EFeCT Conference:
Conflict Management: Strength Based
Approaches
22 March 2012
Touch and
Emotional Containment
Laura Steckley
CELCIS/SIRCC/GSSW
There is a sensible way of treating children.
Treat them as though they were young
adults. Dress them and bathe them with care
and circumspection. Let your behaviour
always be objective and kindly firm. Never
hug or kiss them, never let them sit on your
lap. If you must, kiss them once on the
forehead when they say goodnight.
JB Watson, 1928
(cited in Richards, 2000)
Structure for today
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Touch: benefits and difficulties
Containment and related complexities
Relationship between touch and containment
Implications for practice
Touch
• Touch is the first of the five senses to develop
• Research is becoming unequivocal as to the
developmental and ameliorative affects of
touch
• Links between touch and the development of
the hippocampus and decreased levels of
cortisol
Touch Research Institute
• Numerous studies on the impacts
of touch
– Mother infant studies
– Massage
– Comparative studies across cultures (a few slides
down)
Touch
Skin to skin contact between infants and
mothers by six hours over the first three
days after birth.
After 1 month
After 5 years
soothing
fondling
eye contact
commands
IQ tests
language tests
(Field, 2001)
Touch
Sexual abuse recovery
• 1 group received relaxation therapy
• 1 group received 30 minutes of massage 2x weekly
for a month
• Both groups reported a decrease in anxiety and
depression
• Massage group had a decrease in stress hormones
• Relaxation therapy group reported an increasingly
negative attitude towards touch.
Touch
Participants threat of and
actual electronic shock
– Handholding improved
affect regulation and bodily
arousal
– Higher quality relationship
correlated with higher
levels of improvement
(Coan et al., 2006)
Touch
• Difficulties associated with children’s
experiences of transgressive touch
– Intolerance of or ambivalence about touch
– Staff fears and a culture of suspicion
• Touch deprivation
– Sleeping patterns
– Suppression of immune system
– Increase in aggression
• Puerto Rico 180; France, 110; Florida, 2; England, 0
(Field, 2001)
Moral Panic
An intense societal
preoccupation with an event,
phenomenon, person or group
deemed to be a threat to
societal order or social values
(hence the moral part);
The perception of the degree of
threat tends to be exaggerated
(hence the panic part).
– Witch hunts, McCarthyism/Red
Scare
Touch and Moral
Panic
• Prescriptions and proscriptions
– Addressed by Ward in relation to residential child care in
1999
– Importance of seeing touch as a form of communication
• Addressed in educational settings (Johnson, 2000;
Piper & Stronach, 2008).
The touching of children in professional settings had
increasingly stopped being relaxed, or instinctive, or
primarily concerned with responding to the needs of the
child. It was becoming a self-conscious negative act,
requiring mind-bodily split for both children and adults, the
latter becoming controlled more by fear than a
commitment to caring (p.iix).
Containment
≠
Term is often
(mis)used
disparagingly to
mean keeping a lid
on or warehousing
kids.
Constrainment
Containment
•Notion first introduced by Bion
(1962)
•The infant projects the
unmanageable feelings onto
the primary care giver, who in
turn reflects them back such
that they become more
tolerable for the infant.
•Continual process of hearing
and absorbing cries of fear,
anger, hunger and discomfort
and responding accordingly
comprises early experiences of
containment.
– Very strong parallels with
processes of attachment
Containment
• Early, ongoing experiences of
containment enable the
development of thinking to manage
experiences and emotion.
• When individuals’ experiences of
containment are inadequate or
significantly interrupted, cognitive
and emotional development are
affected.
• Uncontainable feelings and
experiences are normal and arise
throughout the lifespan.
Application
• Bion applied this model to the relationship between
therapist and client, stressing the importance of
metaphoric containment as part of the process of
healing and recovery.
• Containment and related concepts have been
subsequently applied to a range of relationships
and settings, including education, social work,
consultancy and even business.
Definition:
“Containment is thought to occur when one
person receives and understands the
emotional communication of another without
being overwhelmed by it, processes it and
then communicates understanding and
recognition back to the other person. This
process can restore the capacity to think in
the other person” (Douglas, 2007, p.33).
Containment involves:
• Caretakers ‘absorbing’ the
experiences of those seeking
their care to:
– Better understand ‘careseekers’’
needs and how to meet them
– Contain parts of careseekers’
experiences, helping them to
identify, verbalise, and make
manageable those uncontainable
feelings.
(Kahn, 2005)
Containment
This concept can also be applied to the more
complex network of relationships amongst
and between staff and children in residential
child care.
– Involves directly addressing via verbal
interpretation
– Also involves the use of daily activities, transitions,
leisure time, and even the physical environment
towards the…
– …development of a containing atmosphere in
which children feel (over time) accepted,
respected and understood.
