Six questions: PETER WILSON
Peter Wilson is a consultant child psychotherapist and Clinical Advisor for ThePlace2Be, having previously been Director of YoungMinds for more than a decade. He has also served on committees and enquiries to do with national developments in CAMHS provision. He has, he says – with a touch of the humour he advocates below – written “loads of papers and chapters all over the place” and is author of Young Minds in Our Schools.
1. What brought you into this kind of work with young people?
It happened a long time ago when I was “young people”, I suppose. At first, my work at that time (as an unattached youth worker) was a way of carrying on being young and sorting myself out. Out of those early experiences, I went on to be a social worker with very disturbed young people in New York, and later a child psychoanalyst with Anna Freud in London. By the time I had done all that, the scene was set. For me, young minds mattered the most. Get the foundations right. Whole lives are at stake.
2. When you hear kids referred to as “brats” and adolescents labelled as “feral teens”, what’s your chief thought or concern?
Dictionary: brat, a child, “especially an irritating one”. Yes, I know! … and I know one or two adults who could qualify for that title, too. But let’s face it, by and large, children have good reason for being brats, given what a lot of them have to put up with, living with “irritating” grown ups. And “feral”? Well, that just means “wild” and why shouldn’t teenagers be wild from time to time? For me, what’s important is that we remember our own youth, yet keep firm about the boundaries. Keep on trying to make sense of what’s behind the “brat”.
3. If you could make one decision as prime minister that would enhance children’s mental health, what would it be?
Oh, get things right from the the very beginning. Do whatever you can to make the conditions right for having a baby! We know a lot about how the brain develops and how security of attachment to the mother or caregiver matters above all else. So improve midwifery and health visiting services: train them better so that they know more about they are doing. Make sure young parents get good support and education before and after birth and through those early years. Help them to have fun. Pay them, if need be, to be the builders of our people. Just marvel at it all.
4. Without breaking confidentiality, can you share something from your client cases that you’re pleased with?
It’s catching the moment. Touching the true. For much of the time, all of us, clients or otherwise, do our best to hide whatever is frightening us. Usually, we’re scared of losing something or other – our loved ones, approval, control, sanity. So, we are always on the alert and it seems to me that psychotherapy is about reaching a point, a moment, when the nature of that fear can be felt and acknowledged in the “presence of the other”. As a therapist, you have to work hard to gain the trust for someone to trust you with that. I’ve managed that from time to time and I’m pleased about that.
5. Anything you would “undo” if you had the chance to live your practice again?!
Curiously, not much! By and large, I’ve been pleased with how things have gone in my practice. Of course, I would have liked to have been more effective with some of the people I have worked with… but probably, there was a limit to what I could have done anyway. The thing I would undo, though, is the kind of slavish, devout allegiance I gave, for a while, to the school of psychotherapy that “parented” me. I should have grown up quicker and been less precious, less arrogant, more open to other schools and approaches. More honest, in other words, that I didn’t know the half of it, like everyone else.
6. A final word?
Laughter! Too often so many psychotherapy gatherings are bathed in a kind of pious bleak sombreness. Humour is seen as defence, a denial of pain – whether in direct work with clients or in case discussions. On the contrary, I see it as an acknowledgment, a registration; yet a relief, a lifting of the pain so you can see round it a bit better. Laughter not in derision but in compassion. We’re all in the same boat.
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Six questions: LYNN MARTIN
Lynn Martin is Director of Quality Training UK. She works throughout the UK and Europe as a freelance trainer and consultant, and specialises in developing new courses and in-house training programmes for professionals working with young people, including a Post Qualifying Diploma in Counselling Children and Young People. Lynn is passionate about standards for the YP workforce, but also combines her training work with a private therapy practice where she offers a free counselling service for local young people.
1. What brought you into this kind of work with young people?
I initially trained as a teacher, and spent 20 years in teaching and youth work. The youth work (which I much preferred to teaching) involved lots of one-to-one and group work that gave young people the opportunity to make good relationships with the staff. Inevitably, they developed trust in our relationship and began to talk to me. I often found myself out of my depth with some of the issues they were bringing to me, so decided I needed some counselling training. That was about 20 years and 3,000 training hours ago!
2. When you hear kids referred to as “brats” and adolescents labelled as “feral teens”, what’s your chief thought or concern?
I am always greatly saddened. This battle has been going on between adults and young people at least since the 4th century BC when Socrates said of young people, “They have execrable manners, flout authority and have no respect for their elders. What kind of awful beings will they be when they grow up?” I got quite excited when I first heard of the government’s Respect agenda. In my naivety, I thought that at last young people were going to get some respect! I’m so tired of hearing adults say, ”Why should we respect young people? They show us no respect!” My answer is always, because you are the ones who are meant to be setting the example!
