Biting the hand that feeds

By Sue Eusden

Billy was six years old when he was moved to his third foster home that year. In his therapy sessions he would keep me on my toes, always pushing an edge of risk in the room. Once he took a particular shine to a marble egg that he wanted to play catch with. Another day he tried to get out of the window following his curiosity about a sound outside. Frequently he would tell me in his biggest voice: “You’re not the boss of me!”

One of the aspects of asking for help that I have learned about is the importance of being able to detect our needs. Billy could not speak about his vulnerability. He had learnt to hide his feelings of scare behind a camouflage of challenging others. His early parental modelling had been to deal with difficult feelings by threatening others, violence and denial of responsibility. This modelling was having a damaging impact on him and he was taken into care. However, this modelling went with him, he carried it inside himself to each foster home he went.

Good foster-carers struggled to hold him. It can be hard to understand how a six year old can rule the roust and be too difficult to live with, but Billy had developed a fast art of disruption. He was “hard-to-place” and sent to a therapeutic placement agency where his disruptive behaviours, rather than judged as naughty, would be understood as attempts at communication and indicative of difficult feelings with which he needed help.

This third placement was going OK. He was adapting to this better than his previous placements but his situation was far from satisfactory. He wanted to go home to his Mum but had complex feelings of longing for her whilst also fearing her. His capacity to evoke fear in me was palpable and I was always alert to his and my own safety in the therapy room. Guiding him to stay safe without my retribution, shaming or threatening was a therapeutic challenge. Supporting the foster-carers with the same dynamic was part of the team work we did around Billy.

Following a contact with his Mum he returned to his school on Monday morning and set a fire in the toilets. He set light to a toilet roll. The school clamped down fast on such behaviour and he was immediately excluded and the fire brigade gave him a serious talking to. As is often the way, he was punished before he was understood. Adults reacted to his behaviour rather than inquired into it. His experience was reinforced: that adults don’t listen, ask questions or seek to understand and he was left alone with his unmanageable feelings.

We are born shamelessly signalling our vulnerability and we develop a dynamic relationship between what we need and how that need is met. In a good-enough environment we learn, through our attachment relationships with significant adults and siblings, how to ask for help. A joyful dance of need and response strengthens a sense of self-esteem and trust with others. This is not about being gratified, but about being supported appropriately to differentiate between needing and wanting and what is needed from others and what we can learn to do for ourselves. Learning to ride a bike is a prime example of finding the balance between supporting a child to learn skills and safety and letting them experiment and risk falling off, but not getting so hurt that they get too frightened to get back on. The child is learning to regulate their desire, excitement and fear and that is best done in collaboration with someone who can support them to maximise their learning-self without their frightened-self ruining the party.

When we are not helped to learn how to validate our interests and needs and our natural curiosity is met with disinterest or distain then our psyches tend to build in protection. We develop ways to hide our needs. Sometimes this hiding takes place by camouflaging our needs and feeling from others. Sometimes we also camouflage our needs and feelings from ourselves. This later strategy is more extreme and dissociative in nature. In order to keep the camouflage working we develop behaviours that keep it in place. It’s a kind of internal lockdown. This was the situation Billy was in, shielding his vulnerability and telling the world he was in charge whilst inviting condemnation rather than care from the adults in his world. Setting a fire was his way of telling us he was in trouble inside, rather than he was a trouble-maker. Billy’s pattern was to bite the hand that fed him. He confused care with threat, and attacked acts of care in order to maintain his defensive camouflage. It was a disruptive pattern he had learned from his parents and maintained as a repeat of what he already knew and as an act of loyalty to those he feared but loved and missed terribly.

When Billy was a toddler he had accidentally set fire to his Mum’s flat, playing alone he had found some matches. The fire had done enough damage that they had to be rehoused. He had been blamed and beaten. This story was recorded in his social services file but erased from his personal memory. He had tucked it away from himself and others, whilst paradoxically recreating the very scene he dreaded.

In our work together I had this piece of information but I knew that Billy did not. One of the tasks of therapeutic work with traumatised young people is to help them build a coherent narrative, to get their story book in order. You observe their play, ways of being in different settings and patterns of relationship. You are working to understand their experiences and help them fill in the blanks that occur when things were too painful to remember, or help them make links with secrets in the family that they might be consciously or unconsciously holding. This is careful and tender work, with exquisite attention to meaning making with the child through stories, pictures and play.

Billy’s patterns in the room with me suggested he was scared, overwhelmed and fighting to preserve something and someone he had no power to protect. Through his attempts at play we developed some themes for him, exploring big feelings of sadness that his Mum could not look after him and fear that he might have to go back to the aggressive household he had experienced.

After the fire at the school I attended a meeting with the social work team who wanted to move him again. I told them that Billy had set a fire for a reason and that it was our job to empathically understand that, not correctively react and punish. I was a lone voice and felt a parallel with Billy, that I was setting a metaphorical fire in the department and I too risked biting the hand that fed the agency I worked for and funded his placement. They were the power but it was important to also help them manage their scare by translating Billy’s language into speech they could understand too. Billy’s capacity to ask for the help he needed was really limited and this was his only way of getting it, communicating his hurt by showing it, frightening adults and setting his world on fire. The earlier we were able to help him better communicate and have good experiences of being understood and helped, the better his chances were of settling into a home and building trust with adults, untangling his confusion between care and threat and finding a way to love without overwhelming fear and shame.

Social services did approve his continued placement and further therapy. The foster parents were delighted he could stay and they were committed to learning how to best care for him. They worked to develop their own as well as Billy’s resilience in asking for help. Together they explored ways to navigate vulnerability with tenderness rather than attack. He had time now to begin to make links between his current experiences and his past and explore new experiences of receiving care. Over time he developed a sense of safety and built a circle of trusted adults without needing to bite the hands that might help.