Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Adolescent Rage. Netfkix series.- Disorganized Attachment And Adolescent Rage

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Adolescent Rage. Netfkix series.- Disorganized Attachment And Adolescent Rage · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I'm offering you a two-part podcast which is underpinned by the four-part series Adolescence that was on Netflix and starred Stephen Graham and was co-written by him.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I've been wanting to talk about this for a while because it was a very hard-hitting drama, won multiple awards, and really inspired quite a lot of thinking about how to protect children from cyberbullying and the ways in which we could we could understand the sort of hidden effects and what they might trigger.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: The thing is, I wasn't too convinced about that bit.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yes, from the point of view that yes, of course it's a problem, but I think it's not the problem.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: The boy was a product of a family system, and from a psychodynamic perspective, the boy isn't simply symptomatic, he's expressing something of the family system.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now the father was ambivalent, he was inconsistent, and he was a fragile kind of container, and that created what we call disorganized attachment because the father is both sought after and simultaneously feared.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So he is experienced as needed but unreliable.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm inclined to think that there's there's there's more there is more to this from the point of view of did we actually get the message?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Did we really understand what might be being conveyed?
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I suppose only the writers can answer that question, but I watched I watched it twice.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: The first time for well, I was gonna say entertainment, I'm not sure that's the word I'd use, and the second time more forensically, because I was trying to check some of the things that I saw, and I was looking at them from a clinical perspective, and I identified a number of things which I'll go on to talk about.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why is this important?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is a series that was based on more than one true story.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It was to me an incredibly talented and creative way of portraying something, but it was underpinned by true stories.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: That to me is compelling, particularly as someone who writes and who tries to present true stories in a way that are hopefully meaningful.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Now, from my point of view, we're introduced to a boy who is already on the edge of something.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's not chaotic from the beginning and not overtly violent, but there is a sense of something.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's about fragility, and that fragility reveals itself in very specific ways.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: There's an intense need that this boy experiences to be seen, heightened sensitivity to rejection, and a rapid escalation from connection to distress.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: You may recall some of the scenes in which that escalation happens very quickly.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: There are moments where he seeks proximity to his father, watches him closely, waits for a response that either doesn't come or comes too late.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when that connection fails, the shift is immediate.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not disappointment, but disorganization.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: From an attachment perspective, there is no secure attachment.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But this is what we call ambivalent attachment, verging on disorganized attachment.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: The father is present but inconsistent, engaged but unpredictable, emotionally available, and then suddenly not.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: So what we see are moments of attempted connection followed by emotional absence or misattunement.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this creates a devastating internal experience.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's like I need you, but I can't rely on you.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: The boy cannot integrate the father as a whole object, so he has to split the object into two parts.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: The good father, who is longed for, and then the bad father, who is feared and rejected.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this goes back to very early thinking from the child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in her work on object relations, where the primary caregiver in very early development is experienced as either good or bad, black or white.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this has to do with experience of the infant rather than a kind of conscious thought.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: However, children who are developmentally stuck at that point, because their experiences keep giving them the same outcome, will then go on to have what we call part-object relationships.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tricky one, but well, it's not tricky, but it's it's quite complex.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: I might even do a podcast series, probably about 25 should do it.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what we also see is a mother who doesn't intervene.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And this is where the observation is very powerful because the mother isn't absent, she's psychologically passive.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: So she doesn't intervene and provide sufficient holding.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't mediate the father-child relationship.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: What we see is that she observes tension and she registers distress, but she doesn't intervene in a way that reorganises, reorganizes the emotional field.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: So what this means for the child is there is no second line of defense, no repair, no one who says emotionally, I'll see what is happening and I'll help you sort this out.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: So when rejection becomes unbearable, what we're seeing is not a boy who overreacts, we are seeing a boy who has no internal capacity to survive rejection.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: And when attachment is threatened, mentalization collapses, and the ability to think disappears.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Feeling becomes the action.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: There is no thinking.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this is really important.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we see the rapid escalation, the emotional flooding, the behavior that seems and is disproportionate.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: But clinically, to me, it's entirely coherent.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because what we're seeing is a repetition of the original wounds.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: This boy isn't just reacting, he's repeating or enacting, seeking connection, experiencing rupture and collapsing again and again and again.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: This is a boy who can't cope.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: This is a boy who has never been helped to cope.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: He's reaching for something that's never been reliably there.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for parents listening, have you ever thought about your children's experience of you?
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do they fear your withdrawal more than your anger?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Do they experience you as predictable?
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: When rupture happens, how does it get repaired?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Rejection isn't always about what happens today.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's about everything that's never been repaired.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: So I believe that when a child can't survive rejection, they don't necessarily fall apart, they act it out, they show it.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I know I keep coming back to the comment that behavior is a communication, and I say that because it's true.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Behavior doesn't exist in isolation.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: There is always a context within which we can understand this.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: There are a number of quite disturbing scenes.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Some I found intensely sad.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: When the boy was being interviewed by the forensic psychologist, it was really interesting to see how the boy talked about, this is Jamie, how he talked about his father turning away at a football match when Jamie made a mistake and his father wouldn't look at him.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: And there were lots of other examples of a father who were who this boy just couldn't get it right for.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now many of you will ask, or may have asked the question, why did she push him so hard?
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: Or was it okay for her to ask the questions that she did, to ask him about his um his his sexual fantasizing and his views on women?
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'm afraid the answer is yes.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: And as much as it may seem unpalatable, you know, we're talking about somebody who uh ultimately says, yes, they killed another person.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: And as unpalatable as it may be to hear the kinds of questions being asked, they are entirely appropriate.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because her job was to conduct a forensic assessment.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: So she would have been looking for a whole host of signs and indications that would have helped her to form a clinical picture so that she could make recommendations to the court.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: When we're into what we call psychopathology, we're looking at illness, and illness finds expression in many, many forms.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: If we fast forward, I don't know, 10, 20 years, and we see A Jamie, who has become a serial rapist, and we look at the kinds of offenses, not just the kind of offenses, but the psychological profile that underpins them, we can see very often that developmentally there were signs.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Looking for those signs, trying to quantify them is incredibly important.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly, though, people's comments of was it okay to do that to a child?
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was really interesting because in another context, no, it wouldn't be.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: But in a sense, what I thought was important about those observations was people caring for the child.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: However, I would say that there was not a link between his explosive behavior towards her, and not a causal link between that and her questions.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Her questions triggered something that was already there, and it was pretty frightening, incredibly well portrayed by the boy concerned.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is this is really complex because it points towards all sorts of things.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: It tells us about unnoticed danger signs, it tells us about family dynamics, the societal context, and adolescents and what they face.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to close this episode now, but I'm going to go on and provide a second episode very soon.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you for listening.