Help Others: "Leave the world a better place than you found it"

I can name at least five children who had been convicted of murder before they could even tie their own shoelaces.

People think that those who do terrible things must be evil. I don’t think this is true. I have never thought that any of the children I have worked with were evil. 

Now that I've come to the end of my time helping these children, I’ve thought about whether I helped them or not? In all honesty, I don’t know. 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 below, I realised something powerful. As sad as it is to say, it was probably the only time in their lives that these 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 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. 

During my career, most of the children I work with had been physically abused, sexually abused and terribly neglected. Take for example, three children I helped:

Child 1: Was tied to a radiator and made to sleep on the kitchen floor. At mealtimes 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.

Child 3: This child was conceived when his father raped his mother, but his mother couldn't abort him. After he was born, his mother couldn’t stand to look at him because he looked so much like the man who had hurt her. This innocent child reminded her of her abuser because they looked so similar. As such, the child was neglected and physically abused by her awfully.

One of the take home points is: these kids didn’t ask to be born into these environments.

The children I worked with were within the top 5% 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.

Sometimes people cannot understand how a child could behave in this way. The answer in this case is simple: Trauma.

In the community, if you are on the child protection register, you are in a very dire situation. Knowing this, I compared the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE’s) of the children that we worked with to those on the Child Protection Register in Wales. The results were startling.

• 66% of the children reported exposure to domestic violence compared to 21% on the register.
• 32% reported sexual abuse whereas only 7% reported this on the child protection register.
• 44% reported physical abuse compared to 16% on the child protection register.
• 62% registered emotional neglect (the worst form of abuse in terms of biological consequence), compared to 38% on the Child Protection Register of Wales.

Further exploration showed that whilst 14% of the Welsh population had 4 or more ACE’s, 64% of the children I worked with had experienced this.

Let’s look at this a bit more simply. According to Tronick, even very good parents are only attuned to their child’s needs 20-30% of the time and, according to other research, many 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 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 may be why they were in the system. The consequence of this is that the children probably learnt not to cry because crying didn’t get their underlying needs met.

I hope this shows that the children I worked with experienced unbearable trauma that happened time and time again and that their emotional and physical needs were not met. Attachment is not about love, it’s about survival. Without parents providing behaviours that allowed the child to survive, the child had to find other ways to survive.

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 hyper-vigilance. This was the same for soldiers who experienced combat trauma. As Eamon says, these brain functions have helped the children and soldiers to survive in their environments.

So, it is true that the children I worked with had fought their own wars. They survived a world that didn't want them; and like soldiers, the children needed to protect themselves, be vigilant, scan for danger, react violently, dissociate and survive. The children didn’t choose to behave like that, just like a soldier doesn’t chose to behave in their ways. It was just the brains response to trauma.

The brain areas affected are often referred to as the ‘Lizard Brain’; and the point of these brain areas is to become increasingly sensitive to danger and to implement the fight, flight or freeze response. Children who experience trauma, much like the soldiers of combat, have extremely low and sensitive thresholds for stress and high emotions. This makes them vulnerable to violence, mental health, crime and other manifestations of trauma that lead them to being labelled as “naughty” and sent to secure training centres, secure children’s homes and even prison. I truly believe in the therapeutic benefit of secure children’s homes, but it is often helpful to remind ourselves that we wouldn’t sanction or punish a soldier as they biologically react to their threat, so I often wonder why we do for our children.

Now we know this, go back, and read the descriptions of the three children I gave earlier.

Questions: Was child number one violent at mealtimes because he was naughty? Or was it because his brain had told him that at any moment, a dog or person would come into the room and make him fight for food – in the same way a soldier’s brain is conditioned to think an enemy is hiding in the ruins of a building with a sniper gun. Was the child unmannered because he didn’t chew? Or was it because he had learnt that if he didn’t eat very fast by swallowing his food whole, the dog would take it? Was this boy naughty?

Questions: Child number two was highly sexual and promiscuous. Do you still think this was the case? Or do you think her brain may have been conditioned to learn that once older men had sex with her, she would be fed, warmed, sheltered, and ‘loved’. Was this girl naughty? Or was she getting her basic biological needs met?

Questions: Child number three was considered extremely violent and aloof. Was he? Or had he just learnt that the one person he went to for love, warmth, and protection, actually physically battered him, and told him she hated him and that he would amount to nothing? Had his soothing system been classically conditioned towards threat? (See compassion focussed therapy for more information on this). Can you see why he was angry and didn’t get close to anyone? Was he naughty or deeply hurt? Like Peggy O’Mara says: 

“The way we talk to our children becomes their inner voice”.

I hope you see that these kids’ behaviours were their brains response to their trauma. Trauma teaches developmentally traumatised children to survive without safety, security, or connection. The brain will manifest this trauma as extreme violence, self-harm, suicide ideology, drug use, arson, health neglect and loads of placement breakdowns.

It’s not that these children could not learn or change. They were just in the wrong brain state to do so.

Were these kids’ naughty? No, they were not. They didn’t perform ‘naughty’ behaviours; they were SURVIVAL behaviours. These children were traumatised and were crying out for help.

The one thing that these children feared was the one thing they need – a relationship. So, I took this understanding and built relationships with these kids. As Dan Hughes says:

"Connect with people before we correct them"

So, I began to teach the children alternative ways to sooth their reactions to a world that acted like it didn’t want them. I made them feel connected, attuned, warmed, and loved. 

How can this help you:

• Try not to judge someone straight away, they may be really hurting on the inside
• Kindness if free, so give it
• It’s 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
• If you want to cry, that’s fine. Crying is telling us something is good, or that there is something wrong. 
• 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)
• Play
• Laugh
• Protect others 
• Leave the world a better place than you found it
• If you can help one person, you could end up helping hundreds
• 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 it’s time to move on- when things have expired. It will keep you and others happier in the long run. I’ve seen too many people continue to work in jobs they hate or stay in relationships that make them unhappy
•  As you can see, even though in not there, I’m doing whatever I can to connect with you
• I will hopefully give you some happy memories. I know that your brother and mother will.

Love you, 

Dad