3. If you could make one decision as prime minister that would enhance children’s mental health, what would it be?
I would fund mental health services for children and young people properly. When a 15-year-old is so suicidal she needs three sessions of psychotherapy a week on an ongoing basis, yet the urgent referral to CAMHS takes four months, there is something decidedly inadequate about current services. The £6.5 million to provide counsellors in schools in Wales is a start, but what about the rest of the UK? I would put full-time counsellors in every school in the UK, secondary and primary – especially primary, as many issues I come across in adolescents have roots in their earlier life.
4. Without breaking confidentiality, can you share something from your client cases that you’re pleased with?
The most memorable parts are children in such a state of distress that they want to die, and when we finish our work they are happy and looking forward to the future. Eleven-year-old Tom with severe anorexia had told his mother that he wanted to die. When his parents gave me their heartfelt thanks for giving them their son back, I felt a real glow of satisfaction. Then there was five-year-old Ryan who was about to be permanently excluded from school because of his violent behaviour: our work was relatively short term, but when I met him and his mother six years later, mother greeted me as a long-lost friend and wanted to tell me what a delightful child he now was. He had no memory of me or the work we had done together. That’s how it should be.
5. Anything you would “undo” if you had the chance to live your practice again?!
I’m sure that like most people I have made the odd intervention that, in hindsight was too early, too intense or too challenging, or maybe not challenging enough, but I can’t think of anything major that I would “undo”. I have been very fortunate in being able to work in private practice and divide my time between training and therapy. I might have done my training slightly differently had I known at the beginning what I know now, but all of it has been valuable in one way or another.
6. A final word?
As a society, we need to respect children and young people. In my experience, when young people feel respected, they develop self-respect and respect for others. I have my own definition of respect that I would like to share:
Reasonable – don’t expect more of me than I am able to give
Empathy – understand how the world is from my perspective
Security – show me that I am safe in this relationship
Positive – give me encouragement rather than criticism
Equality – I deserve to be treated as you would want to be treated yourself
Compassion – demonstrate that you care about me as a human being
Trust – show your trust in me and let me know that you are to be trusted.
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Six questions: DENNIS LINES
Dennis Lines is a school counsellor and trainer at Shenley Court Specialist Art College (Academy) in Birmingham. If you’re counselling young people, it would be remarkable if you hadn’t come across at least one of his books: Brief Counselling in School: working with young people from 11-18 (2nd Edition, Sage Publications, 2006), Spirituality in Counselling and Psychotherapy (Sage Publications, 2006) and The Bullies: understanding bullies and bullying (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008).
1. What brought you into this kind of work with young people?
I benefited from the rich experience of youth club membership, so I decided at 18 to run a youth club myself, within the church. At 27, I moved into teaching from my former career as an engineer. As such, for many years, I’ve taken an active interest in young people and particularly in their social and emotional as well as their spiritual wellbeing. After 12 years of formal teaching, I was asked to take up a counselling role in support of youngsters who’d become embroiled in solvent abuse. This was because our conventional pastoral provision in school was inadequate to address this and other family breakdown difficulties.
2. When you hear kids referred to as “brats” and adolescents labelled as “feral teens”, what’s your chief thought or concern?
One of the features of our ‘”alarmist”, media-driven age is a tendency to label and stereotype, and youngsters fall too easily to simplistic and to some extent meaningless caricatures. It is youngsters’behaviour rather than the cause of that behaviour or the motivation for it that appears to occupy current interest. Speaking as a disabled person as well as a youth counsellor, I can vouch for the ongoing generosity in which young people give of themselves, are keen to achieve and wish to contribute. Sadly, where finance and profit margins dictate most of institutional living, adolescents and late adolescents struggle to first get a foot on the ladder; certainly this is the case for the so-called “working classes”. One regrettable statistic is that youngsters today are less likely to become upwardly socially mobile than was the case in the 1960s.
3. If you could make one decision as prime minister that would enhance children’s mental health, what would it be?
The opportunity to work. It grieves me that in order for society to run, the government appears content to maintain a sick dependency culture amongst the poor. When national priorities have the effect of maintaining high unemployment, particularly for the unskilled or ex-offenders, there is an inevitable consequence of lowered self-esteem. A sense of worth and self-esteem is gained through full employment and through contribution, not through filling out forms at local benefit agencies for free handouts. I would like to see centres created where all could receive a fair day’s pay for meaningful work. I would also like to see as much attention given to emotional literacy as to academic performance in our schools.
4. Without breaking confidentiality, can you share something from your client cases that you’re pleased with?
Much of my work has been directed towards anger management in recent years, given that this is what teachers continually ask for when making referrals. A few cases I have dealt with recently (which have been written up) involve working with aggressive young people who have found this as the most instrumental way to get their needs met. Often, tendencies to fight and become violent stem from poor adult modelling. At other times, anger arises through not being heard and listened to. Counselling, naturally, has a principal role here. Overall, I’ve been pleased with the outcome of this type of work and supporting violent-prone pupils through to their final years without permanent exclusion from school.
