An interview with social worker and author, Rhian Taylor (Ep.22)

The link for Rhian Taylor's book is here: 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fosterboy-Rhian-Taylor/dp/183816202X

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Fosterboy-by-Rhian-Taylor/9781838162023

 The Gaps website article discussed is here - https://gaps.org.uk/how-to-make-a-social-worker-reflections-on-social-work-education/

E-mail for Rhian: Rhian.c.taylor@outlook.com

BASW Child Protection Master Class Series:

https://www.basw.co.uk/basw-child-protection-masterclass-series

Any questions please contact me on richdevinesocialwork@gmail.com

Follow my blog, where you can be sent fortnightly blogs on topics covered on this podcast: https://richarddevinesocialwork.com/about/

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Transcript

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Hi. Look into which device social work practice, poke class. Hey step by wrench. Odd. It was essential worker. His podcast is about practice related issues, self development and transformation. It will give you knowledge, ideas and practical tools for being a fantastic social worker, supporting you of assessment skills. Direct work, dealing with conflict. And importantly, helping you make a positive difference in the lives of children and families. Hello. And welcome back. Too. My task. Before I get into today's episode. I just wanted to mention the balance with child protection, social practice masterclass series. Which is actually beginning for the first session next week on the 27th of April, 2023. And the first session. Is looking at why it is hard to talk to children and child protection. And identifying key principles and practical tools to help you overcome the challenges to capture the child's voice and build lasting relationships. In fact, I've just realized it's on Wednesday, the 26th of April, not the 27th. So. If you're interested in that. Please do check it out at Child protection masterclass series. And I also have several other. Masterclasses that I'll be running throughout the year. Really looking at the issues that I think face frontline practitioners. Um, so I'd really appreciate it. If you would share it with your colleagues or the workforce development teams or whoever might be interested.'cause I'm really hoping it will support and benefit social workers trying to do that job. And so any help I can receive in chairing. The master class series would be wonderful. And. Whilst I'm on the. Topic of asking for requests. If you enjoy this episode or any of the episodes, I'd be super, super grateful. If you could leave a review. I don't leave many reviews. So I do feel slightly hypocritical in asking other people to. But it that when I have done it, it literally takes two seconds to leave a star rating. So, if you are able to do that, That would be very gratefully received. Now in today's episode, I speak with Rian Taylor. Who is a social worker in an ACAMS team for looked after children Rianna, and I have known each other for a few years now, after we met. On, as we were both on the what works. For children's social care stakeholder advisory group. Which were no longer part of. But we've kept in touch. She has many years experience as a practitioner and as an academic, I'm a trainer. And she's written for community care and organization called gaps and collaborated with research and practice. She's also the author of a book called foster boy, which was published in. 2020. And in this episode, we talk about. Rianne. Experiences as a social worker and the common thread throughout her career. Being an academic and the way in which social work is currently taught. Yeah. Academic for a long time. We look at the value of remaining connected to frontline practice. And some of the challenges when you're not continuing to work children and families. The role of self analysis and the flat tuning, cultivating empathy. And we also talked about her book, foster boy. Which is wisdom for teenagers. And apparently that might be my reading age because I've found it. Uh, brilliant. Accessible. Read. And foster boy follows the story of Phoenix. And the 11 year old who comes into foster care. After he finds his mother unconscious from a drug overdose. And he ends up being placed with newly approved and middle-class foster carers. The Whitaker's. And the story is essentially told from the perspective for Phoenix. And then the foster carers daughter. 15 year old, Sasha. Who is under a lot of pressure from a high achieving family. And has mixed feelings about her parents fostering, and as you'll hear in the interview, it's a really brilliant book in terms of capturing. What it's like from the experience of a foster child coming into a new home, but also what it's like to be enough. Uh, child or parents who decide to foster. And in looking and talking about her book. We discuss. The role of story to facilitate empathy, understanding, and insight. We examine the impact for the family, caring for a foster child. The role of class, the role of the social worker from the child's perspective. The challenge, uh, for children in care, being able to share that true, false and feelings. And a new term that I learned about speaking to rearm, which was vicarious resilience. I finally thoroughly enjoyed speaking with Ryanne. I think she has an incredibly thoughtful, reflective. Psychologically insightful practitioner. Who has a lovely way about her. Whenever I speak to her or interact with her, I always come away feeling more positive. And I think she has quite a. Quiet and profound wisdom about life relationships and social work, but I really appreciate. I would really. Recommend you check out her book, foster boy, which can be found in Amazon. And I will leave links to articles and her book in the show notes, along with her email address, should you wish to contact her? So without further ado. Here is my conversation with Ryanne Taylor. Hi, Mian. Thank you for joining me on today's episode. Hi, nice to be here. Could you, just by way of an introduction, share a little bit about your journey into social work and the various roles that you've held since you've qualified? Okay. So this could take a while because I'm very, I'm pretty old now, so I've been a qualified social worker for 27 years. And I came after working in an addiction rehab unit actually, and then originally trained in the probation stream when we used to have the probation stream in social work training. But most of my roles since then have been in children's services, starting with youth offending and mainly with teenagers. So then working with cares running. Cares service working in fostering. And at that point I started, I was also being a part-time teacher with the Open University. So I was kind of always, I started about probably 15, 20 years ago doing a kind of combined role where I would be doing quite a lot of teaching and training as well as being a practice manager at that point. And then about 10 years ago, I moved to the University of Kent, where I became a lecturer there. So I spent seven years at the University of Kent, where I was predominantly lecturing. I still did some work with local authorities, some kind of freelance work, and. Two and a half years ago, or just over two years ago, I moved from academia and I moved back into a a and I looked after