Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / Adolescence Netflix series.- Family Systems Under Stress

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Adolescence Netflix series.- Family Systems Under Stress · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Today I am bringing episode two, which I began yesterday, episode one, about the Netflix series Adolescence with Stephen Graham and a cast of incredibly talented actors.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: So yesterday I posted about this series covering themes in episodes one and two, and the themes that I identified were, in my view, much less to do with mobile phones and knives, but more to do with family systems and what happens within them.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now I use the term family system as a way of describing what the dynamics between family members, the relationships, how those relationships work, how they develop, how they get stuck, and the effect upon the whole family.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you think of any kind of system, if one or more parts of that system aren't working particularly well, then it's going to have some sort of effect on the whole system.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: And to me, this series demonstrated that in lots of different ways, but I think it did it in a way which quite rightly didn't have that kind of um explanation.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's not really what it was for.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said yesterday, this was a series I watched twice, and in the second, my second viewing of it was really about trying to understand it more forensically.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what was compelling for me was that this was real life.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this wasn't a drama, this was a constellation of real events that had been put together in an artistic way, but an absolutely compelling way.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for me, it's worthy of a second series, and who knows, maybe that will happen.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Part of what motivates me to point these things out is not so much to do with the drama element.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's because I see these sorts of things in my consulting room quite a lot, not necessarily with murder attached, although sometimes other forms of criminal acts.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's true to say that when I'm able to work with parents alongside the child, the likelihood of a positive outcome becomes greater.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there are of course some parents, fortunately few in number, for whom the likelihood of an outcome that's good is limited.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it seems to me that what happens is that such parents tend to regard the child as the problem.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: And inevitably, the more problematic the child becomes, the greater and more frequently the label becomes used.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the child identifies itself in exactly that way.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard children say things like, I wish I wasn't here.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Things would be so much better for everyone if I wasn't.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Now, when I encounter such parents who seem unfortunately unable to join the dots and recognize the system and their parts in it, it's not about blame, it's about understanding.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: But when that happens, I despair for the child.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: And this is made worse if I later discover that the guidance I've tried to provide has been ignored.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so, therefore, that which was predicted has become an inevitable reality.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: And the opportunities to prevent this and alter the trajectory have been squandered.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I want to talk more in this podcast about the family system and make reference to the members of that family system.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Very often there can be one child in a family who carries what no one else can bear.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: And they don't carry it because they're the strongest, but because no one else is.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in episodes three and four, Jamie has become what's called the identified patient.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: The narrative intensifies, he's acting out more visibly and drawing attention from all sources, and he's labelled.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: But psychodynamically, he is the identified patient, and that is so often the case.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: And by that I mean that is how people see him, and that is when when we when we see people through one lens, we forget about everything else sometimes.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in this situation, the family has failed to contain Jamie's emotional experience.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: They've failed to see it, they failed to transform raw feelings into thought.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But more importantly, the parents failed to act in a coherent way in their own relationship.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Jamie's father presented as a likable, somewhat charismatic man.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: He was humorous, seemingly spontaneous and hardworking.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: But there was another side.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Here was a man whose rage was just beneath the surface.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: And you may remember the reference to that his wife made, but the reference to him destroying the shed in the garden, and other inferences that were to do with the man who was constantly suppressing rage.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I noticed another part when he simply shut down.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: And this was painfully evident when driving back with his wife and daughter, Jamie was incarcerated by this time.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: On his birthday after a meal out, Jamie called him on the phone, and it was a really painful scene because the father seemed completely disconnected and unable to engage with his son.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: One-word answers, and the boy trying hard to engage his father, and it was pitiful.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And noticeably when Jamie's mother intervened, it was a passive and neutral reference.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was meaningless, but it what it demonstrated was that her passivity was something which was essentially all she had.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Now I wondered about Jamie's sister and how she was seeing and seen by the father.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: Was she the achieving daddy's little girl?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not quite sure about that, but I rather wondered as wondered if she was in the same way, or in some way counterbalancing what was happening within the family system.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now I say this because it's not uncommon for one child to balance out the distressing behaviors of another by being compliant, but I rather suspect that she had consistently received something that Jamie hadn't.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Probably unconditional love.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: I rather think that the emotional economy and valuing system within the family was very compromised.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: And so the child becomes the emotional container, and also the expression, and then the breakdown.