Human Growth and Development
Emerging Themes
You will have noticed that there is a lot going on in Tracey’ life at the moment, and you may also have observed some parallels and resonances between her own history and the situation of the Dudley/Harris family. When things are difficult in our personal lives it is not unusual to take refuge in work, which may feel more predictable and manageable, but this strategy is a form of denial, and does not usually work in the longer term. As is the case for Tracey, anxieties, apparently about work but actually also reflecting personal issues, have a way of surfacing and taking over, which is what is happening when she is lying awake at night worrying about the Dudleys or finding her heart sinking when she has to visit them. The fact that Tracey is finding herself uncharacteristically unable to think clearly about the situation, and is noticing that her levels of anxiety about the family are at odds with those of other professionals involved gives a clue that something is going on that is not just about the Dudleys.
What might this be? And why now, when Tracey has five years of experience as a social worker behind her, and has presumably coped with similarly complex and chaotic situations many times? There are several things about the Dudley/Harris family that carry echoes of Tracey’s experience in her own family. Lee Harris is an aggressive and controlling man, like her stepfather was, and when she feels herself getting impatient and irritated with Lisa for not standing up to him and putting the children’s needs first, these feelings are likely to be a transference (or more accurately, countertransference, as she is experiencing them towards Lisa in her professional role) of the feelings she had, and still has, towards her own mother (HGD: 38). And in the anxiety she feels when she has to go and visit the family she may well be unconsciously re-experiencing the fear she felt for her violent stepfather.
Hannah’s recent pregnancy and termination will also have awakened memories of her own pregnancy at a similar age, and though she is likely to have encountered this situation before in her work, it is all the more poignant now because at this stage of her life she is feeling a strong desire to have a child, and is uncertain whether this will be possible in her current relationship. Rob’s situation has some parallels with that of her father, who left her mother taking his two sons with him and leaving her, and this is likely to be complicating matters with transference feelings from the past as she and her partner try to find a way forward; she may feel that yet again her needs are not being put first. She may also fear abandonment by her partner, which is probably why she doesn’t dare bring up the subject of having a baby with him again after his initial negative reaction.
Loss is a strong theme in Tracey’s life at the moment; she is also still dealing with the death of her foster carer, Ken, and in her concern to support Mary through her bereavement there may well have been little room for her own feelings of grief. These feelings will be about the loss of a carer who has been a reliable and consistent attachment figure in her life for twenty years, and the closest to a father that she has ever known, but beneath this there will be another layer of feeling about the earlier death of her grandmother, the reliable carer in her family, which happened just as she embarked on adolescence, and was one of the factors that made that period so difficult for her. Now she must negotiate another major transition to a different life stage, signalled by her growing desire to become a mother, and also by the reversal of roles with Mary following the death of Ken, and so that she is now more the carer than being cared for. Working with the Dudleys, on the other hand, is tending to push her back to an earlier stage by making her feel deskilled, as Lee says, like a ‘young girl’.
The situation of the Dudley/Harris family, chaotic but still just about together, contrasts with the fate of her own chaotic family, none of whom she has been able to maintain contact with. The disabling anxiety she feels when confronted with the Dudleys may be partly to do with this if she fears that the eventual outcome of her work with them may be that the family will be split up. This will put her in touch with her feelings of loss about her own siblings. But it will be a complex feeling; there is also going to be a part of her that urgently wants to protect these vulnerable children by removing them from danger, as she herself was protected when she was taken into care. Her emotional involvement and identification with the situation is probably what is making it difficult for her to think clearly and evaluate the actual level of risk to the Dudley children.