Disconnection/Connection and The Space Between.

In lieu of lockdown, we are disconnecting from our habits and routines, our jobs, our friends, our families. I believe we are entering a ‘transitional space’ - a liminal reality - a place that is neither here nor there. What exists between disconnection and connection? To illustrate this transitional space I will discuss a therapy group I ran recently for a staff team of teachers and engagement workers. The participants have consented to my use of the group in this blog, provided appropriate anonymity was used.   

For the past few months I have run an art therapy group for teenagers in an inner city youth project. The project offers education of varying types. The teenagers tend to be amongst the most disengaged in the city. Many come from turbulent backgrounds, many from broken families living in deprived areas below the poverty line. Loss, abuse, drugs, gang culture can be large parts of these young people’s lives. You could say that these young people are disconnected from the mainstream of society. The dissociative impact of the trauma’s that these teenagers have absorbed amplifies this disconnect.

The youth project is run by a dedicated and busy staff team of engagement workers and teachers. They fight a constant battle against lack of funding, resources and disinterested young people who are often unable – due to unprocessed trauma - to engage. The existence of trauma in the setting generates it’s own unique and unforeseen consequences. Staff can be drawn into enactments as the young people project their unconscious needs onto staff. Prominent Psychoanalyst, Joseph Sandler, introduced the concept of ‘role responsiveness’, this being the process of enacting another person’s fantasies of who we are. For example, have you ever felt like a teenager at your parent’s house? Or know someone who speaks to you as if you are a parent, and then you start to act and feel like a parent toward them? Because building trust in a setting such as the youth project can be such a long and difficult process, the relationship eventually becomes less about the roles the young person projects onto the teacher, it becomes real. Toxic role projections are worked through, and staff and student become authentically connected.

When COVID 19 hit and right before schools shut down, I went to conduct the group as usual. No students were in so it was decided that I run the group for the staff. I usually run a group in three stages; we spend thirty minutes in a circle checking in, thirty minutes art making and thirty minutes back in the circle discussing art work. In the first thirty minutes, themes of loss, grief, and fear underpinned much of what was said. Staff were in shock, the relationships they had spent so much time and energy building were, in a flash, gone. Would they ever see the young people again? What would become of their students? How would they cope without the consistency and routines of the project? Ultimately, the overarching theme was disconnection.

The atmosphere was heavy as the participants entered the art making phase of the group. Each participant made a very different and unique art piece. The process of using art materials offered a sense of calm, a space to think about and work through what was most challenging for each member.

In the final thirty minutes we regrouped as a circle and discussed the art work they had made. The themes from the first phase had developed and deepened. This was the first time they, as a team, had become vulnerable with each other, in this way. Their art pieces offered the chance to portray this vulnerability, non-verbally. As each staff member opened up and talked about what they had made, I witnessed the group connecting. They became supports for each other, as each empathised with their recent collective trauma. Some realised that they were not so different from the young people attending the project, having experienced their own challenges in life. As the discussion finished, they decided to keep in close contact with each other as they went into self-isolation and social distancing. They were role responding - being to each other what they had been to the young people in their care. Ultimately, there was a sense of hope and the question hung in the air of whether this was actually an ending or a beginning. The group dispersed feeling held and feeling hopeful. They were connected and it was the most beautiful and emotionally tiring therapy group I have ever run.

As we live in lock down and enforced disconnection, I am impressed by the unleashing of creative means to connect. There is a great deal of empathy for our vulnerability as people. I have been impressed by childminders live streaming ‘story time’ into the home to maintain connection with their children and parents. People all around the world are sharing creative and interesting activities to do at home. Communities are coming together to support the vulnerable and the marginalized. In the face of this threat to life, there is much life to be lived. Existential Psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom, illustrates the power within the polarity of connection and disconnection by stating that ‘though the physicality of death may destroy us, the idea of death may save us’. Looking at this polarity from another perspective, Object Relations Psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, stated, ‘transitional space is that space of experiencing, between the inner and outer worlds, and contributed to by both, in which primary creativity exits’. Thus, within the polarity of disconnection and connection we enter ‘transitional space’, here, there is a wellspring of creativity to be explored and, therefore, hope.