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Inside the Consulting Room. Episode 10. When A Child Feels Safe · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and the final episode from Inside the Consulting Room, episode ten.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I've called this when a child finally feels safe.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: The room is quiet.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's no urgency and no tension.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: No sense of something about to happen.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: Just a stillness.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the kind of stillness that feels emptied, but rather it feels settled.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now across the series, we have met many children.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: The silent child, the angry child, the invisible child, and the fearful child, and each of them adapting in different ways to emotional environments that don't feel entirely safe.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: But what happens when something begins to change?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: When a child no longer needs to protect themselves in this way, when safety is no longer uncertain, but instead it's experienced.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now psychological development depends on one essential condition, and that is safety.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Not simply physical safety, but emotional safety.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The experience that feelings can be expressed, distress can be tolerated, relationships remain stable, and it's okay to be yourself.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Without this, children will adapt.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: They might become silent, angry, invisible, but when safety is present, something remarkable happens, and that is development resumes.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Quite often, what you'll find is that developmental interruptions occur as a consequence of children not feeling some kind of safe.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Now, across many sessions and across many, many, many children, a similar pattern emerges.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: At first, there is tension, caution, defense.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: The child is watching, assessing, working out whether this space that I call the consulting room is safe.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: And indeed, whether or not I, as a grown-up, am safe.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then gradually small changes began begin.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: There's a word spoken or a feeling named or a moment of stillness that doesn't need to be filled.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: A little girl sits in an alcove in the consulting room.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really an alcove, but that's what she calls it, and she draws, and she sits with her back to me and just hums.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And clearly she feels safe.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's not how she was when she first came.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: In one session, a child who'd previously been unable to sit still at all, maybe begins to remain in the chair.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: In another, a child who's never spoken begins to respond to a question.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: A child who has always deferred to others begins to choose.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: These moments are often quiet, but they're significant, and we notice them.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: And that's because they signaled something internal that the nervous system has begun to settle, perhaps for the first time in a long time.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Psychotherapy doesn't impose change, it creates conditions, consistency, reliability, emotional containment.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, the child will internalize these experiences.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: So what was once external, the calm presence of another, becomes internal.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a capacity that the child takes within themselves.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: But at the center of this process is relationship, not instruction, not exercises or teaching strategies, not correction, but relationship.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: And a consistent other who notices, understands, remains emotionally steady.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: And through this, the child begins to develop emotional language, self-awareness and regulation.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: Across the many cases, there is often a moment like this one.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: A child pauses, looks up, and says something that hasn't been said before.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think I feel different.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Not dramatically, not suddenly, but recognizably different, less tense, less guarded, more present.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: A girl said to me recently, the other day, I realized I wasn't worrying.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, why am I not worrying?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then I thought, well, I don't know.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I don't need to.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: This from a girl who came, first of all, absolutely racked with anxiety.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But this process extends beyond the consulting room.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: Parents play a crucial role.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: As they begin to understand emotional containment, affect regulation, and the meaning behind behavior, they too begin to respond differently, more calmly, more consistently.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And as the emotional environment within the home shifts, the child's internal world shifts with it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Safety doesn't mean the absence of difficulty, it means something else.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: That difficulty can be experienced, still occurs, but it doesn't overwhelm the system.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: The emotions can rise and then settle, and the relationships can hold it.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: The children we have met in this series were never broken.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: They were adapting intelligently as best they could to the emotional worlds around them.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: And when those worlds become more understandable, more stable, more containing, the children themselves begin to change.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they were forced to, but because they no longer needed to protect themselves in the same way.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: In a sense, it's about changing the environment, changing the atmosphere, creating something which enables a child to let go of everything as much as possible that they've used to defend themselves with.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: In creating these conditions, what we see and what happens is something quiet but profound.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: The child who was once surviving finally, finally begins to live.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: These podcasts are intended for parents.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because parents are the people who are charged with the responsibility for raising healthy small people.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: In my book, Small People Big Lives, it will be possible to look into all of these things in more detail and with a bit more theoretical and clinical information, but the story is just the same.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially, children experience and change in relationship.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I do hope that this has been a helpful series for you.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: In the next, I'm going to be looking at the psychology of criminality in adolescence.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: And this is prompted by some recent research, which is quite concerning.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: But once again, it prompts me to think how have children reached this point?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: What would have happened if that will be coming soon?
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.