The impact of complex and unwanted feelings evoked in foster carers by traumatised children in long-term placements

Abstract

When looked after children who have been exposed to substantial trauma enter foster care, the manner in which they present can be extremely challenging for the carers and can persist for a substantial period of time. In response, foster carers may attempt to create a nurturing environment for the children. However, the way the children behave can evoke powerful and unwelcome feelings in carers, such as rage and hatred towards those they look after. The manner in which the children present and the frightening feelings this may trigger can overwhelm the foster carers’ capacity to sustain a nurturing stance in relation to the children and jeopardise the placement. In this article, two case studies chart such a dynamic and show that if carers are able to reflect upon the painful and unwanted feelings evoked in them, and acknowledge and take responsibility for what has become enacted in the placement, there may be an opportunity for this harmful dynamic to be processed and repaired. Moreover, there may be a change in the nature of the relationship between carers and children, creating a renewed hope for the life of the placement. The child, too, may benefit from an experience where the frightening, hated aspects of him- or herself are finally felt to be understood and are less overwhelming, enabling them to tolerate these perceptions and contain their enactment in the placement, so increasing their trust and belief in the nurture offered.

Keywords

Looked after children foster care trauma unwanted feelings hate

Introduction

In Winnicott’s (1947) seminal essay, ‘Hate in the countertransference’, he indicates that a mother’s hatred of her baby is instrumental to her experience of the newborn’s entry into the family. He outlines a multitude of reasons why this is the case. These include (p. 201):

He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant, a slave … He shows disillusionment about her … After an awful morning with him she goes out, and he smiles at a stranger who says, ‘Isn’t he sweet?’.

This list is also pertinent to how foster carers might feel at times about the children for whom they care. For Winnicott, the mother must be able to objectively hate her infant or child but at the same time, tolerate those feelings of hatred within her and not enact them. This can be a challenge for any parent but is especially likely for foster carers who can be pushed to the very limits of tolerance. Looked after children have often been exposed to traumatic experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, neglect and abandonment, with the effect of leaving them highly disturbed and making the caring task very difficult (Hanna, Boyce and Mulligan, 2017; Ironside, 2012).

In this article, two case studies of children who reside within the Australian foster care system are presented. Both children had suffered frightening experiences before their foster placement was secured. These were often enacted in their relationships in the new placement, evoking feelings that the carers found difficult to tolerate and contain and for which, as Cairns (2008) indicates, they were often unprepared. These difficult and painful feelings, and in particular those of hate so aptly emphasised by Winnicott, have often been overlooked in the literature, probably because such feelings are perceived as unprofessional and hard to admit (Lynes and Sitoe, 2019). Indeed, they contrast starkly with the more generous feelings of warmth, love and affection that foster carers are expected to have for those in their charge. There may also be an accompanying sense of shame, making it even more difficult for carers to recognise and accept the challenges these feelings present.

The case studies describe two long-term foster placements that came close to breaking down. Their near ending and subsequent survival will be explored in relation to the unwanted feelings that were evoked in foster carers and became enacted in their relationship with the children. The factors that enabled the placements to be repaired and survive will also be examined.

Case example: L

L came into foster care at the age of seven. Prior to that, he had lived with his biological family and had several full and half-siblings. His mother had lived a transient lifestyle and there were times when the family did not know where they would be sleeping. There was often not enough food to feed everyone and the children went hungry. Following the separation of his parents, L lived for 12 months with his father and his father’s new partner, along with his full siblings. But following allegations of sexual abuse by L’s father towards his half-siblings, L, who was aged six at this time, was returned to his mother’s care. She had a new partner who was extremely aggressive and L was exposed to frightening situations of domestic violence. On one occasion, it was reported that the stepfather attempted to strangle one of the half-siblings and on another, he attacked and injured L’s mother with a knife. It is understood that several police officers attended the incident and had to kick down the door to gain entry. L was often a direct victim of this violence. It was alleged that his stepfather trained a dog to attack him and that he would take the dog into L’s room at night in order to frighten him by staging a ‘mock’ attack. Similarly, L’s mother had been observed to be aggressive and abusive towards him when they were together.

It is likely that reports about L’s experience of violence barely captured the everyday fear that he would have carried in relation to what might erupt in his environment. There was no safe place for him. Indeed, his mother’s violence once spilled over into the school setting when having been summoned to come and take him home, she yelled at him and physically dragged him to the toilet. Consequently, after he had been living with his mother and stepfather for about a year, L was taken away from home and placed in foster care.

