma is also the Deputy CEO of the Association of Psychodynamic Practice and Counselling in Organisational Settings (APPCIOS), a charitable organisation dedicated to supporting clinicians and practitioners working with distressed individuals through the application of psychodynamic thinking and skills.
Transcript:
Colby: 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Emma: 0:04
But I actually started my journey the opposite way around and developed my clinical skills through organizational thinking. We think that psychodynamic work, psychodynamic thinking, psychodynamic principles, psychodynamic skills make extremely difficult work in organizations working with distressed people make it bearable, make it survivable, and so you feel bad quite a lot of the time when you’re doing this work. Um, and without any way of um making sense of what that feeling bad is, you drown, so that you go off sick, or you leave, you find something else to do, or you become um punitive in your response because you’re trying to survive. You know, everyone projects. So the adults who work with all of these children, young people, and families are not immune to projecting all over the place. Something transformative happens in the internal world through relationship. And I think that what a psychoanalytic training or model way of thinking and working offers you is some tools to be able to use essentially yourself as the therapeutic tool. Paying close attention to what’s happening to us gives you information and data that you didn’t have before and you would never capture in a form. So the thing that the psychodynamic model gives you is an opportunity to use how you feel, the experiences you have to inform your understanding of a child, young person, family, and not only understand them but then do something with it.
Colby: 2:01
Hello and welcome to the Secure Start Podcast. I’m Colby Pierce, and joining me for this episode is a highly regarded of the psychoanalytic community in the United Kingdom. Before I introduce my guests, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the lands that I come to you from, the Ghana people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Ghana 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 Emma Higgs. Emma is a senior child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist, psychodynamic organizational therapist, and psychodynamic psychotherapist living and working in Northwest England. She has extensive clinical experience across a range of NHS CAM services, including inpatient settings and parent-infant services. Emma began her career at Thornby Hall Therapeutic Community, part of the Pepper Harrow Foundation, where she was first introduced to psychodynamic thinking and practice. Since then, her training in attachment assessment and intervention, infant observation, and psychoanalytic psychotherapy has come together to shape her work. She has a particular specialism in working with looked-after and adopted children and in applying psychoanalytic principles beyond the traditional consulting room. Alongside her practice, Emma works closely with organisations that support distressed children and families. She has been involved in developing and delivering a wide range of trainings for non-psychoanalytic professionals, helping them to think psychodynamically about their work. This includes bespoke training for social care professionals and the police with a focus on children’s development and the impact of trauma. Emma is especially interested in how psychoanalytic thinking can be used more broadly within support services and in exploring the interplay between the internal world, the external world, and the wider socio-political context. Emma is also the deputy CEO of the Association of Psychodynamic Practice and Counseling in Organisational Settings, APSIOS, a charitable organization dedicated to supporting clinicians and practitioners working with distressed individuals through the application of psychodynamic thinking and skills. Welcome, Emma.
Emma: 5:02
Hi, hi Colby.
Colby: 5:04
And welcome, yeah, welcome to the podcast. And I almost got through that without a without boo-boo. I’ll I’ll uh a couple of minor minor little edits will will go in there. And hopefully my head wasn’t moving too much because when you do when you cut out those edits, your head suddenly goes chum to a sudden spot. I think that’s 101 about recording things for YouTube, is you should keep relatively still. So you reading through your bio, you’ve had um quite a diverse uh career and practice, uh incorporating both work with individuals uh and uh sorry, work, yeah, work with individuals and families and work with organizations that support them as well. And on the basis of our prior chat when we discussed you coming onto the podcast, we’re going to focus a bit more this time on the uh the work that you do with organizations. Just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about the work that you do with organizations and how you came into doing this work.
Emma: 6:14
Yeah, of course, yeah. Um, so I suppose um from a from a psychoanalytic perspective, um, I came to psychoanalytic thinking through organizations rather than the other way around. So it’s quite common uh for people who are trained psychoanalytically to then go on to think about organizational work. But I actually started my journey the opposite way around and developed my clinical skills through organizational thinking. So I sort of did it uh the reverse way around. Um so I suppose my my interest really, well, where did it come from? I suppose like everything your interest comes from your background, doesn’t it? It comes from where you start your life. Uh I came from a very uh working class uh city, Liverpool, uh in the northwest of England. Um strong cultural ties, uh strong community ties. Um so I was brought up with these things being, you know, sort of embedded as being essential and important, really, in the way that you live your life, the way that you thrive, the way that you develop. Of course, it comes with lots of tensions, it comes with lots of complications, it comes with a whole range of emotional experiences. Um, and and I think I want I I originally wanted to study art, is what I wanted to do, but I was a working class girl, so you there was no job that I couldn’t formulate a job uh in in relation to art. So I studied art therapy, and then from that I got a job in a therapeutic community. Um so I was young, early 20s, just left university. Um, and it was there really that I started to understand psychodynamic thinking, psychoanalytic thinking through the organizational setting, essentially. Um I have to say it was probably the most uh emotionally turbulent, bewildering experience that I’ve had in my whole career uh working in in the therapeutic community. Extremely rich learning, but it wasn’t without lots of pain and lots of stress and lots of anxiety. Um just a highly emotive experience, really. Um I met some wonderful people um and uh colleagues that I still work with today. Um so this is going back 30 years nearly. Uh so these are colleagues I still work with today. Um I suppose it was a unique place. I know that you’ve spoken to uh some other um professionals who who’ve worked in therapeutic communities and they’ve described uh what it’s like to be in therapeutic communities, but it’s very it’s a very unique experience because you’re completely absorbed in a in a way of living, really. Um and I would say a way of living as opposed to uh tech, it’s you’re not learning technique, you are living together essentially. And um and I just found it fascinating, I found it wonderful. I found that I um was in a set I suppose in a sense, my uh late teens, early 20s, I’d moved out of my community into another community, and um although they were using slightly different language, they were using language, well, they were using ordinary language, they were often swearing as well. Because it was a it was a large group therapeutic community with 25 plus uh adolescents, 13 to 18. So it was a you know, it was a lot of turbulence. The language was colourful, the language was colourful, um but it was there was psychodynamic and psychoanalytic language, but it’s it felt to me like this was the language of my family, my community. It was language I knew something about, but it wasn’t quite described in the same terms. So I kind of found a home there really. And finding the home in organizational thinking um meant that I stayed there for quite a long time. I was there for about eight, eight years, maybe nine years. Um and it was from that really that I discovered psychoanalytic thinking, psychoanalytic practitioners as a job. I’d never heard of it before, as a job that you could do. Um, and it was there that I discovered that really. So that’s how my kind of um interest in organizational thinking came about, and then over the years I’ve developed different sort of ways of working, different skills, different applications. But ultimately that’s brought me back to the application into organizational work because that’s where my heart is, really. That’s that’s what I love. Um, is how groups work, how teams work, um, how organizations work, how people, when they come together, you know, the thing I’m interested in is the psychodynamic practice, what happens when people come together, what happens in the space between the internal world and the external world. So, so that’s that’s what sort of brought me back to organizational thinking. In relation then to sort of how that looks in practice, I suppose it’s you know, it’s sort of consolidated into my work in Apseos, as you as you mentioned. So Apseos was an organization that was developed around about it’s a charity, it was developed in um 2011, I think, 2012. And it came from the therapeutic community tradition, really, and it was essentially uh developed to give a home to and to acknowledge that there were a whole raft of very skilled psychodynamic practitioners um out there that really didn’t have a home, they didn’t have a sort of psychoanalytic home because they hadn’t done a traditional psychoanalytic training. So we’re talking now about residential care workers, youth workers, social workers, um, and they were very skilled psychodynamic thinkers, but they didn’t really have anywhere to belong and to kind of a professional kind of umbrella to sit under. So it it it was its function really was two things. One was to provide a sort of virtual community, therapeutic community for professionals who think similarly, who want to think together, a bit of a professional network, um, you know, support, development for each other. Um, and the the other thing that it does is it provides a training in organizational therapy. So um organizational therapy didn’t exist as a profession until ACOS started really. Uh and what we’ve managed to develop over the course of the last, what is it, 12 years or so, a bit more 12, 14 years, is um we’ve developed a profession that is now regulated and registered with the British Psychoanalytic Council. Um, so during that time, uh obviously incrementally, uh, we’ve created this psychodynamic organizational therapy training. The idea behind that is that uh we we think that psychodynamic um work, psychodynamic thinking, psychodynamic principles, psychodynamic skills make extremely difficult work in organizations working with distressed people, make it bearable, make it survivable, and it allows people to stay and enjoy their work in a very particular way. Um, it doesn’t take away how difficult it is, but it allows them to feel like they’re contributing good clinical therapeutic um skills into their contact with very distressed people.
