ABSTRACT
During the writing of this book, the media have increasingly highlighted a number of related issues-bullying, juvenile crime and the rising rate of school exclusions of pupils with behaviour difficulties. Whilst there are no easy answers to these problems, the general principles of this book are pertinent to considering them. We become available for learning and development only when we have the inner experience of emotional containment or holding. We live at a time when some troubled children are expressing in very graphic, public and disturbing ways their lack of a sense of emotional containment, and their search for limits and for meaning. The effectiveness of our provision of the necessary emotional containment for troubled and troubling children depends upon the extent to which we relate to the issues at hand, in what I have described as a ‘process’-related manner. Where we can learn to consider each of our interventions (at macro and micro levels) as a series of processes which contribute to the processes of emotional growth, then it is more likely that the potential of individuals for growth and learning will be released. The chapters in the second part of this book outline the processes involved in facilitating emotional growth and learning. Rather than being prescriptive in nature, I have sought to explore the psychological nature of the processes, in the hope that readers will be able to imagine how they might apply such thinking in a range of contexts, settings and organisations.
