Human Growth and Development
Emerging Themes
There are a lot of losses and absences in Zak’s life. Zak’s long-term respite foster-carers are no longer able to care for him. His father has disappeared from his life, and Ken, who he was fond of, and perhaps saw as a bit of a father figure, died two years ago. His mother, as has been the case on a number of occasions before, is currently unable to provide a home for him. She perhaps finds it hard to focus on his needs, even when she is at home. He knows he is supposed to have a social worker, but he doesn’t have one.
Jade and Rob are his main sources of support at the moment, but they both seem a little resentful of the fact that they have this role. Both Rob and Jade have made clear to Deanna that they’d rather he wasn’t there. It seems likely that Zak too will have picked up this lack of enthusiasm. We suspect that a lack of enthusiasm on the part of others may be a familiar part of Zak’s experience. He probably is not a rewarding pupil to teach. He sounds as if he is not seen by other young people as someone that one would want to seek out as a friend. We could consider why he gets this message from others. What is the origin of it, and what sustains it? We could also consider what effect this message has on him. How do children and young people respond, when they sense that those around them are not that interested in them?
It’s also worth thinking about the reasons that Rob and Jade are unenthusiastic about him. In Rob’s case, he is annoyed with Zak for contributing to the departure of Derek, a boy who he really likes and feels he had a good working relationship with (see Case Study B). In Jade’s case, she mentions that he makes her feel useless. We’d suggest that professionals can and do resent service users, even if only unconsciously, when those service users make them feel useless. That’s probably particularly true of relatively inexperienced professionals like Jade, who may not yet be that confident about what she has to offer, but it can occur even with someone more experienced like Rob. In addition, both Rob and Jade are resentful of the lack of support they are getting from Children’s Social Care. Clearly, that isn’t Zak’s fault, and Rob and Jade know that, but whatever they may tell themselves as responsible adults, it is not difficult to see how that resentment may colour their attitude to Zak, without them meaning it to. (It’s possible that the connection between Rob’s partner and Zak’s former foster-carers has some bearing here also, although we don’t have enough information to know what that might be.)
One might also ask why Zak is not a priority case for Children’s Social Care. The fact that he doesn’t act out in an overt way may well be a factor here. It’s almost as if he has evolved a strategy for making people leave him alone.
Or perhaps a better way of looking at this would be that he has evolved a strategy of not asking too much of people? This would be consistent with his experience of growing up with a mother who is vulnerable herself and often not able to meet his needs.
Perhaps this also explains his ‘deviousness’ which one might also describe as a form of passive aggression. If you grow up with someone who will ‘break’ if you are angry with her, you perhaps have to contain a lot of the anger you might otherwise feel, about things that you need and are not getting. Perhaps the anger that he is unable to express directly, seeps out in other ways? (For example, by making people feel useless, as Jade does? Or is that ‘useless’ feeling which he elicits in Jade a kind of countertransference: her unconsciously picking up on his own feeling of uselessness?)
Missing from the story at the moment are two people who are or may be important: Zak’s father and his former foster-carer, Mary Carpenter. Both of them might be able to provide perspectives that are missing from the picture at the moment, and one would want to know more about Zak’s relationship with his father, to understand better where Zak is now. We also know only at second hand what Lily’s feelings are.