My Adoption Experience & Expertise
From the mid 70s to the mid 80s I was head of an adolescent unit in North London.
We had 16 residents, males aged 12 plus, many of whom had been kicked out of other institutions for e.g. violence, arson, etc. etc.
I was training in Transactional Analysis, which became the theoretical model for the unit – I taught basic TA to my staff, and we taught it to every young man who came to live with us.
Various aspects of the unit were, certainly and still today, somewhat unusual. For example, I decide that, as we were there for the residents, not the other way around, they could attend all meetings. They could attend staff meetings, their key-workers’ supervision sessions, their case conferences, and any meetings outside the unit (which was not a secure unit, by the way) that affected them. Indeed, I would sometimes insist that meeting would not take place unless they attended, especially if I or their key worker was asked to go to the school to discuss the boy’s latest affront!
Oh, I also decided that, no matter what a boy did, we would not send him away! We knew what we were getting before he arrived, and were usually the latest in a long line of establishments to be responsible for them – in the name of care!
And, the most difficult thing of all for people to come to terms with was the fact that I said no adult, including myself, could use any threat of punishment as a means of control. Within six months of that decision, five of the eight staff I’d inherited had left or were leaving; and most people who came to chat to me about the vacancies lost interest immediately they understood the implications.
I should also say that I had been powerfully affected and influenced by my experience of
These and other powerful ideas I discovered and explored back then, most notably Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and the aforementioned Transactional Analysis, coalesced into a firm conviction that we needed to do something drastically different because our reactions were still embedded in a reactive command and control paradigm. We felt compelled to physically restrain the lads if their rage threatened to explode – or had already exploded into attacks on each other, on staff members or self-harm. Co-counselling, Tinbergen and other sources had already convinced me that the outbursts were not The Fundamental Problem! The outbursts, the attacks, the explosions were all symptoms! Reactive constraint, especially when accompanied by the adult shouting, threatening or bribing, was, in effect, punishing someone for the pain that they carried as a legacy of their journey thus far!
In the middle of a January night, I suddenly woke up with the answer absolutely clear in my mind; we would not wait for them to reach explosion point – we would time-table Holding!
So we did! And there is a long and extraordinary story to tell about that! In fact, much of my work over the next two or three years was attempting to teach holding theory, and the technique I’d developed in the unit, to residential workers, parents and others who had responsibility for volatile and violent children and adolescents.
Over the years we had some dramatic, almost magical transformations with kids we looked after. We could virtually guarantee that we could get kids back into education within six months of joining us. Within a year of joining us, most boys would plan and budget a week’s menu for 20 people – and shop for it (with their key workers because to have given them the money would have just been stupid!
I decided to leave because I wanted to share with others what we had been doing with these always difficult, sometimes dangerous (I still have scars from knife and other attacks), sometime inaccessible no matter how much we valued them and treated with compassion and dignity.
I have an unshakable belief in our incredible, possibly infinite capacity to break free of limiting beliefs, to loosen the chains of guilt and shame that hold us hostage to the past, to transcend horrific experiences and to transmute painful memories into memories of painful events. That conviction is deeply rooted in the years I spent learning from the young people in my care, about whom I cared deeply and, as I still have contact with some of them, still care very much.
In 1986/7, shortly after the Post Adoption Centre (PAC) was set up, one of the founders and the then Director, Phillida Sawbridge OBE, invited me to give a talk on the work I had been doing at the unit and in the couple of years since I left. A little later, she asked if I would work with a single (trans-racially) adoptive mother and her teenage son, which I did. A little later, something similar, then another … after a few of those, Phillida asked if I would commit some regular time to the PAC. I agreed to spend one day a week with them.
Now, more than 20 years later, I am still involved with PAC. I have lectured, run training events up and down the country, worked with countless adoptive families, either counselling on their own or creating and facilitating workshops.
I was a member of the Black Families Child and Family team for some years, and designed a number of workshops such as Making Multi-cultural Placements Work, and Crafty Listening for Adopted Parents. We also ran weekend workshops for BME adoptive families, working separately with groups of parents and teens, and then bringing them together to help them connect and communicate more effectively.
I also run workshops on Self-esteem for Adopted Adults, workshops for couples where one partner is and the other is not adopted.
I’ve also arranged away days and even longer e.g. five days away with groups of Trans-racially adopted teenagers.
I was also responsible, with my dear and much missed friend and colleague, Sue Cowling, Pac’s Training officer and Deputy Director, for the creation of the Post Adoption Counselling and Therapeutic Skills (PACTS) course. This grew out of our lamenting the sad reality that the vast majority of people who came to the PAC for help, and had already been to other agencies or services (Child Guidance, Family Therapy, whatever) had almost never met a professional who knew anything whatsoever related to adoption! If referred to at all, adoption was seen as irrelevant, whether it was a birth mother, adopted child or teenager or adoptive parents.
