Just to, even partly experience, what life might be like for a child growing up in distress, in a family within the Focus Group, I invite you to imagine that you are 12 or 13 and you have a toothache.
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Now a toothache is a really painful thing.
And one thing about a toothache is that I always seem to be irritable when I have one! As time goes on and on, my irritation gets more and more intense, and my toothache becomes more and more painful. Then I am brought to a dentist and after a little discomfort it is eased – and I have no more toothache!
Despite how painful it is, there are three things worth mentioning about a toothache:
~ It’s usually time limited.
~ I’ll be able to cognitively understand (or rationalise) why I have the pain.
~ I’ll nearly always get sympathy.
Now ………….. imagine if the pain is an emotional pain.
Adults in my life can explain to me what toothaches or earaches or tummy-bugs are, and then I can make sense of them. They can also give me advice as to how to avoid getting them in the future.
But my emotional pain is not like that at all. No, it just is!
Maybe the way I know I’m in emotional pain is that I just feel different. I look out at the world and I see other children well behaved and being rewarded, able to concentrate in school and having teachers praising them, holding on to friends and invited to play sports and enjoying them. Whereas I am often left out, (or included initially and then left out), because I do things that adults and peers don’t like – and I just can’t seem to stop myself doing these things.
As I grow into my teenage years my emotional pain is manifest as a mixture of confusion and uncertainty. It is also manifest in a lot of ways that I don’t even notice, really, such as tension in muscles, fast heartbeat, unease or queasiness, impulsive out of control behaviour, perhaps having a lot of accidents, heaviness in the chest area, still having tantrums when other children that I know have grown out of them, and above all having an inner anxiety that I’ll never be able to make it that constantly gnaws away at my self-confidence and self-belief.
If I am 12 or 13, unlike the toothache for which I can get a one-hour quick fix there seems to be no beginning or no end to this pain. I cannot remember when I first had it and I begin believing that I will always have it – it almost defines me. Also, nobody seems to be able to do anything about it.
And also, unlike the toothache, instead of getting sympathy, I am actually afraid and on high alert in case people around me give out to me because of how I am behaving.
Maybe a teacher, or a club leader, or a team manager leaves me out. Maybe my parents will be disapproving of me, or even punish me, or perhaps be on high alert themselves, and I can feel tension in my house – perhaps fights between my parents, and all this seems to be due to my behaviour.
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For the child, this emotional pain is as real and as debilitating as any physical pain but it contains far more power because firstly it is unique and secondly it has a mysterious quality that a physical pain does not have.