Colby: 14:31
Thank you. There’s a there’s a lot in there, and I found myself thinking uh as I imagine the listeners will be thinking while they’re while you were speaking, and um one one particular point that I’d like to follow up on was that um that uh picture that you you you drew about people who had had a non-traditional psychoanalytic training who effectively were um notwithstanding the quality of their practice, they didn’t have a a home as such, uh collective that they could be um a part of. I’m just wondering why you think it is um vital, beneficial, helpful to have an organization like Apsios that brings that creates a home for those practitioners.
Emma: 15:27
Well, I think uh I mean simple answer, we all need a home. You know, that that is essentially what we we will talk about. I I suspect in a little while when we’re talking about looked after and adopted children. We all need a home, we all need a place to belong. You know, our our humanity is uh partly located in our belonging to a community, to a place, to a home, to a family, to uh uh a social group of some kind. This is what we will go on to talk about, I think, you know, in terms of the groupishness of human nature and how that sits with um and is in conflict with the individual bits of human nature from time to time. Um, but this is it’s kind of um it’s an essential part of human development and human um experience. Um, so so I think having a home is a really important place, and home, as we as we know, isn’t necessarily bricks and mortar, it isn’t a pl it isn’t a physical building, it’s partly that. Um, but a home is an internal kind of structure that you feel located somewhere. It’s extremely important psychologically for your own mental health, for your own well-being, to be internally and externally located somewhere. So if it felt important to kind of gather together um a place uh where people could um you know, could could sort of hang their coat up in a way and say, this is sort of where I belong. It doesn’t mean you don’t go away, it doesn’t mean you don’t, you know, nip somewhere else, it doesn’t mean that you’re not part of other things, but you’ve got somewhere where you can kind of hang your coat up and say, I’ve I’ve got a place here, and people can understand something about me here.
Colby: 17:25
So it’s also about professional identity, isn’t it then, isn’t it?
Emma: 17:29
Absolutely about professional identity, and you know, and and um psychoanalytic training in particular is um it’s very rightfully very robust, very stringent, it takes a long time, but but typically it’s always been uh available to people from a particular socioeconomic background because it’s quite expensive to train, it takes a long time, um, and there’s been shifts certainly in the UK over the last probably 30 or more years in terms of that to try and build in um a more robust um range of people who will get into the psychoanalytic profession. So diversity in terms of race, um socio and economic socioeconomic background, etc. were you know, there’s a big drive to try and, as there are in lots of professions, to try and improve that, but nonetheless, it is very expensive uh as a training, and um it for for a long time it remained the domain of the upper middle class to upper class kind of, usually women, um, because they not always, but usually women. Um so so you know this the what we found where there was a group was that there were a group of professionals who come from a different in through a different route. They come in through social work, they come in through residential social work in particular, they come in through youth work, they come in through uh schools, you know, teaching assistants in schools, those sorts of things, um prisons, you know, um uh you know, people who were working with young offenders, for example. So they come in through these different routes, and they hadn’t, they they would never have even uh conceptualized of do undertaking a psychoanalytic trainer because it was out of their sort of way of thinking, really. However, they happen to be very talented in terms of psychoanalytic thinking and psychodynamic thinking, and essentially building relationships with these people who typically uh these the the children, for example, in a therapeutic community are not the children who typically would sit in a consultant room for 50 minutes a week. That would not happen, they’re not gonna sit there and do a therapy in that way. But but the this group of people has a way of working therapeutically with children that was um accessible, it made the therapy accessible to the children. So so the important thing was to give a professional identity to that because it was a really important profession that wasn’t quite captured in the existing structures really.
Colby: 20:11
And you you also mentioned about how um having a a home for them for for this group of practitioners is really important in terms of making the work which is very difficult a bit more bearable.
Emma: 20:29
Bearable and survivable and you know, and essentially um that you um uh you can do work and not lose yourself. Uh it is very difficult work. You know, you work and I know that you’ll know this, but you’re working with quite extreme disturbance quite a lot of the time. Um, and you know, the children and young people families that we work with have um had horrific experiences and they don’t know necessarily how to articulate that in a nice, tidied up way. They do know how to show, you know, they can show us what it’s like, and they usually show us what it’s like and or they make us feel it. Um, and so you feel bad quite a lot of the time when you’re doing this work, um, and without any way of um making sense of what that feeling bad is, you drown, so that you go off sick, or you leave, you find something else to do, or you become um punitive in your response um because you’re trying to survive. So um so so it’s really important to not only survive the work, but to kind of find a way to do something with the information you’re given as disturbing and as distressing. Person as it is to make the work survivable, make it make help you to understand that it’s not about you necessarily, it’s not about me, Emma, that it’s happening to, but it is a really important piece of communication from that young person, and now I can do something with it because I’ve got some tools to be able to think about it in a different way.
Colby: 22:22
It’s interesting. I I’ve been talking about this with previous guests for a little while now, about how we um in the difficult work, there is a real risk that we resort to habitual approach uh approaches to the work. And um those habitual processes, and you spoke mentioned it, can be punitive um and often are. So people become overly focused on how do we manage the behaviour and and they move away from what is the meaning of the behaviour? What yeah, yeah, why why is it happening? And and uh it’s it’s been my the cross that I feel like I’ve borne through the last 30 years is to try to help people to understand what’s actually going on here, yeah. Yeah, and I you you you mentioned that people carry the weight of emotion and uh and and and go on sick leave, leave the work and so on. Where does that emotion come from, Emma, that they that they carry?
