As a child, I desperately wanted someone to come and save me. To take out my broken brain and fix it. To wipe the trauma tape that played on repeat. To fill the void and flood out the pain with love and kindness.
As an adult, I want to save children who are struggling. I am forever managing the pull that tempts me to step in and solve and be the saviour for every young person in need. In my work, I see so many adults made of the same stuff, driven by the same need to protect, nurture and support our children and young people.
Yet when I think about my own recovery, I know that the only efforts that really helped me were those that allowed me to help myself.
My personal journey of change has been significant. My life was chaotic. I lived recklessly with no consideration of consequence, no stability, often no grasp on reality and with survival strategies that often didn’t go further than the next hour. The only ending I had ever considered was suicide and often I was just trying to find a few hours of happiness before the inevitable happened.
I was a child with a loving family, friends and high academic potential. I had been in a fatal road accident as a teenager, so I had a very clear, understandable reason for my behaviour and yet, when I look back at the 15 years it took me to recover, I realise how many of those years were totally and utterly hopeless. I didn’t have to wait for CAMHS. I didn’t have to battle for a diagnosis. And yet, when I look back, I can see that the life that was meant for me fell away from me within weeks of the accident happening.
I had people that told me I shouldn’t feel guilty surviving, but no one I trusted enough to explain what it was that I felt guilty about. I had people who believed I could still do well in my GCSEs, but no one who helped me feel I deserved to. I had people who believed I could move on from the trauma, but no one who made me want to. There were years where people still saw the good in me, but not a day that I was able to see any good in myself. There was so much around me to fight for, but not a single thing I believed I would be able to secure.
Recovery wasn’t about what people did to me or even what people did for me, it was about finding an environment that allowed me to do things for myself. In many ways my first step to recovering from such complex and catastrophic trauma was not anything to do with grief, loss, or flashbacks, it was making a decision to be reliable. I hated the impact being unreliable had had on my life and I still remember looking in a mirror trying to think of one thing I could do that would stop me hating myself and my life quite so much.
Being reliable and having stability and security has helped me to develop some self-worth - enough to stop pressing self-destruct, although not quite enough to avoid imposter syndrome. The steadiness of my new life and the improved relationship with myself gave me the foundations to begin processing the trauma I’d experienced. It gave me the time and space to redevelop my thinking and re-establish my response and reactions.
If you knew me today, you would be unlikely to believe who I was then, and, more worryingly, most people that knew me then had absolutely no belief that who I was then had the potential to become who I am now.
So how do we do better? What can we learn from my experience and the thousands of people that have had experiences just like it?
The answer lies within our communities, so it is fitting that it was the theme for last week’s Children’s Mental Health Week. We need to recognise and emphasise that our environment will do more to help us than any single intervention can. We need to recognise that security is more powerful than sympathy and that hope is far more powerful than handouts.
How we - every adult that interacts with children and young people - treat children and young people is far more formative than what we may say during therapeutic interventions. How we regard children and young people every day determines more of their wellbeing than any stand-alone treatment can.
So, it’s time for change. It’s time to collaborate on the development of relational communities that will instil self-belief, emotional safety and hope in the hearts and minds of every child and young person and provide trusted adults, positive relationships and equitable opportunities for all.
Relational practice isn’t just about reducing suspensions or improving attainment. It isn’t about being nicer to children and young people that are being ‘naughty’, and it certainly isn’t about lowering standards or expectations. It isn’t adults doing more. It’s about working together, to build a community, to nurture a culture that does the heavy lifting - a culture that makes every child and young person feel valued and able, and provides space and opportunity for recovery, for discovery and for change.
When the adults change, everything changes, and in that we have a real opportunity to change the dials on children and young people’s emotional health, to shift the statistics in so many elements of our society and be the reason that children like me become adults that can look back say ‘I made it and I deserve to be here’.
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