Since being removed from that toxic environment, he has been able to articulate some of this fear. He told his foster carer:

Mum tried to drown me … I was having a bath and she just opened the door and came in and held me under the water and I was really scared. I don’t know why she did that.

He has also described his stepfather coming into his room at night for no obvious reason, expressing this as a ‘bad man coming into his room’, as well as how he often had to try and stop his sister from crying so that they would not be heard; he sometimes stayed awake all night to protect her.

By the time he entered foster care, at the age of seven, L was a very disturbed child. It was very difficult for him to settle in the placement and some of his behaviours were extreme. He had severe toileting issues; he would soil himself and smear the contents on the walls. His behaviour was also highly destructive; he would rip up clothes and tear pictures from walls. Because of the extent of the destructiveness, his foster carers felt that they were limited in what they could put in his bedroom. He would simply destroy it. His destructiveness sometimes extended to his own person, for example tearing out clumps of his own hair. In many respects, he exhibited the outbursts of a two-year old but from within the body of a child of seven.

As with many traumatised children, L was also hyper-vigilant and could rapidly move to extreme anger, lashing out at the environment around him, shouting, yelling and becoming physical. His behaviour was unpredictable and it was often unclear to the foster carers what had been the trigger.

L’s foster carers worked hard to emotionally hold and contain him. The female carer described how she would cradle him in her arms like a baby and feed him a bottle of fluid and that he found this very soothing. There were occasions and brief periods when it appeared that the foster carers felt they were able to hold L emotionally, but despite this, they never thought he had really settled into their care and made a home for himself in their family. One thing the carers noticed was that L was unable to tolerate praise; attempts to encourage him or to try to communicate that he was doing well were often experienced by him as a trigger for regressive behaviours. So, it was usually best to maintain a matter-of-fact approach and to refrain from praise. It may be that L experienced praise as an attempt to get close to him; that the foster carers’ constant efforts to embrace him had a paradoxical effect. While at times L could accept the foster carers’ offer of nurture, this could become too much for him. If he was to accept it, he needed to be open to their warmth and tolerate an emotional space that requires an inner vulnerability. When confronted by what the foster carers tried to offer, he was brought in closer emotional contact with his dependence upon them and to his sense of vulnerability. Because of his earlier family experiences, this was a frightening and dangerous inner state for him and his hatred of it made it difficult to accept and trust the nurture and love being offered by his foster carers. This made it extremely difficult for L to settle in the placement and to feel safe and emotionally held.

This dynamic within the foster family lasted for about the first two years of the placement. The carers became increasingly overwhelmed and tired for while there were brief glimpses of hope, these were never sustained. The placement eventually reached a breaking point that came about in the interaction between L and the male foster carer. It occurred when L took some cigarettes to school and the teachers discovered this. He told them that his foster father had given them to him. This was not helpful since the relationship between the foster carers and the school was already strained and the incident exacerbated the situation as the carers felt blamed for something they had not created. When the male foster carer became aware of the distorted version of what had happened, he became irate and ‘lost it’ with L. He burst into the boy’s room and yelled and physically grabbed him by the arm sufficient to cause obvious bruising. When this assault was discovered the next day, both the foster carers took full responsibility for what had happened. They sat down with L and apologised for what they had done and communicated to him that it should never have happened and that their behaviour was unacceptable. There was a mandatory investigation of the incident by the supervisory services, but on this occasion, they did not over-react and after some reflection decided to continue the placement. It was recognised that the foster carers had experienced significant trauma in caring for L and while this was not an excuse for the incident, it was decided that if they could be emotionally held by the team around them, his carers could potentially continue to emotionally hold L.

In the months following the incident, it became apparent that a gradual shift in L’s presentation was taking place. Some of the major challenges that he presented started to diminish. His issues around toileting began to resolve and he was more able to toilet himself; if there was soiling, he would now take himself to the bathroom and clean himself. Eventually he stopped soiling altogether. His level of destructiveness also diminished to the extent that the foster carers were gradually able to furnish his bedroom with items that he would previously have torn apart. They also noted that L’s hair was growing back, he had stopped stealing and for the first time appeared to be happy. The foster carers said that they now had a sense that L felt like he belonged with them. He started to tolerate praise, suggesting that he was beginning to feel a sense of connection between himself and his carers. This shift lasted well into the life of the placement until further challenges arose when L reached middle adolescence.

