ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that relationship, which is built up through attachments, is at the core of people's human experience. It explores the relationship between the child who experiences abandonment and the kinds of restorative experiences a substitute care setting can go some way to providing. The message within abandoned children is that they are unloved, unlovable, bad and somehow guilty of causing the situation that led to being in care. When responsive parental care is rarely experienced, the infant receives little help to make sense of feelings. To deflect from experiencing emptiness, formless terror, nameless dread, children in care may use a range of behaviours, as exemplified above, as a form of protection, a defence. The chapter also shows that children in care experience feelings of abandonment expressed in characteristic behaviours. It explores children's need for a care experience which is structured to provide opportunity for real repair of the sense of self.
