ABSTRACT
This chapter examines and discusses some of the more common ways in which secrets, trauma, and guilty feelings can interfere with the child's capacity to learn. When one considers how a child's teachers can fail to appreciate the impact of an obvious crisis or tragedy like the death of a parent, it is hardly surprisingly that the subtler and more hidden negative influences from the home background are seldom understood in more than a very vague way. The most common underlying cause of learning problems which present variously as anxiety, lack of confidence or motivation is a secret and admitted fantasy of magical knowledge or being a genius—sometimes, simply, a state of quiet complacency. Many children suffer from secret problems and hidden issues in the family or their history, but with many other children, while there is no secret or deception, no one has realised what the real problem is.