(Ward, 1995)
Containment—
the role of a
therapeutic milieu
A therapeutic milieu can assist the client
in holding or containing her painful
emotions, allowing her to express internal
conflict in a way that can bring about a
greater sense of personal responsibility.
Containment
•Is never static
•Is complex
•Has literal and metaphoric dimensions
Containment
Challenges include:
•Holding the literal and the metaphoric in mind
at the same time
•Differentiating own feelings from those
absorbed from young person
•Counter-transference
Diminished energy, insight, increased focus
on control, emotional unavailability,
provoking and/or punitive interactions
Containment for
Containers
Needed not only for the demanding and
complex work of meeting children and
young people’s containment needs, but
to enable carers to respond to
complexity, uncertainty and risk…
…particularly in the current risk-averse,
increasingly bureaucratic approaches to
practice (Ruch, 2005).
Unit Managers
n
n
Pivotal role in providing containment
Increasing fragility of organisations due
to continual restructuring and
redeployment of staff
– Diminishes organisational containment
– Increases pressure on individual managers
as containers
Containment for
Containers
Necessary nesting function of containment
Systems of
Staff Support
Staff
meetings
Containing relationships
between staff and
young people
Consultancy
Other functions
of management
Supervision
Ruch’s Holistic Containment
Holistic containment
• Emotional containment
(feeling containment)
• Organisational containment
(doing containment)
• Epistemological containment
(thinking containment)
Relationship between touch and
containment
• Touch can be an important element of a containing
experience;
• It can also create anxiety, both for the child/family
member and for the practitioner;
• The clarity of our thinking has been distorted by
uncontained anxieties related to touch (and to
abuse, particularly paedophilia);
• Practitioners’ need for touch rarely, if ever,
addressed.
Relevance to conflict and strengthbased approaches
• The capacity of touch to unlock and enhance
existing strengths
• Central relevance of communication and
relationship – to touch and to effectively working
with conflict
• Necessity of clear thinking, hence the necessity of
containing environments and relationships, for
effectively working with conflict
So how might we
proceed?
With meeting our own containment
needs?
With meeting the
containment needs
of Children and
Their Families?
With meeting
the containment
needs of our
staff?
So how might we
proceed?
To touch?
When, why, how?
Or not to touch?
Touch cannot be sensibly separated from the
context of relationships…
References
• Bion, W.R. (1962). Learning from Experience. London:
Heinemann (1967).
• Coan, J. A., Schaefer, H. S. and Davidson, R. J. (2006)
'Lending a hand: social regulation of the nueral response
to threat', Psychological Science 17(12), pp. 1032-1039.
• Douglas, H. (2007). Containment and reciprocity:
Integrating psychoanalytic theory and child development
research for work with children. Hove: Routledge.
• Field, T. (2001) Touch, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press.
• Johnson, R.T. (2000). Hands off! The disappearance of
touch in the care of children. New York: Peter Lang.
• Kahn, W.A. (2005) Holding fast: The struggle to create
resilient caregiving organizations. East Sussex, Hove:
Brunner-Routledge.
References
• Piper, H. and Smith, H. (2003) ‘“Touch” in educational
and child care settings: Dilemmas and responses’,
British Educational Research Journal, 29(6), p. 879–94.
• Piper, H. & Stronach, I. (2008). Don’t touch! The
educational story of a panic. London: Routeledge Taylor
& Francis Group.
• Richards, G. (2000). Putting psychology in its place: A
critical historical overview. Second Edition. London:
Routledge .
• Ruch, G. (2008) 'Developing "containing contexts" for the
promotion of effective work: The challenge for organisations',
In B. Luckock and M. Lefevre (eds), Direct Work: Social work
with children and young people in care, London, British
Association for Adoption and Fostering.
References
• Ward, A. (1999). ‘Residential staff should not touch
children': Can we really look after children in this way? In
A. Hardwick & J. Woodhead (Eds.), Loving, hating and
survival: A handbook for all who work with troubled
children and young people. Aldershot: Ashgate Arena.
• Ward, A. (1995). The impact of parental suicide on
children and staff in residential care: a case study in the
function of containment. Journal of Social Work Practice,
9(1), 23-32.
• Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The maturation process and the
facilitating environment. London: Hogarth.
Laura.L.Steckley@strath.ac.uk
• Steckley, L. (2011). Touch, physical restraint and therapeutic
containment in residential child care. British Journal of Social
Work, advanced access published July 7, 2011, 1-19.
• Steckley, L. (2010). Containment and holding environments:
Understanding and reducing physical restraint in residential
child care. Children and Youth Services Review, 32(1), 120128.
• Steckley, L. (2009). Therapeutic containment and physical
restraint in residential child care [Electronic Version]. The
Goodenoughcaring Journal, 6, n.p.
CYC-Online Monthly Column
Steckley On Containment
• November 2010
• December 2010
• March 2011
Steckley on Touch
• November 2009
• December 2009
• March 2010
• May 2010