This paper is about my therapeutic work as a Black middle-aged female counselling psychologist with children and young people who offend – children and young people who are disenfranchised, and who are disillusioned with themselves, who are disillusioned with the world, and who are especially disillusioned with professionals like me who say that they can help. To reach these children and young people, I have felt the need to be more authentic than when working with adults – to relate, to be myself, to separate from the theory, yet also to have the theory of my profession in mind. It is a journey on which on many occasions I have doubted whether I am doing it right, whether I am making a difference, and yet at the same time I have been able to see that both the young people and I are relating to one another. On many points in this journey, I have doubted if I am doing it right, if I am making a difference. However, as the children and young people related to me and as I related to them, I have witnessed them change, and heal, and I also have changed. In the rest of this paper, I will for the most part refer generically to ‘young people’, because many have told me that they do not feel like children, that they have seen and lived through too much.
I am writing about my process and reflection as a practitioner who has worked in these specialist settings, about what happens between the young people and me, and the crucial importance of the relational approach in reaching young people, especially young Black people. I consider how I bring my culture and fallible me to the counselling work. I refer to what I feel is an unspoken and invisible invitation, perhaps an expectation on the part of the young people to be ‘real’, to be flexible, to be less rigid, and reflect that as the practitioner I am willing and open to adapt or remould the counselling frame to reach a young person and make room for psychological insight and change.
The forensic setting imposes the demand and high expectation that I ‘do’ something with these young people. My sense is that they want me to fix the young person, and to do it quickly, maybe by magic. As I recall the young people that I have worked with, my feeling is that I did achieve something amazing: they stayed within the counselling relationship and they shifted. Something of them healed. I admit that I have felt irritated with organisations and this forensic setting because they often cannot accommodate the counselling frame as I was taught it. In passing, I recognise, but do not explore in depth, that the forensic frame, which encloses the therapeutic frame, has social, cultural, political, and economic features that impact attributes of the children's lives and so also ultimately the therapeutic work.
Theresa May in her 2016 address to parliament on moving into her new role as prime minister said: ‘If you're black, you're treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you're white’ (, 2016). Thus, it is not surprising that Black, mixed-heritage and Asian people are over-represented in the criminal justice system compared to their white counterparts (Ministry of Justice, 2021). It has been reported that 60 per cent of those who received a custodial sentence have been excluded from school; that half of the Black and mixed-heritage young people who offend have experienced racial discrimination in their lives; that one-third have been the victims of criminal exploitation; and that a quarter have disabilities (Mohdin, 2021). These were and are my clients. I need to reach them: to start and maintain effective counselling relationships and produce positive outcomes. These young people are often labelled ‘difficult to engage’ by professionals who work with them. I will start with a definition of the counselling frame and then explain that the young people's lived experiences require that I worked differently, with different parts of the frame, to reach them, and will then consider what the benefits might be.
The frame in counselling and psychotherapy refers to the ‘ethical and professional’ ground rules that help to keep both the therapist and the client safe (Jordan and Marshall, 2010). The frame needs to be ‘fixed, stable or steady’ (Milton, 1993, p. 144) and is made up of ‘unchangeable or easily set ground rules such as the fee, time and length of the sessions, the physical setting and total confidentiality and privacy’ (Langs, 1979, p. 540). The ground rules also include the therapist's ‘relative anonymity and neutrality’ (Milton, 1993, p. 540). In terms of neutrality, I am already feeling myself becoming a therapist undone: I am wondering how I can be neutral about children's trauma and about children being incarcerated.
Gabbard (1995) said that the psychotherapeutic frame was created to contain the difficult feelings and enactments that come about within the therapeutic relationship in the form of transference, and countertransference. Others have suggested that the psychotherapeutic frame permits the therapeutic relationship to be unambiguous, consistent, and that this is healing for the client (Langs, 1979; Jordan and Marshall, 2010).
The modern frame still covers the therapy contract, length of counselling sessions, frequency, the therapy room, and counsellor self-disclosure. However, given the widespread use of counselling and psychotherapy in different settings it is not far-fetched to think that the counselling frame will not only be impacted and changed by the setting, but that the frame may also be altered by the client. Even Langs (1979), a strong advocate of the idea of a very firm frame and the necessity of keeping to it, allows for some variation. He notes it is the responsibility of the therapist to manage the ground rules within that frame.
