The Child's Own Story

Life Story Work with Traumatized Children

Terry Philpot, Richard Rose

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9781849854283
• eBook ISBN: 9781846420566
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Helping traumatized children develop the story of their life and the lives of people closest to them is key to their understanding and acceptance of who they are and their past experiences. The Child's Own Story is an introduction to life story work and how this effective tool can be used to help children and young people recover from abuse and make sense of a disrupted upbringing in multiple homes or families.

The authors explain the concepts of attachment, separation, loss and identity, using these contexts to describe how to use techniques such as family trees, wallpaper work, and eco- and geno-scaling. They offer guidance on interviewing relatives and carers, and how to gain access to key documentation, including social workers' case files, legal papers, and health, registrar and police records.

This sensitive, practice-focused guide to life story work includes case examples and exercises, and is an invaluable resource for social workers, child psychotherapists, residential care staff, long-term foster carers and other professionals working with traumatized children.

CHAPTER 1

Who Am I? The Importance of Identity and Meaning

The meaning of meaning

For everyone, our understanding of who we are and of our place in the world – how we relate to those around us, as well as in the wider world – is critical to our emotional wellbeing. This sense of identity, this sense of self, shows in how we relate to others and how we present ourselves in our day-to-day relationships, from the most intimate to the most casual. It determines not only who we think we are but also who we say we are. In developing our sense of self we come to an understanding of who we are, what we are and why we are as we are. A sense of self is about individuality, our uniqueness as a person: I am who I am and no one else is like me. We attempt to find some kind of pattern or meaning in the experiences which have brought us to the point we have reached in our lives. We come to understand where we fit in, even if we are not comfortable with it. Acceptance of who we are is a sign of maturity.

Identity is a result of experiences that go to the very root of what it is to be human, a root perhaps too entangled in our being to be satisfactorily understood. However, Levy and Orlans (1998) state: ‘Identity is whom the child believes him-or herself to be. Identity formation is based on the child’s experiences, interpretation of those experiences, others’ reactions to the child, and the significant role models the child identifies with’.

Children in care often have a negative sense of themselves, a damaged sense of identity. What they have known in care or within their families has negatively affected their sense of self; they have a poor view of themselves, they will often believe that the misfortunes which have come their way – from the abuse they have suffered to the breakdown of foster placements – is their fault. Children can come to see abuse and rejection as their lot in life, and this breeds a lack of trust in their relationships with adults. Indeed, they may actively sabotage relationships because, as they see it, they do not deserve them.

Thus, the sense of finding meaning, of understanding patterns and linkages, can be denied to a child who has been traumatized. Such children can, without help, grow into damaged adults, wreaking in the lives of others the same turmoil, harm and pain that they themselves have experienced. When the opportunity to engage in life story work is not available, and the individual has not been able to consider cause and effect, identity and a sense of self, it is possible that adults and children alike can become anxious and turn against themselves with drugs, alcohol, self-harm and, at the most extreme, suicide. One characteristic of such individuals is a lack self-esteem, the opposite of what has been referred to as ‘personal judgement of worthiness...expressed in the attitude that the individual holds towards himself ‘ (Coopersmith 1967). Of course, one does not have to have had an abusive childhood to have a low sense of self-esteem or to feel a lack of self-worth, but the child who has been abused and traumatized will have had all sense of worth taken from her and can experience this lack of self-regard in extremis.

A child can be so damaged that she cannot understand what for most of us is most fundamental. For example, a child may know who her mother is, but not understand why she cannot live with her. But, more fundamentally, the question the child will not be able to answer is what it means to be a mother (or a father). What does it mean even to have a mother and a father? Simply the presence of a mother and a father, but even when they are present what is their role vis-à-vis the child? How are they supposed to relate to the child? What do they do for and with the child?

