ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 addresses the importance and practice of containing children’s emotions in a secure and thoughtful way. This includes bearing, reflecting on and responding thoughtfully to children’s verbal and behavioural communications – much like an attuned mother thoughtfully reflects on and responds to her baby’s needs and feelings. This crucial but little understood way of enabling children to feel emotionally held and heard, which happens naturally in attuned relationships, can often get omitted in our dealings with vulnerable children, when we want so much for them to change and achieve quickly.
The chapter looks at both practical and symbolic ways of containment, and at containing ways of being with, and talking to children. It considers the difference between ego support and emotional containment and when they are each needed, and discusses the containing necessity of clear, firm boundaries and calm, empathic ways of setting them.
The chapter also includes a section about children who need a more concentrated experience of emotional containment, accessing therapy and counselling in school (or out of school). This is not about therapy as such, but rather managing the interface between the school and the therapy, including confidentiality, side effects and other issues.