Emma: 23:33
Well, I think I think it’s a combination for most people, it’s a combination of their own experiences, um, and whatever is, I guess, projected to use technical language, projected into them, communicated to them might be another way of describing it. Uh, whatever is given to them or put into them is a good way of describing it, uh, from the children, young people and families that they meet. So it’s this kind of coming together of these two internal world experiences, and there’s always a bit of an explosion, something happens. Um essentially, that is psychodynamic work. How do we kind of how do we remain curious about that explosion? What happened there? And how do we unpick um what that’s about? Um, so so I think that um it comes from the combination of somebody’s internal world meeting your internal world, your emotional experience meeting someone else’s emotional experience. And when that’s kind of infused with trauma, um, abuse, distress, lack of trust, hatred, uh, aggression, violence, all of the sort of experiences that lots of the people we see will come into contact with and have experienced first hand. Uh, when it’s infused with all of that, it um it meets with your internal world in a very particular way. And each of us have got our own experiences to kind of um that can to a greater or lesser extent uh do something with that. And you know, mostly what you’re trying to build actually in this work is clinicians who can develop a bit of an internal muscle to do something with those communications. I always I sometimes say to people, it’s a bit like you know, you do Pilates uh and you do the Planck to kind of build your internal core. I’m not very good at that physically.
Colby: 25:48
Look, I know what you’re talking about, but I’ve never done it.
Emma: 25:52
But I hear that when you do Pilates, you can build a strong internal core muscle, and it’s essential to have a sort of good, strong internal core muscle. So this is really about trying to build that psychological muscle um in individuals so that when they’re de when they’re given this stuff um that is very difficult to uh absorb, tolerate, understand, that they’ve got some muscle to do something with it rather than just spit it back out, which is what happens when people I do have a lot of compassion for people who are working untrained in these situations because they’re left with no choice but to get rid of it because it’s it’s awful, it feels awful. You feel frightened, you feel terrified, you feel furious, like a hatred and anger that you’ve never felt before, and you think, I don’t know where the hell this has come from. This isn’t me, this isn’t what I do. It’s come from the child. Yeah, exactly. So it’s really, really important that clinician, not clinicians, practitioners, sorry, they could be called clinicians, but practitioners are really helped to understand that they can do something with this, they’re not victim to it, they don’t have to just get swallowed up under the weight of it.
Colby: 27:11
Yeah, and I think um I think one of our primary human needs in a way, when the infant is born, I guess they of course they need their um their parents to keep them safe, look after them, respond to um a range of their needs, but they all they all in my way of thinking sit underneath the a very a f a uh a more primary step, which is that the infant needs the adults to understand them, to understand their their experience. And that to me, that’s it, that’s just so powerful that you have children who have been deeply hurt who will project their hurt uh onto the adults around them as a way in which to facilitate being heard and understood in their experience. And they’re not particularly aware that they’re doing it, and and it’s a disaster when the adults don’t know that that’s what they’re doing. So having that that understanding of what’s really going on here helps people to just step out of my own reaction to the work and just think about what’s actually going on here with in this dynamic between the children and and myself. Yeah, and without that, you you you you end up carrying a lot of negative feeling around.
Emma: 28:41
Well, you feel it as if it belongs to you, yeah, and that’s the difficulty. Um, and you do have to feel it to a degree because it’s the feeling of it that allows you to do something with it. You can start to wrap some meaning around the experience you’ve been given, but you so you have to feel it first because that’s how we understand what’s happening in the world is we feel it in our body usually first, you know. It’s just we’re we are bodily creatures, so you know, the the body-mind kind of relationship is really important. Um, so so they have to feel it and not be sort of killed off by it, psychologically killed off by it. Um, so the feeling of it is really important.
Colby: 29:32
It’s interesting. I mean, my I I my professional career is as a clinical psychologist, and I came through a fairly traditional clinical psychology training where um we were taught, or at least we were led to uh believe that it was really important to have to maintain a certain amount of professional distance from the experience of the client and be really good observers and responders to them um without being emotionally involved in their life. And um I I can remember a very early um insight that came to me when I worked, I I my first job as clinical psychologist was in child protection, and I’ve kind of never really gotten away from it. Um and one of my first insights was um it was my emotional reaction to the work that helped me to be a better practitioner in the work, and that I didn’t want to shut that off, didn’t ever want to shut that off. But it’s a bit it’s a double-edged sword. You you need to have you need to know what you’re gonna do with those, with that emotion. And I I’m for what I don’t I don’t think I did know for a long time because I had that insight. I plowed into plowed on. Um and it’s only it it it can be 10, 15. I had a another guest on who talked about you know uh 20 20 to 30 years into his career, he just suddenly has a heart attack out of nowhere. So and and it’s a bit I I I sorry, I don’t want to take too much of the floor, but I I think often think there needs to be an ACES score for practitioners in this work because the consequences of ACEs are longer term, yeah. And I and I think I think I think we as pre um practitioners in the work, um we have to we carry a lot on behalf of our clients.
Emma: 31:43
I think that’s true, Colby, and I think that you know the work comes at a cost, but it’s also a privilege, you know. It is both those things. I’ve learnt a huge amount from the children and young people and families that I’ve worked with and have been privileged to work with some um very uh distressed people but wonderful people who’ve taught me a huge amount. Um, has that always been easy? Absolutely not. Has it come at a bit of a cost? Yes, at times it has, and it’s given me a great deal as well. Um, it’s sort of both. What I would say, I do agree with you actually about the sort of impact and you know, the we know lots, don’t we, about secondary trauma, etc., etc. Um, you know, whatever sort of terminology we want to use. Uh what I would say is that without that is actually why psychodynamic thinking and organizational work is really helpful because it sort of helps you to um do something with the impact so that it doesn’t sit in you in as if it belongs to you, like I was saying before. The the professions I worry about most, the professionals I worry about most, are social workers and uh the police, for example. Um uh uh residential workers who don’t have this kind of support, uh, teachers in schools. I worry about them because they’ve got no framework to um process what’s happening to them. They they very rarely get clinical supervision, they very rarely get any opportunities to reflect or think, they’ve got no sort of theoretical framework to understand some of this stuff. Um, so that that actually I think has a bigger impact. And then what you see in those professions is they use all sorts of understandable defensive processes to protect themselves from the impact of what’s happening to them. You can’t survive it otherwise.
Colby: 33:43
Yeah, it’s interesting.
Emma: 33:45
Unfortunately, that is happening in mental health, actually. Sorry, in the UK at the moment. So I feel you know, I I still work in CAMS and I see lots of uh my colleagues um using all sorts of defensive practice to manage the impact of what they’re listening to day in, day out, every day, the high levels of risk, high levels of suicidality in the young people that they’re working with. And they use all sorts of defensive practice, and it usually looks like organizational defensive practice, like tick boxes, risk assessments, uh forms that they go in with that they use to fit to complete their therapeutic sessions. It it looks like that sort of defensive practice, so that they distance themselves from the work. But I think for myself, well, how do they survive it otherwise?