The reality is that once humans are being themselves and there is countertransference from the therapist, the frame will be impacted, and there will be some variation to the frame. Langs (1979) refers to an ‘optimal frame’ and that anything else is a ‘deviant frame’. In my experience, the forensic setting, the organisation, and the criminal justice system have
more control over the frame than the therapist. I would go further and suggest that the forensic setting is full of traumatized children and young people locked up away from family, friends, and the community, which significantly impacts the setting and the counselling frame. The setting is a social microcosm in which racism as well as classist attitudes and behaviour from the community impact on the frame. The dominant factor for me was the need to adjust the frame to meet the specific needs of the young people who were my clients to make it possible for therapy to happen.
‘Valid interpretative work can only occur once the therapeutic environment has been secured’ says Langs (, p. 30, cited in Milton), but the reality is that as the therapist I have never been powerful enough to secure the setting. The forensic system is constantly mindful of the young people's offending, their potential dangerousness, and the unpredictability of young (mainly) Black people's behaviour due to unresolved trauma and the resulting poor emotional regulation. The setting controls the physical environment, the young people, and, to some extent, the therapist. In the space left to me as the counselling psychologist, it was my task to make the rest a secure-enough frame. The word ‘secure’ has different meanings in forensic and therapeutic spaces. In forensic terms, it is about making spaces safe against young people; in therapeutic terms, it is about making safe spaces for them.
One aspect of the traditional counselling frame is the therapy room. Some have suggested that the frame and the therapy room have become ‘synonymous’ (Jordan and Marshall, 2010). However, in many of the forensic settings where I have worked there are no fixed therapy rooms but rooms that can be booked by any professional working with the young people. The traditional ‘textbook’ therapy room with two comfortable armchairs, a coffee table, and a nice clean circular rug is absent. Instead, there are rooms that are used: for education; for a hair-plaiting session; for gaming with an Xbox; as an informal library with a bookcase; as a centre for youth worker sessions. The room as a space protected for
conducting therapy is not a given; instead, a room with multiple uses is available. Initially, these multi-purpose rooms unnerved me. I felt that I was not able to contain the physical therapeutic space in the way that a therapist should, so I wondered how I would contain the young people's emotional content. My emotions were stirred, close to the surface, without the traditional therapy room to enter and wear. I felt on edge and wondered what could ground me in my role. But this was a passing feeling as I watched young people sit and physically relax in the room. It seemed to me that the room was a positive feature for them because they had more history with the room than they did with me. They knew the room and I did not. They had been in the room before when it was not a counselling room, but when it was a room to use for various other purposes – just to be. This familiarity with the room helped the young person to feel more comfortable, less defended, and more able to engage with me as a person.
The absence of a regular counselling room is inconsequential because in this context what is important is that something more transformational happens between me and the young person. A different type of therapy room manifests – one that is relational. This different type of ‘room’ offers containment, and a space for the therapeutic work to happen. In this environment, the containment needs to be concentrated in me as the reliable presence. I am responsible for containing the young person and myself, unafraid of what the young person will bring into the space between us. My role is to stand up to and look beyond the label ‘offender’ to the child, the young person. In this process of attachment, it is necessary for the therapist to understand that the forensic setting is a trauma-saturated one, in which the therapy room, as curated and contained by the counsellor, can offer some solace and space for the young person to process past experiences of abandonment, as well as strong present feelings such as anger and sadness.
Boundaries are maintained in the relationship because I am the person that they speak to about shame, being poor, living on a council estate, being angry with parental figures, or being excluded from education and society. As the therapist, I keep a different demarcation for us. In
the counselling space, they do not have to be in denial of the loss of their childhood and their innocence; they can allow themselves to shed a tear and to admit that they are afraid. In this, they are heard, cared for and understood, and healing can happen. Our roles are differentiated: I have become a maternal figure, a different type of mother, an auntie, a caregiver, a healing figure. I can feel that I do not have to be perfect.