Meaning entails having knowledge. Take the example of a child who has been taken into care. She has lived in a children’s home and has also been in the care of one, two, three or even more foster carers. But can this child understand why she cannot live with her mother and father? To say that they could not look after the child is insufficient if the child is to understand who she is, why she has lived as she has (and with whom) and how this has led to her acting as she does. It would be very easy, in the distorted views that some children in these circumstances can develop, for a child to blame herself not only for who she is but also for her not being loved, even for the break-up of her parents’ relationship. A child like this will need to understand that it is not her fault that such things happen, rather that certain events, not of her making, have affected her life. The child also needs to know that for all the awful things that have happened in her life, there have also been some good things – that there are people who have given love, people who tried to help, incidents that were enjoyable. This truer, more realistic, more balanced view is one which a child can then integrate into her understanding of her self and her identity and gives her a more rounded view of her life.

A part of that understanding is acceptance. There are two kinds of acceptance. One is to accept what has happened and to try to understand it as a basis for the future. The other is to know what happened, to believe that the past cannot be understood but that the present can be an opportunity to build a different future. This can be a denial that the past does affect us, and such an acceptance can bring later troubles. If children do not make sense of what has happened to them, then the past can catch up with them.

Race, culture and identity

The Children Act 1989 states that the child’s ethnic, cultural and religious background should be respected and, where possible, cultural and religious needs should be met in any family placement. This is because our ethnic, cultural and religious background is something else which is critical to that healthy sense of self, of knowing who we are, what has made us, where we came from. Children who have suffered many placements, who have been separated from their families may well be unaware of their heritage or a part of their heritage. Even a child of, say, a white mother and a black father may not know her father’s precise ethnic background if the father has been only a fleeting (or even a non–existent) presence in her life. There is plenty of evidence to show that the denial of a child’s ethnic heritage can have a deleterious effect upon mental health ³ and that ignorance of it can, at the very least, be confusing to the child. So, helping the child connect to her religious, cultural and ethnic background is something which will also help to increase the sense of self, of who she is.

Those engaged in life story work will need to take account of the needs of children who come from black and ethnic minority families, or whose heritage is mixed. Such a background, as Ryan and Walker (2003) remark, ‘is an added dimension to their feelings about themselves – colour’. They go on to say:

Preparation for life story work always needs to be handled with extreme care and honesty, especially when you are trying to put things into their true perspective, and possibly even more so when you are working with black children and black children of mixed parentage – and particularly if you are white. (p.45)

It is necessary in life story work to enter into the child’s world and understanding, which means that it is important to recognize the challenge that that presents with the child who is from an ethnic minority. This is especially so if the worker is white. Such a worker would be advised to make use of a consultant on race, but also to become familiar with the relevant aspects of the child’s background – their religion, the customs and beliefs and practices in the country from which their parents come (or from which, of course, they may come).

As Ryan and Walker (2003) caution, black people are often thought of as a homogeneous group, something which no white person would ever consider true of themselves. Workers who take time to familiarize themselves with a child’s background are saying something very positive to that child: that they respect and value her.

Race is often referred to but matters of culture and religion less so, though the three can be intermingled. Let us take four examples. The first case concerns a boy whose father was a Muslim from Bangladesh. The father would leave to go on pilgrimage, but so far as the boy was concerned, ignorant of his father’s religion, he simply had a father who disappeared frequently – why he had no idea. The boy needed to know not only why his father left for such long periods but also the significance of why he did.

Another boy came from Tyneside, but he had no idea of his background or of the traditions of an area of which he had little memory, living as he was in the south of England. His mother, a Tynesider herself, had always been reluctant for him to know about his background because his father, who also came from the area, had gone to live in Wiltshire from the age of five to 15. The father had lost his Geordie accent, which had made him an object of ridicule among his contemporaries when he returned. Part of writing the boy’s life story book was to hear a tape recording of his mother and a past foster carer so he could listen to their accents, and also to have copies of the local newspapers to read to acquaint himself with the area.

The third example concerns a girl who was of Irish descent, something of which she was unaware. Her life story worker took her to Ireland and she learned about Catholicism, the faith into which she had been baptized but had not been told about. She decided that she wanted to go to mass and to attend a Catholic school. When it was time for her first communion, her sister’s first communion dress, thought to be lost, was acquired and she wore it at the mass. Again, this was an important connection with a hitherto unknown past. For another child in this situation, the matter might be dealt with differently but to the same end. Such a child, also baptized as a Catholic but brought up in ignorance of this, could be shown her baptismal certificate, told who her godparents are and the role of godparents, and taken to mass.