Colby: 34:38
Yeah, yeah. You you’ve you’ve you’ve mentioned defensive practices, you’ve mentioned a number of groups, all of which as I was going through my head as you were mentioning them, and then you mentioned them, and and and what what are they beyond risk assessments, tick boxes, what what are those defensive practices look like? What what should people be on the lookout for?
Emma: 35:06
Um I think um things like um removing themselves from sessions, so remove removing the humanity out of sessions with or you know, contact with children and young people, for example. So going in with forms, as if that tells you anything, loads and loads of forms, um uh being um agenda focused rather than curious about what might emerge. I know that that’s frightening to do, but if you go in with an agenda, you’ve already applied a set of circumstances to the session, there’s nothing for you to learn. Um, and this young person, child, young person wants to be in touch with a human being, I think, um, not a set of forms. Um I think they I know why people do it. I think they do it because they feel lost and frightened and out of their depth, understandably. Um I guess the other thing would be uh a huge focus on uh the behaviour change, as you mentioned. Let’s just focus on the behaviour change, or a huge focus on a particular element of the child or young person. So you come in through a pathway. So are we treating anxiety? Are we treating depression? Are we treating attachment or something like that? As if there’s not an individual with a whole constellation of experiences there that means that they depending on which lens you look at it through, it’s going to fit perhaps any one of those. Who knows? Um, so a singular focus rather than uh meeting a person, an individual.
Colby: 37:01
Yeah, so it’s kind of that retreat from from truly understanding, truly um experiencing and what what the other person is experiencing. We’ve we’ve retreated to perhaps even more so, I think, to uh a habitual reserve and professional distance in practice. I’m wondering about um, you mentioned also police officers, uh, teachers, social workers working, I guess, in local authorities in in more generic child protection type roles. What sort of defensive practices do you think they themselves and perhaps their supervisors should be on the lookout for?
Emma: 37:45
Yeah. Um, I think you know, social work, if I start with social workers, I think they’re completely swamped with paperwork. They’re a massively scapegoated profession, so they are always expecting to be attacked, not just from the clients they see, but from cult, you know, our our pop, our population, essentially. Um, and they are uh a profession that are um usually the ones to be blamed when something goes wrong. So there’s there’s defensive practice built in from the start, they’re covering their backs from the word go because they’ve been scapegoated and maligned and blamed for horrific events, but it’s not social work per se that’s kind of caused that to happen. Um, so they’re swamped with paperwork and they uh have developed a kind of hardened attitude, I think, to quite severe distress um and pain. Um and they get um conditioned to the horror of the stories they hear, and the threshold increases. So the uh it’s like what it’s it’s becoming a bit, they become a bit numb to the things that they shouldn’t become numb to. So sometimes I hear stories and feel shocked, and I look around and I think is no one shocked at this, and sometimes I have to say, say in a child protection meeting or something, you know, I’m really impacted by that, like I’m really shocked by that. And they might say, even, oh, we hear this all the time, you know. And I and I say, Well, you should be shocked. That’s shocking. You should be shocked by that. That’s an awful thing to hear. They become a bit desensitized because they have got to survive, uh, so they come be hard. The police are different in a way, I would say, Kobe. I I think this has been one of one of the very surprising things that I’ve found in my contact with the police. I don’t have a lot of contact with the police in terms of their actual work, um, and I don’t have a lot of contact with them individually therapeutically. I do training uh with the police, um, and I had expected a bit of a macho attitude. I suppose this was my bias. I’d I’d expected a bit of a macho attitude, a sort of dismissive quality to emotionality and human experience. I actually didn’t find that at all. I found them to be uh really receptive, very moved by the training that I delivered. They they are not taught child development, for example, um, as part of their training. So they so then when they see children and families who are traumatized, um, you know, there’s domestic violence or there’s child abuse or they’re doing um interviews to best evidence interviews and things like that, and they’re meeting with children, they they’ve got no context within which to um place the experiences they’re having with these children and young people because they’ve got no understanding of child development other than ordinary stuff that we might pick up along the way, or they may be parents, for example, and have got some sort of understanding of it, but they’ve got no specific training in relation to the impact of trauma or neglect, for example, uh, and what that might look like. Um, so they they’re very moved by the training, and it’s the trade that when I deliver that training, I always get police officers coming to me at the end of the training or in the break or something like that, uh telling me their story, which is very often traumatic, really quite horrific traumatic experiences.Colby: 41:28
Yeah, they have a lot of problems with uh retention in police with post-traumatic stress disorder.Emma: 41:34
Absolutely. Um, and so you can imagine, you know, if uh you’re a police officer with a traumatic story from whatever, whether it’s in the job or prior to the job, uh, and you’re meeting with a very distressed child who’s got a traumatic story, you can imagine where these two things might meet and what that particular explosion might look like. Internal explosion, um I’m thinking about as opposed to an external one.
Colby: 42:04
Yeah.
Emma: 42:05
And teachers so your capacity to think is gone, your capacity to do anything is gone.
Colby: 42:12
I have a I often say that um uh and I’ve meet I’ve talked about this on the podcast with previous guests, is that um what I’ve observed with social workers in particular in child protection is they stop thinking about the work that they’re doing. They just follow procedure, follow procedure, follow procedure, and a lot of procedures about how do we manage risk, yeah. So rather than I just wanted to pop in. I’m gonna ask you about teachers as well, the same question in a moment, but I wanted to pop in. I just remembered while we were talking that that insight that I referred to earlier, um, I can’t because it was so long ago, it’s 30 years ago, I can’t remember the temporality of the of the two. So I was in a job interview where I was asked about how you how I how you manage the feelings, and I said, well, I you know, if I stop having those feelings, then I I think I’ll I’ll not be a great practitioner. But I remember coming in to do an assessment of a um uh a child who was um under 10. And they I came into this is when I worked in child protection, and I came into the office and I went into the secure first secure area, and in there was this very young and very waflike, very small child, and lots of adults all around at desks and lots of activity, that first thing in the morning activity, drinking coffee and chatting and and so on. And the child had been brought in and dropped off by a taxi. And I just I I just her her experience, I mean it was the first thing I acknowledged to her when I s when we went into the room to do the assessment. But that that stuck with me for a long time. Her experience of being collected from home by taxi, a stranger, and brought in, and then having to kind of sit and wait for me. And she didn’t have to, I wasn’t running late. She it was she was just the first first person that I was seeing that day. Yeah. And I I just felt awful for how she how that might have been experienced for her.
