Reunification

Reunification

As touched on in my blog titled, "Hesitation", from a few weeks ago, I've wanted to revisit the concept of reunification more broadly. In that Blog, I examined the latest literature from indigenous populations in the USA. Here Landers et. al (2023) found that reunification is more or less inevitable across the early adulthood of the people within the study. The extrapolate this based on this issues cited, to postulate that reunification is perhaps a truism of the foster care population, such that only the odd outlier exists, but for the most part, all fostered children want to normalize their relationships with their biological parents. 

What is there to parse in this revelation? I've thought of a few things in the past few weeks since my initial writing, being; 

1. Reunification feels logical based on my professional experience.
2. Reunification aligns with my academic experience from a sense of parsing one's cognitive dissonance and fictitious fairy tales about family that may come to be through distance and early trauma.
3. Identity is a powerful inner concept, that requires much reflection in order to capitalize on potential.

Let's start with my experience. In the 13 years I've been working in the foster care realm, I've known of just one young man who was adamant in not wanting to discuss the potential for having a relationship. So strong was his hatred of her, and so intense was is loathe of reunification ideas, that he abruptly told the Minister of Families and Communities at the time, "to stick it", when she boldly said that it was a desire of all young people. His story was particularly horrific. I remember loosely (not to strip sincerity from his story but to anonymise him in part), that his mum sexually abused him and kept him in a cage. Terrifyingly shocking yes, but given my experience, not altogether unique unfortunately. It may be that the Minister was wise, and postured something to him that he was just not ready to hear, especially given he was displaced within the system at the time. It may however be, that he is an exemplar of sorts, that reunification is not for everyone. I don't very much believe in inductive scientific method, whereby one extrapolates a conclusion based upon stackable conclusions, so I have tried to rationalize the young man's stance. All my searching has yielded the plausible conclusion that the young man was not ready to face his demons. All the while however, I think the Minister was slightly erroneous in their ways too. See this young man really didn't need to hear anything akin to running home, but that's doesn't mean that the sentiment of reunification necessarily not apply. What is perhaps more diplomatically befitting if the scenario I described may be a sort of 'coming to terms', or being at piece with his mother. Perhaps a reconciliation for his own self-interest may have sought to bring him piece, and resolve any neurosis that may have psychodynamically emerged throughout his teenage hatred. Well-played all of us can agree, but there's something so divinely powerful about the biological connection to identity that lingers in one's curiosity. 

Conscious or not, everyday media implies that if you don't have a positive relationship with, or safety net in, your parents, then you're not normal. Trying to reconcile just how messed up your unique childhood may be, is a very private and subjective experience. This brings me to another reflection I had recently with someone; that our feelings are very much subjective, and that at times, this can cause us even more distress. See, we're hard wired to employ agreement and sympathize with the young man's plight I described earlier, or to show absolute distain at events like mass shootings or the Holocaust. We compare the immense trauma those sufferers must have with our own first world problems, and think perhaps, "What right do I have to feel despair". And yet, when the feelings may pass, we may reflect and think we could feel no worse, no stronger than we were feeling. You may be right. Why would our feelings know to calculate their expression based on an external level of subjective trauma? Instead the locus is internal, very much in our control, but at the same time, as significant in feeling as a runaway freight train. There is no stopping them. And in the moment, those feelings are ours alone, comparable to none. We then, owe it perhaps to ourselves, to be kind, and acknowledge our despair as worthy, not letting any other comparison further spiral us downward. 

The young man in question has every right to his feelings about his mother, but melancholy is a more helpful place to arrive at, through thorough heeling. There must be something so immensely meaningful if the majority of kids who've been forcefully removed, seek out of their own volition, to reconcile with their parental abusers. They're often (I'm sure) attending therapy, processing, learning, healing, but there is no medicine like reconciliation. Perhaps it is their own innate drive, seeking out reunification. To meaningfully connect, confront, and parse one's own feelings of disdain that's truly reparative. 

Thankfully, the cure here is simple. Exercise temperance and dignity in our approach to our kids. Go with them, and not against them. Do not push a child who's struggling to find their identity. Instead, be there to offer solace and opportunities. In this, we exercise behavioural openness, and lead the way toward reconciliation of feelings, and pave the way for any possible reunification. It may not be during childhood, tumultuous teenage years, or early adulthood, but it may happen. At least it won't happen with any barriers that we've accidentally employed. 

