emotional ability

“Hi, I’m Simon”

      “Yes …. Simon and Tony … you’re Tony’s boyfriend”

“Er, no …. no I’m the new … arts worker …”

A staff member interrupts and takes me to one side.
“Oh, it’s OK Simon, don’t worry about him, he lives in a world of ‘Eastenders’. We try not to collude with it, we’re not sure it helps him”

The staff member lightly touches my new friend on his back smiling with a look of tired but genuine deep concern.

The young man in question with a moderate level of Learning Disability proceeded to tell other enlightened truisms about the world around him through the lens of a popular TV soap opera, with the support staff all appearing to take on scarily accurate TV aliases. It was genius at work. The whole of his life and ongoing experiences mapped out using an existing and familiar narrative. It appeared to allow him to engage with people emotionally. I played along.

I’ve continued to work with people like this young man for the last ten years. Most people with Learning Disabilities, now ‘Intellectual Disability’ live relatively independent lives, some with families, some in their own homes. Most are hidden people. Until recent years, society hid them in asylums and now we pay less than minimum wages to care staff to care for them ‘in the community’ and when times are hard, we cut their benefits. We often act as though they have no contribution to wider society.

I work with the most vulnerable, who struggle with behaviours or thoughts that prevent them from being kind to themselves. Like any therapist I am perhaps there to encourage resilience, support them to find safe boundaries and safe ways of holding what appear overwhelming thoughts. Much of this relates to issues of loss that are profound and distinct for this group of people so entangled with the lives of others for care and meaning. Some, in their loss, express a sense of being a financial burden on their families, and indeed on society.

Before becoming a therapist I worked with a community for people with Learning Disabilities, where ‘carers’ and the ‘cared for’ lived together. I ran an afternoon art workshop. The community leaders expressed an expectation that I would plan a group activity each week. Planned activities are not my strong point, and so each week I would arrive feeling utterly inadequate. All of the community members already seemed happy making art of differing varieties, and so I would sit with each, one by one and talk about their art work, making suggestions and playing with materials. Over time they seemed to respond, becoming more engaged, their mood lifting. The community staff appeared somewhat unimpressed, and would often give me subtle and sometimes less subtle pressure to conform and design a group activity, to keep everyone active and occupied.

One week I gave in and planned a beach-combing exercise, gathering found objects for a sea-themed window display. In my middle-class mindset I imagined pretty pebbles, bleached driftwood and the making of some papier-mâché sea creatures. On our return from the beach the residents emptied their bags of found objects into the middle of the garden. In front of us lay a vast pile of stinking seaweed, old coke cans, plastic bottles and fish bones. Had we arranged a beach clean-up, we couldn’t have done a better job. All of the members stood around the pile smiling at their catch.

As a therapist I now look back and wonder with curiosity whether the residents were unconsciously or maybe not so subtly expressing something of how it feels to be different in a society obsessed with perfection; found lost objects, the detritus and waste of life now collected and given new hope as a collage. Or maybe they just found the richness of colours and smells fascinating and enlivening in a world sometimes sterile to imagination. Maybe this was an act of social defiance.

People with Learning Disabilities are often dismissed, intellect holding such veneration in our society, and yet these people seemed emotionally intelligent, more aware of their emotions and the emotional state of others, and how to express this in the subtlest of ways. In the therapy room we can be broken together, both human, both looking for clues, trying to subtly pin hope and meaning in place long enough to grow into the demands of that which is beyond us. Beyond words we work, but not beyond emotions.

Occasionally mentally stressed people from London would come and stay with the community for a week; people without disabilities who were looking for respite, or moments of meaning in anxious lives. On leaving the community the visitors appeared calmer, more open, less depressed, less anxious. I don’t believe this was just some kind of social relativism. The wave of emotional ability experienced in the community appeared to go deeper than any cognitive understanding of affect. It touched deep, like a deep hug. I was touched deep, and can speak of the lasting effect in my life. We are a lessor society if we miss the fragile, gentle and yet incisive emotionally able contribution that people with intellectual disabilities embody.