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I finished reading the clinical material and noticed how irritated I had come to feel. When I re-read it, my discomfort grew. I felt unusually critical. Given that the actual material does not warrant such a response, what was going on within me? Who was I identifying with such that I wanted to reject the material in a critical way? It was disconcerting: after all, a thoughtful therapist had described a third session with a 15-year-old mother and her two-month-old baby, yet I felt judgmental and, at first, critical of her potentially creative questions, interpretations and embodied actions. There are many possibilities for my experience, several of which could be simultaneously relevant. What follows is one hypothesis.
A moment of authentic expression seemed to occur some time into the session when mother Lisa could express her unnamed but powerfully felt fury at feeling judged and restricted. She mentioned not being allowed to take baby Anna out on her own yet; or being allowed to have any time on her own. The theme of ‘not being allowed …’ filled the exchange. I bristled with frustration when I considered the restrictions Lisa was expected to adhere to and asked myself what evidence Social Care had to justify preventing a young mother, who had not harmed her baby, to go for a walk on her own with her baby, or have some time with friends without her baby? With many teenage mothers, a grandmother or aunt would naturally offer to help for a few hours to give the mother a bit of space. There is often an inherent understanding in the grandparent that adolescence and full-time responsibility for the survival of a baby create understandable tensions and help is offered to support the adolescent negotiate her conflicting wishes. This was not allowed for mother Lisa and so the question is raised as to how the network of professionals involved in the case might be acting into Lisa’s history and her family dynamics?
Lisa’s father’s harsh rejection of his daughter crashed into