What is Blocked Care and how do I know if I have it?
I recently wrote about why, as a therapist, we often prioritise work with parents over working directly with young people. In a nutshell, this is because working in this way offers the best possible chance of strengthening the attachment between a young person and their parent or carer and it is this relationship that offers the best hope of healing for a traumatised child.
As part of this article I mentioned something called ‘blocked care’ and thought it might be helpful to revisit this concept – what it is, why it happens, how to spot it, and what to do if you recognise it in yourself.
What is Blocked Care/Blocked Parenting?
Blocked care/parenting is a state parents can enter when prolonged stress suppresses their capacity to sustain loving and empathic feelings towards their child. Broadly, this happens almost instinctively as a way of protecting oneself from a child’s trauma which often shows itself in fearful, dysregulated and extremely challenging behaviours. In blocked care, parenting tends to become more reactive (just responding to problems rather than a child’s emotional state) and attention gets pulled towards the most negative bits of the child.
In their book ‘Brain Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment’, Dan Hughes and Jonathon Baylin describe four different types of blocked care:
Chronic:
This is most likely to be the case when parents themselves have experienced difficult childhoods. Growing-up in an atmosphere of fear, can result in your amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for detecting fear and preparing for emergencies), ‘lighting-up’ much more easily than it might for someone who received consistent, attuned parenting, making it far more difficult to respond to the challenges your child presents in a way that fits with your values and beliefs.
Acute:
This can happen after a traumatic event such as a bereavement or health scare. These events can make it more difficult to feel close to our children, experience pleasure in their company, and remain attuned to their inner world. If we are struggling to manage our own feelings, it is extremely difficult to tune into those of our children.
Child Specific:
This is particularly relevant for adoptive and foster parents who often find that despite their attempts to reach out to their child, they are frequently met with indifference or hostility. Over time, this takes its toll on parents and their own defences begin to click into place, leading to the development of resentful and angry feelings. It’s extremely hard to be empathic when we are in this place!
Stage Specific:
This can happen at particular developmental stages e.g. adolescence.
Why does blocked care happen?
Research undertaken in 2014 by the Department for Education reported that a significant number of adoptive parents experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) including being preoccupied with events, thoughts and pictures in the mind, waves of strong feelings, difficulty sleeping and dreaming about events. Violence towards parents and siblings was reported by 57% of people who took part in the research and was shown to have a particularly devastating impact on family life.
Dan and Jonathon draw upon neuroscience to try and make sense of how interactions between parents and children can shape the brain. They suggest that stress can ‘lead to the development of mutually defensive feelings between parent and child, when the child mirrors the parent’s stress and then exhibits signs of his or her own distress that the parent, in turn, mirrors back’.
This state of blocked care closely mirrors the child’s state of blocked trust making it hard to create attuned interactions that make attachments stronger. Parents often end-up questioning their own personal qualities and parenting and can feel ashamed and embarrassed by their child’s behaviour. This can lead to social isolation, problems in intimate relationships, reduced self-esteem, low mood and anxiety. I’m sure you do not need me to spell out that caring for a child who is rejecting and even violent day after day can be hard to bear.
Am I in blocked care?
As a therapist, I am often struck by the enormous challenges foster and adoptive parents have struggled with, often for many years, with little or no specialist therapeutic help. Since the advent of the Adoption Support Fund (ASF), some adoptive families are receiving this help for the first time and in some cases, it quickly becomes obvious that it is the parents whose stories must be heard and understood before they can be expected to step back inside the mind of their child.
These are some of the signs that you might be in blocked care:
- Feeling defensive and finding yourself being more guarded to protect yourself from rejection.
- Feeling burned out, chronically overwhelmed or fatigued.
- Being aware that you’re meeting your child’s practical needs but that it’s hard to feel any real pleasure in parenting.
- Feeling very caught-up with the child’s behaviour rather than the meaning of the behaviour
- Noticing a tendency to be reactive rather than proactive.
- Finding it hard to think about different ways of being with your child – feeling very ‘stuck’ with one way of doing things or one preferred outcome and finding it hard to keep an open mind.
- Feeling very sensitive to rejection.
- Being irritable with your significant other or other family members.
- Becoming isolated from friends and family.
- Feeling cynical about your situation and/or the help being offered by your support network.
- Finding it hard to tap into feelings of compassion or nurture and then feeling guilty about this.
- Feeling ‘shut down’
What can I do about it?
Learning what your vulnerable spots are from your own upbringing and understanding your history, values and beliefs can reduce the chance of you becoming defensive and reactive with your child. If you notice feelings of fear, anger, discouragement and shame, try to take some time to think about where these might be coming from. Work with a therapist familiar with attachment and trauma can provide the space for you to do this.
Try to get in touch with compassionate feelings towards yourself. Know that you are doing your very best and try to apply the same compassionate thoughts to yourself that you might to a loved one struggling with similar issues. If you can, take a ‘big picture’ approach and think about some of the positive changes that might have happened for your child over the years – often these can happen so gradually that we take them for granted but remembering the progress you’ve all made can help to keep hope alive.
Be mindful of the messages your amygdala is sending you! This system is tuned-into threat which can of course be useful, but can also lead us to mis-read our child’s intentions, sending us into fight, flight or freeze mode. Managing our own stress levels is absolutely critical but easier said than done!
Self-care means something different for everybody – it might mean taking yourself out of the house for an hour or two (or a weekend if you have very supportive and understanding friends or relatives!), enrolling on a weekly exercise class, phoning a friend, or linking-up with other adopters/foster carers at a support group or online. Try and take the time to think about the different parts of yourself – your physical well-being, your relationships, any spiritual needs and try to regularly do at least one small thing that replenishes this part of yourself.
I truly wish there was a clear ‘prescription’ I could offer you to help you out of blocked care as I know that what many adoptive and foster parents want more than anything is to feel connected to their child and experience joy and pleasure from parenting. At the very least it’s important to be able to recognise signs of blocked care in yourself, stay away from self-blame, and get the support you need to fight another day.