Emma: 44:29
I also sorry, I was just gonna say those experiences are really important, Colby, aren’t they? Because you know, I’ve got similar sort of stories in different places I’ve worked really where you know there’s certain children, young people, adults actually that I’ve worked with, families that I’ve worked with, that will always be in my mind, like they’ve sort of lodged themselves somewhere because of whatever’s happened in that contact that we’ve had. Uh they will always be there and they teach us different things. It’s an important thing to hold on to. Um, you know, it’s not always pleasant, they’re sometimes painful, but they’re really important pieces of information to hold on to. Um, because they help us uh not only connect with the humanity of what we need to connect with, because that’s essential. Um but they but they help us um understand something about what’s uh what’s being you know the there’s a generosity. I know this it doesn’t feel like this when you’re on the receiving end of some of these communications, but there is a generosity in in the you know, you are being giving a something, um and you know, some it’s not always it doesn’t always feel like that. I’m I’m sort of correcting myself as I say it because I’m thinking about some of the things I’ve been given. They’re sharing something, and um it the thing that they’re sharing may not always be wanted by us, and it’s got to go so but it’s got to land somewhere, like it does actually need to land inside a person somewhere, otherwise, you know, we end up with um all of the things we know about, for example, the prison population, you know, the adult prison population. We end up with a population of people who uh can’t use relationships um to to have themselves understood, yeah. So, you know, so they they sort of live in the in actually going back to where we started, the importance of home, they they live in a world where home is is not something that’s useful to them at all.
Colby: 46:46
And teachers, teachers are another group group that what in fact have probably have the most um exposure to our uh troubled uh young people, and again also carry a lot of uh stress, but also carry a lot of um responsibility for managing behaviours.
Emma: 47:07
Yeah.
Colby: 47:08
What what do you what do you you see in terms of those defensive actions, those at work? Things that need to be, I guess, looked at, recognized, looked at, and understood, and perhaps um dealt with in a in a different way. What do you how do you see teachers responding in a defensive way?
Emma: 47:28
Um teachers, I mean, absolutely through behavior management, managing the class, uh focus on uh I don’t know if it’s the same actually in Australia, but there’s a a sort of almost um uh kind of uh completely unrealistic uh being wedded to attainment and attendance in the UK, as if they are measures of something. So everything is seen through the lens of attainment levels and attendance. Um, so the whole of a teacher’s job is structured around attainment levels, attendance levels, and um behavior. So manage the behavior in the class. What do I see them do in practice? I mean, I’m sort of being slightly careful because I don’t want to be unfair to teachers, but I I actually struggle with teachers more than probably most of the professions because I think they are highly defended. Um, I do understand why, but there’s a real rigidity around the capacity to see anything through a different lens.
Colby: 48:40
Yeah.
Emma: 48:40
Um, I think, I mean, certainly this is definitely in the UK. I don’t know how widespread this is, but you know, teachers are a profession that are under huge amounts of scrutiny uh in the UK, offstead come in and they, you know, they sit in classrooms and they they there’s an atmosphere in the whole profession of judgment. Um, you are being measured and monitored and assessed for competency all of the time, and that is absolutely passed down to the pupils. So, you know, most ordinary kids who come from ordinary backgrounds can kind of suck this up and get on with it and just kind of get through the day, and you know, even then they have uh sometimes a bit of an awful time in school. But if you’ve got a child who, for example, can’t learn, can’t learn, not won’t learn, but can’t learn because, for example, they’ve had a traumatic early history, there’s been lots of neglect or abuse, they they can’t play for a start. If you can’t play, you can’t learn. So they’ve got no capacity to sort of use their mind that you know they’re not relaxed, they’re in a completely traumatized state. So you can’t learn or play if you’re not relaxed in a relatively relaxed state. They feel endangered in those classrooms. It doesn’t look like that. I appreciate that, and certainly by sort of mid to late adolescence, it doesn’t look like they can’t do these things. It looks like defiance and violence and aggression and disruption and all of those sorts of things. They these kids humiliate teachers, is what happens a lot. Is that I think they humiliate them, they expose them and humiliate them, and they find their weak spots, and um because they’re very good, Ari, because they their whole lives have been uh they’ve been uh trained to find people’s weak spots, because that’s where you get the communication in, and they humiliate them, and teachers don’t understand the humiliation as something that they could do something with, for example. I mean, if you, for example, you’ve got you’re working with a child and they they say the thing that’s gonna just make you feel like the smallest person you’ve ever felt like ever in your whole life, um, and they’ve taken you right back to your most vulnerable self. You your option, you’ve got a couple of options, haven’t you? You’ve kind of got an option to hate this kid, they’re awful. What a vile child. I’m perfectly fine. I’ll put my big girl boots on and kind of get back out there, and you know, you might become aggressive, or you might become very strict, or you might become very rigid or disciplined. You might say, I want that child out of my class, you might exercise power, for example, because in schools there’s a massive power differential. Um, so you might exercise power in a very particular way, you might become very punitive, and that this child has disrespected you, has misbehaved, has not offered you the rightful authority that you deserve, etc. etc. You do all sorts of things, you could do a whole range of things. What you’re very unlikely to do is say, Oh my god, like is that anything near how that child feels? Like, if that is anything near how that child feels or has felt in their lives, that is awful. Now, if you can get to that point, you can approach that child, and or you or a colleague, a team of people can approach that child and sort of understand something about what’s communicated and find a way in. You’re not going to go up to them and say, I think you felt really humiliated because they’re not going to tolerate that, but you can find a way in. You, for example, can be very careful about not humiliating them because you know humiliation is extraordinarily painful for them. So you could find ways to be with them that don’t humiliate them, that don’t make them feel small, or don’t make them feel like they’ve got no power.
Colby: 52:44
As you’re saying that, I’m thinking both both the child and the teacher.
Emma: 52:51
Absolutely.
Colby: 52:52
Because I’m thinking about how how how so often leaders leadership in an organisation doesn’t participate in training. That’s for that’s for the people on the floor. And they and then through this podcast and speaking to a range of um guests, they that’s that’s really been um the the message, really strong message has been leadership. Everyone, yeah, drivers and organisers, everyone needs to be aligned and they all need to have um they need to be supported to think about the work they do. Because the first thing I think in in defensiveness, when you when you when you fall prey to defensiveness, the first thing you stop doing is thinking, and you and you resort to uh, as I said before, kind of habitual, um reflexive type responses. And um so there needs to be a a support structure that allows thinking about what’s going on, and that that has to come from the uh leadership of the organization, both sh supporting it, but also knowing themselves what’s really going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emma: 54:10
You know, that’s well there’s also an in in increase in projective processes, so adult, you know, everyone projects. So the adults who work with all of these children, young people, and families are not immune to projecting all over the place, they absolutely are projecting all over the place. Also, they’re getting rid of the stuff that they can’t tolerate. Um, and usually that goes upwards, it goes to the leadership. So, leadership, people in leadership are in uh receipt of particular kinds of projections, and we might understand these in family systems, you know, they they’re in a sort of parental projective position. So, you know, the the managers are senior colleagues, the managers are organizational leadership, even if they’re sort of unknown. People like the NHS, for example, is an absolutely huge organization. I only know some of my leaders. I don’t, you know, the the rest are faceless. So you can project in all sorts of ways. I can project particular things into my managers when I’m particularly upset or distressed, my direct managers, I can do something with that, or my supervisor, for example, um, and feel frustrated or disappointed with them, or like they haven’t looked after me properly, or I’m angry with them, or whatever it might be. Uh, to the faceless sort of big leadership people in organizations, the I have to say, what tends to happen is the vitriol of the projection is huge. You can hate them in a very different sort of way because they’re distant from you. You can um denigrate them in a very particular way because they’re very distant from you. Actually, this is just ordinary stuff. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but you do need a leadership function that can receive the projection in the way that your ground floor kind of residential social workers, teachers, whatever it is, can receive the projection from the child or young person. So the projection and the anxiety ought to go up in an organization always, and you need a leadership that’s got the capacity to think as you keep uh drawing at right rightfully drawing attention to your capacity to think has to start and and kind of be functional at that leadership level.
