Paper: The Bare Mattress

Paper:  The Bare Mattress 

Guilt, doubt and the nature of the ordinary in adoptive relationships


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published
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Public
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Articles by Members
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Children and Families

Authored on :
24/10/2024by :
Jackie Horsburgh

Containing Groups

By Jason Mitchell

An adoptive father was recounting to me an experience that I found most intriguing. The story involved his family’s encounter with a common situation to which many adoptive parents will relate. Their son, who had been with them for nearly six years and was soon to become a teenager was, in many ways, very settled. He enjoyed school, felt comfortable around his family and had managed to capture what, for the most part, was a real sense of belonging with them.  At home he generally felt safe and secure, though on occasion there would be upheaval as one would obviously expect, particularly around significant dates for him, such as Christmas and family birthdays. In amongst this settled and relatively stable picture, however, there was one recurring difficulty, particularly for the adoptive father, involving the son’s bedroom.

When their son, aged six, had been placed with them, the couple had gone to great lengths to try to create a bedroom space that they felt their son would find settling and would enjoy. They had spent many days decorating, fitting new carpets, installing new bedroom furniture and filling the space with soft toys.   They had also, very early on in their relationship and together with their son, painted murals on large sheets of wallpaper to be hung above the bed with images depicting their family life together. It was very much as if the space they had created together was capturing something of the parents’ desires and wishes. It felt to me as if the hope was that in creating this space some of those desires and wishes might ‘rub off’ on their son and he might somehow find this a way into what was being offered to him.

The father then told me that their early impression of the son’s experience of his bedroom space was that he found it to be very challenging. Over the next few years this bedroom was to become a battleground. The son began systematically to deconstruct the space and he began tearing the wallpaper from the walls, picking holes in the carpet, emptying the drawers out of the window and re-filling them with torn and crumpled paper, crisp packets and any other rubbish he could find. Dirty clothes would be permanently strewn across the floor, where they would be mixed in with food trampled into the carpet and the new bedroom furniture was slowly graffitied, defaced with whatever was available: nail polish, paint and the ink from ballpoint pens.  His mother purchased a wicker clothes basket for him so that he could fill it up with dirty clothes she could wash once a week; the son filled the basket with his clean clothes and then urinated on them.

The battles over the bedroom space became a frequent and ingrained part of family life, an almost weekly occurrence.  The father, in particular, found it almost incomprehensible that his son could want to live in such devastation `as if he wanted to be an animal’. Throughout it all there was a sense of knowing that something more was at stake here. The father described it as a persistent feeling that something about this situation was somehow ‘out of place’. All kinds of bargains and deals were attempted; incentives were put in place, then immediately sabotaged and made unattainable. Eventually, the mother, resigned to the fact that this was not something she could cope with anymore, refused to enter the son’s room. The father continued to attempt to find a way to ‘win’.

As the son grew a little older, things began to improve somewhat. He began to share something of his feeling about the bedroom with his family, telling them that he felt ‘overwhelmed’ by the space and that it was ‘just so much to look after’. Soon after this the family decided that they should redecorate the room again, perhaps make it simpler and less cluttered. Their thinking was along the lines that their son, now aged twelve, was growing up and perhaps needed a space that reflected this. The bedroom was stripped and redecorated, a process that the son found quite difficult and challenging in itself. He nonetheless helped with the work, his father believing that this might give him some sense of pride over this space, or even ‘ownership’ of it. This new bedroom became slightly more successful. The son did attempt to keep the space tidier and, for a while, the battle receded. The father shared with me that his impression of this time was that it was as much about exhaustion and exasperation as it was about anything else. Even with this apparently new-found calm, difficulties which centred around the room still simmered and the feeling that something here was still somehow being missed, or being misunderstood, continued.