Spend time on finding facts, speak kindly and openly about significant people in kids lives, and offer opportunities for growth and connection. This is the panacea to most sustained harm I see with kids in care. In this, the risk is that without empathetic and humanistic connection with our kids, we may over or undershoot the delivery of the facts we're trying to articulate. Undershoot, and you risk painting a picture that mum and dad can't see you every day because they're just not well enough. Overshoot and you see night terrors after the child learns that dad killed himself using a dirty needle that mum gave to him whilst they were already high on Special K, loaded up with 3 times more than he was used too. Your 6 year old doesn't need to hear that. But how does one tell what is the right thing? This is tricky, but here's what I recommend:

1. Focus on the facts. We have a tendency to be too raw, creative or minimalist in order to protect our children. Instead gently illustrate the agreeable sentiment. Facts themselves are not innately traumatic, it's the mechanisms we employ around them which can cause anguish. Remember, the child has already lived and survived what you're trying to help them process.
2. Process the facts yourselves. If we're brutally honest and make time to reflect, we all can experience high levels of cognitive dissonance in the face of what people do to each other. We may think sex offenders all need to be sentenced to death, but at the same time see a child longing to spend time with an offender. Our own distain must not overarch someone else's experience if we're to come alongside them. 
3. Practice empathy. In my experience, people are way better at empathy than they think they are. Do an experiment with someone you know and trust, and ask them for an example. No doubt the answer is most often akin to sympathetic feeling instead. Feeling sorry for someone is not the same as walking alongside them. Empathy works best when we believe that our feelings can at some time truly mirror another person's, regardless of the stimulus that exude them. Meaning, we can all relate to horrors if we truly allow ourselves. If we cast aside our fear, and let our feelings take hold, we can experience a great reverence for the varied nature of the human condition. You don't need to be a sexual abuse survivor to necessarily relate to feelings of helplessness, shame, isolation, embarrassment, resentment, hatred, anger, or burgeoning melancholy. Most of us have had those feelings, and we should be brave to feel them once more if it should help us sincerely connect with another. 
4. Practice detaching. Not to be confused with de-attaching, the opposite of humanistic connection. No. Detaching is stepping back from your own dialogue and self talk, and looking, listening, and taking in a wide frame of reference. Did you notice body language change, tone shift, a very subtle lip quiver or upward glance to a particular side? These subtleties can tell you a great deal. The more you practice, the better you get at steering your response to elicit more comfortable responses from people. How do you know others comfort is increasing? Simple. Dialogue continues. The best time to detach in conversation is to use silence as a tool. Don't but in. Don't let your own ego, or inner voice, rush you to keep things moving. Slow down, create space, and examine what's happening. Then lean in, and increase the warmth in your approach. If you get it wrong, and you're noticing, people will always let you kindly know. Miss with consistency and people shut down. You haven't earned their safety.

This week's literature review

Due to the complexities associated with family time, or visitation between biological family members and children, I've done some digging. I recently have a practice example, where children in permanent care are starting to resist attending family time after many years of attending despite not having a positive experience. Mum is assertive, but fine to work with, but there are 8 children all together at family time... It's a bit chaotic. To make things worse, their permanent carer clearly articulates that whilst she won't keep them from attending, she never wants anything to do with the biological family. This has made me feel like parental alienation may be at play. In search of a definition of 'parental alienation', I really admired the clear distinction made by Bernet et. al (2020, p. 1556):

"Parental alienation (rejection of a parent without legitimate justification) and realistic estrangement (rejection of a parent for a good reason) are generally accepted concepts among mental health and legal professionals. Alienated children, who were not abused, tend to engage in splitting and lack ambivalence with respect to their parents; estranged children, who were maltreated, usually perceive their parents in an ambivalent manner."

My initial assessment would be that the Carer is not actively hating on the biological family, creating false narratives, or embedding direct harmful degrading psychological information. Instead, I think even the carer would boldly agree, she just doesn't, and will never, like them. her admission is that she can't accept the horrible things she'd done to the children in the past, the poor choices she's made, and the failed restoration attempt still in her memory. My question still remains, is this 'alienation', or realistic estrangement? With the kids votes entering the equation now, are the kids reasonably electing estrangement, or should we take more assertive action with the carer or kids? As Bernet et. al (2020) may suggest, the answer may be in forensically testing people involved with the Parental Acceptance and Rejection Questionnaire (PARQ) in order to help delineate what's happening. The end goal here being, to work out if the children's wishes are sound, or potentially misdirected. Until that may be undertaken, the approach must be to listen to the kids voices, and avoid further creating any dissonance within the children for their choices.