‘Who can empathise with the Big, Bad Wolf?’ empathy and multiple narratives as an EP in a Children’s Services context

I have been working in a Specialist Practitioner Educational Psychologist role for the last 4 years within a multi-disciplinary ‘Edge of Care’ team placed within Children’s Services.

It is an exciting and unusual role and one which has challenged some of my thinking and values as an Educational Psychologist.

Working within the different context of Children’s Services, alongside professionals who do not always share my language and my views, has made me increasingly aware of the unique contributions of Educational Psychology, but has also brought some of my own beliefs and ‘blind spots’ more firmly into conscious awareness.

The thoughts below reflect my own personal journey in exploring a professional ‘need’ for the certainty of a single, clear narrative when working in difficult situations. Using ideas from Personal Construct Psychology (Kelly, 1955) to explore my own personal and professional constructs has been challenging at times but, I hope, has led to growth and development as a reflective practitioner.

Personal Constructs are, by their very nature, personal and individual. My reflections are not a commentary on the profession of Educational Psychology as a whole. I hope they will be useful to others in thinking about their own constructs and struggles with complexity.

Truth-seeking and the need for a scapegoat

The human brain loves a good story. Many of us grow up on fairy tales and myths, or family narratives which are told and retold. We remember stories; we use stories to help us make sense of our world. As a child I loved myths and fairy tales, where the big, bad wolf was defeated by the hero or heroine. But is the wolf always bad?

A clear and memorable story often needs a villain. Within a Children’s Services context, my input is sought when something has gone wrong. A child or young person is in a miserable or difficult situation. My thinking often defaults to “what has gone wrong?” or “who is to blame for this mess?” I naturally seek a ‘big bad wolf’ to blame.

I tell myself it is very natural to seek a scapegoat. It is easiest to find a scapegoat who is absent. When working in schools, we may hear or even collude with narratives about the ‘useless’ social worker who never turns up. When working with social workers, sometimes its stories about the birth parents who could not place a child’s needs above their own. When working with parents, sometimes an absent parent is blamed or failures of the system to diagnose within-child needs. Foster carers sometimes find a scapegoat in an unsympathetic school or a chain of different allocated social workers.

As humans, we seek the safety of a clear and certain narrative. As Psychologists, we need to hold these narratives lightly and retain our curiosity and reflectiveness about our own biases and preferred stories. We may choose to think of this as the ‘curiosity’ discussed in Dan Hughes and Kim Golding’s work (Golding & Hughes, 2012) or as ‘social constructionism’ (Burr, 2015) or as developing ‘safe uncertainty’ (Mason, 1993, 2022).

I first began to notice my own constructs around certainty and scapegoats when I worked with two estranged parents who had conflicting narratives about their parenting and relationship prior to their separation.

Following every consultation and conversation with either parent, I found myself truth-seeking. A little voice in my head would say “If I only knew exactly what had happened…”. Was this need for truth meeting my own need or the family’s need? As a psychologist, I could see that the children needed structure, routine, safety, connection, regardless of the ‘truth’ about their past. My search for the truth was, in reality, about who I felt was deserving of my empathy. In order to work effectively with the family, I needed to stop trying to find the hero and the big bad wolf in the story. I needed to exchange certainty for curiosity and to fully hear the stories of both parents. I needed to find a way to empathise with them as people with complex and difficult lives; people who are never entirely hero or big bad wolf.  

Multiple points of Empathy

How can we hold empathy for the ‘big bad wolves’ within broken and messy narratives?

It might be hard to understand Social Workers who fail to turn up for important meetings. Or to have empathy for birth parents who have had children removed due to sustained neglect. It is not always easy to empathise with foster carers who are struggling to care for a traumatised child. We might struggle to accept the feelings of school staff who hold firmly to punitive ways of managing the behaviour of traumatised children.

I want to draw a clear differentiation between empathising and agreeing with an individual or system. There are times for support and times for challenge. But how many of us can hear a challenge without first having our feelings heard? In the same way as we encourage ‘connection before correction’ with children and young people, we also need to spend time connecting with adults around children in order for our ‘corrections’ or gentle challenges to have any impact.

I have rarely spent time with any child, young person or adult with whom I have been unable to find empathy. The mother who has been unable to care for her children was, herself, a child who was not adequately cared for. The social worker who didn’t show up was desperately juggling 30 ‘high-risk’ cases and working within a traumatised system. The foster carer seeking diagnoses and within-child explanations has been kept awake by a child’s distress for the past 5 nights and is questioning their own value and worth as a carer. The teacher is finding that a young person’s resistance is triggering personal memories which are too much to manage alongside the daily stresses of paperwork, inspections, classes, school politics and young people’s mental health needs.

Can I be open to all of these lived experiences? Can I hold these multiple narratives? Can I let go of the professional safety of a single narrative? And can I be self-reflexive about the way I relate to and think about individuals that I work with? Can I notice when I am holding too reverently to a particular narrative or scapegoat? Can I notice the impact of my own experiences and biases on how I respond to those with whom I work?

Not on my own.

The importance of different and differing voices

Within my current team, we use the process of a reflecting team during consultations with families and professionals. During a reflecting team, we spend some time hearing from the family and case-holder with one member of our team facilitating the conversation/exploration whilst the others listen fully without contribution. We then switch roles, so that those who were listening can offer reflections, whilst those who were speaking can listen fully to those reflections without responding or engaging.

The reflections take the form of a conversation and are tentative and individual. Reflecting team members speak as individuals, not experts. We notice the different identities that are informing our reflections and biases. Our aim is to broaden out ideas, explore both sides of a story and open up possibilities, rather than evaluate or judge. When I am part of a reflecting team, I am safe enough to offer numerous (and sometimes conflicting) ideas and to reflect on my own pace, style, language and biases and how they may be influencing my contributions and interactions with others.

At the end of a reflecting team meeting, there is rarely a single hypothesis to work from. At times the meetings can be frustrating for those among us who enjoy the structure and certainty of quick decisions and clear plans. However, when the meeting Is finished, I feel confident that the family/case holder has been heard and that we have spent time trying to understand an experience more fully rather than imposing a favoured hypothesis or plan.

Unfortunately, I cannot carry a reflecting team around in my pocket to help me notice the impact of myself in my interactions or to hold multiple perspectives. However, I think holding on to a reflecting team approach throughout my work can help me hold multiple narratives and multiple points of empathy.

I have found regular peer supervision (both with those in my team and those in similar roles) as well as trusting relationships, a place where I can explore and safely be challenged on my own need for certainty. When we work in individual silos, we risk isolation within our own safe, firmly held narratives. When we work within teams in which it is safe to reflect and disagree, we can move towards a more open, effective and ‘listening’ stance in our work with children, young people, families, carers and professionals.

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