Colby: 56:37
There’s a lot of in this space, there’s a lot of talk about trauma-informed practice. Yeah, and and it’s it’s trauma-informed the term has become endemic, I guess, in its usage in in populations where um there’s been significant adversity in the lives of of the client group. But not all trauma-informed training or models or whatever is is psychoanalytic or so psychodynamic. Where where do you think where do you see um the psychodynamic practice that and and concepts and that you’re talking about, where does that sit within so-called trauma-informed work?
Emma: 57:30
Oh, that’s that’s quite a big question, isn’t it?
Colby: 57:33
I mean, I guess and it’s a question without notice, I should say.
Emma: 57:37
No, it’s okay. I g I I I mean it’s got me thinking, but I think probably in Australia, like in the UK, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic thinking practice has kind of gone a bit out of fashion. You know, we have kept a strand of it in the UK, but it’s not the core, like everywhere, CBT, behaviour modification, etc. The sort of core um sort of uh they’re not straight, they’re not trauma-informed. No, but they’re but they’re the things that are kind of offered. We we get ACES training, everybody now gets ACES training uh in residential homes, uh in schools. Schools often call themselves trauma-informed because you know it’s not it’s not unimportant what they’re doing, um, but they go on a course for a day or something like that, and they learn a little bit about attachment, a little bit about trauma, the impact of trauma, and and they call themselves trauma informed. Um I don’t I don’t think that that’s unhelpful, it’s just that it’s a small bit of something that can kind of um well, what I don’t even know what it actually gives you. Uh it might give you a slight orientation towards something else that might be happening. So, you know, that’s good, that’s a good thing.
Colby: 58:59
Yeah.
Emma: 59:00
Um psychoanalytic work, psychodynamic work is essentially about the unconscious, it’s about the unconscious. This is the reason in lots of ways that it’s gone out of fashion, and the reason it’s such difficult work is because it requires you to be in touch with um the distress and the disturbance in a very particular way. Um now, my view would be that you get much more rich information, accurate information, um, person-specific information. Um if you if you do that. Um that there’s you know, essentially the you uh you trans something transformative happens in the internal world through relationship. The problem with trauma informed in its broad sense is it’s like it’s applied, like it’s a thing that you can just tell people and then it does something, it doesn’t do anything. You have to do something with the trauma-informed, and you the only transformative change that happens is through relationship. And I think that what a psychoanalytic training or model way of thinking and working offers you is some tools to be able to use essentially yourself as the therapeutic tool. You are the tool, that’s it. It’s not a cognitive process, it’s a relational felt experience. Um, and you know, for all the reasons we talked about before, that comes at a bit of a cost, however, it does make a change that is transformative as opposed to something is understood up here, but it’s not felt here.
Colby: 1:00:54
It’s long been my thought about it working in this space for 30 years. You I’ve seen attachment theory has hung around, but other theories have come and gone, uh, and certainly, and some are more to the fore at very at certain times. So um I think and for example, and I’m just picking one from my 30 years of experience, the neurobiology of trauma, that the that that body of work, which I found really helpful in my development as a clinical psychologist, the the work of Bruce Perry, uh, particularly in my early years back in the uh mid to late 1990s. So I’m not I’m not having a go at it. But what I what I my observation is it it’s it’s rich on knowledge or under you know what you need to know. It’s it can be a bit light on on what you need to do. Now I know Bruce has moved on, for example, and has the neuro-sequential model of therapeutics, but uh so in some senses what I’m reflecting on is kind of before that it gave people a lot of detailed information, but but there was not much that they could do with it, and maybe that’s why Bruce, you know, it also moved into into that. But uh, but there are there are other things like you know, ACEs, ACES scores and um what do you do with those?
Emma: 1:02:33
Um yeah, exactly.
Colby: 1:02:34
What do you do? I think I think we need guiding frameworks. We need we need him we need um to be able to have a lens or or even multiple lenses through which to understand what’s happening for us in the work and understand what’s happening. I think that’s probably one of the bits that is omitted a lot now that I think about it is the what’s happening for us in in the the widespread conventional kind of trauma-informed approaches to the work. What is happening to happening to us as practitioners as part of this dynamic with with the people that we’re working with?
Emma: 1:03:14
Yeah, yeah. And I suppose the psychodynamic model would say that paying close attention to what’s happening to us gives you information and data that you didn’t have before and you would never capture in a form or a set of experiences. You know, essentially you capture the ACE’s experiences, it’s a set of experiences, it doesn’t tell you anything about how that has impacted that particular person and how that particular abusive event or traumatic event has met with that particular person’s internal world, and you know, the sibling of that person might have an extremely different experience because they’ve got their own internal world that’s met with this particular event. So the thing that the psychodynamic model gives you is an opportunity to use how you feel, um the experiences you have uh to inform your understanding of a child, young person, family, and not only understand them, but then do something with it.
Colby: 1:04:24
What do you do?
Emma: 1:04:26
Well, you try to make some sense and uh through relationship make some sense, wrap some meaning around what’s being communicated, you bear the pain, they’re not alone, you’re traveling on something together, you create a unique language, a unique journey, a unique set of experiences. Um, so they’ve got a kind of partner in trying to understand this thing that might be intolerable. You try to help them build up a reservoir of uh muscle, for want of a better word, to tolerate and live with the experience they’ve had because it’s never gonna go, it’s never not gonna have happened. They do have to find a way to live with it and move on from it. You help them find a way to um accept something about their past and allow themselves to think of a future that can be different. You’ve try and help them find some hope, um, trust in relationships again. Essentially, you’re trying to replicate something that happens through ordinary child development, aren’t you? You know, um uh you you mentioned infancy earlier, yeah. You know, and an infant is is born into the world and they, you know, they they you know, there’s nothing more projective than an infant. Essentially, that is what they do. They project their bodily experiences out into the world, into their mother, father, whoever it is, but I’ll use the word mother for ease, and it is very psychoanalytic. So, you know, they project the the all of these experiences into their mother, and they don’t know what any of this means. The mother’s job is to receive the thousands of communications that they get given every day. Receive it, feel it, digest it, do something with it, and transform it into something that’s got a bit of meaning. What does that look like in practice? It looks like a screaming baby crying because they think they’re dying, and the mummy comes along and she says, Oh, it’s okay, I think you’re hungry. Is that a hungry pain in your tummy? Now the baby doesn’t have any idea what hungry means or what tummy means or any of that, but they do know that this mummy person is trying to do something with the information that they’ve been given. And then that happens thousands of times a day over years, and then the baby develops a mind, and that’s what you’re trying to replicate in a psychodynamic relationship.
