19th November: The Attachment Research Community (ARC) Annual Conference

Kicking things off on the 19th, we’ll join the Attachment Research Community (ARC) Annual Conference again as proud sponsors. We’ll be sharing insights into our Gold Pathway for our Attachment and Trauma Programme and how we’re supporting schools to use relational practices. Our whole school Attachment and Trauma programme aligns with ARC’s campaign to raise awareness of Attachment and Trauma needs within schools across England. We’re looking forward to connecting with leading researchers, practitioners, and educators who are as passionate about creating attachment-aware schools as we are.

The theme this year is Creating a Relational Solution - Improving outcomes for children and young people through connecting the Education, Health, Social Care and Criminal Justice systems. Our team will be discussing how high-quality, trauma informed training can support those working with young people to improve outcomes.

We can’t wait to engage with experts and discuss insights on supporting secure attachment and holistic approaches to learning.

20th November: Schools and Academies Show

The very next day, you’ll find us exhibiting at of the Schools and Academies Show (SAAS), where we cannot wait to meet with leaders in education and discuss new ways to enhance children’s education.

We’ll be sharing our best and latest resources for educators, specifically designed to empower schools with high-quality training that make a genuine impact on pupils and staff alike.

Excitingly, our team will be launching our brand new Empowered Parenting Bundle of online Click Learning courses for parents, and offering free trials – and a range of goodies – at Stand K4. Come and have a chat about how we’re helping schools and the educators that keep them going.

See you there!

If you’re attending either event, be sure to come say hello! We’re excited to connect, share ideas, and see how we can all play a part in transforming education.

At the end of an intense yet rewarding day, mentoring individuals working in the front line of our social care world, I found myself replaying something that had come up for one of my mentees.

We had been considering our autonomic nervous system and the way in which we all have a very personal reaction to triggers. These may have been based on an experience so far back in our lives that we cannot pinpoint when our response was first programmed into us via experience. We were talking of our implicit memories.

In previous sessions we had explored our own childhood attachment experience that shapes our behaviour and our relationships. It had been easier to locate explicit childhood memories from our own memory, from family anecdotes and photos to piece together a journey through life that pinpointed how our attachment appeared to have been shaped. This was helpful when we began to identify our stress reactions to work related issues and to begin to reflect on how we care for ourselves once we notice our nervous system shifting up a gear.

As typical solution focused social care professionals, who work in a highly reflective profession, we try to learn more about our triggers and to understand the childhood experience that has shaped our response to them.  Why does my body think that this situation is a threat when my rational brain is telling me that I have no memory of any reasonable reason to be so triggered? And this is where we can find ourselves going down the rabbit hole of self-analysis and of self-criticism.  The rabbit hole of implicit memory.

On this occasion, this is where my brain did continue down that rabbit hole and end up in the entire rabbit warren with curiosity.  We are not just going back into our own implicit memory bank to problem solve why certain elements of our demanding jobs seem more challenging than others.

The neuroscientist, Dan Seigel, tells us in his book ‘mindsight’:  The New Science of Personal Transformation, the autonomic nervous system - which regulates bodily functions that we are not conscious of such as breathing, the heartbeat, and digestive process - is older than our physical form

‘the nervous system begins in the embryo as the ectoderm; the outer layer of cells becomes the skin. Certain clusters of these outer cells then fold inward to form a neural tube - the spinal cord... The whole nervous system sets up its basic scaffolding, its core architecture, during development in the womb. Genetics are important for determining how neurons will migrate and then connect to each other.’

So, simply put, down there in that wonderful rabbit warren I was contemplating that we inherit our ancestors DNA and are hardwired to their nervous system.  The heart of our relational well-being is literally the skin that shapes and defines what we typically refer to as ‘self’. It is hard wired with cellular memory from our ancestors. This is taking implicit memory to another level entirely and is telling us that the very structure and cells of our being, including our nervous system, were passed down from our ancestors that we have never met.

So - have you joined me down in my rabbit warren or are you being very sensible and choosing to just peer in from the entrance hole above?   If the way that I respond to the challenges of my demanding role in social care is, to a degree, shaped by, not just my experience, or even my parents experience, but also my grandparents, my great grandparents and their great grandparents’ experience ….  Do you get where I’m going with this?   Delving too far in to the causes and triggers may be my new stress factor and not be conducive to my wellbeing after all.

