Those working in child protection see parents and families at their worst. It is often difficult not to be judgmental and this creates a barrier that prevents meaningful engagement.
Empathy and understanding are emotional conditions. We cannot simply instruct professionals to “be understanding”. Even if they act as if they are empathetic and avoid expressing judgment (as part of something we refer to as “showing professional detachment”), this means they are being inauthentic and insincere.
This book explains a technique that has been used when working with groups from Bulgaria‟s child protection services. It is powerful and it can provoke empathy. We have seen this for ourselves. It works.
How does it provoke empathy?
In an interview published in 2012, Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert says that if he had to “summarize the scientific literature on the causes of human happiness in one word, that word would be „social‟”. Gilbert is a positive psychologist. The developmental psychologist, Gordon Neufeld would be more likely to refer to “attachment”. We will add our own word – “relationships”. All the words reflect the idea of human interconnection. Poets and philosophers talked about the concept before psychologists got around to it.
Empathy can be provoked by placing professionals in a position in which they must contemplate their own dependence on their connections with others. We could say that those professionals work with people who suffer because of profoundly faulty connections. It‟s painful when connections fail, isn‟t it? For those people the pain tends to be prolonged but it is something we can all understand.
The technique described in this book is based on the work of Bert Hellinger, a German psychotherapist who studied psychoanalysis and gestalt therapy. The method depends on Hellinger‟s concept of family constellations. Essentially, Hellinger is pointing at the same phenomenon as Gilbert and Neufeld and his emphasis on familial bonds and the roles of mothers and fathers is of central importance in the context of Bulgaria‟s deinstitutionalisation programme.
In the words of Henry Ward Beecher – “There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.” Children deprived of this very special connection are the saddest of all children. By providing social workers with a sense of their own capacity to feel this sadness, we provoke understanding of the “broken family” irrespective of skin colour and wrong-doings of its members. We create empathy.