a team in Cams four, looked after children. So we do a lot of therapeutic work. We've looked after children. So I spent half my week there and then I spent the other half of my week doing teaching and training. And is that been like a common thread that's gone through your career and the work that you've done? And what's been some of the underlying kind of reasons for moving from different teams into different teams? Yeah, I, I can certainly see, see a theme of working with teenagers. That's been a really large part of my work, although I do work with some younger children now, and that's really lovely. I think there's a theme of me wanting to learn. I always want to learn and develop. And that's definitely been a, been a, a theme of, you know, one of the things I'm really so grateful for in the profession, just how interesting it is. Mm-hmm. And how just there is always the potential to learn and grow. I remember an old manager telling me, there's not gonna be, you know, it's not the best career for financial, for financial game, but you'll always, you'll always get the personal growth in this job. So maybe there's a theme of that, that I'm always learning. And I suppose for me, there's the different parts of myself. I think that the part of myself, which is a practitioner and wants to be closer to the ground of the work, and then a part of myself that likes that kind of analytical teaching side, and I've been really fortunate, really, that I can keep both alive. Mm-hmm. I feel really fortunate when I was just doing the kind of analytical teaching work, I missed that feeling of being on the ground. Connecting with people that you get from practice the privilege really of that, even the kind of vulnerability of that as well. Mm-hmm. It does keep you, you know, it keeps you realizing just how difficult this work is, which is quite important to hold when you're doing all the theory and the thinking, which can, because you can, can all, it's all great in theory, isn't it? We all know what to do, so it's helpful to remind myself to be kept kind of very grounded by the fact, often with my casework, I don't know what I'm doing and kids are shouting at me and I'm getting it wrong in relationships and that, that, that's a really important kind of thing to hold alongside sort of anything that's more theoretical or, or teaching based. Yeah, I've definitely noticed that if I step away from practice, In my role do parenting assessments, but then I also workforce development responsibilities. And if I step away from practice even for a couple of weeks, I very quickly become quite idealized about what social work is and what it should be and what it could be, and unintended consequences of that de detachment. And that looking down with kind of an idealism is that you can then become quite critical of what social worker is and what social workers are doing as if like when you are in the, on the ground, that you are not as, as, I don't know, valuable or prone to making mistakes as they are when you are in that kind of position. And so I, I definitely resonate with what you're saying about being connected to practice and how it makes you deal with the unknown and the uncertainty and yeah, not having the answers all the time. I think that's really important. And also as someone who's prone to go into the head mm-hmm. You know, I like quite li I mean I like, I like quite like being in my head, you know, that I know my challenge is to keep, keep rooting to kind of the heart and the emotions. Mm-hmm. And I think when you're just doing sort of analytical teaching work, you're in environment often, particularly if you're in a university as I was, where everyone's like that. So that kind of thing you describe is, is, is then become, can become the culture that, you know, we know how, you know, that kind of slightly critical, like you say, you know, ideally we want, we wanna do it a particular way. Mm-hmm. So it's really helpful I think, to keep rooting to the kind of emotions of the job. And for me it's not getting lost in the head and actually it's the body as well. I would say. It's not just bringing the, kind of, bringing it down from thoughts to, to the heart, to the feelings. Also noticing. That we bring our bodies to this work as well. You wrote a really brilliant piece for gaps, which is an organization that promotes kind of systemic thinking, therapeutic relationship based approaches in which you described your transition from academia back into practice and that it was titled How to Make a Social Worker Reflections on Social Work Education. What, what inspired you to write that piece? If you can recollect? Cause I think it was a couple of years ago now that you, you wrote it. Yes. I think it was important to me because it's an unusual journey really. I think there's a sort of sense that when you get to a kind of an academic job that you know, and there are lots of privileges with it, so it's a big decision to give up some of the privileges of that work. There's also lots of challenges. It's actually really hard work in loads of ways and as it's practiced, but, but there's I, I knew it was a really difficult decision and I suppose a bit of me wanted to explain some of that. So it, it felt I left about six months so I could sort of sit with some of my thoughts cuz I didn't want it to be reactive. And again, whenever you write something and another two years, I'd probably write it differently. But I wanted to talk about some of my worries cuz I was worried. It's a bit easy to say our students aren't prepared for practice and some people are brilliantly and some are amazing, but there is some stuff in the system which makes it really hard to train social workers in the way I would've liked to. And that the, there was, and, and really this is not a. About individuals, sort of lecturers. It's, it's the fact that higher education is a system on, on its own, really. And it's about, it's an amazing thing. You know, it's really important. Universities need to progress their research and they need to do all those things. Those are really important things. But sometimes when you're teaching social work in those environments, they are, are some real ethical conflicts cuz that those people who lead your departments aren't signed up to social work values. They're not from that background. They, they're higher education people and they're doing the right thing for higher education. But there are some challenges then with feeling like you are given or your social work students, everything they need to be prepared for practice. So I wanted to express some of those worries that I had hopefully in a, in a, in a, in a, in a thoughtful way. Because one of the themes of the article, what, what's your sense that in academia, There was a slight disproportionate focus to teaching students around some of the social structural issues that impact upon children and families, which obviously, and quite importantly is required in terms of an exploration and an understanding. But you felt like that sometimes that was given a level of attention that wasn't proportionate to some of the other areas around psychology and relationships? Is that, yeah, and, and the emotions of doing the job because how we feel about doing the job are emotions that come up in the relationships with people, to me, determined so much of the quality of our work. And I