Telling stories: Enabling violent mothers to progress from enactment to psychotherapeutic engagement
Mothers who harm and, in some instances, kill their children are viewed as undeserving aberrations, vilified and marginalized in the press and abandoned once their children have been rescued. They rarely get to tell their stories yet these are women who, almost without exception, were neglected and abused during their own childhoods, and in perpetuating their neglect we protect ourselves from facing the generational problem in our midst. As James Baldwin wrote ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’
In this presentation Angela Foster will talk about the challenges to therapists as they struggle to ‘face’ this problem and hear the stories. She will address some common themes: humiliation and shame; severe personality disorder and experience of repeated toxic relationships in which care and abuse are undifferentiated and some of the ways in which this work is being carried forward.
