DEAR YOGESHREE confused feelings in child and youth care work

DEAR YOGESHREE

This is the second letter in a series which explores the idea that feelings, the child's and ours, can help us to find meaning in what is really going on in the deeper levels of the child. This letter however explores what is often called  "noise". This is an introductory letter. It  tries to set out the complexity of "noise" in what we might be feeling in any one complex group life moment .The letter which follows will attempt an example from practice, a narrative, to help illustrate this.

In most child and youth care situations messages get thrown at you from all quarters , all sides and usually all at once..especially as we are involved in group care and group interventions and interactions. The task of sorting out the range of feelings in us, and in others, and so our thinking and our responses becomes a complex and very often confusing  exercise.

A metaphor that helped me to get some idea about what was happening in me in these moments came from my childhood. At my family home, we had a piano. It was not an upright piano but a medium sized grand piano called a boudoir grande. If the lid was opened the strings were exposed flat, asif strung across a table. It was great fun. WE could put little objects on the strings and see them bounce, vibrate and make all manner of noise on the resonating strings. But the big lesson was this: If the strings were not dampened but left free to vibrate freely, and you struck one note on the piano, say middle "C", all the strings of that note resonated too. Here was room for some experimentation... if we played the gramophone,... say rock and roll, and the strings were open then the outside music got the piano strings resonating too.

See, that was me...I was like the boudoir grand. I could play my own feeling notes, but all the other feelings in the room resonated in me too, up and down the scale Like playing the piano with open strings and having rock and roll playing at the same time

The risk was always that it all just becomes a confusing noise of feeling, and so confusing my thinking and my responses.

There is a game we play in the training of child and youth care workers. Blindfolded, they have to follow the voice of their partner to reach a given seat whilst everyone else is calling instructions to their partners at the same time. It means , sorting out all the other voices and their messages, tuning-in and hearing your real guiding voice amidst the confusing noise of all the others to know who is who and where you have to go. It's like that with feelings . Important amongst all the noise, is that we can sort out the melody of feelings you are playing, with all its resonances from all the resonating feelings in you that belong to the child, from the policy and procedure noises that come from your organisation and from all the other resonating feelings and messages that come from the others in the group.

It is very confusing......

 But through the maze of feeling, it is our work to make sense,  to grasp what is really happening

........and so the story of Sindiswe ...... .next time

 Love

 Barrie