One morning, there was an issue with the heating system in the house and the father needed to go into the bedroom to check the radiator. As he entered the room, he noticed something. The bed was stripped down to the mattress; the duvet cover was similarly stripped from the duvet itself. Everything was piled next to the bed. This was perhaps not unusual given the circumstances surrounding the room; a bare mattress was probably fairly common. For whatever reason, however, there was something about his perception of this space that in that one moment had changed. As he looked around him at the vague mess and the ‘stripped back’ and ‘bare’ space he began to picture his son as a baby, in another home, in another life. As a baby surrounded by danger and threat and squalor, surrounded by unpredictability and dread, a space that probably smelled strongly, where food was probably scarce and had to be hoarded. A place where a bare mattress would be expected. A neglectful place, where his son’s life had begun. He described suddenly feeling ‘hollow’ in this moment, perhaps describing the experience of becoming witness to something that called into question what he had previously felt that he knew and understood. That understanding had become dislodged. The `hollow’ was what was left behind.

Over the following days and weeks, the father began to find his way into thinking carefully about the battle of the bedroom. He began to consider his son’s experience of the room, about what he described as the ‘hostility’ towards everything about it, and how this hostility was somehow also mixed in with a sense of wanting something to shift, or to change. In amongst these thoughts, he focused on his own desire to ‘win’ this battle and he began to wonder what exactly was at stake. He felt incredibly guilty, feeling that, in some way, he had known that something deeper was at work here, but that he had `not wanted to see it’. As I was talking to the father about this experience, I began to consider how common it was. As an adoptive parent myself, I can say that I have certainly encountered something very similar in my own family. The physical circumstances may have been different, but the underlying encounter and the dynamics surrounding it are the same. I began to think about the idea that we, as adoptive parents, are making an offer to our children that they have few or no grounds to repel.  We are, perhaps, occupying a position in which the sanctity and purity of what we offer brings with it another, deeper, agenda. Thinking about the parents` desire to create a space in which the hope was that their son could take up and become a part of a kind of collective dream, wish, or desire for their family I wondered if, in part, this might bring with it a further desire to wipe away some of the experiences of ‘before’. To seem delicately to place a pure white linen sheet over a stained and broken mattress. Given that the experiences of these children are often intensely disturbing to think about, how tempting must it be to seize all given opportunities to state, categorically, ‘You are not in that place anymore?’ But further to this, how irrational, contradictory and almost perverse might it seem to us to have to consider the idea that, for our children, the bare and broken mattress still exists, still holds sway and absolutely must be given credence?

If our children have neither the tools, the understanding or the ability to repel vocally the invasion that is our offer, their only course of action might be another kind of resistance. I should like to suggest that this act of resistance is actually inherently hopeful. In considering this, I am reminded of D.W. Winnicott and his thinking around the ‘antisocial tendency’. During a talk given to the Borstal Assistant Governors` Conference in 1967, Winnicott suggested the following:

`The characteristic of the antisocial tendency is the drive that it gives the boy or girl to get back behind the deprivation moment or condition. A child who has been deprived in this way has first suffered unthinkable anxiety and then has gradually reorganised into someone who is in a fairly neutral state, complying because there is nothing else that the child is strong enough to do. This state may be fairly satisfactory from the point of view of those who are in charge. Then, for some reason or other, hope begins to appear, and means that the child, without being conscious of what is going on, begins to have the urge to get back behind the moment of deprivation and so to undo the fear of the unthinkable anxiety or confusion that resulted before the neutral state became organised.’ (Winnicott, 1990).

