23/06/2025
How Often Do Institutions Mistake Distress for Disruption?
The Echoes We Hear in the Therapy Room
I do not work with children directly. But like many therapists, I sit with adults still carrying the psychological imprint of early relationships. I see the long echoes of unmet needs, fractured trust, and caregiving that was inconsistent or unsafe. The ways clients navigate closeness, respond to authority, or brace for rejection often have roots not in singular traumatic events, but in the daily dynamics of the systems they grew up in.
And so I often find myself thinking about those systems: schools, residential units, care homes, and other institutions where children are supposed to be held. Because these environments don’t just support development they shape it.
From Misunderstood to Mislabelled
In many educational and care settings, particularly those dealing with children with disorganised attachment, I’ve seen or heard through clients how easily trauma is mistaken for troublemaking. A child who lashes out or shuts down is seen as difficult, defiant, or attention-seeking. The adult response? Control. Containment. Exclusion.
But as Geddes (2006) insightfully pointed out, “The system becomes reactive and acts out the child’s experience of thoughtlessness and abandonment.” In other words, when a child expects the world to hurt or neglect them, the system often does exactly that not out of malice, but because it lacks the frameworks to do anything different.
What gets missed in these moments is the why behind the behaviour. As therapists, we learn to move from “What is wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?” That shift isn’t just rhetorical. It’s relational. It opens the door to curiosity to seeing behaviour as communication, particularly when words have failed or were never safe in the first place.
Seeing the Child Beneath the Behaviour
Disorganised attachment is born in contradiction: when a child’s caregiver is both the source of comfort and the source of fear. These children develop survival strategies that are often confusing to others and deeply exhausting to themselves. In institutional settings, these patterns get reinforced when adults respond with punishment rather than presence.
John Bowlby’s concept of the secure base remains a crucial reference here. A secure base isn’t indulgent or permissive. It’s emotionally predictable, reflective, and stable enough to contain fear without escalating it. It gives the child room to retreat, return, and test the strength of the relationship over and over again.
In settings like pupil referral units or residential care, this approach is deeply demanding. It requires adults to manage their own triggers, to remain thoughtful in the face of verbal or physical aggression, and to resist the urge to dominate when they feel powerless. But it’s in these exact moments that the most powerful repair work can happen.
When Systems Become Sources of Healing
I’ve worked with adults who were expelled, restrained, or excluded as children for behaviours they still don’t understand. Their core wounds weren’t necessarily from “bad people” but from systems that failed to think about them that responded to pain with power, and to fear with force.
But I’ve also seen what happens when a different kind of relational leadership is present. When staff are supported, trained in attachment-informed care, and given space to reflect, something remarkable begins to shift. The institution itself becomes a container for repair, not just a backdrop for reenactment.
And that’s the hope we carry: that with reflection, patience, and attunement, even large systems can become places of healing. Where children aren’t labelled for their pain but held through it. Where the response to distress is not discipline, but dignity.
Three reflective questions for readers:
When do I find myself reacting instead of thinking?
What behaviours do I tend to judge quickly?
How can I support others in becoming more reflective, not just more regulated?
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Photo by Ivan Andriavani on Unsplash