5. Anything you would “undo” if you had the chance to live your practice again?!
I regret never having received formal training in family therapy. Many of the difficulties that youngsters have centre on the dynamics of how family members relate with one another, how behaviours are reciprocal and how poor communications develop into family dysfunctionality. Apart from personal bereavement, and perhaps difficulties that centre upon friendship squabbles – where teenagers have to achieve the psychological task of moving from adult- to peer-dependency – a good many difficulties originate, and are maintained, through fractured family relations. It is here, arguably, that client improvement requires the whole family to change. It’s a pity that many of the courses I have seen require candidates to enter as pairs of co-workers, which, as an individual therapist, creates a problem. I find that even in couple therapy involving parent with client there is more scope for an improved outcome.
6. A final word?
I consider that too little interest is shown in the spiritual makeup and development of young people. In an age like our own, where secularism has tended to erode much religious faith, and where zealous fanaticism has caused many to rightfully question the value of religion, there has been a tendency to devalue spirituality, and to view it as synonymous with religion. Quality human relationships have a spiritual component, in my opinion, and I think that counsellors, as well as educators in general, need to recognise this in their own practice as they help their various clients to cope with daily living.
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Six questions: NICK LUXMOORE
Nick Luxmoore has worked for more than 30 years with young people, whether as counsellor, psychodrama psychotherapist, trainer or teacher. He has authored several books: Listening to Young People in School, Youth Work and Counselling; Working with Anger and Young People; and Feeling Like Crap: young people and the meaning of self-esteem. It might therefore come as a surprise to read below that he also hates young people (don’t jump to conclusions!) and doesn’t always say the right thing.
1. What brought you into this kind of work with young people?
I was a very angry teenager – very anti-authority, very “What’s the point?” I’ve probably been dealing with that stuff ever since! I did English at university because it seemed like the subject most about people, and I became an English teacher in a comprehensive school because that seemed like the best way of getting to what mattered for young people. Then I found that I could get there quicker through Drama, then through PSHE and then by not being a teacher at all. I became a youth worker and started training as a psychotherapist.
2. When you hear kids referred to as “brats” and adolescents labelled as “feral teens”, what’s your chief thought or concern?
I think that most adults have a powerful relationship with their own adolescence and are reminded of that whenever they think of young people. I also think it’s an under-acknowledged fact that adults – including kind, committed counsellors – hate young people. Of course, they love and care passionately about them as well but they do, in part, hate them. It goes back to the baby loving and hating its mother, who reciprocates those feelings. Young people love and hate their carers, who can’t help reciprocating. I’ve found it immensely liberating to acknowledge my own hatred, to know that there’s a part of me that wants to call young people “brats” or “feral” while knowing that I care about and love them as well.
3. If you could make one decision as prime minister that would enhance children’s mental health, what would it be?
I believe in the capacity of schools to offer young people an experience of themselves and other people that builds confidence and a sense of worth. Counsellors can help a school with that task. So I wish that every school had a proper counselling service, owned by the school and operating holistically – seeing staff and parents as well as students, and involved in all aspects of school life, not just seeing people behind closed doors. It worries me when I hear about peripatetic counselling services, flitting from school to school, or services shrouded in mystery with school staff not allowed to know what’s going on and feeling shut out. As prime minister, I would institute a rigorous new training specifically for school counsellors and I would insist that CBT, by itself, was no qualification for a school counsellor!
4. Without breaking confidentiality, can you share something from your client cases that you’re pleased with?
Two related things happened this week. Firstly, it was The X Factor final on television. I think The X Factor is interesting as a national exploration of whether people are ordinary or extraordinary. Do we have the X factor ourselves and, if we don’t, are we worth anything? Also this week a young person told me that he no longer felt “butterflies” about his girlfriend. He was worried that this might mean he was no longer “in love” with her because what he felt was no longer extraordinary. We talked about real love being ordinary and slow and reliable and clumsy and cumulative and he seemed reassured. I was pleased.
5. Anything you would “undo” if you had the chance to live your practice again?!
All the stupid things I’ve said and done over the years.
6. A final word?
A plea on behalf of teachers… It annoys me when professionals begin by saying to young people, “I’m not a teacher!” as if to say, “I can be trusted” or “I care about you” or “I can keep things confidential”. Teachers can be trusted. They care. They can keep things as confidential as anyone else. I’m in awe of teachers – of how relentless the job is and of how little thanks teachers get. They also get no clinical supervision, despite working with far more young people than any counsellor and usually in much more difficult circumstances. They should get supervision. Not only would it help them think about their interactions but it would stop them getting so fed up. A disaffected teacher is far more disruptive than a disaffected young person!
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