This resistance represents a concerted and mobilized effort to hold back the attempt by us to cleanse the past in pursuit of a future in which it can be, in some sense, disregarded or demoted. As I`ve said, I would suggest that this action could be considered inherently hopeful, and vital, a hope that arises in recognition of a space to discover life. It is mounted in response to the possibility that this chance might be jeopardized if the fear and anxiety that this space might stir in us all cannot be taken up and held as equally vital. This idea was framed for me perfectly recently when working with an adoptive parent who stated that adopted children ‘are doing what they are’. I thought again about the idea of the mural that the family had painted on wallpaper during the earlier days of their lives together; how this ‘family flag’ had been unfurled like a crest, to be hung above the son`s bed, perhaps in an effort to remind him constantly of all the ways in which his life was now so very different. How conflicting might this have felt for him? How then might this be for all adopted children? On the one hand we are offering them something that is absolutely desired, something which does, eventually, feel safe, warm and inviting. But at the same time, I wonder if we might consider that an acceptance of that invitation may feel like a kind of surrender in which they might lose a part of themselves.

When thinking around the above concepts I was reminded of the work of Alice Miller and her book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, which explores the role that creativity can play in the development of a sense of self which is somehow estranged from the truth. D.W. Winnicott also came to mind, when he suggested that for the true self to be known would be worse than being eaten by cannibals. I wonder if an attempt to enforce the idea of an acceptable self on a child may be experienced as something similar. Perhaps this could feel like an exorcism, an expulsion of the bad. Or perhaps even an attempt to create some kind of an enforced internal mental space into which these ideas could be projected and held. In his book, ‘The Basic Fault’, Michael Balint suggests that a child experiences rationality through reference to their own experience of primary relationships. In this context then, the offer becomes a rational suggestion that something within them is inherently bad. It is then a small step to considering how the effects of early abandonment may contribute to this sense of a part of the self that requires persecution. Further consideration might show how our children’s understanding of their biological heritage may well include the idea that they are also linked to a possible future in which they become a perpetrator of something evil, something which requires purging.  I believe that this idea of purging is something which, in one form or another, seems to inhabit the culture of adoption. It manifests in so many different ways, but in all of them I would suggest that the underlying idea of the pursuit of good over evil presents itself, perhaps even in a reverential and quasi-religious manner. It can be seen in the way in which these children feel the need to carry the notion of adoption alongside them, almost as if it is a shadow, entering a room before they do, as if it were some unspoken expectation to be taken into account as a part of all that follows it. And apart of them that will, at some point, inevitably require an apology.

It is the notion that regardless of how clean and tidy you keep your ‘room’, underneath it all the stained mattress will still exist, will still be stinking - remaining so unacceptable that it can only ever be hidden and kept secret; a part of a past that no longer exists, or a part that can be actively disavowed. I wonder then if we as parents might, on some level, experience this choice to `not know’ as empty and hollow.  I imagine my daughter sometimes stating in her mind, ‘I’m sorry, it wasn’t me. It was my adoption.’ Behind this statement I believe there lies a deeper experience of primary abandonment which, over time, takes on the name ‘adoption’. Often, this unacceptability seems to shelter beneath a façade of something which resembles benevolence. This was clearly demonstrated to me when an adopted child who was recounting their experience of a school counselling service shared with me that, regardless of whatever issue they took into the room with them, it was inevitably always brought back to their adoption.  They told me, ‘They don’t see me….the only thing they see is adoption.’ From their perspective, there was no room for any of their experiences to exist in the present. Everything that they struggled with had its roots in their experiences of being an adopted child. In so doing, the notion of the impurity that existed within them continued to be reinforced. I encountered it first-hand when our daughter was invited by a charity to attend an ‘art experience’ for adopted children, only to discover, to her absolute horror, that her work during the day was being scrutinized by a therapist who was encouraging the children to paint their experiences of ‘family’. Our daughter felt she had been made instantly invisible. The expectation was that the broken and sullied part of her could be usefully viewed. In so doing the girl who had come along to paint and have fun had been made not only superfluous and unimportant but also had been instructed, once more, that there existed inside of her a part that was unacceptable, requiring this special kind of scrutiny; as if the catastrophes that had occurred in her life were ever-present and could not actually be rightfully held in the past. It was catastrophe as a life sentence. I think again of Winnicott, when he suggested that if catastrophe cannot be rightfully placed in the past where it belongs, then it will be projected into the future, where it becomes the inevitable. Perhaps then, the request as it exists might be for us as parents to help our children recognize this and to help them continue attempting to place these experiences in the past. This does not mean disregarding their reality, but it does mean applying a temporality to events that enables a progressive future. Later, our daughter wrote me a note to pass on to the charity. It read, simply, ‘We are not adoption’.