did feel that, I think the social location, understanding the societal issues just absolutely vital. So in no way would I wanna suggest that, that we shouldn't, shouldn't be doing. We really need to be psychosocial. But what I was seeing was not much of the psycho, bit of the psychosocial that that, and I could see why that happened because it's quite more difficult to teach in in big groups. There are some structural stuff in universities. We were teaching in big lecture theaters and it was difficult to get more sort of personal teaching where you could really explore things like attachment, people's own attachment histories, if you're teaching big groups, if the numbers are large, if you're not getting safe spaces and rooms where you can do that in a kind of safe way. It's quite difficult and it's quite easy then to stick to the head stuff the, and in some ways that is easier to do the sociological stuff. Mm-hmm. So for me, I would really want social workers to do more inputs. On particularly, I suppose I think about attachment on trauma related stuff, but that involves looking at your own. That's not just heads stuff. They would need to be, students would need to be supported to do that well in terms of their own self-awareness and how that stuff impacted on them and how that's gonna impact on the relationships they have when they qualify. Now that's actually hard, quite hard to do at the moment with some of the pressures on universities. And. I feel that stuff's really important. I'd really love it if students could explore their own attachment history as pa part of their courses. And we're really looking at their, what they bring to relationships, their triggers, what's gonna come up for them in conflictual relationships. And of course many students are doing that on placement. So I'm not at all saying that people haven't done that, they are doing that. But I wanted it to be also in the academy as well, not just reliant on practice educators, cuz it's a lot to ask practice educators to be responsible for all that. And we've got brilliant practice educators in this field. But I wanted there to be more of that teaching in the, in the sort of main provision of, of social work training. Cuz it does feel that that really helps people when they get to practice. I dunno if you, you've got any thoughts on that because you've done a lot on attachment. Yeah. So I. Developed an interest in, in attachment theory after beginning practicing as a social worker and then working with parents where I was trying to make sense of how they'd come to develop some of the difficulties that they'd developed. And because I, I, I always thought that most people for the want to do good or they want to be a good partner, they want to be a good wife, they want to be a good husband, they want to be a good parent. So then if they were acting in a way that was compromised in their ability to do that, I wasn't particularly inclined to be judgemental. I was more mm-hmm. Interested about, well, what's happened in your life that meant that you are not able to care for your child in the way that you would want to. And then when you'd ask people questions about, or how is it that you've come to develop a problem with drugs or alcohol? Or, how is it that you've come to believe that acting coercively or controlling is a way that you convey your love to somebody? Then I was always kind of directed back to their childhood. And then what would be revealed is a certain set of conditions where they would necessitate to develop ways of coping with D adversity and those ways of coping helped them in that situation. And then it carried forward those strategies development. And what, what I really loved about attachment theory was that it helped me massively understand what I was observing with children and the parents that I were working with in terms of the strategies and the ways that of coping that they were developing, but also that it helped me to make sense of myself. Mm-hmm. And so I'm not particularly keen on ideas or theories that get used. With people over there. So there's a certain theory or certain, certain ideas that we apply to the parents, but, but that aren't self relevant in some sense. Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that I learned around attachment theory for me was like growing up with my dad who mis drugs and alcohol that my mum who was depressed, that I developed a kind of convulsed compulsive caregiving strategy. Mm. Which was to minimize and deny my own feelings, especially negative feelings, and then try and please and implicate my mom. And that was a strategy that served me quite well actually in social work. But it also came a cost in terms of my ability to be intimate within relationships to, to my wife and to my children. Yeah. And and that awareness. Helped me to appreciate how difficult it was or is to overcome that type of strategy. So for like the last several years I've been in various types of I suppose you'd call it therapy or self-help. Mm-hmm. Where I've been trying to undo the strategy that served and kept me safe in my childhood. Because it's no longer serving me in, in, in my adult life, cuz the context is very different. And so I think that's what's available when you look at topic like attachment period is a, it can help you to understand other people but also it can give you a level of insight and, and that level of insight will, will cultivate some self-awareness, but also hopefully some empathy for how hard it's to change patterns of behavior and. We'll create a level that insight that you've developed through that hard work, through that hard learning from, we'd say in training, from the training from the inside out, you're starting with yourself. I don't know. That sounds like empathy to me. That sounds like connection cuz it comes from a place of em of vulnerability. Hmm. And interestingly, we might go on to talk about this, but one of the things in the novel I wrote was I thought a lot about people don't want pity. They don't want an intellectual understanding of their problems. They want exactly what you've described. Someone who is working at this stuff themselves, who can see it, who sees it in themselves to some extent. Mm-hmm. And that sounds like a more kind of genuine empathy. Yeah. From that kind of understanding where we're looking at ourselves and we're looking at other people and we're able to make the connections. And it reminds me This quote by Carl Young where he talks about you can really only meet people to the degree to which you've kind of met yourself. Yeah. And so there are kinda unresolved issues or elements of yourself that you haven't yet confronted. It's gonna be very difficult for you to be able to be the space or be the relationship where other people can confront those aspects of themselves. Yeah. And this work just brings out so many strong feelings. And again, for me it's been, I've been drawn back to a lot of psychoanalytic ideas around defenses cuz I could see my own. And it's been incredibly helpful to understand defenses in the light of my own response to the strong feelings that come up in the relationships that I, my work relationships or my teams as well as my work with service users. And to understand that and that gives me a much greater understanding of what my, what I see in, in the people I'm working with. So let's talk about your