I am the consistent presence, but this consistency needs to be flexible. I am the therapist who looks for them if they do not attend counselling, who finds out if they have gone to court or have been transferred to another custodial institution or elsewhere. I am the therapist who considers whether perhaps another activity has prevented them from coming to their counselling. I am someone who keeps them in mind, and who will look for them in the forensic setting. This is the shape of therapeutic consistency for both therapist and young person. If we miss a session, at our next meeting I will mention their absence, I will tell them that I looked for them, and they might smile and say, ‘I was at court’ – almost surprised that I enquired about their whereabouts and that I did not know they would be in court, as if I had forgotten that they were imprisoned, that they were offenders. When this happens, it feels as if something is being repaired, as if we are flying in a different direction from the type of attachment they had experienced in early life. In this work I often feel like the aunt who is a consistent force, who can be relied on to provide them with some acceptance. In fact, some of the young people, usually those who are not my clients, might hail me from a distance by calling out: ‘Hello Auntie!’ When there was some whisper amongst the guardians of some of the settings that these young people were being disrespectful to me, for a moment I felt a ruffling of my feathers, but that was more about my struggle with the fact that I am now viewed as an elder both in the forensic setting and in the Black community.
Langs (1979) states that the therapist witholding opinion upholds good interpersonal boundaries. In their ‘relative anonymity’, the therapist can
be viewed by the client as sane. In my opinion, it is disingenuous to portray myself as ‘sane’ when the young person's world has been turned upside down and they find themselves in the criminal justice system, where they feel insane, but are expected to appear sane, so that they are not further labelled as ‘mad’ or ‘bad’. Moreover, I have never felt ‘sane’, and the older I get the less I understand what being sane looks like. In the room, there is both unspoken and spoken recognition, from me to the young person, that I agree with their verbal summary of their situation: ‘this is mad’.
There is an element of anxiety coming from the child, and possibly from both of us, and this must be worked with. It must be named to maintain the therapy, to make healing possible. The anxiety is that in the forensic setting anything can happen: the young person's identity can disappear, and they may become just an offender; they are both their government name and their street name. The anxiety can also present as uncertainty that they will ever return to the other world called ‘society’, and there is also uncertainty as to whether they will have another counselling session. In the counselling space between us, the child-clients and I talk of that other world, ‘the community’. We talk of how it smells and sounds, what they eat there, and how they dream of returning there. They also mention dead friends, drugs, and violence. There is pain and loss as we talk. The only way to do this work is with a flexible counselling relationship and frame – not to be neutral or to be insane, like the system.
The forensic setting is stark, and I understand that young people need to feel real, grounded, and have some power in the room. This requires that I disclose something of myself and my understanding of them. I often disclose my cultural heritage: that I am a British-born Nigerian and Antiguan, and have some understanding of and familiarity with the cultures of all of these countries; that I know something of Caribbean parents, the food, dialect, complex family arrangements, grandmothers who parent grandchildren; that I know of Nigerian and Caribbean parents who have high academic expectations of their children, and that both cultures have a strong sense of shame. My nods and a few utterances communicate that I know of ‘isms’ such as racism, sexism, and ageism,
that I have suffered all of these in the Western white world. That I bring with me a wide cultural awareness of being Black in Britain and further an awareness of the global anti-Blackness that is endemic, a part of everyday life for Black people. I bring my positionality with me into the therapy room and the therapeutic relationship, and even if it is not seen accurately by the young Black person, they engage and interact with me from their perception of my positionality as being ‘other’.
Sue (1988, cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 2), referring to the poor take-up and positive outcomes of Black people in therapy in the USA, says that therapists often fail with Black clients because they cannot ‘communicate and understand the values, lifestyles, and backgrounds of these clients’. I think it is slightly different for me because I can speak to poverty, trauma, missing Black fathers, and being overlooked through discrimination and racism. I have experienced all of them.
Pedersen 1976 (cited in Patterson, 1996, p. 2) says, ‘There is increasing evidence that the trained counsellor is unprepared to deal with individuals who come from different racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups whose values, attitudes and general styles are different from and threatening to their own.’ There is a ceiling to my cultural awareness as well. I have parts of not knowing, because I am from a different Black British generation to the children I work with. I am not fully in touch with young people's social media, or street culture, so the young client will occasionally be required to explain aspects of their culture to me. In doing so they hear their own narrative and get in touch with the story they want me to know, and as I ask for more clarity, they hint at what happened to them, how they felt, their loss, their pain, and how they want to move away from certain lived experiences, situations, and lifestyles. This is how the therapeutic work is done.