A colleague pointed out to me that neither adoptive parent or child is allowed to forget, even momentarily, the nature of their relationship and just get on with being a family.  Perhaps then, with this in mind, we can consider how incredible it is that these children somehow find a way to mount this hope-filled resistance to these attempts to separate them from, or define them as, their adoption.   But it is not only within the experience of these children that these processes manifest; it is also within the experiences of the adoptive parents and within the organisations that support them.  It is perhaps important to hold in our minds the fairytale of adoption.  Not only the images of a rescue from dark forces and into a Happy-Ever-After but, perhaps more importantly, the apparently inherent purity of the child to be saved.

The conditions and circumstances that lead to a child becoming looked after and subsequently adopted are, undoubtedly, beyond the ability of the child to influence or control effectively. These experiences are deeply disturbing and in no way the fault of the child. Perhaps it is simply human nature that, in response to our knowledge of these factors, we seem to wish to imbue these children with a kind of purity which might counteract these disturbances. Perhaps as a part of this we might construct a false assumption that if the child is blameless, they must be pure rather than ordinarily human and fallible which, in turn, suggests that we as parents must be equally infallible. In doing this, I wonder if we are attempting to manage the horror that we feel so deeply when we consider their early life experiences. This is of course, a fallacy, an unachievable and impossible task, but how tempting and how seductive it is for us to think that this might be possible. In response to this, we as adoptive parents might find ourselves trying to parent in ways that keep us separated and excluded from any discourse with those elements of the experiences of our children, or indeed of our own experiences, that we perceive as being negative or inherently bad. This would therefore become a position in which we remain steadfast, benevolent and immoveable, in which any attempt to bring these experiences into view as being a fundamental part of the make-up of either our children or of ourselves would need to be held at arm`s length and battled with. This might manifest in our lives as a bedroom that must be kept in the present, tidy, ordered and safe or as an attempt to establish a separate and differentiated part of the children called `adoption` that contains unspeakable elements that can only be expressed through art. But I do not think this is the whole story and wonder if this is actually symptomatic of a deeper issue which permeates so extensively that it has become viewed as normal.

My experience is that in nearly all my encounters with adoptive parents, the one persistent element is a fear around their own capacity. The widely accepted and now widely promoted view of adoption is that it requires a kind of parenting that is above and beyond the norm. Throughout the training and development process that these parents navigate in their journey towards adoption this idea exists as the unconscious undercurrent. These parents receive and take in an idea in which they begin to believe that they will be required to parent from an immoveable place, where pain and disturbance can be tolerated only through the preservation of a kind of separateness.  It is a position in which nothing gets in, nothing sticks.  I have heard this referenced in many different ways, with parents referring to having to be the ‘Kings and Queens’ of their families or having to reach a point where they are able to deliver ‘Parenting Plus’. Something of this appears in W.R. Bion`s paper, On Arrogance, in which he makes the suggestion that:

'The implicit aim of psychoanalysis to pursue the truth at no matter what cost is felt to be synonymous with a claim to a capacity for containing the discarded, split-off aspects of other personalities while retaining a balanced outlook. This would appear to be the immediate signal for outbreaks of envy and hatred.` (Bion, 1984)

This statement is in reference to a patient’s envious and hateful reactions in response to identifying the analyst as an object that would obstruct attempts at splitting and projection. This makes me think of attempting a position of enduring benevolence, where parents are attempting actively to obstruct their children’s capacity for projective identification. Later in the paper, Bion suggests that the patient experienced the analyst’s apparent insistence on verbal communication as an attempt to mutilate the patient’s method of communication.