book foster Boy, when did you, when was this book published? So, it was published two years ago in the middle of lockdown, which isn't the most sensible time to publish a book. So it's how do you come to write a book? Okay. Seems like a completely alien idea to me that you would think a, that you would even think about it in a book. You would then actually write it. I think it was a little bit of my rebellion about against academia cuz I was in this environment where it was very head focused. We were, you know, trying to, we'd always, you know, we were very much living in our heads and there's a part of me that was aware that I'm really influenced by stories. And when you're a social worker, you're living in the stories, you're living in people's stories and stories, if you are open to them, really help you learn about the other and they really help you learn. Potentially they open you up to a, an an empathy, which, I mean, it's not the same as going through things yourselves, but if you really read with imagination and engage with stories or you watch things and you are really, your emotions are open to, to learning from people's stories. And I thought that was very powerful. Cause I think that's how I've always learned. So really for my career I should have been registering for a PhD or writing a textbook. But I saw these, you know, there seemed to be a lot of them and I didn't see many gaps. Mm-hmm. And I was like, there's so few stories about children in care particularly, but I was also interested about the profession cuz one of the other things which was concerns us assist how social workers portrayed in the profession. And I wanted to write a good social worker. Hmm. Because I was wondering how are we gonna change this view of view of the profession? And obviously it's only one story, but I want, I did want to sort of put something in the public domain, which might give us sort of slightly different view of social workers. Of course. I then had to work out how to do it and I took a very simple approach. I just thought I can, I try to write a thousand words a day for 60 days. Oh wow. And that's, that's it. I wrote a young, my novel was based for young adults, and that's the short, I mean, I wrote a much longer than that in the end, cuz I started to really enjoy it. But that's how I started it. So one of those, I tried to build up the habit and make it achievable and then it, I really enjoyed the writing a thousand words per day for 60 days. Yeah. I didn't do weekends and I could find the time to write a thousand words a day. How, how long would it take to write a thousand words a day, roughly? Oh, I can't remember. I'm sure I pre vacated a lot, but I love the, I, I started to love it and that makes the difference. It didn't mean there wasn't discipline cuz I had to get my, I had to sit on that chair and stay in, in the chair. But it became a pleasure once I could, once I got myself in the chair and I, you know, I, I'm sure I did lots of avoidance as well, but I did really love the process of just submerging myself in a character. So can you talk a little bit about the book and the storyline? Yeah. So one of the other things I was interested in was how few stories there were about children in care. Someone has a, a care experience person has said to me, oh, I'm so fed up with Tracy Beaker because everyone in school thinks that's what my life's like. You know, there's a single story and I think it's Chi Amanda, UCCI Didi, who says, is written a brilliant Ted Talk or presented a brilliant Ted talk on the danger of a single story. Mm-hmm. So I, I thought there should be more stories about children in care. So that was one the sort of basis of what I was interested in. And I had this idea of a child who was on the edge of care, who lived with his mum, who was an addict, and then saw her overdose, found her after overdosing, and then went into care and he'd had that kind of history where they'd be, he'd been, they'd been kind of running away from social services. But the other thing I was trying to do, cuz I, I dunno if what you find, but I've, I felt aware that as a social worker, sometimes you live in two worlds. There was my nice, kind of like, I live in Quirk, sort of a, I don't know, a posh town basically, but I live on an estate. And I was, I've been working in Patch as a manager, so I'd kind of know that there were difficult things going on for families, not far from where I live. And I, yeah, I'd be living in this nice bubble of my family and I always, yeah, I was sort of dealing with could I ever, what would, what would, so I knew those kids having difficult times and I suppose I, I'd play with the fantasy, could you do anything? What if you were their foster carer? What if you took'em in, you know? And. And I think it was just, I was always sort of intrigued by that. Could you ever make these two worlds come together or people's worlds so different? Mm-hmm. So what I did was my idea was that I'd write from, with the perspective of the child who is being taken into care and from a child in the foster family who was in this quite sort of well-to-do Area, this kind of middle class world. And what would they, with a very do gooding kind of progressive left wing kind of intention to try and help would what, what would happen if you brought those worlds together? And I was interested in mental health issues cuz you've got the kind of trauma of the child being taken to cow, dealing with so much staff. But also I know that I've got two girls, two teenage girls. I know there's a lot of issues for young women in those kind of middle class environments. Mm-hmm. There are a lot of mental health issues and, but how do you compare them? Because that was my dilemma as a professional working with kids in these incredibly traumatized situations and then also having children in these very different worlds. And they didn't seem to match. They didn't, they weren't together very much. There's not enough mixing, there's not enough. You know, so I was interested in those two kind of issues. How would you bring them together? So I wrote from the perspective of the child, I'd write one chapter from the child's perspective. Then I took this other character as a 15 year old girl in this foster family. And that they're just starting fostering. They wanna do good, they wanna be nice, they wanna be kind, they wanna make a difference and they wanna help the poor kids. You know? So they wanted to rescue really. Hmm. And I wanted to explore that. So that was my idea. And I, I then took it from there. In exploring these two narratives, how would they get on? Would they ever find empathy for each other? Can you connect? What's the difference between, as we were saying earlier, pity, which is what really the rescuing family wanted to, wanted to do. And how and how does that feel as a child, you know, with the kind of issues that this child was bringing yet also a lot of strength. This kid was brilliant. He was sharp, he was wonderful, like wonderful. Character really for me, I absolutely loved him. Mm-hmm. He lived in my head for a long time, so I talk about him like a real person. Yeah, it was a really interesting way of that the book being presented, cuz it, like you said, you had the, the perspective of Phoenix, the 11 year old boy who was, who was brought into foster care as a result of his Islam's drug overdose. And