Case example: N

If we consider the immense power of the destructiveness that children from highly traumatised backgrounds can transmit to their foster carers, and acknowledge the frightening feelings of hatred these projections can generate within caregivers, how can they contain these feelings that threaten to overwhelm their capacity to keep looking after their children? As in the case of L, N’s life with her foster carers had been marked by early experiences of violence when living with her biological parents and disruption of her attachment development as a result of decisions made through the courts.

She spent the first six months of her life at home with her biological parents before being taken into care. In that time, she was exposed to significant violence. She spent the next two years living with foster carers before going back home at the age of two-and-a-half. When she returned to live with her parents, her brother Z had just been born and was less than a month old. The pattern of violence in the family home continued and after a further seven months, N and Z were both removed and placed with N’s original foster carers. A month later, they were returned home by order of the children’s court but were removed ten weeks later to the previous foster placement. Eight weeks later, Z was returned by the children’s court to his biological parents while N remained with her foster carers. Another three months followed before Z was again moved to live with his sister in foster care. The level of disturbance for N through these experiences is clear from this comment to her foster carer about the prospect of living with her biological parents: ‘I don’t want stabbing in my stomach. Mum had blood!’

At the age of two-and-a-half, of which two years had been spent with the foster carers, N presented as settled; she was toilet trained and was meeting her developmental milestones. Fifteen months later, following this period of significant disruption to her world, she had become a highly disturbed child; for the foster carers, she was hardly recognisable as the little girl who had left their care 15 months earlier. Her presentation was frightening. She was aggressive and angry, highlighted by her roughness with her brother and the family pets – something that continued long into the life of the placement and resulted in the death of one of the animals. Her language was replete with expletives and verbal abuse towards the foster carers if she did not get what she wanted. She would have tantrums two or three times a day, often related to the carers’ attempts to set limits around her constant demands − efforts that would result in their being physically attacked. Her sleeping was also disrupted, with reports of regular nightmares.

Over the course of the placement, N’s difficult behaviour persisted, abating and escalating at regular intervals. The foster carers provided a very nurturing environment for her, constantly creating opportunities for her to feel emotionally held and loved. At the same time, they attempted to place boundaries by creating routines and structure in an effort to contain N’s feelings of being overwhelmed and out of control. The arena of bedtime was often a contested space for her, as it can be for many looked after children, in that it recalled experiences of separation and abandonment, accompanied by difficulties in feeling safe enough to relinquish herself to the empty space of her room and go to sleep. The foster carers were sufficiently attuned to N to know when she could tolerate them maintaining firm boundaries around the bedtime routine and when she needed flexibility. In the latter case, they often accommodated her needs by placing a mattress alongside their own bed in their room so as to soothe her distress, while keeping other aspects of the bedtime routine in place.

Maintaining boundaries has been a tenuous business for the foster carers. N’s outbursts, which at their worst could last for hours, involved throwing objects, breaking glass and physical assaults. They were often unpredictable with no obvious triggers other than the foster carers’ refusing something she demanded or failing to fulfil, by some small error, something she was expecting or by her being bored. The ‘failure’ of the carers to completely meet her needs and demands was experienced by N as a gap in her connection to them that could be felt to be both frightening and catastrophic. For the carers, this could be emotionally draining, as they could not dare to let go of their attempts to perfectly meet N’s needs in a way they would for other children. They felt as if they were ‘walking on eggshells’ for a lot of the time. This made maintaining boundaries a fraught and fragile business. There was a sense that any attempt to keep them firm could result in an outburst, so it was difficult for the carers to feel they were in control of the dynamic within the family.

Despite the foster carers’ immense efforts to emotionally hold N, the pattern of escalations continued, both at home and at school. In the early school years, she was gradually transferred to the main school, initially going for only a few hours a day, for a few days a week and through this gradual introduction, eventually attending full-time by the end of her first year. In the initial two years of schooling, she had a full-time support worker to help her to integrate into the school environment, a level of support rarely found in Australia. But even with this input, it was difficult to sustain N within the school environment and the foster carers would often be asked to come and take her home. After two years, the support diminished to the level that children with high needs normally receive in Australia − usually a maximum of about three hours a day. Without this help, the school struggled to cope, particularly during lunch periods when the children were in the yard. Often some incident occurred that would lead N to unravel emotionally and lash out at other children and staff. With this diminished level of support, the school staff became overwhelmed by her pattern of dysregulation. Consequently, they became less empathic and more punitive towards her. They did not have the emotional or professional resources to contain her and increasingly called the foster carer to take her out of school. Often N would not want to leave and her rage would then be turned towards the carer as she struggled to take her home. The foster carers, who were already exhausted from managing N at home, were further drained as there was no sense of potential respite from their feelings of exhaustion when N went to school; there was a sense that the telephone would ring at any moment and they would be thrust back into the emotional whirlpool surrounding N. The situation eventually reached a point where she was expelled from school in grade two. Not long after this, there was an incident within the family whereby she physically attacked one of the carers’ sons-in-law. This violent outburst was witnessed by some of the carers’ adult daughters who withdrew their support for their parents. As a result, they decided to relinquish the care of N.