We might consider how our claim to be able to maintain an immoveable position whilst at the same time somehow offering something containing for our children is one that they might experience as similarly abhorrent or mutilating, as Bion suggests. How it might be possible for us as parents to find our own ordinary human fallibility to be so undesired as to feel the need to project it outward into the very children for whom we are attempting to remain so unmoved. Once placed within our children, that fallibility, should it be seen, might mobilize in us as parents a need to defend against that recognition. Maybe even to go to war with it. These ideas are, in some way, promoted by the processes and systems that surround the culture of adoption.

Once more my thoughts turn to Winnicott and his notion that it is a parent’s role to introduce a child gradually to an ordinary sense of human fallibility through incremental failure. If we assume that for these children the failures that they have experienced in primary care have come so early in their development as to be considered catastrophic, could it be that adoptive parents and adoption organisations might be suffering from a perfectly understandable fear of repeating some of these catastrophic experiences?   The issue here is that this is of course a fantasy. It is a part of the fairytale of adoption, however, that has endurance.  It is the ever-benevolent fairy godmother who remains unmoved by even the most heinous of crimes.  It is the ‘Good Witch’ from the Wizard of Oz who, upon first meeting Dorothy, asks her, ‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?` Nothing between these two extremes could possibly exist. This idea is pursued and reinforced by the systems and organisations that make up the world of adoption seeking ‘Child Focused’ approaches. Maybe this drive towards such a view negates the potential for a much wider notion of an ordinary family focus to exist at all, but this might show the inherent benefits of conflict and challenge. The consequence of this undercurrent is a vested effort by those who pursue adoption to reach the unreachable. In these attempts they are actively dehumanized, instead becoming mockeries of reality,  seemingly open vessels into which nothing ‘ordinary` could ever be placed.

I now want to consider how, at an organisational level, it may be possible to attempt to mobilize projections of idealization outwards from the unbearable horror that these children have experienced and into adoptive parents. Isabel Menzies Lyth explores something of these ideas so well in her paper, Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety. So very often, when adoptive parents or prospective adopters are struggling to assimilate these same ideas it is because, unsurprisingly, some part of them, a part that has an awareness of the fairytale nature of this fantasy, knows that it is not something that they could ever actually achieve. These considerations, however, in themselves important and inherently useful, tend to be assuaged in training by the provision of tools and techniques which, in my opinion, actively reinforce separateness.

Maybe we should consider how for our children their experiences of the ordinary setbacks, challenges and failures that are inherent with being human can become obstacles to be negotiated which can therefore facilitate learning and development. This is, perhaps, a different kind of consideration from the idea that failure is simply a repetition of a catastrophe that has already occurred. Doubt is an active part of development and discovering our own humanness requires an examination of how, where and why our doubts exist. I would suggest that doubt is an intrinsic part of our ability to learn and that doubt in itself can form an integral part of opportunity. With this idea in mind, I often picture a frightened child who is alone in a room with an adult. The child does not wholly understand why they are afraid, but the fear is present nonetheless. Sharing that fear with an adult who dismisses it and gives it no value would be a wholly different experience from sharing it with an adult who accepts it, even though they may not understand it, and is willing to explore it alongside the child.  In this sense, perhaps strength of conviction might be thought of as a willingness to explore, even in the presence of doubt. In considering this we could think about what this experience might be for our children. If they are in possession, as a part of themselves, of emotions and experiences that they find fundamentally disturbing, what might their experiences be of an attempt at the impossibility of enduring benevolence? Maybe, in some way, these unnameable and unspeakable horrors need to be shared in order to be understood. In my experience, it has always been the sharing of these difficulties, as they are taken up and claimed by the family, that leads to understanding.

