Keep Listening in HM Prisons

I was concerned to read in a Guardian article here that the prison listeners service may be under threat because of government cuts. Prison listeners are trusted prisoners who volunteer to be trained in listening skills by the Samaritans. Whenever other inmates are feeling suicidal or depressed they are padded up with a listener who can then help them to talk and share their feelings. The article states that prisoners volunteering as listeners help the prison staff to manage suicidal and depressed prisoners. I have visited prisons that have a listener's cell on each wing. It's a little roomier than your average cell, in recognition of the valued work that's being done in there and the need for more space. Prisoners rightly wear their volunteering as a badge of honour because when you are a listener you are in a position of trust.

So the listener service benefits those prisoners experiencing distress because they have someone to talk to who has an idea what it's like to be in prison, separated from family and friends. It benefits the prison service because they are having suicidal prisoners monitored in a cost effective way. It helps to rehabilitate offenders because they are learning and applying listening skills underpinned by empathy and compassion and one of the greatest challenges in the rehabilitation of offenders is making up for deficits in empathy and compassion. So rather than cutting the listeners service I would expand it: teaching as many prisoners as possible basic counselling skills, running prisons in more democratic ways, modelling constructive rather than aggressive ways of using power. This approach has been used in Therapeutic Communities and in institutions committed to the principles of restorative justice. It needs to operate across the whole prison - inmates and staff - and is an alternative to the power dynamics that currently rage in HM Prisons, where might is right and were it makes complete sense to remain emotionally detached and physically aggressive.

Personal Reflections: New Job, Good Feelings

Thursday was an important day for me. I attended a job interview at Blackburn College and was successful in my application for the post of part-time lecturer in counselling. An 18.5 hour contract in the place where I have enjoyed more than ten years as an hourly paid lecturer. I am very happy and excited to be given this contract, it's an exciting time for our expanding range of counselling courses at the University Centre.

Something unexpected happened during Thursday which has had a major impact. It was the amount of support, the good wishes and the affection I felt from so many people. There were Facebook comments, text messages and emails, as well as the support from friends and colleagues all around the building. I felt loved and valued to a degree I have not experienced since my counselling diploma ended ten years ago. I think I played a part in that too. I let people know that I was going for the job, I asked for help and gave people opportunities to offer kind words and encouragement. I think the old me (and it still happens) was too mistrusting of people and too frightened of feeling rejected to ask for help. Of course this does my friends a disservice and denies me the love I need and deserve.

As well as feeling loved I felt a strong sense of belonging. As I walked around the University Centre I knew so many people and have known many of them for such a long time. I attended the college as a 17 year old in 1986 to retake my 'O' Levels. A couple of my good friends were teachers back then, teaching government and politics and helping me get into university. That's not to say I am institutionalised. I've worked in private industry, the voluntary sector and for the probation service. When I worked in the private sector and with probation I never had a sense of belonging and neither job enabled me to live my mission quite like teaching at Blackburn College.

So, lots of learning from this week. If I continue being open about my feelings, ask for help and offer love and respect to others, then I create opportunities to feel love in return. I can travel all the way up Maslow's hierarchy of needs: to esteem and self-actualisation. I am not a religious person but I am sure Ecclesiastes had it right: 'Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall be returned unto thee".

Getting Back at Dad - Edward II at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

Last night I watched Edward II by Christopher Marlowe at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester. I first saw the play in 1996 at the Bolton Octagon, when the production was given an optimistic ending, suggesting a spiritual reunion of the lovers after death: Gaveston as murderer, holding Edward in his arms beneath a cascade of rose petals. On reflection that ending seems out of sympathy with the play's pessimism. It romanticises Edward’s love for Gaveston, portraying it as some Platonic ideal, rather than an expression of hubris and defiance.

Toby Frow, director of last night’s production, provides a more faithful ending that also uses the same actor to play Gaveston and the murderer Lightborn (the excellent Sam Collings). It reminds us of Gaveston’s role in Edward's destruction and helps to provide the play with its sense of tragedy.

The production is excellent. It is set in the 1950s and begins in a rather louche club with a jazz band playing. The movement of furniture between scenes is sufficient to anchor a sense of changing time and place. Sometimes the place we are in is the disintegrating mind of the defeated King. In the final scenes the helpless Edward remains visible in his dungeon whilst we return to the Court to hear the plots of Queen Isabella and Mortimer.

The historical Edward II was emotionally deprived and bullied by his warrior father. When Edward’s affection for Gaveston, a childhood friend, became too intense, Edward’s father sent Gaveston into exile. Imagine how that must have burned in the young man’s heart? Chris New brilliantly plays the King as an emotionally undeveloped and slightly camp young man. In Act One Edward is prone to adolescent anger and flights of haughty rhetoric, but there is innocence there too, beautifully captured by New. The innocence turns to murderous wrath as the Lords opposition to Gaveston unleashes unresolved Oedipal rage that is never quenched.

Marlowe's play is a bleak portrait of human nature: each character is corrupted by the power they seek. Edmund's expresses his love for Gaveston but soon chooses another favourite once Gaveston is dead. It is a symbol of defiance that Edmund needs not a man to love. Edward’s love for Gaveston is narcissistic and reckless. It provokes others to take away his Kingdom so he can have his revenge. In the end he is undone and we are left feeling pity for a man brought down not by love but by hubris.

Book Review: Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik

Boris Cyrulnik is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who has worked with deeply traumatised children in Rwanda and Columbia, children who have survived genocide or served as soldiers. I mention this because Cyrulnik himself points out that an individual's traumatic history is often revealed in his or her choice of career, and Cyrulnik's history is certainly traumatic: a child during the Second World War, he evaded the Nazis by working on a farm, whilst his parents, like thousands of other French Jews, were arrested by the French police and deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered by the Nazis. Cyrulnik says that after the war nobody wanted to hear his story, it didn't fit with France's need for de Gaulle's narrative of resistance and liberation. So, like numerous victims, before and since, Cyrulnik adapted to his environment and developed a secret history, 'splitting' his personality into acceptable and unacceptable parts until the day when he would have enough strength to tell the whole story. There is a subtext here, and an insight into the French 'collective unconscious', still coming to terms with the events of the Second World War. Cyrulnik points out that cultures often need a narrative that negates the true horror of things. Thus the French war in Algeria, which resulted in the death of 28,000 French soldiers, was termed a 'policing operation' and the conflict in Northern Ireland, with over 3,500 deaths was known as the "Troubles".

Narratives are important for Cyrulnik, they have the ability to defend an individual, as well as a culture, from the horror of things. Cyrulnik's style is aphoristic and discursive so there is no bulleted list of protective factors contributing to a child's resilience, instead Cyrulnik argues that, 'Biological and developmental forces are articulated with a social context to create a self-representation that allows the subject to see his or her life in historical terms' (51). It is the historical perspective that offers redemption: 'The things I've been through. I've come one hell of a long way. It wasn't always an easy journey' (51). The trauma of the victim is reframed as the triumph of the survivor, victor in the face of death! So, Cyrulnik's message is an optimistic one because he believes our histories do not determine our fate, that many individuals experience traumatic events in childhood and go on to live happy and meaningful lives. Like another psychotherapy optimist, Bill O'Hanlon, Cyrulnik argues that the wounds we suffer have the potential to give our lives substance and meaning, they are, or can be, to use Cyrulnik's metaphor, the grit in the oyster that transforms into a pearl.

Cyrulnik, B. (2009) Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free From the Past, London, Penguin