It became evident that although the foster carers had been pushed beyond the edge of their capacity to hold the family intact, they were still committed to N and were prepared to continue to care for her. They did not cut her off from their world and maintained contact. After a period of six weeks, she was able to come back and live with them again. On her return, it became evident that there had been a palpable shift in her presentation. While she continued to have outbursts, they became less frequent and when they did occur, they did not seem to last as long or have the same intensity. There was a sense that she had unconsciously stepped back from the extreme of her attacks upon the foster carers and the placement. This shift was accompanied by a significant change in the atmosphere of the placement over time, with a greater sense of calm and containment as the carers regained some of their former confidence and appeared much less exhausted. Once again, they were able to take pleasure in N’s company and felt secure enough that she would interact constructively with their extended family. With this development, the female foster carer, for the first time, felt able to return to work to pursue a part of her life that had been her passion. Thus, the placement now felt more tenable and has been sustained over the following two years. The foster carers continue to maintain their commitment to care for N on a long-term basis; for them, she is a part of their family.

Discussion

In both case studies, the children resided in placements as part of a therapeutic foster care initiative called ‘The Circle Program’. One of the premises of this service is that children live in their placements for as long as their needs require, which often means until adulthood and beyond. Part of what makes the placements ‘therapeutic’ is that the foster carers are provided with therapeutic input on a weekly or fortnightly basis by a specialist team that includes a foster care worker and a clinician. As the clinician involved in both placements, I have worked with L’s foster carers since before the incident described and with N’s carers since she was two years old.

Themes common to both case studies

The two case studies described share at least three themes in common. The first relates to the intense feelings that children may bring to a long-term placement and how these can be played out over time. The second concerns the impact of those feelings on the foster carers, often evoking intense and unwanted feelings that can be difficult to acknowledge and contain. At times, these may threaten to overwhelm carers and disrupt their relationship with the child. A third theme, which links to the first two, is how therapeutic support can help carers and children to accept and tolerate these kinds of unwanted feelings, and to repair fractures in the placement’s structure and dynamics, enabling its survival.

The children’s views

As in the cases of both L and N, many looked after children have had experiences where their needs were met with dismissive or aggressive reactions rather than a nurturing response from the parental figure from whom they sought comfort. As explained by Lanyado (2002), in such situations children are likely to build emotional defences to protect themselves from a sense of vulnerability. Foster carers are usually fully aware of the deficits the children have experienced and attempt to address these in the best way they can. However, the children slowly begin to experience the vulnerability of their reliance upon their relationship with carers; this can be overwhelming as it may recall earlier experiences where such vulnerability was abused. As a child starts to feel close to his or her carers, this sense of vulnerability can become intolerable and the child may attack or push against them as a means of killing off these feelings. Lanyado (2004) argues that there is a terrifying pain in ‘feeling close’ for the traumatised children as they are afraid of being hurt by the closeness and feel the need to destroy the experience. This was illustrated in the dynamic between L and his carers whereby he was unable to tolerate praise and any attempts to offer this would trigger his destructive behaviours. Similarly with N, the court’s decisions to return her to her biological family were likely to be experienced by her as an abandonment by her foster carers − they had got rid of her by sending her back to the frightening world of her birth parents. When she did return to the foster home, the carers’ attempts to hold her emotionally were experienced with ambivalence: on the one hand, they evoked complex feelings of not wanting to let go of the foster carers; on the other, there were feelings of rage fuelled by experiences of abandonment.