Moments of sharing can be incredibly difficult and can feel very much like some kind of continued perpetration of something sinister, or just fundamentally wrong.   I often tell the parents that I work with that it is often during very difficult moments that the most surprising and fundamental shifts happen, perhaps akin to seeing a parent expressing apparently disturbing emotions, and subsequently recovering and repairing where appropriate. In this scenario, a child has the opportunity to learn that their own experiences of disturbing emotional states can be accepted and shared. The consequence of this is that these raw emotions, that can be so debilitating and disturbing for these children, can be moved away from a place where they are felt to be evidence of the inherent badness within themselves and into a place where they can be held as accepted and subsequently thought about. We could also consider here the idea that in allowing ourselves to become vessels into which something unspeakable might be placed we can form the first step in transforming the unspeakable into something which can be named, thought about and understood. In order for this to happen, we must allow ourselves to be filled, to take in something of what is being offered to us through whatever difficulty we might be facing.

How liberating might it be for a child suddenly to experience someone who, in response to their fears, their anger, or their destructiveness, states in some way or another, `I feel how painful this is and I don’t know what it is but I am willing to stand alongside you while we try to understand it?’ I would suggest that many adoptive children actually experience attempts at serenity and benevolence as deep mockery.  The choice then, for us as parents, becomes either to cover the dirty mattress, or to take it in and to accept it as an intrinsic part of our family. In so doing we might then have to accept not only the painful and disturbing nature of sharing those experiences, but also the guilt which comes with knowing the role that we, as adoptive parents, play in attempting the cover-up. There may be an argument which suggests that we could find ourselves, somehow, not attempting the cover-up at all.  Or that we might be able to remain alongside our children always for the experiences I have described. I do not believe, however, that this is actually possible. Certainly, if we think about the deeply terrifying nature of those earlier times in an adoption, it would be foolish to consider the idea that we might be able to engender in our children, or even in ourselves, the kind of levels of intimacy that such approaches would require. But intimacy within these relationships does absolutely exist. It is grown and formed through challenge, triumph and failure in exactly the same way as it forms in so many other relationships. I believe that one of the key issues presented to adoptive parents, prospective or otherwise from within the culture of adoption, is the presence of the unconscious undercurrent that suggests adoption is a ‘different kind of love’. This statement would benefit from much deeper scrutiny as defining love as something different immediately suggests that there are two distinctive and exclusive states which are experienced as fundamentally separate. This has never been my experience. We, as adoptive parents, experience the same love, the same hatefulness, the same horror, pride and guilt. There is some interesting thinking around these themes when considering how differently we might look at the relationships which can be developed in stepfamilies and how this undercurrent does not seem to be so present. I tend to believe that it is actually in our experiences of guilt around our actions that something of real value for our families can be found.

If we can perhaps concede that the act of adoption in itself has to carry with it some element of invasion, that an intrinsic part of the process is one in which a child is removed from a place which they might willingly call home and put into a place which they might be asked to call home, then maybe we can begin to understand this. A part of this process, it seems to me, is inherently deceitful, in so much as these children are always presented with the illusion that they have some choice in this. Preparatory work which is undertaken with these children aims to encourage the idea of a ‘new family’ in their minds and many adopted children later in life find their way into the kind of thinking that asks the very important question, ‘Why did no-one ask me if that’s what I wanted?’ It may well be that at some point that question, or some form of it, was asked but I wonder how much ‘more work’ would be undertaken with a child who answered, `No, I don`t want a new family’. The truth is that these children have no choice in this and, as difficult an idea as it might be, we are perhaps then in a position to have to acknowledge that this is both a real consequence of their situation and something in which we, as parents, have played an active role. So is it possible for us to imagine that a resistance mounted might in essence be a request, not only for us to make these acknowledgments, but also for us to know that in attempting to cover up elements of who they are, of where they have come from, we are attempting something which they find incredibly destructive? And in so doing we are attempting to force identities upon them which cannot ever be accurate fits.