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we could say the child is not the problem, the child is a symptom of the problem.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: In episodes three and four, we see escalation.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's an intensification of behavior, risk taking, and emotional volatility.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: And this is not random, it's communication.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: The child is saying, This is what it feels like inside my life and this family.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Then we see fragility and collapse as relational rupt, the boy becomes increasingly dysregulated, less able to recover, more dependent, and more volatile and more violent.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't about resilience failure.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is cumulative relational trauma.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now, relational trauma is not the same as how we might understand the sort of trauma that causes PTSD.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is something else.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: We go back to the father, by now it's it it becomes clear that his role isn't malicious, but he's emotionally unreliable and is completely unable to recognize the child's internalized world.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because it's almost as if he's too immersed in his own.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: So at precisely the point when his son needs his father most, he is just emotionally absent.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's no consistent attunement, no integration of emotion, and no co-regulation, no soothing.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of expectation and reaction to when Jamie doesn't perform.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: The mother's passivity now has consequences because the child is exposed, the emotional field remains unregulated and there is no protective override.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So what does this lead to?
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: A child who must manage when adults cannot becomes overwhelmed and then moves towards collapse.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: This is where the series becomes deeply uncomfortable because we face the systemic truth.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because the question is no longer what is wrong with the boy, but what has this boy had to carry and what can possibly explain the absence of awareness in the parents?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: He isn't the problem, he's the evidence.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Children don't need perfect parents, but they really do need predictability, emotional recognition, and repair when things go wrong.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now without these they carry that which should never never be theirs.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: There are children who break rules, and there are children who break under the weight of what they carry, and sometimes they're the same child.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: What a child can't say, a child will show you.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: It is unfortunate for me to have encountered these sorts of things in my consulting room because I'm left with a sense of opportunities being wasted, squandered.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, only very recently I discovered that something had developed in a family where the fourteen-year-old boy had managed to, I say managed to, that really isn't the right way of putting it, but a fourteen-year-old boy had been in trouble with the police and had gotten involved with other disenfranchised young people, and the outcome wasn't good and the future looks oblique.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: That said, maybe it will turn around.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I suppose if I bring this all together, I would uh strongly advise you if you haven't watched the series, watch it.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's painful, but it's really good.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: I would also say that the main elements are to do with parents being aligned, parents working together, paying attention to their children.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: But when I say paying attention, I mean a kind of awareness of what the child might be experiencing.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: Always encourage your children to speak.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And when they do, listen.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Listen listening means hearing what the child has to say rather than what you think the child is supposed to say.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to what it is that they're telling you.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Don't judge it.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: Because when they express it, it means that it is allowed out.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: You have to show them that you understand that they are experiencing what they're experiencing.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: I read an incredible post earlier on a woman who I was talking, she's desperate.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: She's a five-year-old boy who is no, that's not true, an eight-year-old boy who sounds like he is quite hard to handle.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I unusually decided to read some of the con uh some of the comments.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: And she had said it was it was so hard because he just can't tell me what he feels.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: I've been trying really hard to get him to talk about what he's feeling and what's happening.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, good for you.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly at her wit's end, asking for help.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: One or two sympathetic, actually, that's not fair, a lot of sympathetic responses.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: But one person said, well, he should be able to say what he's feeling by the age of eight.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, which book of wisdom does this come from?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: I was very tempted to write a long reply.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't, I simply posted my podcast series link and said, hope this helps.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: But but it really strikes me when we have ideas about how children should be, we need to stop and ask ourselves a question.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Just say, well, where does that idea come from?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is that realistic?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: If we can exclude words like should, ought, must, and instead ask what?
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening?
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Not what should be happening or must be happening or ought to be.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: What is happening?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: What do I see?
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: What does the child see?
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because with them what we do is we open up who that who that child really is.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And we're not trying to change them or design them, we're trying to guide them.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said probably more than I expected, but never mind.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: I'll be back with another podcast series soon.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.