In breaking or stretching the frame, I address the power imbalance in the therapeutic relationship which requires the young people to be willing to reveal everything about themselves, a position that is vulnerable and sensitive (McLeod, 2003). My not knowing encourages the young person, as the expert, to explain their culture to me, and this momentarily transforms the balance of power. It also helps the young person to
connect with their own voice, identity, and autonomy. It is my chance and my place at these times to be curious as the young people lead me through their world. Then I take over the lead, as the therapist, making the connections between their early life experiences, traumas, and current behaviours. It occurs to me that I can ‘communicate and understand the values, lifestyles and backgrounds of these clients’ (Sue, 1988, p. 2) and that I am providing a ‘culturally responsive form of therapy’ (Sue and Zane, 1987, p. 2).
As mentioned earlier, oftentimes counselling sessions do not happen weekly for young people in forensic settings. There are many reasons for this, including criminal justice appointments, young people going to education or other daily activities that need to happen. Thus, the Jamaican patois phrase ‘Mi soon come’ is operative in the breaking of the frame of regularity. ‘Mi soon come’ implies that the person will be back soon but working on Jamaican time or any island time: it may take a little while, but trust they will be back. West Africans have the same sort of way of communicating that they will return, but maybe not immediately. It is a cultural communication that recognises that there is a strong-enough attachment between the young client and me. As the therapist, I will keep the therapeutic space for the client, and we will pick up on the return of the other. In such settings, I am creative about sending messages to the young person to let them know that I am keeping them in mind. Sometimes it is a therapeutic letter slipped under a door or a visit to the exercise yard to say hello to them – or to say hello to no-one at all but, just by being present, enabling them to see me and know that I am there for them. I am helping to create some semblance of continuity of relationship and regularity that the young person may not have had previously in their lives.
Frequently, when I resume the counselling after a brief break, I attempt to explore that separation and the young person admits that they missed meeting for counselling, but then the admission is quickly brushed aside. The setting is one where they need to retain composure to some extent,
and admitting missing the counsellor and counselling can be viewed as an indication to themselves of their own weakness. When we explore the loss around the missed session and other losses in their lives, they say that they need to be strong and not break down, but admit that they missed me coming to take them out of the normal barren isolation of confinement in this custodial setting. I feed back to them that I hear their reluctance to look at loss and pain, that I can see that currently they do not want to explore it further, but that I will be listening for when it comes up again and that we will need to take time to look at it.
The ending in a forensic setting is no different from the ending in any other setting, except that the grieving surrounding it feels insurmountable and extremely challenging precisely because of the setting. It is eased if the young person is to be released back into the community: then we can reflect on what we have covered in the therapy work and their plans. However, it is not always easy. For some, the ending reminds them of other final endings, such as the death of friends in street violence, or the last time they saw a father or mother. If they are being released into the community, they fear that they could come back into the criminal justice system, so I name it and they acknowledge that it is a strong possibility, because they are enmeshed in a criminal street life from which they cannot extract themselves. A few admit that they are also strangely addicted to the danger – but that is another paper. Other unbearable endings are when young people are going on to adult institutions to serve the rest of their sentence, and for both of us the challenge is the pain of the continuation of incarceration. The breaking of the frame is the fist pump, a touching of our fists, common amongst young people, that also happens between me and the young person. It says to me as the therapist that they have let me into their world, to relate, when they don't usually, because they have learned that relationships can wound them.
I have come to the end of my paper, and I am aware that a neat conclusion
eludes me. The young people continue to sit and stand at my shoulder, they overlook my writing, they seem to whisper to me about other things I should have mentioned in this paper. I tell them in my heart that there is not enough room to reference many things, especially unprocessed material. I explain to their ghosts that I want a tidy conclusion to this paper, one that allows me to put all their pain behind me, and my countertransference onto the page so that I can walk away, that I want closure. I tell them that I want this paper to be polished, well-written, professional, and sophisticated. However, I know that the style of this paper can be called chaotic, simple, and maybe naive, perhaps the channelled essence of the children? I feel that this paper is incomplete, that my heart still aches from their stories and that my processing of their material continues. They will continue to teach me, and I can feel myself looking around for another paper to write so that I can separate from them a little more. Perhaps they will never leave me, and rightly so.