Colby: 1:07:22
It’s having having gone down the traditional route, I I because of my primary guiding framework, the the the the theoretical orientation I most use was uh attachment theory, and and we all I always thought it was not, you know, it kind of sat on the boundaries of of psychodynamic and and other developmental psychology kinds of theories. So I did, I was never I always thought that the work that I do doing that I did was psychoanalytic in a sense, but but not deeply psychoanalytic. But in actual fact, I I arrived at that very place that you’re talking about a long time ago, which is to try and understand, think it very much about the infant and what what the infant experiences and what they’re projecting, and for a lot of our young people, I think um that there that’s what we need to be turning our mind to. What was what what the trauma occurred through neglect primarily and abuse during infancy, and um a recent conversation with Peter Blake, he was he was very much uh talking about well what infants do have seem do have a mind. What do they do with all of those experiences? How are they how are they stored? How do how are they expressed?
Emma: 1:08:53
But in any bodily, isn’t it? It’s the body, and they so that’s where you know it I know there’s lots of debate about where the mind is actually going back to the sort of neurodevelopmental stuff you were talking about, sorry, the neuropsychology stuff you were talking about, you know, this uh this introduction, well not introduction, the all the work that’s been done about the polyvagal system and the sort of central nervous system. And I I actually I don’t know if this is true or not, but it as a as a theory it really helps me because I’ve always kind of located my mind when I talk about the mind, I talk about it here somewhere. And I noticed a couple of years ago I was talking to a colleague who I actually worked with in the therapeutic community, and I’d met up with him somewhere else, and we were talking, and he was talking about his mind, and he’s doing this, and I’m doing this, and I’m like, So, where’s the mind then? Like, you know, because of course the mind is an abstract concept. So, so I started to think, and I don’t know if this is true, but I’ve started to think that that sort of central nervous system is the mind, in a sense, and that’s really helpful for me because it it really helps me understand how much is located in the body. You know, the body is it the the brain is the brain and does something called thinking or something, but it’s of course informed by the body. There’s a sort of process that’s going on here that’s kind of cyclical, and I think that’s the kind of mind. This is just my theory, by the way, but that’s the sort of mind process. This is just something that helps me, and I think partly because of what you were saying, Colby, is you know, a lot of my training, but a lot of the work that I do is working with children who were traumatized in infancy, they’ve got no language for their trauma, they’ve got no way of uh conceptualizing it as an event because it happened pre-verbal, it happened pre-memory, even. So, how do they make sense of that? The the reason we know they’re traumatized is because they it’s in their body, they show us, and they usually show us through behavior, and usually the way the way they show us is by having an impact on our body. That’s how they show us. So, this is really important stuff that I think we need to kind of uh keep, you know, really hold in mind. This is what, for example, teachers, social workers, police struggle to understand is that somebody who can’t remember a traumatic event will still be traumatized by it.
Colby: 1:11:27
Yes, yeah, yeah. When you were talking before, I I was thinking a lot about containment. And and and really that’s um people are a bit confused, as was I, when I first came first came across the term uh containment used in this uh in this space. Um but from a psychology a psychoanalytic point of view, um it’s it’s about being able to recognise, acknowledge, hold what the person is projecting and and then help them make sense of it feed it back in in feedback in in ways and in dosages that make it more tolerable. Making it making the experience of hunger more tolerable. And and Beyon he, you know, Beyond’s work, he talked about when when we we effectively contain someone, one of the outcomes of that is that they’re then able to think.
Emma: 1:12:38
And you could extend that’s the it’s the prerequisite to thinking.
Colby: 1:12:43
Yeah, and then so they can think and then talk about it. Yes, if yeah, so uh the uh a a young person who grows up in a conventional nurturing care environment will tell their mum and dad that they’re hungry, yeah, but the prerequisite for that is way back, if they’re not we well, the prerequisite for that is way back when their parent understood that they were hungry and responded to them. And um so if the child is not telling anyone that they’re hungry, if they’re doing other things, then we have to recognise that early on um the the the the adult wasn’t effective wasn’t an effective container, they didn’t feel understood by the adult. And this is I guess in part why I say understanding you gotta is where we start. And it’s also it’s probably our most powerful intervention is to just spend time understanding what’s going on here for the child. And then our responses can be psychological, they can be you know psychological strategies or whatever, but but I think um they’re just can they’re relational sh responses more often than not. You know, how do we it’s how we uh how we um uh create a relational space that is therapeutic for those particular issues for the for um for the person or the and and that goes for the child in front of you, it goes for the for the the practitioner and it goes for their supervisor and it goes for the manager as well. Everyone needs because as you say, everyone is in receipt of of projective experience. So you have a choice you either don’t think about it and just respond in a pre in a procedural way, heartless procedural way, which is interesting in the in the social care and child protection field. Like who’s gonna put their hand up to say, I prefer to respond in a heartless procedural way, or you have to think about it. Yeah. But you can’t think about you can’t immerse yourself, I guess, in the experience in that way unless you are well supported to do that. And that’s what we that’s one of the things I guess we find with organizations is that they don’t the support structures for the staff are not there.
Emma: 1:15:23
No, absolutely, and that you know brings us in a way back to where we started in relation to Apkeos, which is why it was you know, the work that we do in organizations is to try and build within the teams um these uh supportive structures, um, thinking structures, essentially, a culture of thinking that means the the contain the containment process that you’re describing there isn’t just happening in an individual, it happens in an organization. So um you’re trying to move the psychedelic. I mean, you’re right to kind of it was containment I was describing, so I’m glad you picked up on it. And of course, Beyond’s uh done the the work, it’s brilliant in a way, you know, brilliant in the proper sense of the word. Uh what he’s done in relation to uh the container-contained model, and I like to think of it as a container-contained model, which is how he described it, because it captures the dyadic relational process that we’re talking about. It’s not an it’s not a one-person process, it’s not a one um system process, it’s a it’s a relational process. Um, and what you know, what we would be hoping for organizationally is that you move that out of the individual, so the mother person or the individual condition in the consultant room, for example, who where it’s really important that it happens there, but organizationally, you can build a container-contained model as well. So that the digestive process, which is what happened essentially, the container-contained model is a process of digestion. Um, and you you you’re given something, you digest it, you do something with it, you metabolize it, and you reproduce something with meaning attached to it, as you rightly say, in a tolerable form. And organizate it is possible for an organization to have that container-contain model as part of their structure. And what that looks like is um good hierarchical structures, good systems, good processes, um, spaces for people to think together. Uh, you might have different spaces where people think. So, for example, the management team might get some specific support to think about uh a relational thing that’s happening or a projective process that’s happening from the staff. How do they understand that in relation to the particular group of kids that they’ve got in their home, for example? You know, what’s that about? Um, they might have a particular space to think about that, and then you you sort of cascade that right the way through the organization so that everybody’s got a small group, perhaps individual, and large group opportunities to think. I guess the other thing we because the other thing we haven’t touched on in a way, um Colby, is the power of the group. That’s the other thing that you capture uh when you do organizational work. You know, groups can be wonderful and they can be very reparative and they can be very destructive, as we know. Um, so how do you create a group, staff group and children’s group, uh, where there’s reparative capacities within the group, and it’s it’s extremely powerful if you can get it right. Um, it can be very destructive, as we know, which is what we need to try and uh mitigate against.