Children confronted by these experiences are likely to blame themselves for the loss of their world; they feel that something within them has led to its destruction. N would not have understood that she had been returned to her parents as a result of a legal decision; instead, she is likely to have experienced it as an inadequacy within herself that led her foster carers to let her go. Children like N and L can be confronted by massive feelings of inadequacy, humiliation, loss, helplessness and hopelessness, all of which may be compounded by what Lanyado (1985: 60) has called ‘additional perceived parental failure’ where ‘in addition to the trauma itself, from the children’s point of view, their parents had let them down when they most needed them, as they were unable to contain their child’s distress after the traumatic event’. Thus, the child’s experience is not only one of trauma, but also the absence of being held emotionally when they are at their most vulnerable. Unfortunately, the child’s feelings of inadequacy are not easily or quickly resolved by simple measures, such as an emotionally available parent, which means that negative feelings can then become internalised to form hated aspects of the child’s self.

Alongside these internalised feelings are parallel ones that trusted parental figures have failed catastrophically to hold them emotionally. New carers cannot be trusted so readily and must be tested. For N and L, as with many other separated children, the foster carers may be understood as a symbolic representation of the parental figures who have failed them; they are not reliable and the children’s rage is enacted against them. For Rustin (2008: 79), this rage ‘seems to have the meaning of an attempt to pass on [the child’s] horrific experience’. It is the way their child communicates to carers the frightening elements of early experience. So, in this sense, the child’s behaviour can be understood as paradoxical: it is an attempt to reject the closeness offered by the foster carer, but also an endeavour to communicate past frightening experiences in the hope that they will be understood and tolerated (Ironside, 2004).

The carers’ views

The emotional impact of a child’s experience of abuse can also create shifts in the internal worlds of foster carers, undermining their sense of identity as facilitators of children’s well-being (Donachy, 2017). For the carers of L and N, the enactment of the children’s rage within the placement over a prolonged period took its toll on their capacity to sustain their nurturing stance. Ironside (2009) presents a similar case to that of L, where a child (Stephen) had presented as particularly challenging over a long period of time and Mrs Smith, an experienced carer, had tolerated many years of abuse. Ironside notes (p. 335):

… [her] feelings of being overwhelmed … the feelings of loss of competence and rejection could all be thought about in terms of Stephen and the projection of feelings that needed to be understood and contained. Stephen could not verbalise to his foster mother … the extent and level of his feelings but he could make her feel these things.

L’s foster carers carried similar projections of feelings of rage and inner hatred that could not be verbalised and which they could no longer contain. The male carer’s assault on L may be understood as an outcome of these unprocessed feelings.

Enactments such as these often arise after long periods of struggle between carers and children and when the foster carers’ emotional resources are finally depleted. They may reflect a fundamental mismatch between what the carers are trying to achieve and the experience the child brings to the family. L’s foster carers had many positives: they were consciously aware of his earlier trauma and worked hard to counteract this by providing a nurturing and loving environment. As they explained, this was sometimes achieved by holding him like a baby when he was distressed, through which they were sometimes able to soothe him. They provided what Winnicott (1971: 89) described as a ‘facilitating environment’ − a continuity of repeated and consistent experiences of emotional holding over a long period of time. However, these attempts at nurture are not necessarily commensurate with the child’s earlier experiences, making it hard for many children to accept the care offered. The work of Winnicott is useful in making sense of this dynamic as he writes (1947: 199) in relation to traumatised children:

It is notoriously inadequate to take such a child into one’s home and to love him. What happens is that after a while a child so adopted gains hope, and then he starts to test out the environment he has found, and to seek proof of his guardians’ ability to hate objectively. It seems that he can believe in being loved only after reaching being hated.