then you have the perspective of Sasha, the 15 year old who'd grown up in this middle class family. And then as the book, the book storyline proceeded by alternating between these two different versions of similar events essentially. So you go from Phoenix's perspective to sas, back to Phoenix's, back to Sasha's and it really encapsulated the complexity of multiple perspectives and coming from different worlds really. Well I think. And it also massively cuz as a social worker, My role is the responsibility of the child, and then I, if we remove children, you place them into foster care. And although you have to make sure that there's a good match between the, the, the child that comes into care and the foster family, I don't really get that involved in some of the internal dynamics and some of the internal relationships. But this book really illustrated how the challenges of, for example, Sasha, the 15 year old growing up with parents who were quite pressurized in relation to her academic performance, then happened to contend with having another child move into her family home. And then the challenges it created for the foster parent, the dad who was very driven and work focused, and the mum who was taking on the role of the foster carer and I think who had wanted to do it a bit more than the dad. And so playing outta that conflict between the couple. Mm-hmm. And so it just really beautifully allowed me to see a different perspective and a different world that I hadn't really thought about really. Until, until I've read it and, and it's voice that's not often the child in the foster families. There's not a lot of of support for those children. It's a big thing to show your family, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think I'd really ever even considered it until I, I, I'd read the book not, not properly. Mm-hmm. I was interested in comparative suffering as well. Cause quite often she was going through some difficult stuff, bullying in school. This pressurized pressure from her parents. They all wanted to be a doctor. She's, she's trying to individuate really and explore, find out what she really wants to be. And feeling a lot of anxiety about school. But she's always, she knows that cuz, cuz of the child living with her, that her problems are, which she would say she kept, I think in the book I had her say, you know, these, I know I've just got first world problems. You know, I know these problems are nothing compared to you, but these are strong feelings still and are they valid? And this issue of comparative suffering, I think is difficult for us. I find it difficult working in the field because I know that my stuff, my, my com, my my own complaints, you know, my own things I struggle with, you know are comparatively so minor, yet they're still, you know, do they, are they real to me, that thing, like if your legs broken, it's still hurting kind of thing. But I think when we work in this field, it's quite easy for us to minimize our own needs for lots of reasons, isn't it? And if you were a child living in that family, it would be very hard to sort of, to say, actually my needs are important here. I'm finding this difficult. Yeah, I hadn't really thought of that comparative suffering idea before, but it's definitely a thing, isn't it? And I think for, for me, one of the ways in which, like I used to minimize or dismiss the emotional effect of my experiences, the difficulties I had grown up was, well, it isn't as bad as, mm-hmm. And so, yeah, I haven't picked up on that idea around Sasha who is under rem pressure to perform academically in her middle class home and how that compares to who has been removed. Cuz his, because of his mom's kind overdose and drug and alcohol problem, could, could you talk a little bit about Phoenix and how you developed him as a character? So, he's an 11 year old boy and I think one of the reasons I was interested in him, cuz often we don't, we don't really maybe attribute the. A sort of deep inner life to, to boys of that age, we can be a bit dismissive. Oh, they're just on their gate, they're on their computers, they're on their PlayStations. Mm-hmm. How do you, so I was kind of interested in then developing a voice for him. And that was hard because it would've been nice to, cuz he's not gonna articulate his feelings, so I had to do quite a lot. Because he wasn't gonna talk about his feelings. I think he did have a rich inner life. But in terms of the, the dialogue I was writing, it was often like, you know, I dunno he was not gonna say what he's feeling, so how do I communicate this trauma man? And how do I communicate his inner, inner life? Life and just how hard things were for him. So a lot of that I found as I was writing that I knew it would be in the body. So he had lots of stomach aches and he'd feel a knot in his stomach because he wouldn't be able to kind of articulate. The strength of the feeling. So I became very aware of kind of trauma being held in the body as I wrote that voice. And I, I suppose I became increasingly aware of just how little he was just an in this impossible bind. You know, he had to, he wanted to, to be back with his mom. So he couldn't tell the truth to the social worker. He was always having to kind of convey the narrative of his mom around needing to go back with her. So he was just constantly having to work out what to say, what not to say in difficult situations and just that it is a terrible dilemma to have to, to deal with. So I wanted to convey that and I wanted to convey his love for his mum and the tenderness of their relationship. I want, I wanted to do that. That was quite hard to do cuz he, he was, Dealing with incredibly difficult things because of his mom, but I wanted to convey his love for her and the complexity of that, and also the, his growing realization of how she'd let him down. And how do you hold that together? It's hard enough as a, as an adult, isn't it, to deal with kind of people's flaws to deal with the, the complexity of relationships, people who love us, and people who let that down. Now, as a child, how would you to hand often children have to do that. They have to deal with that incredibly complex position of people. They love letting them down. And our tendency as human beings is to split, isn't it, to, as a defensive mechanism, because that is almost impossibly hard to hold. So my mom has to be all good and, and everyone else, and the, the social services can be all bad, but how does a child deal with that dilemma? Yeah, I think that's what the book encapsulated really well was like these conflicting and contradictory feelings that he had towards his mom, but also his foster carers. Mm-hmm. And yet at times he would, he would articulate none of them to the, to the social worker. So and so, when you are a social worker working with a child, all you get is what they, what they give off. And what the book allowed to see is what might be experienced for a child who's facing the conflict of, eh, like wanting to go back and be with his mom and to love her, but also being fearful that things are gonna resort back to how it was before he came into care. Yeah. He wanted, I wanted to write a good social worker. This was my dilemma. Sorry, I had this thing before I started. Let's write a good social worker, cuz they're always in TV prints, they're always a bit, they've always got some major