ABSTRACT
One maths teacher I knew was worried about being sacked because many of the fifteen-year-old boys in his class would come up to him and say things like ‘Sir, can I tell you about my Mum, she’s drinking again’ or ‘Sir, my Mum’s got all sad again. What do you think I should do?’ Such young people as this would gain hugely from a reflective space such as that offered in this exercise. With an empathic adult, it can be a real relief for a child or teenager to talk about and think about what it’s like for them to live with a troubled parent. As a result, the child is able to think clearly about their emotional experiences rather than feeling flooded by them. The idea, developed by Christopher Bollas (1987), is to help the child to find words for feelings and move from a disturbing unthought known (troubling sensations, images, feelings that have never been symbolised in words and coherent thought – ‘I know it but I have not had a thought about it’) to a thought known.