He continues by explaining that there are many reasons why ‘hate remains unexpressed and even unfelt’. For foster carers, the conscious awareness of the awful feelings and experiences to which these children have already been subjected makes it very difficult for them to harbour such feelings of hatred towards the child. They can feel confronted by complex emotions that they see as inappropriate or even illegitimate (Lynes and Sitoe, 2019). Thus they may seek to obliterate such feelings as the very use of the term ‘hate’ in connection to the children in their care is felt to be an anathema to them – something they recoil from. Winnicott echoes this when he writes about his own experience of caring for a child from what he describes as a ‘broken home’. The child started to enact his experience of physical violence within his placement, engendering a feeling of hate within Winnicott. He writes (1947: 200), ‘Did I hit him? The answer is no, I never hit. But I should have had to have done so if I had not known all about my hate and if I had not let him know about it too’, so elucidating the importance of the parental figure being in touch with their own murderous feelings and hatred towards the child. These feelings create a tension with other emotions that foster carers bring to the relationship, such as an unconscious attempt not to be hated or to present as being ‘better than the child’s birth parents’. Thus, carers and child may reach an impasse over the course of a long placement whereby the child continues to express his or her hatred, unconsciously communicating ‘you will hate me’, while the foster carers try to meet this with love. For Winnicott (1947: 202), such love may be insufficient as it may contain a denial of hate. It appears to him ‘doubtful whether a human child as he develops is capable of tolerating the full extent of his own hate in a sentimental environment. He needs hate to hate’. Without acknowledging such frightening feelings, something will inevitably give. The foster carer may no longer be able to maintain their therapeutic position of emotionally holding the child, and may be drawn into an enactment of their unacknowledged feelings of rage, perhaps reacting physically, as in the case of L, or potentially abandoning the child, as in the case of N − enactments that can replicate the child’s traumas. This unsatisfactory outcome is the product of the intense hatred that has been constantly projected onto foster carers by the child − they have become filled with the intolerable feelings that the child cannot contain (Ironside, 2004) − and the perception of the child that this foster carer’s good intentions leave them in a vulnerable space. At best, the child will feel that their ‘horrific experience’ has been passed on, internalised and understood by the foster carers and that any re-enactment of their earlier trauma will create an opportunity to repair past damage through a different experience in the relationship with the current parental figures (Lanyado, 2004; Tonnesmann, 1980). At worst, there is a risk that the child may just dismiss new carers as the most recent versions of parental figures who are abusive or rejecting.

The consequences of unresolved hate

Enactments of painful and difficult feelings that arise in the relationship between foster carers and children can lead to fractures in the relationship and the untimely disruption of placements. This, again, may replicate the children’s earlier experiences of multiple losses and further undermine their capacity to develop trusting relationships. In the cases of L and N, both sets of foster carers were able to repair the ruptures that happened and maintain their care. Nevertheless, the disruptions created ambivalent feelings of shame, guilt, failure and defeat, feelings that are often identified with a placement breakdown (Valentine, MacCallum and Knibbs, 2019). At the same time, they also harboured strong feelings of anger in connection to what they felt the children had put them through. It was very difficult for them to accept what had occurred.

The contribution of the therapeutic input

For the placements to survive, therefore, it was important for these overwhelming and potentially destructive feelings to be understood and tolerated. This formed a crucial part of the task of the therapeutic team working with the foster carers over the period following the placement breakdowns. The team had been working with the carers on a weekly basis prior to the ruptures and had established a trusting relationship that provided a crucial foundation for the work surrounding the difficulties. The consistency of this input played an important role in the carers feeling supported through their painful experience and in the ability to hold an emotional space whereby they could articulate their feelings and vent their rage, and have them acknowledged and understood.

Throughout this process, opportunities emerged for the therapeutic team to explore and attempt to make sense of the dynamic that had become enacted in the two case studies. By being able to sit with these frightening emotions, carers came to accept that potentially overwhelming, destructive feelings can be managed and survived. This was then internalised by the children, providing them with an experience that their own destructive impulses, which they fear are too powerful for their parental figures, can not only be understood by their carers but also survived. In this way, the children may come to feel that these impulses are less damaging and more containable, so reducing their unconscious need to enact them, as was clear in the improved behaviour of L and N.

Conclusion

In the cases of both L and N, the placements had been underpinned by the bedrock of repeated, consistent nurture which the foster carers had provided over many years. It was hoped that through this process, the children would begin to internalise and integrate an experience of sustaining parental figures. However, given their earlier experiences, it proved difficult for them to believe in the nurture being provided and they unconsciously pushed the foster carers beyond their limits to contain their rage, provoking a potentially destructive reaction. This functioned to repeat the children’s earlier experiences and was felt by them as a confirmation of their perception that parental figures could not be trusted, alongside feelings that what they carried internally was frightening and unpalatable. This reaction opposed everything that the foster carers were trying to achieve for the children and evoked painful feelings of failure and guilt. By working through these feelings, along with openly exploring the uncomfortable feelings of rage and hatred that the children had evoked in them, the foster carers were able to acknowledge their own frightening feelings and carry responsibility for what had occurred in the placement, so increasing their capacity to repair the fractures. In addition, by accepting their own intolerable feelings, the carers were able to provide the children with an experience that their own frightening feelings could be made tolerable and that their hated, ugly parts could be accepted, so enabling them to feel more contained in their placements.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge OzChild, the foster care agency with whom this work was undertaken in partnership. They are an integral part of the therapeutic team who work to keep the placements intact.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Andrew S Browning is a Therapeutic Specialist at the Australian Childhood Foundation, Victoria, where he works with looked after children. He has trained as a Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and has a background in neurophysiology.

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