16/06/2025
This June the ACP supports by , and the theme this year is Community as a Superpower.
Child and adolescent psychotherapists work with refugees in the UK, while also being aware that conflicts, persecution and experiences of refugees around the world have an impact the children and families we work with. Read their piece below.
This week we are sharing a piece written by Michela Mazzia and Valerie Curen, child and adolescent psychotherapists and ACP members, who discuss the importance of thinking about the experiences of refugees who experience further attacks, persecution and live in conflict settings.
We would also like to share a paper the insightful paper “Shifting ground: the child without family in a strange new community” by Melzak, McLoughlin and Watt (2019). The paper is open access for a month. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0075417X.2018.1556316
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Michela Mazzia and Valerie Curen discuss:
“There are many refugees who are descendants of other refugees, especially in places with ongoing conflict or persecution over multiple decades. There are generations of refugees that were never allowed to return to their homes after forcible displacement. These refugees carry a history of generational trauma and their trauma is ongoing, as in their lives all systems of safety and security have been and are continuously undermined.
Where conflict, persecution and war is ongoing, refugees live in a dire humanitarian situation, where every feature of safety has been destroyed or damaged and the essential elements for a developing child’s basic needs are in jeopardy or no longer exist.
Winnicott’s (1965) stated that “there is no such thing as a an infant –meaning that wherever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.” This highlights a baby’s life inextricable connections to that of parents, families and communities. Reliance on, and attachment to these systems is fundamental in guaranteeing a child physical, mental and emotional development. If parents are prevented from protecting their children, they are robbed of a core aspect of their identity, agency, purpose and self-worth. A cornerstone of what enables communities to survive is lost.
For babies and children in areas of ongoing conflict, the greatest trauma and risk for survival comes from the loss of all familiar sources of safety and security. Some children in these contexts have lost one or both parents. Surviving parents are emotionally and physically debilitated and traumatized.
Parents relationships with their children is therefore impacted, leading in some instances to freezing, dissociative states and disorganized responses (Baradon, 2010; Beebe & Lachman, 2014). Hostile environments are therefore are responsible for an extreme form of impingements in a baby’s sense of ‘going on being’ and on the internal worlds of developing children and adolescents in the process of becoming themselves (Melzak, McLoughlin and Watt, 2018).
We know that babies and young children are especially vulnerable to trauma because their brains and bodies are still growing. Each stage of development lays the foundation for the next, like stacking blocks. Exposure to trauma can interrupt this process and delay or deviate developmental acquisition at a given stage. These disruptions don’t just go away — they can follow the child as they grow, making it harder for them to learn, connect with others, and cope with challenges later in life. The earlier the trauma happens, the more deeply it can affect a child’s future development.
As child psychotherapists, we are concerned that brutal and dehumanizing treatment of refugee populations could normalize a notion that refugees and their children are of little or no value.
Recognising when children are being harmed and intervening to safeguard them is a key aspect of their recovery from trauma. There are organisations that despite the odds, support refugees to reconnect to each other and their communities, and talk about their feelings. These organisations work against enormous odds, while being aware of high levels of ongoing trauma, and intergenerational issues; but also of the huge potential and resilience of the population, and the need for simple child and adolescent focused responses such as spaces for play and creativity.”
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References:
Baradon, T. (Ed.). (2010). Relational trauma in infancy: Psychoanalytic, attachment and neuropsychological contributions to parent–infant psychotherapy. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Beebe, B., & Lachmann, F. M. (2014). The origins of attachment: Infant research and adult treatment. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Melzak, S., McLoughlin, C., & Watt, F. (2018). Shifting ground: the child without family in a strange new community. Journal of Child Psychotherapy, 44(3), 326–347.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. International Universities Press.
