How to Understand Change: "Everything Has An Expiry Date"
Hey Champ,
This blog may be best read alongside your mother, or when you are older. It has themes in it that you may find upsetting.
The last few months have been full of change. For example, I have found another job, which means that I have to leave where I’ve been working for the last 7 years. There’s a few lessons that I can teach you from this experience, and one is:
Everything has an expiry date.
Parts of this blog may seem depressing, but when your mind understands it, it can be quite liberating.
Think about it for a second, everything ends. For example, food has an expiry date, your mother and I have an expiry date; jobs end; seasons finish, school, and sports dissipate.
Realising this can be liberating in many ways because it means that everything in life is borrowed. We borrow the warmth of the sun; the oxygen we breath; the energy from the food we eat. We borrow the seasons of our existence because everything wax and wanes with the rhythms of life. This means that even though everything is borrowed, it is also interconnected. For example, I borrowed your mother and your brother from the universe, so that we could have you.
Knowing this should make us appreciate the fact that we even get to experience those people, places and events, in the first instance.
Many humans are rubbish at thinking ahead. Consequential thinking hasn’t always been my strong point either - especially when I was younger. This means that for most people, they only reflect on the changes in their life after they have changed.
I have reached my expiry date as someone who helps children. As such, I’m going to use this article to reflect on the career I am leaving behind. I want to spend the rest of this passage telling you about the work that I did, the impact I hope it had, and what you can learn from it.
***
I started helping children following my placement at a secure mental hospital. Whilst there, I worked with some really violent people who had severe mental health issues.
As part of one of my tasks, I had to look through the history of the patients. I noticed straight away that nearly 90% of them had come from the care system. Once I had the stats, I sat back and looked at my screen. My initial thoughts were:
"What am I doing here? I am working with people half way through their lifespan, who are on life sentences. Surely, it is better for me to help people who are 10 years old, and give them the skills that they need to flourish over the next 50 years. Maybe that can stop people committing such terrible crimes and ruining lives, including their own".
When I realised this, I left the hospital and began working within the care system, helping children.
The children I worked with were considered to be within the top 5% of the most behaviourally challenging young people living in the UK. They displayed many behaviours that included, but were not limited to: extreme violence, self-harm, suicide ideology, drug use, arson, health neglect and loads of placement breakdowns.
I can name at least five children who had been convicted of murder before they could even tie their own shoe laces
Now, people automatically think that those who do terrible things must be evil. I don’t really think this is true. I think that whilst there may be a genetic predisposition to callousness and lack of empathy, most ‘evil’ people are created. I have never thought that any of the children I have worked with were evil.
Sometimes people cannot understand how a child or adult could behave in this way. The answer in this case is simple: Trauma.
The majority of the children I worked with had been physically abused, sexually abused and terribly neglected. Take for example, two children I have helped:
Child 1: Was tied to a radiator and made to sleep on the kitchen floor. At meal times his father made him fight the dog and the winner got to eat. The prize was tinned dig food.
Child 2: Was raised in a car outside of her family home. Whilst the family enjoyed home comforts and physical love and affection, she was forced to live in a car. The only time she was appropriately touched was when her parents went to feed her scraps of food and change her nappy before the people who had paid them, came to sexually abuse her.
It is plain to see that these kids didn’t ask to be born into these environments.
In the community, if you are on the child protection register, you are considered to be in a very dire situation. Knowing this, I compared the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) of the children that I worked with to those on the Child Protection Register in Wales. The results were startling, but all you need to know right now, is that the children I looked after had it much worse than those considered to be in a bad situation.
Let’s look at this a bit more simply. Even very good parents, like your mother, are only attuned to their child’s needs 20-30% of the time and, according to other research, the majority of people are assumed to have secure attachments and are not living within the care system.
This, putting it bluntly, may mean that if the children I worked with cried 10 times a night to be watered, fed, changed and/or hugged, their parents didn’t even wake up three times. This lack of attunement and care was one of the reasons why they were in the system.
