Inside the Consulting Room. Episode 10. When A Child Feels Safe

Transcript

A Quiet Room And A New Theme

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, this is Kim Lee, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, and the final episode from Inside the Consulting Room, episode ten. And I've called this when a child finally feels safe. The room is quiet. There's no urgency and no tension. No sense of something about to happen. Just a stillness. It's not the kind of stillness that feels emptied, but rather it feels settled. Now across the series, we have met many children. 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. But what happens when something begins to change? When a child no longer needs to protect themselves in this way, when safety is no longer uncertain, but instead it's experienced. Now psychological development depends on one essential condition, and that is safety. Not simply physical safety, but emotional safety. The experience that feelings can be expressed, distress can be tolerated, relationships remain stable, and it's okay to be yourself. Without this, children will adapt. They might become silent, angry, invisible, but when safety is present, something remarkable happens, and that is development resumes. Quite often, what you'll find is that developmental interruptions occur as a consequence of children not feeling some kind of safe. Now, across many sessions and across many, many, many children, a similar pattern emerges. At first, there is tension, caution, defense. The child is watching, assessing, working out whether this space that I call the consulting room is safe. And indeed, whether or not I, as a grown-up, am safe. And then gradually small changes began begin. There's a word spoken or a feeling named or a moment of stillness that doesn't need to be filled. A little girl sits in an alcove in the consulting room. 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. And clearly she feels safe. That's not how she was when she first came. In one session, a child who'd previously been unable to sit still at all, maybe begins to remain in the chair. In another, a child who's never spoken begins to respond to a question. A child who has always deferred to others begins to choose. These moments are often quiet, but they're significant, and we notice them. 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. Psychotherapy doesn't impose change, it creates conditions, consistency, reliability, emotional containment. And over time, the child will internalize these experiences. So what was once external, the calm presence of another, becomes internal. And it's a capacity that the child takes within themselves. But at the center of this process is relationship, not instruction, not exercises or teaching strategies, not correction, but relationship. And a consistent other who notices, understands, remains emotionally steady. And through this, the child begins to develop emotional language, self-awareness and regulation. Across the many cases, there is often a moment like this one. A child pauses, looks up, and says something that hasn't been said before. I think I feel different. Not dramatically, not suddenly, but recognizably different, less tense, less guarded, more present. A girl said to me recently, the other day, I realized I wasn't worrying. And I thought, why am I not worrying? And then I thought, well, I don't know. I don't need to. This from a girl who came, first of all, absolutely racked with anxiety. But this process extends beyond the consulting room. Parents play a crucial role. As they begin to understand emotional containment, affect regulation, and the meaning behind behavior, they too begin to respond differently, more calmly, more consistently. And as the emotional environment within the home shifts, the child's internal world shifts with it. Safety doesn't mean the absence of difficulty, it means something else. That difficulty can be experienced, still occurs, but it doesn't overwhelm the system. The emotions can rise and then settle, and the relationships can hold it. The children we have met in this series were never broken. They were adapting intelligently as best they could to the emotional worlds around them. And when those worlds become more understandable, more stable, more containing, the children themselves begin to change. Not because they were forced to, but because they no longer needed to protect themselves in the same way. 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. In creating these conditions, what we see and what happens is something quiet but profound. The child who was once surviving finally, finally begins to live. These podcasts are intended for parents. Why? Because parents are the people who are charged with the responsibility for raising healthy small people. 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. Essentially, children experience and change in relationship. I do hope that this has been a helpful series for you. In the next, I'm going to be looking at the psychology of criminality in adolescence. And this is prompted by some recent research, which is quite concerning. But once again, it prompts me to think how have children reached this point? What would have happened if that will be coming soon? Thank you for listening.