floor or something, you know, like even if they're. So, but I as, because I was in his voice and I was in his position, even though I wanted to write a good social worker, I knew I couldn't get him to like her all through the book. And she was doing amazing things for him. And I, I was doing, so she was like, she'd, and I, I knew what a sacrifice they'd be. So every week she'd pick him up and take him to see his dog through the tr and she'd drive through the traffic. And I was just thinking what a sacrifice that would've been when you've had this, when you know you've got your, whatever you've got to do in terms of your paperwork. And she's sitting in the traffic so he can see his dog. And she does amazing things for him. And she fights for his mom and she fights for him. But, so, you know, your instinct then my instinct as a kind of social worker was to want to get the kid to like her, to see that she was doing good for him. But I knew that that was never gonna happen when I was in his voice, when I was really imagining what it was like for him. It was never, she, he was never gonna see her, what she did. And he was never gonna really like her cuz she was, she's the one who took him into care when, after his mum overdosed. So he always had that image of her in his mind and that was an interesting contradiction. But again, that's life isn't it? Why should they like someone who's so involved in such traumatic things? So I had that contradiction. Yeah, it was a really interesting part that, of the story actually was like, cuz she, she was a genuinely nice carer and really hardworking social worker, but from Phoenix's point of view, he didn't see what was she was doing behind the scenes. So he could only make a judgment based on what Yeah, he made available to him. And there was a couple of bits where I've got them here where the social worker sh Sheray, is that her name? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Where she said to him, oh, leaving you to find her when she's overdosed is a form of emotional abuse. So Shiah Sharia had said the Phoenix that his mum leaving, leaving him to find her when she'd had an overdose as a form of emotional abuse. And then you arrived. I looked down at her. How come wanting to top yourself be abusive to me, mark was the one who was upset. Stupid social worker talk. So I just thought it was an interesting how the, the social worker was trying to convey what had happened to him, but the language just didn't resonate with how he Yeah. His perception and his experience is that his mom wanted to top himself was because she was upset. It wasn't to be abusive towards. And then there's another one where she puts when they're looking at reunification and this is from Phoenix. Shere said, we need to make sure she can prioritize your needs above her own needs. What the fuck did that mean? I was only happy if Mal was happy. We were a family. We needed the same things. And there's just things like that. Those kind of phrases kind of come off the tip of our tongue and we don't really think much about them. And it's not like they're untrue, but from, it just reveals what, how they might be received from a child's point of view. And it just really allowed you to like, think differently about how we practice with some of the children that we work with. I learned so much through thinking about things like that. It made me think about the jargon. And whenever I look through the book now, I like, I can see that that. Cuz she was, you know, she's a good social worker. This the phrase she were use was using was not, were not unrealistic. They're things I would say, you know, she wasn't like completely going for it with the jargon and the acronyms or whatever. These are the things, like you said, they're on the tip. You know, things that we do say or we try and explain, but they make really little sense if you're an 11 year old kid or maybe not do even a 15 year old or, or from a parent's point of view, a parent who really loves their child, what sense do they make? So it was, it really helped me to, to think differently about those things and be more cautious about the, the language that I use and just trying to see it from that other point of view. Mm-hmm. That. That's the benefit I think of it for me. I mean the main, I mean, I learned so much and to enter into that imaginative project, and I've been doing some work recently on mentalization, which in some ways is another word for what I was doing, and I did. It was transformative for me in helping me think, think about it more fully from another perspective, and I'd have hoped I did that anyway. But because it was so long and I spent so long in that voice, I did see it. I think it was more impactful. In terms of really trying to get into that experience, what, what would it feel like? What do these services feel like? What does it, I mean, I, when, you know, and stuff we don't wanna talk about. Mm-hmm. I was very interested in class and yeah. And I know I kind of played up. I I do feel in some ways I shortchanged lots of foster cares cuz there's so many stories that, which would be very different to tell about foster carers. I wanted to, I wanted to explore a particular thing around middle class sort of anxiety. So I chose quite a well off family. And of course that's not consistent, you know, there's lots of range. There's a huge range of foster carers out there, but, but there are issues of class and money that we don't talk about very much. And Phoenix, a lot of the time he is remind, he sort of says, you know, they are being paid to look after me. What? No. And of course, what does it feel like to have people who are paid to look at, look after you? I think that would feel a big thing for me. And yet, Again, it's so normal for us in the system that the power of that, the impact of that knowing you're with a family and that this family weren't doing it for the money in any way, but it was still hugely impactful for this kid to know and those kind of things that are so normalized for me as someone working in the system. I was seeing them afresh when I was coming through, looking at through the eyes of the child. But I would say I'm al always really conscious in saying, oh, it's really powerful, the imagination. I'm also really powerful. This is nothing compared to lived experience. So whilst I benefited a lot from imaginatively entering a child's life and, and I think that it would be good to have more stories about children in care, why we really need more stories is we want more lived experience. So in no way can I, however hard I try to imagine, can get near some of those experiences. So that was also really important. That's really important to note. It's, it's kind of what I could do without the lived experience, but I would really would love to have more lived experience as to sort of draw on to be in the public domain so we can learn from a wide range of stories, not just these few are not just through fiction really, cuz lived experience is much more powerful. Yeah. The class issue is really interesting and it's making me think when you're talking then about the, the, the two children that, that I, this was like several years ago now that we removed of the mum's alcohol issues and domestically violent relationships and we removed them from like two, two bad, pretty unkempt, not very well looked after home mm-hmm. On