Insight is helpful.  Reflective practice and critical thinking are essential in our world of social care. But finding ways to hold us safe and steady in the here and now is also essential.

It’s a bit like holding these two things in our two hands. In one hand we are holding our awareness of traumatic situations and of challenging explicit and implicit memories ( both ours and our mentees).  In the other hand we are holding our deep core sense of OKness.

Finding ways to authentically hold these two things in balance is the key to mental health and wellbeing in the demanding profession of social care.  It is also the key to healthy relational practice in support of others.  For one hand we create our bespoke scaffolding using mindful techniques that gently bring us back to the here and now.  I wonder whether those of you that consider the science behind our amazing autonomic nervous system but choose to settle comfortably at the entrance to my rabbit warren, are actually already practicing a bit of mindfulness and are just sitting with what IS right here, with both hands nicely in balance, right now instead of chasing implicit memories back up their family tree.

The message from my evening reflection on my day supporting others:

We have two proverbial hands. If we always give a little time in our day to filling one hand with wellness, practices that develop a deep core sense of OKness, it will balance out the weight in the other hand that holds all of the heavy emotional knowing of things that we cannot unknow and that we hold for others.

Personally, I practice mindful meditation in its many forms. I don’t sit in formal meditation every single day and can be easily distracted, but I do practice enough, both formally and with mini mindful moments and mini emergency breath practices, that I instinctively go to one of my learned techniques to settle my mind as soon as I notice my nervous system telling me that I have been triggered. Now that I have pondered on how far back this nervous system of mine began to be shaped, I think I might add a little smile and a nod to my ancestors at the end of my next meditation practice.

Earlier this year I moved house and am now comfortably at home in my new abode – a perfect fit, meeting all my needs and greeds.  The garden remained a project-to-be-tackled over the summer holidays – a small but unruly wilderness of wild poppies and willowherb, bindweed and ground elder, all protected by the natural barbed wire of brambles and nettles.  I spent a lot of time with my secateurs and garden fork, clearing and pulling out deep tap roots, and turning over the soil.  It was very satisfying.  I realised as I worked that I was unconsciously making judgments, taking sides – so the two foxgloves I found were not consigned to the garden waste sacks with the other weeds but carefully lifted and planted in the cleared soil – protected species.  Worms that I disturbed and saw wriggling their distress signals, I would rescue and put back in ground that I had already turned … until a robin arrived, perched close by, with his head on one side, clearly waiting for his lunch.  His needs took precedence and a couple of worms would be sacrificed – left on the soil’s surface for him to feed on.  Slugs were also laid out for lunch – but ignored.

I tell you this, not because I think you are interested in my gardening, but because I realised as I gardened that I often take sides without even being aware of it.  At the time I was updating some training around the issues birth children experience in fostering families, and was reflecting on my own family’s experience, as we had started fostering when our birth children were quite young.  The research clearly demonstrates that birth children are resentful at having to compete with their foster sibs for parental time and attention, along with being expected to share toys and space – and sometimes even friends.(eg . Adams, E., Hassett, A. R., & Lumsden, V. (2018). ‘They needed the attention more than I did’: How do the birth children of foster carers experience the relationship with their parents? Adoption & Fostering, 42(2), 135–150).

In the conversations I have had with our birth children, who are now adult, they can acknowledge the gains (our family comprised a rich culture of social and ethnic diversity – and our children are now comfortable mixing with people from all walks of life and have embedded tolerances that many of their peers may lack) but they have also made it clear that there were times that they felt that their needs were being ignored as we focused more on the demands of our foster children.  I am sure I made choices instinctively  - based on need – so our foster children would often take precedence, one way or another, because I knew something of their earlier traumas and what they had survived.  Unconsciously, perhaps, I expected our birth children to understand that, even though they were so young.  I certainly told them – probably at least once a day - how much I loved them – but never shared with them the details of our foster children’s histories.

The self-awareness I now have, as I garden, I wish I had had when we first started fostering.  Children’s sense of hurt – and sometimes rage – at their parents taking sides with a foster sibling needs to be more sensitively validated and addressed than I think I managed to achieve with our children.