MARK'S BLOG Archive

I've been unwell for a few days with severe respiratory problems now, thankfully, being brought under control by antibiotics and steriods.  I'm getting better, and what I observe today is how I am in the process of change.  My perceptions are shifting, tangibly, from those of a tentative, weak, reliant, sick person to those of an optimistic, proactive, engaged well person.  What interests me is that I'm witnessing this shift in my experience, as my body fights off the infection.  Tomorrow I'll be much less able to identify with the sick person because that will no longer be my direct experience.

We tend to get pretty bound up in our personal and immediate experience.  Do you look out of the window in the morning and 'check the weather' before deciding to take a coat?   Are your children reluctant to take a drink with them 'because I'm not thirsty'?   Now takes over.  Now is also a building block for tomorrow.  And, taking this backwards rather than forwards, yesterday's 'nows' were the building blocks for today's experience.

The brain stores information in a use-dependent fashion.  The more a neurobiological system is ‘activated’ the more that state (and the functions associated with that state) will be built in - for example, practising the unicycle, ‘memorising’ a song, or staying in a particular state of mind.  All systems in the brain are composed of networks of nerve cells known as neurons.  These neurons are continuously ‘changing’ (in chemical and structural ways) in response to ‘signals’ from other parts of the brain, the body, or the environment (e.g. light, sound, taste, smell). So you can see how the brain is organised to respond the environment.  In terms of evolution, we'd have got nowhere without this adaptability.  The brain remains sensitive (plastic) to experiences throughout life - but different parts of the brain are most plastic (e.g. the cortex - in terms of evolution, the most recent part of our brain) and others relatively implastic (e.g. the brainstem - in terms of evolution, the other extreme).

Three or four months into a Family Group, it is not uncommon for parents to experience a collision between the impact of their own early experience and their current experience of parenting.  Some parents find that, in order to sustain the positive change that they have witnessed in their child, they need to draw on personal resources that they don't actually have.  To create a nurturing and sustaining relationship for their child, they look to draw on an experience from their own childhood, but find instead that this is not an experience they were offered sufficient of to have been embedded as a building block in their brain. 

We know how difficult it is to step outside our own immediate experience.  So how on earth do you make the leap into creating an experience that you have not had?  How do you 'replicate' something when the feelings are not there, neatly packaged, ready on cue?

You can't.  It doesn't work.  Simply 'going through the motions' leads to the land of plastic hugs, passing on that experience of never being truly held.  An EXPERIENCE is required.  The parent needs to experience that sense of emotional containment, of being held in the attention of a nurturing other.  The experience takes time, trust, and occurs in a relationship that will probably have to withstand a few security tests before being found reliable. 

The Marlborough Multi-Family Therapy Group model, developed by Eia Asen, Neil Dawson and Brenda McHugh, and which we know as 'Family Group', recognises and accommodates all the above and more. It's brilliant.  Through the multiple layers of emotional holding, it supports the experience of emotional containment and is available as required.  This may manifest in many ways:

• parents contain the anxieties of their children
• children reflect on shared experience, containing and including peers who are experiencing separation or isolation
• the group shares the holding of a particular child, maintaining positives, allowing the parent to use the therapeutic experience to help process their own childhood issues
• parents share and contain anxieties, supporting each other with strategies and holding each other to account 
• parents, the school-based partner and mental health partner hold and reflect on the anxieties in the group
• the school-based partner and mental health partner ride turbulence and anxiety in a relationship, with peer supervision and external supervision 
• parents, and often children, demonstrate an enlivening capacity, full of hope and love, which fuels the whole process anew

We know that experiences during the critical periods of early childhood ORGANISE brain systems.  The parents who struggle to draw on the experience they aspire to offer are often parents who themselves experienced trauma during infancy and childhood.  There's simply no point in all the judgmental finger wagging, blaming, and other ignorant responses offered daily by politicians, commentators and some in the media.  It does nothing to address the fundamental issue that humans need sufficient experiences of benign, nurturing, emotionally containing relationships if they are to learn, to be resilient and to be able to 'hold' others.  Now, more Family Groups.....well, that would help.

For more on the brain, either see the WAVE report, or go to Bruce Perry's Child Trauma Academy. Follow links to his Neuro-Sequential Model of Therapeutics and don't be put off by the title.  Bruce Perry is a genius.  He makes everything clear.