an estate. And Sarah moved into the children moved into a five bedroom Huge property with a double driveway in a big back garden and a trampoline and, and the kids kind of flourished in foster care and did really well. But, and, and then the mum actually did really well. She turned her life around and got clean and became abstinent and engaged in treatment and got the house up together. And the kids ended up being reunified, but one of the conflicts they had was like, oh, we're gonna have to give up some of the confidence that we'd kind of become accustomed to like the trampoline in the back garden and some of the niceties of their life. And, and they were desperate to go back to look at them up. It wasn't, yeah, any ambiguity about the love that they have for their mom and that their mom had for them, but definitely torn between having adapted to a certain kind of lifestyle and them having to give that up when they moved back into their mum's care. And that's a big deal, isn't it? The Phoenix says, at one point in the book, he says, when he goes back to his mum, he says, I could see the doors to my future closing behind me. And he wanted that Cho, it was really important to him, but it cuz he knew that there would be a lot of educational advantages, partly cuz they're obsessed with education. So he could also say that that was problematic cuz he was also like, why are you, why you so stressed all the time? Mm-hmm. But, but that, that's a real issue. And that's a, and also I suppose the more you live in foster care and the more the cultural and or if it's a middle class foster care in a different class to your own, the more culturally you get used to different things so the distance could become even greater. And I try to observe those small things around class, around things like, you know, food and when you eat and. All that stuff, which is, and like he, when he first moves, you know, the fact that they would always talk around the dinner table, he was like, it's like a police interview here. You know, because there's certain sort of evens that, those assumptions, what you do over an evening meal, do you watch the, you know what, and not to, and I don't wanna sort of, it's, it's tricky to talk about cuz you don't wanna stereotype anyone. Mm-hmm. But some of those things which are a bit middle class kind of, you know, we'll sit and have our conversation and, you know, in a particular way. You know, he, he found out, like being in a police interview, he was like, what? Why you keep asking me all these questions? Stop asking me questions all the time. Yeah. And for that family, it was politeness, it was concern, it was like, we're really concerned about, you we're asking all these lovely questions. And for him it was kind of like, oh my goodness, leave me alone. It's not just class, but it can be a bit of a class thing. But things around, there's a, it's a real dilemma for people isn't it? To, to That, that that their foster care experience might be drawing them away from culture and family of origin of course. And then you know that in terms of race and different ethnicities that could be even more profound. But just in terms of class and money and expectations of life, it was also important. It was really important to me that they weren't the that, cuz he never really fell for all that stuff. My character, he was always a bit smart about it. He was like, you know, he was, and that was really important to me as well because I, I didn't want it to be this kind of the, the middle class family rescuing the, the poor child. I didn't wanna play into that narrative. And really I hope that the book communicated is that what they learned from him from Phoenix because, I mean, he, he, I hope that that came across. It's a bit tricky to write, but I wanted to in some ways, what we call now, Vic. Vic, have you heard of the vicarious vicarious resilience argument that, that actually we learn. So just as well as we know about vicarious trauma, that we pick up the trauma of people we live with or we, we work with that actually. There's also an idea and there's some research on this that we grow, and maybe that's what we were talking about in the beginning of this interview and I was saying how much I've learned from being in this field and what you would describe in when you wanna stay close to practice. You, you, you, it keeps you grounded. There's something about called vicarious resilience that's been researched. These are the qualities that we gain from being in touch with people who are struggling, but are sometimes overcoming struggle, who are staying hopeful in situations that I couldn't stay hopeful in. You know, that we actually are also picking up on those amazing strengths. So, I mean, I didn't know that term. Then, but when I look back, I think some of the things that Phoenix was brilliant. He was so much more present than anyone in that family. He was very much in the know. He absolutely adored his dog. He could relax and be with that dog and feel that love. He was, you know, they were learning from him because they were caught up in a whole other load of stresses around being focused on their future and being very anxiety driven and also not being honest with each other. So Phoenix was very confused in how he was honest with this mum who was loving him yet letting him down. But there was also another. A parallel story going on around in the family where they weren't saying what they thought to each other, that there was this, again, a kind of a lack of individuation in terms of being able to say what you really wanted to and keeping these narratives going. In that case, it was, we're all gonna be successful, we're all do good as we're gonna be doctors and, and how, how do children, how do teenagers start to kind of begin to find themselves in those narratives within families? How do we, and that's a dilemma for us all, isn't it? How do we, when there's a strong narrative within a family, how do we find ourselves within it and how I, I think, I mean, I wrote this mother who is quite annoying, the foster care ever, but she was the worst bit. But she, of course, I was writing myself to some extent and the worst maybe hopefully the kind of some of. Hopefully some bits I'm aware of, but bits of my parenting, which have been pressurizing to my kids and how I've been enmeshed in their successes and failures. And I wrote one scene where the, the child says to her mother, I'm not used. And that came from someone I know actually. It was a line I picked up lots of lines from people that I'd sort of noticed over the years. A, a, a child who'd said to their, their parent, I'm not you. And she says, I'm, you know, I'm not you. And we all need to say that to our parents and our par as parents. We all need to hear our children. And I think that's a line that's in my head a lot as I parent, you know, reminding myself all the time. They're not me. And that goes across kind of, that was an issue for both sort of sets different people in, in the both of the storylines really. I'm not you, how do I be myself in the circumstance? I love that idea of vicarious resilience. I haven't heard of that. And I definitely get a sense like. Inspiration from some of the parents and the children that I work with because although they're making decisions, but sometimes forcing themselves are up for people harm. When you hear