PACTS, eventually evolved into the Adoption Counselling Expertise (ACE) course, a 21 day course that included information and expertise on almost every aspect of adoption, including historical, legal, social, psychological, as well as many of the relevant and innovative theories models and techniques that are now more well-known and ‘mainstream’.
Eligibility for entry in the PACTS Directory, required at least two years post-qualification - and at least 200 hours of clinical practice, and there was an obligatory annual review day.
I still conduct workshops for adoption professionals, occasionally for PAC, though usually under the auspices of my own company Social Effectiveness Training (SET).
One of the workshops helps professionals whose job it is to match children and adults for adoption, although it works just as well when considering fostering, for example.
I coach people in how it is possible to predict, certainly anticipate, how people are likely to be a problem for each other.
How so? Well, what ever else we are we are creatures of habit! The F form and on the child’s file provide enough information to provide the adults with enough information to be better prepared to respond to the child’s distressed and distressing behaviour in ways that will help to heal.
I have lectured to international lawyers, been a guest on various TV and radio shows and written about various aspect of adoption, with a particular emphasis on trans-racial and intercultural adoption.
Although it needs updating, here is more about me[1]
On a more personal note, I was raised in a white family who, like me, were unknowingly conditioned to believe in the myth of white supremacy. I was described as and described myself as a half-caste and non-white. ‘Back in the day’ as they say, and that day was a very long time back, the world was a little more innocent and a lot more unkind to people who were different!
I was adopted by my putative father, was ‘in care’ from age 11 to 15, was homeless for while, and then fostered by a strangely wonderful family in Essex. I left there on the day before my 17th birthday, was homeless again for a while, hitched around Europe a bit, learning a lot more about people and life, I can tell you! (Although I almost certainly won’t!!)
I learnt a lot both as direct target of and a witness to racism, sexism and many other isms. One of the most important things I learnt was that ignorance is not a sin!
I learnt that mostly from my own ignorance and narrow-minded prejudice, from my intolerant dismissal of any attempt to get me to re-evaluate my limiting beliefs and bedrock assumption, and my arrogant resistance to other people’s ideas and values.
I am not only more tolerant and respectful, I also understand much better why it is that we can cling so tenaciously to some idea that we forced upon us in childhood. Why we fight to hang on to our limitations – and our habits- even though they make us less generous, less accepting, less tolerant and less kind. Our habits can also make us less considerate, respectful, assertive, focused and thoughtful!
When I coach train, mentor or supervise or consult to adoption and fostering professionals, I hope to raise their awareness of the bigger picture and to offer different perspectives along with techniques and models of human behaviour and of humans being.
The same is true of my work with current or prospective adoptive parents and foster carers. There is a somewhat different emphasis because parents and carers have – certainly hope to have, I assume - a very different kind of relationship, with some significantly different outcomes that the professionals.
So, I combine a lifetime of personal experience, with three decades of professional interactions and learning from many thousands of people of every age, class, nationality, pigmentation, cultural background, at various levels of self-esteem and Emotional Intelligence.
co-counselling, The basic idea of Co-counselling, (shared by many humanistic approaches) is that if we are given time and compassionate attention (rather than questions and advice) we will be able to explore whatever is blocking or hurting us or prevents us realising our potential. This resonated with what I’d read in Nico Tinbergen‘s book ‘Autism: New Hope for A Cure’. Tinbergen won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for Physiology or Medicine. After his Nobel Prize Lecture, the medical profession were derisive because he addressed children's inability, starting from infancy, to relate to people and situations in a normal way i.e. autism. Perhaps you can, as I do, detect echoes of attachment disorder and possibly even some connections with the Primal Wound? Tinbergen maintained that it was possible to restore an autistic child to normalcy by establishing a secure mother-child bond; thereby suggesting that the cause of early childhood autism is due to the failure of the mother and child to establish or maintain a normal bond.[1] Again, that somewhat relates to the intensive work done by, among others, the Post Adoption Centre.
To say that autistic children are "ineducable" and remain dependent all their lives reveals a lack of knowledge about the problem according to Tinbergen, since we still do not have any idea of the causes of autism. What we do have is a mass of disconnected information in search of a theory. All negative predictions about the future are, in reality, no more than statements about the failures of past attempts. According to him, the opinion of experts cannot be trusted since they cannot look into the future. And, he continued, was it not equally the case that until the causes of cholera, smallpox and many other illnesses were discovered, they were considered incurable too?