Small is Beautiful

I'm going to talk about the issues of scale whilst considering how we work at the Arbours Crisis Centre. At the Centre we have three groups of people, three resident therapists, six guests (the name we give to our patients at the Centre) and 10 team leaders.

The guests who come to the Centre are extremely damaged people. They live on a precipice, their identities uncertain, unsure whether they want to live - or not. Many of our guests over recent years have inhabited the borderline state of mind, neither in relationships nor out of them, ‘stable in their instability’ (Fonagy 1991), neither choosing life nor death but often finding frightening behaviours that keep them compromised at death's door. Many of the guests at the Centre ‘do’ something destructive like bingeing or cutting. Usually they are people who in their history have experienced someone ‘doing’ something to them - they have been intruded upon by others. Their ‘no’, perhaps in a situation of abuse, has not been heard. Consequently as part of their way of communicating they ‘do’ things to themselves… and to others, usually through the launching of violent projections - that is, forcing their anxieties into other people. For people in this borderline state of mind nothing is right, and, often, despite having used considerable energy to get to the Crisis Centre, when they get there, everything is wrong. The food is wrong, the rooms are too big or too small, the resident therapists are either always too busy when you want them, or they are knocking on your door just when you wanted to be alone. Rooms are too hot or too cold, team leaders are either too removed, or too demanding on the guest - and so on. This is the borderline world where the world of intimate relations between subject and object, mother and child, has been profoundly damaged. And there is the longing for the transformational object - the perfect person or place that will make everything right.

Often, guests at the Centre experience a crisis on