Human Growth and Development
Emerging Themes
Derek
As Rob sees it, Derek is torn between loyalty to his family and his desire to do something different with his life. The tension between family expectations and personal desires is perhaps not in itself so unusual. It’s surely a common dilemma in many families. What makes Derek’s situation particularly difficult is the huge emphasis placed on family loyalty in Derek’s family (as Rob describes it, at least) and the fact that the ‘family business’ that the family expects Derek to be part of, is essentially a criminal one.
Derek seems to have been able to confide in Rob more than most. Probably it helps that Rob isn’t intimidated by him. Rob is sensing the power of family in Derek’s life, and how difficult it is for Derek to distance himself from his family and their expectations. He is surely right that it is asking a great deal of a 17-year-old boy to be able to do this without any sort of support.
Rob
‘As Rob sees it, at least,’ we noted above. Rob is an experienced and capable worker by the sound of it, and he’s unlikely to be completely wrong. However, it is always worth noticing when a professional identifies particularly closely with a particular service user, as there is often a bit of projection/countertransference going on in such situations, which may mean that the professional is particularly focussed on aspects of the service user’s experience that remind him or her of something in the professional’s own life, and may find it harder to recognise aspects of the service user’s experience that aren’t quite so like the professional’s own experience. (If you refer to the material elsewhere about Derek’s partner Tracey Green (Case Study J) and the Dudley/Harris family (Case Study G) you’ll see another example of this: in her mind, Tracey identifies Lee Dudley with her own abusive stepfather.) Conversely, professionals may be less sympathetic to service users whose experiences are less familiar to them, or to people who seem to be creating problems for the service users they do identify with. Rob’s attitude to Zak (Case Study K) may perhaps be an example of this?
Rob is feeling torn in his own life between loyalty to his sons and desire to do the right thing by Tracey, and it may be partly for that reason that he is so focused on the idea of Derek being torn between the need to please his family and his desire to make something different of his life. This is not to say Rob is wrong about that. It may well be that, because of his own dilemma, he is unusually well attuned to this aspect of Derek’s own experience, and is picking up something there that other staff do not see so clearly. But if you were Rob’s manager or a colleague of Rob’s, you might want to consider whether there were other parts of Derek’s experience that also need thinking about. Is it really all about divided loyalties, or are there issues to think about to do with Derek’s anger management, poor impulse control, drug use? It’s possible Rob could do with some help disentangling the problems he’s having at home from the problems of his clients, so as not to be prone to use their problems as a way of working out his own issues.