Colby: 1:18:55
And I I think you’re right. I think um um we started with a bit of a structure, but in uh in with a with a number of questions, but in in probably in keeping with the with the topic, we just uh uh remain curious about about well I did and and we meandered a bit. We meandered through maintaining a a stance of of curiosity. Um I guess so I I actually think we covered most of most of what um uh I had thought we might cover. But I found myself thinking just now about what what a um a containing the organization looks like, like an effective containing organization looks like. And I I wonder before I say what I think, what I what I’ve observed, I wonder wonder what you observe when you see a an effective containing organization. What do you see?
Emma: 1:20:03
I think I mean I think you you you’ve mentioned a few times now the link between containment and thinking. So I think that’s what you see is uh uh a preparedness to discover, a preparedness to uh not be an expert, to be prepared to learn something, get to know, understand. Um you see a preparedness to think essentially, which is that you’ve got um a sort of steady core of something that means that when you’re challenged and moved and um displaced slightly from ideas or processes that you might have, that you are curious about why that’s happening, why it’s happening now in particular. Um that you have an interest in the human people that make up your organization because organizations aren’t some magic thing, they’re essentially a collection of human beings so that you stay connected to the humanity of the people who are your organization. Um that you and and actually, I don’t think uh containing good organizations always um get it right. I think they make mistakes, I think that they um they flounder, they get lost, they continue to get frightened, they continue to feel the impact of external stresses, for example, funding cuts, all of these sorts of things. You know, they they still are living in the real world, but they’ve got a capacity to kind of um shift a little bit with all of these things. Actually, this is an interesting thing because an important part of containment, I think, is something like a boundary system, you know, that you’ve got a it’s not it’s not like a free-flowing thing that if it passes through sort of filters in this digestive model. Um that muscle I’m talking about, like there’s a there’s an impact that’s felt, things go wrong all the time, especially when you’re working with distressed, troubled children, young people, families. Things go wrong. Um, so you feel the impact of the thing that’s gone wrong, but you don’t collapse under the strain of the impact, and a good sort of impact barrier in a way is something I always think of it a bit like because I think in images, this is me art, but it’s sort of training going through. I think in images, but um the I always imagine it to be like you know, the do you ever remember those space hopper bouncy things? Did you ever have them when you were a kid? Like these big rubber bouncy things that you used to sit on and hold the oh yeah, yes, yes, yes. We used to call them space hoppers, um, but you know that thick rubber that can kind of take a bit of a punch.
Colby: 1:23:17
Yeah, yeah. It can’t take me now, but yeah.
Emma: 1:23:20
It can’t now, no, no. But it can it can feel the impact of something and it can change shape because of the impact of something, but it doesn’t collapse. Um, and the the problem with, for example, too rigid organizations that might have all sorts of wonderful policies and procedures in place. I’m not anti-policy and procedure, by the way, but you know, you kind of stick to that with a rigidity. Like we’ve got these wonderful care plans, and everyone has to do exactly the same thing all the time. Like there’s a rule that every single member of staff has to do the exact same thing and follow the care plan. I mean, apart from the fact that it’s completely impossible, it’s never going to happen. So you’re setting everyone up to fail. Um, the rigidity of it is brittle. So then when it’s knocked, it collapses, it just shatters. Having none as the opposite is no good either. No, you know, you you do need the sort of that’s the other bit about a good functioning organization with with uh a capacity to contain, is that they’ve got uh good ordinary structures, foundational structures in place, they’ve got an aim, they’ve got a collective, they know why they’re coming into work, they know what they’re doing. Uh, you’ve got a staff group that work together and think together, and they might not always like each other. Is the space in that organization for them to kind of, without persecuting each other, share what it feels like to be working alongside each other? Because that’s really important. As I mentioned before, some of the colleagues I still work with now, those relationships were built 30 years ago in a therapeutic community. These are the people I trust, these are the people who know me, and they can say to me, Hold on, Emma, you’re getting that a bit wrong. That’s not what you’re doing there. Well, you know, they can sort of pull me back when I’m losing my mind a little bit because they know something about me. These relationships are crucial in our professional careers, um, in our personal lives as well, but our professional careers, they’re crucial. So you want a kind of culture and an environment where the staff can build uh not always pleasant but good quality, really robust relationships with each other where they can challenge each other, but they’ve also they can help each other think because everyone loses their capacity to think, everybody does. So when you’ve lost your capacity to think, I want somebody, you know, when I’ve lost my capacity to think, I want somebody behind me saying, It’s all right, I can think for a bit, and we share our capacity to think, yeah. And of course, you know, the thinking thinking happens in relationship, so you always need more than one mind to think. So even if it’s a relationship with your own mind, it’s a relationship. So you thinking is a relational um experience process, yeah, it’s a better word. Thinking is a relational process.
Colby: 1:26:24
I’d love to talk to you for another 15 minutes or so about that too, uh Emma. Um I yeah, so the word that really stands out for me when I think of organizations that and you know, I can think of one in particular that I that appeared I had representatives on this podcast earlier on, is just is the humanity of it. Therapeutically to people at all at all levels, including the people that you don’t like, like for example, birth parents. Absolutely a lot more humanity shown to birth parents would not go astray because when the children turn 18, the the birth parents are still there.
Emma: 1:27:21
Um absolutely I’ve met lots of parents, uh Colby, and I don’t think I’ve met, I don’t know if I’ve ever met any. I’m sure they exist, but it’s few and far between that you meet parents that are intentionally harming, as in setting out to harm their children.
Colby: 1:27:38
Yeah.
Emma: 1:27:39
Birth parents, as we know, birth parents, um, you know, parents who uh who may even still have contact with their children, they they’re usually there’s troubled children and infants inside of them. And I don’t know at what age we sort of switch off our compassion. Um, I think in boys, it’s young than girls. We have less tolerance for boys who are troubled than we do for girls who are troubled. But then you get to adulthood and uh we we struggle um as you know as a culture here maybe there to remain compassionate um towards these people who you know they’ve already had the worst thing happen because their children aren’t with them. But you know we struggle to have compassion for their pain and you know the uh they might have done horrific things to their children but it doesn’t mean we can’t have compassion for their pain either.
Colby: 1:28:37
Yeah. Thank you Emma I know the evening is is um progressing on for you it’s it’s the morning now the sun is up I started I started in the dark and now it’s light. I suspect you st well you started in the dark and I suspect it’s I started in the dark yeah I started in the dark and it’s still dark Colby but but bed is calling yeah yeah all right well I won’t keep you uh from that so thank you very much for coming on
Emma:
I’ve really enjoyed the conversation me too it’s been an absolute pleasure
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Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce. Finally, all references to case examples are anonymised to the extent that the actual case could not be identified, or are fictional but based on real-life examples for illustrative purposes.