Last is a boy who had a white, Irish Catholic mother and a Muslim father. They were not married but the father was married to someone else and had four children. The son, though, had been brought up as a Muslim (with his mother’s agreement) and his father arranged that the local imam come to the house to teach the Koran, and so he remained ignorant of his mother’s religion. The boy disliked the imam’s visits and Islam gave him no reference points because his whole environment was non-Muslim. He did not attend mosque and was learning a language that he would not practise. However, had his mother not been antipathetic to her own faith, the boy could have made positive choices about which faith he wished to adopt. Here was a case where there was identity without meaning attached to it. The boy’s situation was exacerbated by the local authority refusing to place him within any one of three white families, all of whom would have been suitable for long-term fostering solutions, while it sought a Muslim family. Failing to find one, the local authority then placed the boy with a Sikh family on the basis that Sikhs and Muslims are members of ethnic minorities!

Attachment

Important, too, in the formation of identity and a sense of self are the ideas of attachment, separation and loss.

Attachment theory was developed in the 1950s by John Bowlby (see Bowlby 1969).⁴ It seeks to explain why patterns of behaviour either persist or change, over time and across relationships. It posits the idea of a blueprint that is created for each of us in the early months of life. This says that if our attachment stems from a nurturing and loving relationship, then we will develop maturely. But if the relationship is one of violence, rejection, pain, abuse, lack of bonding, and disruption, then there is a possibility of developmental problems, such as criminal, violent or abusive sexual behaviour.

In its earliest formulation attachment theory emphasized the parent– child relationship, and while that relationship remains formative, it is now also known that other relationships throughout our lives impact on our attachment. Children who have suffered long periods of separation from their parents or who have lost their parents and suffered severe emotional difficulties find it extremely difficult to make relationships with others and can become withdrawn. They can exhibit various other kinds of behaviour problems. While Bowlby and others based their ideas on close observation, the effects of loss and separation on children had been seen some while before this with the experience of children evacuated during the Second World War.⁵ Howe (2000) says that ‘attachment behaviour is an instinctive biological drive that propels infants into protective proximity with their main carers whenever they experience anxiety, fear or distress’ (p.26).

Anxiety, loss and distress are, of course, an inescapable part of living but crucial to facing and dealing with them is whether one has sufficient emotional protection. Critical for the child is what is called ‘the internal working model’. This is the mechanism through which the child attempts to connect her self, other people and the relationship between them. The quality of the child’s caring experiences will determine whether the internal working model is positive or negative. According to Howe (2000), children’s adaptation to their internal working model – their attachment style – can be

•securely attached (the carer is loving and the child is loved)

•ambivalent (the caregiver is inconsistent in how he responds and the child sees herself as dependent and poorly valued)

•avoidant (the caregiver is seen as consistently rejecting and the child is insecure but compulsively self-reliant) or

•disorganized (caregivers are seen as frightening or frightened and the child is helpless, or angry and controlling).

The last response is one often associated with children who have been maltreated. (It is important to stress that while we have referred here to children, a lack of attachment is seen in adults in their personal and sexual relationships and in their role as parents.)

Internal working models have also been referred to by Archer (2003) as ‘road maps’ providing the child with an internal framework of his world, which Perry (1999) calls ‘experience-dependent’. This framework, accordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• PREFACE
• Introduction: No Child is an Island
• 1.Who Am I? The Importance of Identity and Meaning
• 2. A Tale of Two Children
• 3. The Truth and Something Other Than the Truth
• 4. Interviewing: Art not Science
• 5. Safe at Last: Providing a Safe and Stable Environment
• 6. Internalization: Towards an Understanding
• 7. Making the Book
• 8. But Does It Really Work Like This?
• 9. Life After Life Story
• Notes
• References
• The Story of Saccs
• The Authors
• Subject Index
• Author Index