Troubled Hearts, Troubled Minds by Peter Nelmes

Author:Peter Nelmes [Peter Nelmes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785834400
Publisher: Crown House Publishing
Published: 2019-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

The past

Our behaviour is influenced by our emotions, which are closely related to our past experiences and the beliefs associated with them. Thus the past provides a context to our present, and can significantly affect the meanings that are made there. Charlie’s story clearly exemplifies this. It began and ended with him sitting on a plush sofa in a well-appointed living room, patting a dog rather than talking to me. There were two different dogs, sofas and living rooms, and two different families who owned them, though they had in common a naïve belief that they were the people who would love Charlie better, that their love would be more effective than everything he’d had before, and that it would be enough to counter all that Charlie’d had to endure up to this point.

The first family were George and Sal, whose house was on a busy road leading into a small town. The noise from the traffic was absorbed by the cheap double glazing, the secluding lace curtains and the many trinkets that adorned the window sill. Charlie sat there, aged 13, trapped in the niceness of the furnishings, so far out of his comfort zone that he could not move. He had a pinched expression and was wiry and wary of eye, all of which made his smile and chuckle all the more charming when they appeared later. He was far from smiling on the first occasion we met. He did not know what to do or how to act. His only form of politeness was to sit quietly and keep his thoughts to himself. So I did all the work, asking the questions about how long he had been out of school, and discussing with George and Sal (who were keen to help give the conversation some legs to compensate for Charlie’s monosyllabic replies) such issues as the long taxi ride Charlie would need to take every day to travel to and from our school. They weren’t happy about it, but as the county they lived in had run out of educational providers that were willing to allow Charlie to attend, there did not seem to be any choice. George and Sal knew how limited Charlie’s choices were; they themselves had agreed to foster him on a ten-day emergency placement, and that had been two years ago.

Charlie’s paperwork gave little clue as to what he was like. It spoke of ‘anger management issues’, ‘strong character’, ‘short attention span’, ‘communication difficulties’ and the like. It was typical of the statements we received: generic and unhelpful. Such statements could mean anything from a child who had hated the demands of mainstream school but whose behaviour problems would evaporate once they settled into the more caring ethos and slower pace of a special school to a budding psychopath with a serious criminal career trajectory ahead of them.

Sitting there watching Charlie squirm was not helping me come to any conclusions. George interjected that Charlie would not mind the taxi ride, as he liked cars.

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