There is also something important to be said here about the concept of space. In the recounting of the situation I described at the beginning of this paper, I do not think it was in any way a coincidence that the movements for both parents and child in this family began to occur following the creation of some kind of ‘space’, both physical and psychological.  The son’s remarks that he found his room ‘overwhelming’ and ‘just so much to look after’ have, undoubtedly, a quantitative quality, but I wonder if we can also imagine the qualitative nature of these statements. The room was stripped back and made bare; the clutter of all those wishes and desires had somehow taken a back seat and into this space something new appeared.  I was also struck by the father’s suggestion of his ‘hollow’ feeling. As if he too had created space within himself into which something new could settle and grow. I imagine him as a vessel, finding himself open enough to allow something out in order to make room for these new ideas to find space within. In so doing, I wonder if there was something about recognizing not only the forceful nature of applying dreams, wishes and desires on someone who has limited tools to repel them, but also how, in finally finding a space in which guilt and regret could be felt about this, this family was able to create a new space in which a whole new series of dreams, wishes and desires could be created together. Maybe there was also some deeper acknowledgement of how the father’s own preconceptions were in themselves ‘hollow’ and empty.

It may be that our guilt, as I have described it, is necessary and I wonder if the experience of guilt or regret is a formative part of the process by which we can allow ourselves to begin to create something new.  As if in recognizing something of our actions, our wishes and desires, whilst at the same time recognizing how absolutely human these responses are, we are able to step into a new kind of learning. But this is no easy task. Experiencing the raw nature of these emotions is debilitating and is not something that anyone would desire. Perhaps, in the light of this, it is no wonder that we are so encouraged to take up tools and strategies to keep these feelings external. In so doing, we instantly dissolve the possibilities that real intimacy brings, the chance within a shared vulnerability to be taken in by each other in a real and meaningful way. By allowing the other person to experience our concern for them as a part of what is being shared. Perhaps there is something to be thought about here around the apparent danger that such raw, primitive and inherently intimate feelings bring in adoptive relationships, or indeed, in any relationship. It maybe that the process I am describing here is one in which an adoptive family can discover that such intimacy absolutely does exist for them in an ordinary way, but that the journey to discovering this place might require a navigation through some incredibly turbulent and apparently disordered spaces. I am suggesting, as a part of this navigation, that the experience of these spaces could be essential. That without being able to step into a place in which we can be an open vessel into which disorder, turbulence, pain and destructiveness can be given room to exist, our discovery of this intimacy might become much more difficult. I am suggesting that in sharing some part of our own doubt, vulnerability and even what we fear might be dangerousness, we are stripping ourselves back from something which is attempting the impossible, with all the connotations that this suggests to our children, to people who are just as human as they are. Maybe there is something intrinsically important about our own experiences, as parents, of these spaces. If a resistance of some kind cannot ever be avoided, then it becomes entirely necessary in order to preserve a vital part of our children’s inner worlds. It is therefore actually in their experience of our willingness to engage with this resistance and to acknowledge our own guilt and regret that something new is created.

 

References

Balint, M. (1989) The Basic Fault. London: Routledge.

Bion, W.R. (1984) Second Thoughts. London: Karnac.

Bion, W.R. (2006) Experiences in Groups. London: Routledge.

Gabriel, Y. (2008) Organizational miasma, purification and cleansing. In A. Ahlers-Niemann, U. Beumer, R. Mersky, and B. Sievers (Eds.), Socioanalytic thoughts and interventions on the normal madness in organizations: 53-73. Bergisch Gladbach: Andreas Kohlhage.

Menzies Lyth, I. (1960) Social Systems as a defence against anxiety, In Human Relations Volume 13, issue 2:  Tavistock.

Miller, A. (1983) The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self. London: Faber and Faber

Winnicott, D. (1949) Hate in the Counter-Transference. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 30:69-74.

Winnicott, D.W. (1990) Deprivation and Delinquency. London: Routledge.

Winnicott, D.W.(1990) The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac.