Latest / Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour / The Psychology Of Adolescent Criminality. Ep 3. The Unseen Child & Acting Out

Transcript

The Psychology Of Adolescent Criminality. Ep 3. The Unseen Child & Acting Out · Inside The Consulting Room - Understanding the Child Behind the Behaviour

• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, this is Kim Lee, child and adolescent psychotherapist.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to this series, Understanding the Psychology of Adolescent Criminality.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm going to focus in this episode on attachment loss and something we refer to as acting out behaviors.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's a particular kind of silence that can live inside some children, and it's not the silence of calm or the silence of in in a peace.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's the silence that occurs as a consequence of not being reached.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: A child can sit at a table, be spoken to, be provided for, and yet they can feel as though they are not fully there.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes the only way that silence is broken is through action.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: So welcome back to Inside the Consulting Room.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: In the last episode we explored the developing brain and the role of impulse.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to go deeper because not all behavior begins in the moment.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Most often it is something that has begun in relationship.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Now, attachment is something I've spoken about before, but every child develops an internal expectation, and it's will I be seen?
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Will I be understood?
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Even will someone come when I need them.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And these expectations form quietly over time, and when they're uncertain, something shifts, and it's not always visibly, but often profoundly.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reminded of a fourteen-year-old boy who was referred to me following a multitude of incidents of seemingly insignificant theft, small things, phone charges, headphones, stationery, nothing of great significant value, and actually not things that he needed.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Everything seemed unnecessary.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: And his his parents were completely confused and baffled by why would he need to do that?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: There's no deprivation and there is no obvious reason.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, times like that, I think, no, maybe the reason isn't obvious, but it doesn't mean there isn't one.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: When uh I mate with him, I ask things like, so when you take things, what's that like?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, I don't know.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: I d I don't know.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Well, what do you what's it like before beforehand?
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, I don't I don't know.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I said, okay, well, and when you do it, what's that like?
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, It's good.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, Okay.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: So we sit and he avoid he avoids eye contact, he doesn't initiate anything, and I think he's feeling a con a combination of guilt and shame and overexposure.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: And pretty much all of his responses are brief, but over time something begins to emerge, and it has to do with the home.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: He describes his parents as busy, both academics, both highly committed professionals.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: But he says things which suggest that the conversations are functional, that the sorts of things that get spoken about are to do with practicalities or just functional things.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: There seems to be little evidence of emotional exchanges, things that are like you know meaningful connections.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And he says that sometimes evenings are just everyone just doing their own thing.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So this you know sense of no connectedness.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I ask him what it what's that like being in that in that kind of situation, and he says it's like no one would notice if I wasn't there.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't help, although I don't say it, I can't help but think, no, you're probably right, because that sentence is where the work really begins.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Over several sessions we return to the stealing, and it occurs to me maybe the word stealing is harsh because it carries a judgmental connotation.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So I start saying when you take things that don't belong to you rather than when you steal or commit an act of theft.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And what I'm really interested in is what's going on underneath the act, what what is happening before?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: And he says, There's this feeling like something is about to happen.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I say, Where where does this feeling live in your body?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: And he points to his chest.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, When when you take things that that aren't yours, what happens to the feeling?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it just goes.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: When I do it, it's like I'm actually there.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Now the act itself is not about the object, it's about in that moment becoming real, creating a sensation, interrupting what must feel like an emotional absence or void.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: So for this boy, taking things that don't belong to him becomes a way of taking from a world that can't see him and who could not be received relationally.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, none of this is logical, but that's not what we're talking about.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: When a child's emotional world is underattended to, they do not simply cope, they adapt.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that adaptation takes the form of withdrawal, numbness, or action.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: Now, similarly, a 15-year-old girl was presenting with repeated involvement in low-level criminal activity.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was shoplifting, vandalism, and occasional aggression.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: And when she first enters therapy, she's very guarded, anticipating that I'm somebody else who's going to give her a hard time.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: Even a bit defiant, I don't care, she says.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, yes, she does, but she can't allow herself to come into contact with caring because she wouldn't know what to do.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: But slowly something begins to change, and she begins to speak about her early child, not spontaneously, but because I gently inquire about different things that she may have may remember and who does what in the family and how things are.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: And little by little more and more comes out, and very often what comes out can be quite shocking.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Oddly enough, when children communicate these things, they do so with what we call absence of affect, meaning that they describe something quite often in a factual way because it's been normalized.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Now, for her, alcohol was a daily feature in the family for the parents.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So too was conflict, and she would withdraw because that was the safest thing to do.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So emotional safety was really unpredictable, and she would be alert to anything that indicated that alcohol might come into the room, so to speak.