Containment 3

“Brother, let me be your servant

Let me be as Christ to you…

I will hold the Christ light for you

In the night-time of your fear.”

It was usually sung for someone who was finding life particularly difficult or painful. A kind of lullaby between the singers and the soothed. It offered a promise of containment. “We can’t take away your pain, but we will do our best not to leave you alone with it.” (A lovely thought albeit one that cannot be totally fulfilled. At some point we are all left alone in the night-time of our fear.) The most we can hope is that the night-time doesn’t last too long. And that somebody is there with us in the morning.

Effective containment is a balance. The child who is frightened of the monster under the bed can only share its parents’ bed for so long. At some point the child has to go back and look under the bed and face the monster. That way they learn to self care. Then, when the next child is scared the monster, they can comfort them.

I remember doing a role play in a workshop. I was playing a husband whose wife of 40 years had just been told that she had six months to live. The other participant was being a counsellor. They listened to me as I expressed my grief, my fury, my fear.  Nodded and made empathic noises. Then said “I understand how you feel.” At this point I nearly had to be forcibly restrained. How could this counsellor who was at least 30 years my junior begin to understand? How dare she have the temerity to say that to me? What did she know of grief, or loss, or suffering? Whether I was in role or out of it, I was furious. She looked ashen, having suffered an unexpected emotional mugging.  What she needed to have done was to demonstrate that she understood. And to show me what it was that she understood. So “You must be feeling very frightened right now” might have helped.  Or even “How are you both feeling at the moment?” I make a point of never telling my patients “I understand.” Because I probably don’t! I’ll ask how they feel. I’ll suggest how I think they’re feeling. I’ll ask “How does that make you feel?” But I won’t tell them I understand.

How does this relate to the previous pieces? My hope is that it highlights that good containment holds both the Light and the Darkness. The Love and the Hate.  When I was lecturing I worried about those students who were devoutly Evangelical. I interviewed one candidate, asking her for her responses to being threatened, verbally abused and generally intimated by a patient who might be severely psychotic. Her response “I’d let the love of Jesus flow into him” worried me. Here was someone who was unable to know her own hatred. This put her at risk. And her colleagues. We did not offer her a place.

I previously quoted Isaiah 45:7 “I form the light and create darkness: I make peace and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” Containment allows these two to live together and be acknowledged equally. The psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott wrote “What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal chid, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle and to appropriate… At the start he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and… imaginings…”  (Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency)

This is containment. This is care. This is nurture. The rest is just nonsense.

Filed under: Borderline States , Counselling , Dreams , Hope , Mindfullness , Narratives , Reflective Practice , Religion , Spirituality , The Inner World , The unconscious , Ways of Being Tagged: Containment , Delinquency and Development , Donald Winnicott , Isaiah , Light and Darkness

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