I hope this shows that the children I worked with experienced unbearable trauma that happened time and time again, and that they did not have their emotional, physical and attachment needs met.
Attachment is not about love, it’s about survival.
Interesting research helps to shed light on the traumatised child’s way of surviving their experiences. Eamon McCrory compared brain scans of traumatised children with soldiers before and after combat. It was found that children who were exposed to maltreatment and domestic violence had higher activation in the brain regions responsible for threat detection and hypervigilance. This was the same for soldiers who experienced combat trauma. As Eamon says, these brain functions have actually helped the children and soldiers to survive in their environments.
So, the children I worked with had fought their own wars. They had survived a world that didn't want them; and like soldiers, they needed to protect themselves, be vigilant, scan for danger, react violently, dissociate and survive. The children didn’t chose to behave like that, just like a soldier doesn’t chose to behave in their ways. It was just the brains response to trauma.
Now we know this, go back and read the descriptions of the children I gave earlier.
Were these kids naughty? No they were not. They didn’t perform ‘naughty’ behaviours; they were SURVIVAL behaviours. The children were traumatised and were crying out for help.
The one thing these children feared was the one thing they needed – a relationship. This is such a hard thing to achieve, but as Dan Hughes says:
Connect with people before correcting them.
Now that I'm coming to the end of my time helping these children, it makes me think about whether I helped them or not? In all honesty, I don’t know. Remember our post on success? Well, maybe we should read that again. However, I do believe that I did two successful things:
- I connected with them;
- I gave them happy memories.
It's strange to think that a child living in a secure home could have a happy time. But when I reflect on the examples above I realise something powerful. As sad as it is to say, it was probably the only time in their lives that these traumatised children were fed, looked after, and given the space to be children.
I opened my drawer when I was cleaning out my office and found lots of pictures of me and the kids that I worked with over the years. There are pictures of me and the children using a slip and slide, doing human bowling, jousting, dancing, laughing, dodgeball, unicycling, painting, playing the drums. When I look at their faces they are smiling - and its genuine. So, even if my therapy hasn’t worked and they still struggle throughout their lives, I know they will look back and remember the time when they were allowed to be happy, safe kids that were seen and heard. But more than that, they will look back and remember the times when they laughed.
What can you learn from this?
- Try not to judge someone straight away, they may be really hurting on the inside
- Kindness if free, so give it
- Your mother is the best mother I’ve ever seen. She and your brother will meet all of your needs, if I can’t be there. If you choose to spend your life with me in it, I will certainly provide and protect you
- Its really hard to empathise with someone who is doing bad things, but think about it, no one does any of those things because they are happy
- Try connecting with people before correcting them - your mother and I used to do this to each other all the time
- If you want to cry, that’s fine. Crying is telling us something is really good, or that there is something wrong. Even big boys cry.
- When you are thinking about jobs, sports, whether to travel, etc., think about the difference between a passion and a purpose. I was lucky to find a job that was both my passion and purpose. It is really helpful to realise that the two concepts aren’t the same. For example, I am passionate about boxing, but it is not my purpose. Since you’ve come into the world, you are my purpose
- The simple moments are the best. So many of the kids I worked with forgot what the rain felt like (because they had been locked up for so long); many hadn't played as children; loads had killed someone before they could even tie their laces. Try not to take things for granted. Every day I step out and mindfully feel the air flow over my bald head - its stunning.
- Cherish the happy moments with your brother, mother and family
- Play
- Laugh
- Protect others
- Try not to get too attached to things. This doesn’t mean that you should be cold and unloving, It means the opposite. It means that you should love as hard as you can, but with the acceptance that the thing, person or event that you are loving, is only borrowed.
- Everything ends, and this is liberating because it means we shouldn’t possess over people, places and things
- Try and work out when its time too move on, when things have expired. It will keep you and others happier in the long run. Ive seen too many people continue to work in jobs they hate or stay in relationships that make them unhappy
- Smile
- Reflect
- Love