about their kind of stories or their experiences, it's just kind of completely inspiring that they're not, it's, although it's bad that it's not as bad as it is, but they aspirate try and overcome their trauma and their difficulty is still very much alive and presence and presentive even in the face of all of the obstacles and diversity and challenges that they've come up against. And that's what we're probably trying to put our fingers on when we talk about what we get from this profession is a real privilege, isn't it? And that's probably what drew me back to practice at the end of the day. And what keeps you doing the different bits that you are doing that there's something about that which is a privilege. No, I don't mean that. I don't don't want that to patronizing, but I do mean it really that I feel fortunate to have done the job I've done. I feel very grateful to be in this career. Yeah, actually, I do think it is an astonishing privilege that you, that we get to meet parents and children and find out the most intimate aspects of their lives and mm-hmm. And we go into their homes and the, and the living rooms and their bedrooms, and it's just such an unusual, and I think probably quite rare ex human experience, there's lot that don't require that level of intimacy. And and so I do think it is, it is a privilege that we have access to people in that way. Mm-hmm. Ju just before we kind of wrap up, are there any, are, are you gonna write another book? Do you have that? Is there an intention? It's funny that at the moment I feel less. Less of a, I suppose, a desire for it, because I feel, maybe because I'm back living in the stories now, I'm back now I've left academia. I also think it'd be hard to write now because I'd be worried I'd be drawing on stuff about unconsciously. Obviously I'd be trying really hard not to draw on stuff, but I think it would worry me that I would be drawing on stuff, so I'd wanna be writing something really different. I did find it hard to bring it into the public domain. I felt really vulnerable. I find it. Yeah, I felt very, I think as I cared about these characters and there is a vulnerability with creativity, and again, I, I, that's something I learned from, I felt almost, you know, just, just the sort of sensitivity and the vulnerability of saying, oh, this is something I've. So it brought up a lot of stuff for me, that process. So I didn't, I really loved the writing. I didn't enjoy the process. Mm. And and it, I, I wrote it very much for young people. It's quite hard to get it into those places that yet for young people who are reading. And so a lot of my readers have been older people which, which is great. I'm just really grateful for anyone who reads the book. But I would also, I'd be interested in how I could get it more to, if I was to write again towards two young people themselves. So I've got some questions really. I have written, I have got a draft of a sequel, actually. Foster girl, foster boy, foster girl. I've got, and I haven't developed the draft and, and now that, so that's an issue for me. I d I, can I go back to that? Mm-hmm. So I kind of did a second. With the same family, with a different child staying with them. So it, it is there, but, and obviously it's a ton of work, so, and I tend to make myself quite busy with other things, so maybe I'm avoiding it. So I'm gonna think about that and learn, learn from that. But there, i, I, I need to remember how much I love the writing of it. Mm. Are there any kind of social work books that you would recommend that you, that you've enjoyed or that you've read in terms of fiction? Fiction or non-fiction? Oh, where do we start? Well, it's interesting the stories, isn't it? I, I mean, I'm, I mean, fiction probably is a good place to start because we don't use fiction that much in social work teaching or training. I really enjoyed, my name is Leon by Kit. Again, that's interesting. Around a child in care. So it's a similar kind of theme, so that's a great one to watch out for. Obviously is more well known, but his book, my name is Y. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so, so there's, but there is a lack, isn't there? I think, I mean my, my children of the Jacqueline Wilson era era, I think they learned load. I'd be telling, I'd be, when they were grown up, I'd be like, time, I told them about domestic violence, however, and you know, and they'd be like, oh, we already know about that. So wast Jacqueline Wilson has become a bit, the single story for, there are some really good books. I remember a psychiatrist who was training at the university saying, if you wanna understand bipolar disorder, read the Illustrated mum by Jacqueline Wilson. So, and they said, child book, but it's really, and I went back and read that, so, so that's interesting being recommend. That was a time in an academic institution someone was recommending a, a children's book to understand bipolar disorder. So that shows potentially the power of some of these stories. So there are some good stuff, but I wish there were more really. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And the book, foster Boy, if people were interested in getting hold of the book or were interested in connecting with you, how could they do either of those things? Yeah, so it's on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle. It's also on Blackwell's bookshop if you want to avoid Amazon. So I can give you those links and I can also give you an email address for people to contact me. Should we put those in the show notes? Rich? Would that be helpful? Rather than me say, say them now, but I'm always interested to hear from people would love to be more engaged in storytelling in the, in this field. I think it is important, but hard to kind of find the, the space for it. But would love to hear from people who are also interested in storytelling and would also love to encourage people who have lived experienced stories to tell. Because if I found it vulnerable, you know, I was working in a university, it wasn't my own experience. Mm. And I, and I've got loads of privilege. In terms of being able to find the time to write it, you know, it takes a lot of, you're spending a lot of time on something you probably will never get any money from. That's, there's a certain privilege that comes with that. If you are having to, you know, look for, look for, if you're earning in a way to feed your kids, you can't spend two years working on something that you might not get anything from. So I'm really aware that people would need support to get some of those stories out into the public domain. So I, yeah, I don't have a lot answers to all those things, but I've certainly learned a lot about how challenging that is and some of the vulnerabilities of that. So it'd be really be lovely if we could support people who have their own stories more to communicate those to social work and training for social work students, but also in a kind of wider public sense. Excellent. Yeah, and I couldn't recommend the book highly enough. It's a really lovely insight for me. Remarkably well written and thoughtful, but, and I think the fact that it's written for adolescence to me made it more enjoyable and, and accessible. So yeah, I, I would definitely recommend checking it out and yeah. I'm grateful for your today. Thank you for coming. Thanks, rich. Great to see you.