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And she described lying in bed at night, just listening, waiting, not being able to sleep, and uh not knowing what what would happen next.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: So this isn't simply history, this is the architecture of this girl's internal world, i.e., how her internal world is put together, and she has no control over the architecture because she's never been helped to see it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: When she describes the act or the offending, she says it's not scary, it's actually calmer than being at home, which is a really odd thing to say, but on the other hand, there's clearly something that's happening that is that that that gives her something that, albeit in a short-term way, helps her.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, we know that in the eyes of the law, quite rightly, that is not behavior that we can leave unchecked.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So for her, somehow, crime becomes a predictable, contained, and structured experience in contrast to an internal world shaped by uncertainty, fear, and emotional volatility in a curious kind of way.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: She's got no control over those things, but she does have control over what she takes, over what she does.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say that, I don't mean control and she can choose to and choose not to, although there she did give examples of when she stopped herself.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: But we're talking about a young person.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: In my view, behaviors that appear chaotic are often an attempt to create some kind of control.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: You see this a lot with conditions like OCD and self-harm and eating disorders where in their own curious way they give the person or allow the person to have a sense of control.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: But it's momentary and it keeps having to be repeated.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Now, with attachment types, we have to we have to understand that some children learn I don't need anyone, so they develop an avoidant attachment type.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Others uh might develop a kind of I need you but I don't trust you.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: We call that ambivalent.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: And some experience something that's even more confusing and destructive.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: You are safe and you're frightening.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that is what we call disorganized attachment or the basis for it.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: I used the term earlier of acting out.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Acting out is the expression of something, finding expression through behavior, so it becomes a language, a signal, and also a form of regulation, not because the child chooses it, but because they have no other reliable way or language to express what they feel.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: And if you grow up in a household where when you try and do that, you get ignored, shouted down, what you feel is reframed, then it's really simple, you just stop saying it.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: When we see behavior that troubles us, we're often only looking at the surface.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: But beneath that surface, there may be so many things, unfelt and unprocessed grief, unspoken fear, unmet need.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And a child trying in the only way that they can to be felt.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: When a child can't rely on being held in mind, they may begin to act in ways that force the world to notice them.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes what looks like defiance is actually an expression, a question, am I here?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Can anyone see me?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I don't think, well, I think I know these things aren't conscious intentional acts, they are reactions.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I talk a lot about the difference between reactions and responses.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Reactions don't have thoughts, responses do.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: Reactions are those things that happen.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: And of course there's an explanation, but our task is to enable the understanding, enable the thinking, the awareness, understand the architecture of the child concerned.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: In every case, absolutely every case I've worked with over so many years, every child's difficulties have an explanation.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the explanation, as I said in the last podcast, is not an excuse.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's not what I do.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not here to excuse, I'm here to explain, in the hope that the explanation can lead to change.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: So where criminality is concerned, yes, it can be explained.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: The what we have though is is something of an oil and water situation, in as much as uh the judicial process is interested in establishing facts to ascertain guilt or innocence.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit unfair to say that that is all that they do.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: As a clinician, I'm interested in identifying what it is that has given rise to those things which have found expression in the way that they have.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I am approached by um police forces who want to talk to me about a case that I may have worked with many years ago.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: They might want me to disclose information, to pass over notes if I still have them after many years.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason that they're doing this is because, and bearing in mind this might very well be for a victim of crime rather than a perpetrator, but both have been true.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Their purpose is evidence gathering.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're looking for corroboration because they want to put together a case that they can then pass through to the Crown Prosecution Service in order to gain a conviction.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: They want to get the case into court.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now that's entirely reasonable, and I don't have a problem with that.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: However, that is a very different set of principles to the ones that I have to operate by, because I have to think about the consequences of disclosure.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: I have to think about whether or not the patient is going to be potentially re-traumatized, what the patient's position is in terms of me passing that information on.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that doesn't have to do with the Crown Prosecution Service.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: It could ultimately have a closer relationship with adult mental health services.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: So it it is oil and water, and I have no I'm not attaching any blame to those services because they're doing the job they're supposed to do.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: But seldom is it the case that they will ask why something has happened.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: They're interested in prosecution.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the way the system works.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: But alongside that, we do have to ask why.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why is this happening?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: We have to understand it, and there isn't any point asking a young person, why do you do it?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: What we have to do is create the space in which that comes to the surface as a consequence of us facilitating, helping the young person find the words that can help us to see the internal architecture.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: In the next episode, we're going to look at shame, identity, and what might be called the criminal self.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening.