When people are overwhelmed, they don’t need a lecture. They need someone who can help them think again. That’s the heart of our conversation with Dr Laura Steckley, a leading researcher in therapeutic residential childcare, as we tackle one of the most misunderstood ideas in trauma-informed practice: containment.
We start by naming the problem. “Containment” often gets misused to mean restriction, restraint, or simply keeping behaviour quiet. Laura and I unpack the psychodynamic meaning instead: making the uncontainable containable, the unbearable bearable, and the unmanageable manageable. We talk about what uncontainment looks like in real life, when language disappears, anxiety spikes, and a child (or adult) feels like they are coming out of their own skin. From there we map the mechanics of good containment: receiving the emotional message, staying steady enough not to be flooded, processing it, then giving it back with empathic acknowledgement so the other person feels seen, heard and felt.
Containment also isn’t just a one-to-one skill. We explore “holistic containment” in residential care and across organisations, including predictable routines, clear policies, reflective supervision, and the meaning-making conversations that help staff and young people understand what happened. We go straight into leadership too, because senior leaders often need the most containment and get the least, and that gap can shape the entire culture of care.
If you work in residential care, foster care, education, child protection, counselling, or any trauma-informed setting, this will give you language, frameworks and practical ideas you can use immediately. Subscribe to Secure Start, share this with a colleague who carries a lot, and leave a review to help more people find the show. What helps you feel contained when the work gets hard?
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Transcript:
Welcome To Secure Start
Colby 0:00
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast brought to you by the Secure Start Aura apps, supporting trauma-informed care and practice at home and in school.
Meet Dr Laura Steckley
Laura 0:17
Psychodynamic concepts, including atta including containment and including attachment, because attachment is fits the criteria for psychodynamic. It should make us more compassionate. And I think the more we can soften into um into accepting and working with our own struggles, the more we’re able to do that well for other people. If people listening to this who aren’t familiar with containment theory get nothing else from the podcast, there’s maybe two very simple handles to be able to hold onto it. The first is in the name, it’s um making the uncontainable containable, the unbearable bearable, the unmanageable manageable. And the other handle to hold onto it with two hands is good containment processes enable thinking to manage experiences and emotions. We all experience things that are uncontainable. So this isn’t just for children who’ve had you know profound adversities. This is human. And it brings in that emotional part of the work, it’s feelings work that we’re doing. And we I don’t think we have a great vocabulary for talking about the feelings work part of the work. And so I think containment makes an offering around that as well. So containment doesn’t just happen between individuals, it happens within groups. And containment theory has been really powerfully applied at both individual level and at groups and systems level that I think can really help us do better by children. And and also develop developmentally enhancing environments for workers. How do we do containment for leaders? Do you know like because they they really are important and um they influence how congruent things are in an organization. And I think they probably are in the greatest need of containment and probably get the least amount, and then they affect how containing an organization is.
Colby 2:40
Welcome to the Secure Start Podcast. I’m Colby Pearce, and rejoining me for this episode is highly experienced academic and researcher in the field of therapeutic residential childcare, Dr. Laura Steckley. Before we begin our podcast episode, I’d just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands I come to you from, the Ghana people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Ghana people feel to land, waters, culture, and community. I’d also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. Now Laura previously joined me for episode 20 of the Secure Start podcast. Those who have listened to that podcast episode will remember that Laura joined the University of Strathclyde in 2003, and that she is simultaneously part of the School of Social Work and Social Policy and Celsius. The Centre of Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland. Before coming to the university, Laura worked in direct practice management and training in residential treatment for adolescents in the United States and residential childcare in Scotland. Laura’s research interests broadly involved deepening our understanding of key areas of practice in order to improve the experiences and life chances of children and young people in residential care. In this episode, we plan to delve more deeply into a recurrent topic of this podcast, containment. And welcome back, Laura, to the Secure Start podcast.
Laura 4:38
It’s good to be back. Thanks for having me.
Colby 4:40
Oh, you’re welcome. We’re going to have a conversation that I’ve been really looking forward to speaking to you more about since our first podcast some time ago. Um, in fact, more than 20 podcast episodes ago.
Laura 4:54
Oh my gosh. It was like yesterday. Time is just speeding up all the time.
Colby 5:00
I know that was something we we talked a little bit about, I think, uh outside of the podcast, but I remember it’s social acceleration theory.
Laura 5:09
Yes. Yeah, you’ve got a really good memory. It’s got a lot of explanatory power, which also containment does, and we’ll be talking about that. But yeah, and that’s things are speeding up, and AI is really gonna turn up the pace even more, I think.
Colby 5:23
Yeah.
Laura 5:24
Yeah, another topic, sorry.
Colby 5:26
No, no, that’s okay. Maybe that’s a topic for the third uh edition of this sequence, the trilogy. But um I yeah, but uh I I have uh been really looking forward to uh having this conversation about containment. It is something that is often mentioned, and and as is often the case when concepts are often mentioned, uh they’re not always well understood by the listener, I guess, nor are they all always well explained. Yeah.
Laura 5:58
So we’re just gonna try to do better on that last bit.
Colby 6:01
Yeah, we’re gonna dive into just talking about containment today.
Laura 6:06
Okay, sounds good.
Colby 6:09
So um I yeah, I I I think I told this story last time. I may have told it in a different podcast even as well. But um growing up here and studying here in South Australia, where psychoanalytic thinking and terms and concepts um were not disseminated very much through through the training that I did, in particular as a clinical psychologist, um, my first exposure to the word containment uh r resulted in feelings of horror.
Laura 6:44
Yeah.
Colby 6:45
Because uh I I I it was shortly after my first book, the first edition of the attachment book was published. I went online as people do and I Google searched and and I discovered that there was a online education module for teachers in the UK. And it was on the topic of containment, and it had two references. One was a Bulby reference, and the other was my book. And I was horrified to hear that it might in some way be associated with restrictive practice.
Laura 7:18
Yeah, yeah.
Colby 7:20
Which of course is not, and as I you know, uh in the in the intervening years, and certainly since I’ve been doing this podcast, I’ve become way more au fa with um psychoanalytic theory, psychoanalytic terms, their meaning, and discovered that I’ve probably been a psychoanalytic practitioner uh more or less for a very long time without without fully owning and identifying that.
Laura 7:46
Yeah. Yeah, there’s not a lot of um there’s there’s discomfort or um ambivalence, even suspicion of psychoanalytic um, or maybe more broadly psychodynamic um terminology or theories here in Scotland as well, although I think part of it is due to um sometimes the language that’s used by some of the authors, and also sometimes it’s been misused to kind of distance and um make superior the the you the wielder of that theory to kind of yeah, um yeah, and I think there’s been a huge disservice done to the the benefit of the ideas. And I I I I was hoping to say this later and I might repeat myself, but I think psychodynamic concepts, including atta including containment and including attachment, because attachment is fits the criteria for psychodynamic, um it should make us more compassionate, it should make us more insightful to the struggles that people are undergoing and to our own. And I think the more we can soften into um into accepting and working with our own struggles, the more we’re able to do that well for other people. And these concepts help with all of that when they’re used well. And a lot of practitioners and writers of psychodynamic ideas do write in that way and and use their work in that way, but some haven’t. I guess any any discipline is gonna have a mixture. So I think that’s yeah, and certainly the term containment has been used pejoratively here in the UK, um, to mean a couple of things, kind of like restrictive, and even um sometimes internationally I’ve run into it being used synonymously with a physical restraint to contain somebody and to physical, physically restrain them being used synonymously. Um, or just to keep a lid on things to kind of warehouse children in a way that doesn’t really help them grow and heal and recover. And um so yeah, that’s maybe we’re starting with why not containment, like because it’s been it’s been a rough journey to continue to bang the drum about this. And I almost abandon it because of the immediate, almost visceral reaction that other people have had to when they hear the word containment, and that that means something really negative to them. Yeah, yeah.
Colby 10:35
We’ll get into it, but I just I could can’t resist to just also acknowledge something that you said a moment ago and to say that I agree that psychodynamic thought is far less judgmental than in other schools of thought and practice and far more curious and exploratory and um understanding of the patterns of behaviour that make us and where they come from.
Laura 11:10
Yeah, where they come from. That’s the thing.
Two Simple Handles For Containment
Colby 11:13
And and often we’re when we when we turn our mind to where we come from, that does support a more compassionate self-view. So let’s get into it. We’re gonna talk about containment. Uh again. We’re both chatters, this could go on for a while. But um uh let’s get into containment, a much much used uh term on this podcast, but maybe not always well known and understood uh amongst podcast listeners. So what is containment from your point of view?
Laura 11:48
If if people listening to this who aren’t familiar with containment theory get nothing else from from the podcast, there’s maybe two very simple handles to be able to hold on to it. The first is in the name, it’s um making the uncontainable containable, the unbearable bearable, the unmanageable manageable. And it where I live, managing or things being unmanageable is the language that people are most comfortable with. So the containment is really about helping shift things. It doesn’t make difficulties go away, but it makes them more manageable or more containable. So that’s the first handle. The other handle to hold on to it with two hands is good containment processes enable thinking to manage experiences and emotions. And again, that’s very basic fundamental thing that we all are able to do that we take for granted. Like it’s so kind of deep in the fabric of our experience that we aren’t even aware that we’re doing it until it breaks down. Um and that’s a way to kind of understand containment as well, is um we all experience things that are uncontainable. So this isn’t just for children who’ve had you know profound adversities, this is human. And um, we all experience a subtle or significant breakdown and containment in our lives at various points, hopefully not too pervasively or often. Um, and so again, for people who are just brand new to this, thinking about a time when when you couldn’t use thinking to manage your experience when when that broke down, like what was that like? For me, I start to lose language, like I can’t complete sentences, and there’s a bodily reaction as well. And um, but but just thinking about when are times where, or more subtly, where you’re just not thinking very clearly. Um, and you realize you look back and you’re like, what was I thinking? Do you know that’s a way into going, well, maybe, and it’s about anxiety is kind of the term that’s used in in the literature. Um, and anxiety is this term now that’s so much used to cover a lot of things. But anxiety in relation to containment is like um it’s not just hand-wringing anxiety that you know, the the typical way that we think about it, it’s also um anxiety that you have about other feelings that you don’t want to have. So it’s a spin-off. That term anxiety is to kind of cover unwanted feelings and the feelings we have of that unwantedness of other feelings. And so when we’re having feelings that we don’t want to have or thoughts that we don’t want to have, that can raise anxiety. And so containment is a way of managing that anxiety so it doesn’t interfere with your ability to think or your clarity of thought. And it’s not like it’s all or nothing, there’s like a whole, you know, continuum of how well you’re able to use thinking to manage your own thoughts and emotions and situations and have clarity, or how much that might get compromised by circumstances, but as well your own internal reactions to those circumstances, or same with children. So, again, that uncontainment as another way into understanding, like you could think about kids that you’ve worked with. I like to start with ourselves, like when we’re uncontained, but think about kids. Like I can remember referring to certain kids as like coming screaming out of their own skin. Like I used to say that it’s like their own skin can’t even contain them. They’re so full of rage or anxiousness or um uncontained emotion. And and actually a colleague of mine um was really good in reminding me to talk about like the uncontained happy experiences sometimes that children have that then go bad, they go wrong because it’s uncontainable, right? So it’s not just bad things that are hard to contain as well. But yeah, so and things being uncontained is another way in. Um one other thing I’ll offer at this point, as again, this like introductory way of understanding it. If you’ve worked in residential childcare or other forms of um, and I’m sure this applies to other other types of work as well, but I’ll I’ll keep it to what I know. And there were times when um when things would start to feel a bit scary or shaky, or you know, and I worked back in the day, my first job there was two of us with 18 kids. So like we had to we had to have really good group facilitation skills and and channel the group in positive directions and stuff. And when that started to go negatively, it was scary. And um, and the next place I worked, there were there was a larger complement of staff and a larger group of kids, 28 kids, five members of staff on duty at any given time, um, all going well. And so as things would start to feel like somebody would step onto step into the scene, you know, and all of a sudden. So if you think about like who are your containers, who are the people that when they enter the situation, everybody goes, oh yeah, and nothing really substantively has changed except their presence. Now, for them to be a good container, it’s um they’re not just somebody who’s scary and everybody, you know, there’s someone who um, and we’ll talk about how containment works in in just a minute, but um, so you might be that person too, and especially if you’re tuning into Kobe’s podcast, you’re you know, you’re interested in developing your um your knowledge and your thinking, and so you may well be one of those people as well. And the best containers are those who when they enter the scene to use this this example. You don’t just go, oh, it’s okay, Colby’s here. You go, ah, I I can handle this, right? It becomes more manageable. So it isn’t just Colby’s here and he’s gonna rescue things, it’s ah no, I can do this. I can I can manage the situation, I can help this kid or this group or whatever. So that’s kind of a way into like a richer sense of what this containment thing is that isn’t the kind of containment that you might hear used in a really negative way. That still exists, but I I like to call it constrainment, you know, rather than containment, which isn’t really a word, but you know, it helps distinguish. So yeah.
Colby 19:00
In in my world, in uh uh as a psychotherapist, uh I when I I I just it’s really obvious when you see that it it works. And I I think you know, as I’ve become more familiar with containment, you see it more and more. Yeah, when people come in in distress, and by the end, you know, after about 40 minutes of the cons consultation, uh maybe earlier, maybe later, but they start uh uh stopping and thinking about their circumstances and their their problem that they come in. And and so what you s what that is is you see that you’ve been able to absorb all their their sense of overwhelm, hold it for them and and help them better understand it or better receive it back and and um in a more uh uh palatable dose dose. Yeah, in a more containable dose. And then they then they just start and then they go, oh, well, I think I’m just gonna do this sort, you know, and then they start thinking problem solving and uh and deciding on a course of action almost without needing me. All they needed from me was containment.
Self-Containment And Co-Regulation
Laura 20:16
Yeah, and and and when I was preparing for today, I realized with the toing and froing that we had about like what to talk about, I didn’t have how, like how it works. So like I was I was thinking we could tack it on at the at the end of the what, but you just talked through the steps of of how it works. That at least in Beyond was the founder of containment theory, and he modeled what happened in therapy. Well, what happened between in his day was the the mother, we might say caregiver, to try to give cognizance to the wider range of people who give primary care to infants. But he he talked about the mother and the infant and the processes that happened, and then he paralleled that to what happened for him and for his clients in the therapy space. And then that’s been expanded out into residential child care. Adrian Ward was maybe the first that I could find who was applying containment theory to residential child care spaces. So what happens in the therapy hour can happen side by side while you’re washing dishes or in the car, which is such a great space for um the kind of conversations that can be containing. But there’s other ways of doing containment that we’re gonna get to, but but the essential like mechanics are the absorption. So, you know, if you’re working in a field where you’re helping people, like being able to tune into them, and like absorption was like survival in the early days of practice for me. Like you needed to quickly absorb what was going on with the group and kind of understand what was. Needed and what kind of approach so that things went well, um, or so that you could kind of recover them back into going well when things started to spin off. And um, but then what we do with what we absorb. And um Bian talked about active cognitive processing. So your part of your container is like that thinking space and reflecting space to then enable that. Now mirror neurons are kind of involved. And the other thing is um Douglas has a definition of containment that has two really important components. And this is many years after Beyond. He never stepped back and and defined what containment was, but she talks about she talks about it just between two people in her definition, but it’s like three-dimensional chest than when you start dealing with like group living environments, but um it’s it’s a communication between two people where where one person receives the emotional component of that communication, um, actively cognitively processes it without becoming overwhelmed. That’s the other key part. So it’s the emotional part of the communication, not just the surface words, and then doesn’t become overwhelmed through actively cognitive and then gives it back in that more containable form with um empathic acknowledgement, with empathy, so that that other person feels seen or feels heard or feels felt, right? And that experience of feeling seen or heard or felt, or the gestalt of that somehow restores the capacity, not maybe not completely sometimes either, because it’s that whole spectrum, but improves the capacity or sometimes completely restores the capacity to think in the other person. And that that’s Douglas’s definition, and I find it really useful because it picks out some of these key component parts and it brings in that emotional part of the work, it’s feelings work that we’re doing. And we I don’t think we have a great vocabulary for talking about the feelings work part of the work, and so I think containment makes an offering around that as well. So yeah, so that’s that’s a big nutshell of like what is containment, yeah.
Colby 24:22
And I think um I when I was listening to you a little bit earlier, the question came to mind is this something can you can you contain yourself?
Laura 24:31
I’ve wondered about self-containment, yeah.
Colby 24:34
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or or do you think Beyond and other people who think about and write about and practice in this way, they think about it more as a relational process?
Laura 24:46
I think it’s both. I don’t know what Beyond would have said, and or others now who write about it. And Andrew Cooper died in the I think in the last year, um, and he he’s written recently about the experience of being a container. He wrote it and they published it posthumously. Um so I don’t know what they would say, but I’ve really thought about that a lot because I’d like to be a more self-contained person, actually, because I spell out a lot, you know. I just like I can’t stay focused sometimes because I’ve got too many thoughts, and yeah, um, and I I process outside rather than inside. I think that’s but I yeah, I I think we internalize another probably not just psychodynamic theories, talk about that internalization of models and formative experiences. And so I think there’s a relationship between the quality of containing relationships, and you you mentioned relational. I think relationships are the most and fabrics of relationships as well as individual relationships are the most important experiences and processes of containers of containment for people. There are others that we’ll be talking about in a minute, but um, but I also think then that can be internalized, and people can be to a greater or lesser extent self-containing in events or in situations or in parts of life. But I don’t know how much like a person can become completely self-containing.
Colby 26:24
Well, I look at it, I probably look at it like this, and and the relationship between comp containment and co-regulation and that developmental pathway towards self-regulation. That I guess when when people when people are contained regularly, and I I use the term felt for.
Laura 26:49
Yeah, I use it. Yeah, that that experience of being felt for, which uh I also talk about in in an in the context of projective identification, another beautiful but that’s the first kind of inaccessible term is projective identification, but I just didn’t bring it in because it’s like that people we’re throwing a lot at people already. Yeah.
Colby 27:13
And and I’m known for not being very jargonistic. That’s why because I largely because I don’t know all the jargon, but anyway, um there’s some benefit for remaining uneducated, I think. But um also but what I was going to say is that there it through a process of co-regulation and containment, the individual, the child, the growing child becomes able to contain themselves.
Laura 27:42
Yeah.
Colby 27:43
And part of that is really the ex I think the experience that those oh those those overwhelming emotions are can be managed.
Laura 27:56
Yes. Can be managed. Yes, and it is it’s experiential how that develops. And like just having your when you’re first in the world, everything is pretty overwhelming. And when your tummy’s empty, or when you have wind, or all of the things that and the million, gazillion, trillion that brought Bulby, or maybe it was uh post-Bulby, the arousal relaxation cycle, and having the need met, be laying the foundation for trust, for you know, internal working models. And Beyond and Bulby were talking about the same processes for developing attachment as well as developing containment. And it containment is another way into co-regulation or good co-regulation and containment, they’re like they’re talking about the same stuff. Um, but yeah, and and so it’s that minutia of over and over and over, because it happens, you know, countless times a day, and then all the days of say the first two years of life, you know, but throughout our lives, do you know? And it’s so the little things add up and they matter to how we are able to self-regulate or self-contain.
Colby 29:14
Yeah, you would see that in therapy as well, through through um regular and repeated experiences of containment in therapy, that people’s come to the position where actually I can I can manage this on my own now.
Laura 29:28
And I don’t need to go to therapy anymore.
Colby 29:30
The therapist is redundant. Um I got in trouble for saying that. Uh not in trouble. I I mentioned that to a previous guest and we were talking about attachment-based um supervision. And I talked about the goal being redundancy as as a and and as a therapist and perhaps as a supervisor as well. And and uh he made the point, which I think was a really powerful one, is that you if you’ve done it, if you’ve done your job well, you’re never really redundant. You you’re just you’re just in the mind of the child or in the mind of the person.
Laura 30:08
Yeah.
Colby 30:09
You don’t have to carry you away. Yeah.
Laura 30:12
Yeah.
Colby 30:13
You’re in the mind, they can reflect, they can, they can call you to mind, think about the their experiences while they’re engaging with you, and yeah, and chart a course from there.
What Being Contained Feels Like
Laura 30:25
Yes, and that whole spectrum thing too. I don’t know if you ever had clients go through something where they felt like they needed to come back for a period of sessions because things got, you know, events happened or we all slide back or whatever. So it’s also not all or nothing, right? You know, and so the therapist being redundant, the therapist just not being needed, maybe forever going forward, or maybe for the next year or two, and then going back or whatever. Yeah. But I with containment, we get it through all sorts of things. So you talked about the client coming in, but you might have a friend who like you’re really upset about something and you go for coffee. And if your friend’s a good container, and actually there’s a like the friend is absorbing, and so you’re like, ah, and the friend doesn’t just stay down here kind of wooden or whatever, but they also don’t come right up here and become overwhelmed with you or like outraged with you completely. They kind of do this and then they kind of do this and bring you back down, right? And so thinking about your relationships or your supervisor or um or your family or whatever, the people in your life who are good at that when you’re really upset, or just the day-to-day who invite, who who are curious, who invite reflection. There’s subtle forms of containment that are less obvious than than that experience. But we I realized through studying containment and applying it to the research and to my teaching that I have continually looked for containers through my life. And I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing, you know, and I know who my containers are, and they contain in different ways under different circumstances and stuff.
Colby 32:21
What does that feel like to be contained?
Laura 32:24
Yeah, yeah, that it’s like relief, and it’s also like being able to access more of yourself, do you know, and the better parts of your nature when when you’re well contained, when I’m well contained. That’s that’s how it feels. Part relief and partly like plugging back into the better parts of yourself. Yeah, for sure.
Colby 32:45
And and and what what would people notice about themselves if they were a good container? What do you think?
Laura 32:53
Oh that’s a good question. That’s a really good question.
Colby 33:08
It’s interesting because I’ve I’ve had a lot of people. Yeah, what do you think? You start you starting Well I’ve had no, I’ve had people um taught tell stories about good containers. Yeah. And they they were a really good container. You know, the staff would be go barreling up to them, and they’d be 10 out of 10 going, oh my god, this has happened. And and these people would just remain present and connected, unflappable, perhaps perhaps a bit. Yeah, and and and just able to bring down that sense of crisis and overwhelm.
Laura 33:52
Um yeah, a real groundedness. Yeah, like I was thinking about from the out, like my first thoughts were from the outside, like able to listen, able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings, able to to empathize with other people, but like from the inside, you might think you’re a good listener. Do you know what I mean? Like that I’m also often grappling with am I really how I think I am? Do other people experience me? You know, that sort of thing. So from the inside, I guess people coming to you and then leaving um in a more reflective state or with a greater capacity to think, I guess would be the very basic how that would feel. Yeah. Because sometimes people come to you because you’ll get outraged on their behalf, right? Like it’s a bit more complex, or the, you know, and sometimes they can just dump their stuff and then go away and and not have to think about things because they’ve just done the projective identification, but the loop hasn’t completed around that reflection and what’s really going on with me, or whatever. So yeah, of course I’m gonna.
Colby 35:03
But uh, yeah, I think um I I think it’s a very containing is a very soothing thing to do. I think I agree with you. You have to be able to um cope with taking on other people’s experience, feeling feeling for them without pouring petrol on the bonfire, so to speak.
Laura 35:25
Or getting overtaken with it yourself, right? You know, like yeah, I think that’s really tricky.
Colby 35:31
Being able to think clearly ourselves in the midst of acting in that containing role, I think is is really important as well.
Laura 35:41
Yeah. Yeah. And being really emotionally present and you know, both to receive and then to convey. You know, I think that emotional presence is a big part of it too.Colby
35:52
Yeah, and we convey it, and at least I know that I when I when I’m acting as a container in therapy, as the therapist, I’m conveying it in both in both what I’m projecting in my non-verbals and in and uh also in the what I’m saying. So you’ve got that, you’ve got that they’re they’re experiencing heard, they’re they’re experiencing uh being heard, sorry, they’re experiencing being acknowledged in their experience in my in my words and in my gestures and in my nonverbal expressions. Yeah, my eyes are.
Laura 36:29
Yeah, our faces are really, really important in all of that, aren’t they?
Colby 36:34
Yeah, that’s what the children look for. That’s what the still face experiments show, straight to the face of the world. Totally.
Laura 36:41
Yeah. There’s a guy in Glasgow who does um who does uh neurological kind of research about and he he runs kids through kids who’ve experienced profound trauma and they lose their capacity to identify different emotions. They’re like emotions like curiosity or confusion appear to them by the triggering of the amygdala as you know, as threatening or as aggressive or that sort of thing, too. So sometimes children are scanning our face because you know they’re trying to clock, are you a threat to me? And then their capacity to read that is impaired. Yeah, yeah. And so it becomes really tricky. That that’s why it becomes hard with some kids to really you’re trying to convey empathy, but they’re receiving messages of threat, yeah, yeah. And that it’s in that place where a lot of the work happens.
Colby 37:48
I think a lot of that has to do with dose. Yeah, because a lot of what we’re talking about with containment facilitates an experience of closeness. Yeah, and our children, but anyone, adults as well, who have experienced relational harm, yeah, can be quite triggered by that. So we yeah, well this is why it’s really important to be also thinking, able to think while we’re feeling for and and ex and and absorbing because we have to be very mindful of the dose, I think, that we’re we’re giving back.
Laura 38:28
And the the approach too, like you and you might consciously do that, or you might just learn through repetition of what doesn’t work, but like the the fit of how we’re conveying that. Again, maybe why the car is so useful, for example, because there’s other distractions and it’s not face-to-face and stuff, you know.
Why Residential Care Needs Containment
Colby 38:52
Yes. And it I mean and this is one of I think the the strengths of uh residential care for children is that there are many adults that the children can form a relationship with. There’s not that same level of relational intensity that can be actually be a barrier to full containment because it just feels too uh close to the children, too much for the children. So that kind of leads me into my um my next question I was gonna ask you, which is you know, why why should we be talking about containment uh and thinking about contact containment, particularly in a residential childcare context?
Laura 39:38
Okay. Um well we we talked about why not containment, and that you know, the the challenges of of helping people to understand when there’s already it’s not a neutral term. Um so so yeah, there’s even more to overcome. So why why pursue it? I think the first one is it’s developmental. Um and that is the foundation for me, like a developmental orientation to how we think about kids and how we think about our staff and how we think about ourselves. And um so we develop that capacity, and we’ve already started to speak about that in the earlier part. Um and part of our job is to facilitate development, whether you’re a manager, even a senior manager, to facilitate the development of the people you manage, or whether you’re working directly with children. Um, and again, it’s a bit like um psychodynamic ideas. I think proper application of developmental concepts also bring about a more compassionate stance and a more effective stance. Like, what does this child need? Like this child needs to learn to accept consequences of his behavior. Well, yeah, but that that’s a developmental thing to even understand cause and effect thinking. And some of our kids had such chaotic interruptions, chaotic environments and interruptions to their development, that that cause and effect thinking that again is so deep in our fabric we don’t even realize we’re it’s part of our apparatus, isn’t there for some kids. And then we castigate them, you know. So um, so thinking about what does this child need in order to be able to start to think about the consequences of his behaviors and make better choices. God, the how often we told kids make better choices when I was in my early days of practice, I cringe. Um so that that’s part of it. Um and it often isn’t treated as a developmental theory, but I have treated it as a developmental theory in my teaching and in my writing. Um, and it has profound intersections with attachment. But what it what it brings to the table that attachment could, but hasn’t really, is it applies to everyone. And I I do like there was a place in Scotland that years ago was doing work with residential workers around their own attachment. Um styles is sometimes used. Uh David Howe used organizations, like how their attachments were organized. Um, and but rarely is attachment applied robustly to adults in my little corner of the world, both professionally and and geographically, but also systems like organizations and attachment, attachment, containment has been applied really well to understanding how services work and what is needed in order to create better cultures. That so containment doesn’t just happen between individuals, it happens within groups, and containment theory has been really powerfully applied at both individual level and at groups and systems level that um I think can really help us do better by children and and also develop developmentally enhancing environments for workers and you know, better places to work, better places um to grow up for a spell of time or for longer. So that’s the the main reason why, like, and I and again, I think unconsciously before I even knew what containment theory was, I was always looking for that. And I wanted it not just in individual relationships, I wanted to work in a place that had that kind of that way of supporting, maybe because I’m a thinker or I’m I’m a doer as well, but I I want to do things thoughtfully. Like that’s that’s my nature. And so I’ve always wanted to look for places to that would support that. Way of being in the world. So that’s the personal reason.
Colby 44:04
Yeah, and and look, and if there’s only one thing that I would ask people to always do, and you know, even if they forgot every everything else that I said to them, I’m un and I’m talking about adults who work in these spaces, is to think about what you’re doing.
Laura 44:21
Yeah. Just to think and how hard that is sometimes, you know. There’s a lot going against you. Yeah. Yeah. How busy, how scary, the things that you you’re being asked to think about aren’t easy, you know. And so there’s you’re swimming against the tide if you’re gonna do that consistently.
Colby 44:41
We th those adults, and and be they residential child care workers, be they foster carers, kinship carers, they need to be contained.
Laura 44:51
Yes, containment for the containers for sure. And and this is what we’re asking kids to do, to think about what they’re doing, right? And then it’s really hard for us to do as well. And I think we’re becoming less reflective generally as a society with acceleration.
Colby 45:09
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That we don’t we don’t have time for it.
Laura 45:13
Right, right. And it’s like easy way to avoid by you know that accelerated, busy doing is a a way of feeling like we’re doing well without having to stop and think. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Colby 45:30
You raised the the issue of holistic containment with me and uh like a simple model for thinking about containment.
Laura 45:41
Yeah. I and it’s also helps to kind of do containment better too, which is in our exchange in preparation for this, talking about the application of this, and we’ll and we will get to that um in a more grounded, tangible way. And this is a nice bridge to that. So this this was this model was developed by Julian Rouche, who has just recently retired. Um, and she’s done a lot of really good work around a lot of things, reflection as well. But I come back to this again and again. So, like containment, she talked about it having three different facets, like the faces of a diamond. That’s how she’s using that word facets. So there’s the emotional part of containment that just simply makes the feelings more manageable or even more feelable. Like sometimes things are so uncontainable or so unbearable, we we we unconsciously stuff them out of conscious awareness so that we can’t even feel how angry we are if it’s you know, if it’s too frightening to be angry or whatever the feelings are. So to make it more manageable or even more feelable, thinkable. Um, and so if you think about like what happens in your place of work or what you do for children to make the just the feelings more manageable, like in Scotland, it’s a cup of tea, and knowing how people like their cup of tea is a big way of it’s a gesture, right? And so getting into how do you do containment well and feelings containment is often done just through gestures or like giving a person a break when it’s been a really stressful thing happening on the floor, and um saying, Go go have a cup of tea, or um food often is used as a gesture to comfort and um can be containing. All of these things can also shut down thinking. So, you know, um, I think the other really big one in Scotland is humor. And when I moved to Scotland from the United States, I’d worked in residential in the United States, that’s where those big numbers were. Um humor was like, oh my gosh, it the currency that you had if you could be funny and diffuse things with humor or black humor kind of giving a perspective on things that all of a sudden, because you’re laughing, even though it’s really horrible, and the black humor kind of holds that horribleness while at the same time you’re laughing and all of a sudden it’s that bit more manageable. So um gestures, words, but it’s all through that conveyance of empathic acknowledgement. Um, the second facet that, in the order that she had offered it, is she called it organizational containment. I’ve written about it as doing containment, but like you’re doing containment through that emotional containment. It’s more like the structures or systems that you have in place, the rhythms and routines, if you’re working directly with children, if you’re manage in management, it’s like making sure that supervision happens regularly and that there’s a policy around that, and that there are things to hold accountable if you’ve got a manager who’s not doing any supervision, right? So that level is like at an organizational level of the systems, processes, procedures. And sometimes, again, they can compromise containment. If you have a policy come down that’s really ill-thought out or unclear or compromises good work, it can really make people feel uncontained. But good policies, procedures, rhythms, routines are that middle facet that can contribute to containment. And then the last one is around making meaning. She called it epistemological containment. If you study philosophy, that’s it’s about the meaning of things. And that’s where, like in your therapy hour, you know, a person started to be able to think, and then, you know what, I’m just gonna do this, or I give it now, or whatever. And so um where that happens, how we support that happening, and so that middle level, that middle facet is like can support so supervision happening regularly, and a good policy around that is like the organizational containment, but in supervision, you’re having the kind of conversations that help you make sense of your practice, or in the car with the kid, you’re having a conversation that helps them make sense of what happened this morning in class, right? That’s meaning making containment or making sense of containment. You bring the three together, and that’s holistic containment. And you think about like where are we doing it well and where where do we need to kind of focus our attention, and that’s shifting back to a more organizational level, whether it’s how we organize our day today, because the kids are feeling really uncontained, or what are our policies at this place of work. And it helps break it down to like where are we doing it well, where are we missing a trick or two, um, to have that more holistically containing environment for children, but for the containers as well for adults. Yeah.
Colby 51:05
I I just want to I feel like I want to describe to you my first job as a clinical psychologist experience and and um in the spirit of wondering about how it aligns with what you’re talking about in terms of this holistic model. Okay so my first job as a clinical psychologist with it was with our statutory department of child protection. They were called something different then, um, and it was in one of our outer suburbs of of Adelaide, the town, the what call most people think of it a town, the city that I live in, it’s got 1.5 million people in it, so it’s a big town, isn’t it? But uh but anyway, um so I was out in the outer outer suburbs with with perhaps the most uh disadvantaged community of people. And and not I had grown up in a in a similar community, but not probably more of a mortgage-belt community, um, where there were people who mixed demographic of people who are more or less disadvantaged, I guess, than than was my own experience growing up. But this is this community and and the and the department that I was working for, of course, brought me into comp uh uh contact with families, individuals and families have experienced compound disadvantage and intergenerational disadvantage. Anyway, it was my first job out of university. And I was the only psychologist. The uh what what uh how it was organized in those days was that there was a psychologist to it attached to each office. The office was largely made up of social workers who were doing this um the statutory child protection work. The psychologist was doing assessments of families and children and uh and helping informing decision making about where to go with with matters. Um so you straight out of university into quite a consequential role. Yeah, yeah. And uh, pardon?
Laura 53:19
Were you pretty uncontent going straight out of university into that?
Colby 53:22
This is what I I guess this is what I why why I thought I might tell this little story and and and get your thoughts on it because because I was I was probably more contained than I’ve been anywhere else.
Laura 53:38
Oh my gosh!
Colby 53:39
And what’s that about well I wonder about these things. Firstly, when I was interviewed for the job, there were uh a couple of the people there was the chief clinical psychologist, but there was also uh some other um older male figures that were staff in the office who I felt really safe with. If I could put it like they they they they were really like they they felt like authority figures to me. Um and then the office itself was very supportive of of the role, notwithstanding that I was as green as grass and just out of university. Fortunately, I’d worked for our one of our local child and adolescent mental health services for about four and a half years while I was studying. So I had you know a bit of a inkling about organizational culture and and so on. But but anyway, what I wanted to say was I had there were certain individuals, there was uh an office-wide, I guess, environmental culture of interest in and support of the role that I was taking on. There was lots of black humour, black, black humour, and um and it was in that context that I I had had an in an earlier interest in attachment theory at university, but I really explored it in much more detail and was able to utilize it as a as a guiding framework. So I it it to me it’s almost a bit like the epistemological organizational and the and individual. I can’t remember the term you used for the first facet, but I had all of those things going for me. Yeah, and I never I never felt overwhelmed, I never felt inadequate. I never felt I never felt that it wasn’t a role that I could excel in. And and I’m I’m so privileged to have had that experience as my springboard into the profession.
Laura 55:57
Yeah, yeah. Well, and even you had a theory that was a container, like you had a theory that was fun, you know, epistemologically containing that also had that emotional component, like attachment theory has a lot of heart, doesn’t it, when it’s used well. So um, along with the people and how wonderful, how wonderful. Yeah. I never worked in a place that felt holistically containing. I think you know, there were individuals, but I’ve never worked in a place where we really got it together to feel like the whole culture of the place was cooking on gas in terms of holistic containment. But that sounds really wonderful. And did the work go well? Like, did you feel was the work effective and made a difference with the people you were serving?
Colby 56:52
Well, yes, and at the time, and we’re talking about more than 25 years ago, you know. I started in that role in 1995, so um 31 years ago. But um I generally speaking, I without what meaning to sound uh um you know conceitful, I I think you know I did a good job. I I did a good enough job for the office to f uh forgo uh a social work position and employ another psychologist because psychologists were useful to have around. Um that’s a good say I largely had a free reign to do. And I I unlike other psychologists at the time in the department, I I was doing therapy as well. Um not just doing assessments. Yeah, it and it was just anyway. I talked too much. I I I but we as you were talking about what it looks like, I just it really resonated that that holistic model, it really resonated with what I couldn’t readily identify with as my first experience. I I can say also that I worked in another office in the same department, and it was a completely different, it almost broke me. It was a completely different, and I have been back and done work for the department, and it’s almost broken me.
Containment For Leaders At The Top
Laura 58:16
Yeah, yeah, and other people around you probably are on the verge of you know breaking too, and it just it’s really hard to turn that ship. You know, right when we shifted into that, the thought I had been having was how do we do containment for leaders? Do you know, like, because they they really are important and um they influence how congruent the values and the around how congruent things are in an organization. And I think they probably are in the greatest need of containment and probably get the least amount, and then they affect how containing an organization is. So I’d be interested in the leadership figure and your in your first place and what was going on for them that they were able to support such good holistic containment.
Colby 59:20
I I I felt group contained, I would have to say. Um I think as I said, there were those those adults who I also heard spoken of, you know, when they left the office and people were giving speeches, they that they they people felt safe with those people around. It wasn’t it wasn’t like the manager of the office who was the no, not not at all. Um I I haven’t had yeah. In in my time in the public service, I I didn’t have tremendous um experiences of or opinions of, indeed, of of um the nominated managers. But um as I said, in that in at least in that first role, and I was there for five years, it was yeah, it was just the best uh work environment I’ve you know I’ve had in 31 years. Longer even if you even if you go back to the time I spent in Cam. So 35, 36 years. Yeah.
Laura 1:00:28
Wow. Wow. Wow. It can be done.
Colby 1:00:35
It can be done.
Laura 1:00:36
Yeah, yeah.
Colby 1:00:37
Yeah, you just I I’ve had a lot of people on this podcast deliberately to talk to to talk about um managers, senior management, and and their needs and what what their staff need of them.
Embedding Containment Across Organisations
Laura 1:00:54
Yeah. And to to be able to think and reflect and hold that space and be present and all of that kind of stuff, what they need in order to be able to be those things. And and it comes back to like when it when you have good experiences of containment, it you plug into your best self, right? You’re able to think and do. It’s not just thinking and it’s not just doing this, that synthesis, and how there must be a critical mass where enough people are having that experience and wanting more of that experience and getting on board, whether it’s unconsciously, like it sounds like in your experience, nobody was consciously working to some model of holistic containment, it just but you had reflective people who could could embody some of those values and ideas and stuff. But if you even, well, if you had that explicitly, and a project that we’ve just finished up was trying to create uh a holding environment. So bringing in some of Winnicott’s ideas alongside Beyond’s containment and um supporting uh a residential service to actively try to develop a containing environment and just how challenging it is. But for those people who were able to feel safe enough to feel unsafe, and I think that’s the other thing, that felt safety that keeps coming back doesn’t necessarily mean you feel comfortable, and it’s a you’re safe enough to tolerate the scariness, that’s a different kind of unsafety, then you know, magic can start to happen. Um, but yeah, it’s hard. Yeah.
Colby 1:02:34
You’ve you kind of lead into something that I did want to ask about, which was how how do we how how do you how do you more deeply embed containment, the pract the idea of it, the practice of it into organizations and into residential care practice for children?
Laura 1:02:55
I you know, I’m not sure. Um that project had a lot of success within it and had a some significant challenges. It it’s a a long-term project, longer than 24 months, which was a funding period. Um well, and when I first started talking about containment, like I think I put people off and they um they thought, no, this is a bad thing, either psychodynamics or you know, keeping a lid on things. Um in Scotland or at least in my little pockets of professional work and people have plugged in and want to hear more about it, want to talk more about it, um, and want and know that they need to that they want to embed that more, but how to actually do that, we’re kind of figuring that out now. So um I think giving people uh ideas that are in an accessible manner and giving them language to be able to then reach for it and talk about it, because language is a tool of thinking, um, is is part of the process. And then just providing experiences that are containing and um helping people plug into that, but it feels early early days for where we’re going with that, where I am. Um yeah, and I think the experiential is as important as the kind of semi-formal here, this is what containment is, and you know, this is you’re doing containment when you did that with that kid, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah.
Colby 1:04:36
We hear a lot, I hear a lot, a lot that a lot of good projects get defunded in my neck of the woods, you know. People will say, oh, you know, this or that project, including including one of my own, um uh just before COVID. Um yeah, good good projects getting unfunded and funding moved to somewhere else. And I I think that that’s largely largely can happen if the if if senior management, the people who control the purse strings, don’t really have a a deep understanding of the of what you’re trying to implement through your uh through your programme. Certainly that’s been my experience that that and so we have someone like Simon Benjamin who was on um way back in the first 10 podcasts, but um he’s now an organizational consultant, formerly a CEO of of some major social care um concerns here in Australia, came from the Mulberry Bush, actually. Um in the UK.
Laura 1:05:42
They know their containment there.
Colby 1:05:44
Yeah, yeah. And Simon talks about you know, you what you you need to start right at the top. Yeah. So that what what you want to implement for the children, you have to implement from the top and let it flow right down through the organization.
Laura 1:06:01
That reminds me of Jim Anglin and he talks about congruences. It flows top down. He would say the exact same thing. Yeah, for sure.
Colby 1:06:10
Yeah. So it it I guess that makes me think that if you if you’re going to embed it more deeply into an organization, it really just starts with working with the senior leadership team in the first instance. Yeah.
Laura 1:06:24
Yeah. And that’s not always possible.
Colby 1:06:28
No.
Laura 1:06:28
You know? And so then you might have to make pockets. But yeah. Um I think the way people think about leadership often um yeah the the vulnerability that comes with really doing the work yeah it’s it’s hard. And they’re carrying a lot of responsibility and to be able to go to that place may just they don’t feel safe enough. That place of really reflecting on you know what’s going on for them, what they’re absorbing, what they’re projecting into their stuff, all that kind of stuff is is difficult. And I think the other thing that I’ve noticed is as people climb the ladder to increasing levels of being responsible to manage other people to make systematic decisions that might affect people in negative ways is I think a defense against the pain of that sometimes or having to fire people that kind of thing is um is detaching and you can’t do containment if you’re detached right but some people I think feel like they can’t do the hard parts of leadership in an emotionally present way. And so yeah doing containment from the top down is a it’s a different model of leadership I think. And and I think most of this happens at an unconscious level. I don’t think people actively think oh I’m going to be more of a detached leader but I just think that’s the norm you know to be able to make you got to make hard decisions to you know well they’re even harder when you’re emotionally present but I think that emotional dimension of leadership is necessary to make the right decisions. If you only lead emotionally you’re not going to be a good leader but if you only lead with that kind of practical reasoning part of your logical brain um that’s it it’s that synthesis again. And um I don’t know how well that is supported in general out there.
Colby 1:08:45
You you need both is what you’re saying. I don’t yeah I I think within an organisation uh people would perhaps might perhaps say oh you know they’re a very empathic person that they they really deeply understand uh our experience and so there might be a positive perception that way but I think at that level of leadership it’s it’s probably viewed as um and talked about thought about as a as not a an ideal way of running an organization you probably get m got more allegiance to that other view which is the kind of logical rational um detached detached view and and what what containment theory says is you can have it all.
Laura 1:09:40
Yeah and in fact you need to be contained to be able to hold the the tensions of that and the difficulties of that you know um but yeah yeah but you can you can be a emotion um sensitive and you can you know and you can also be able to think and and and perform in a logical way. Yeah yeah if you’ve got if you’re contained in that yeah but it’s a it’s a pretty big demand and so you would really need that you would need your own containing processes to be able to do that. And um yeah I don’t think that’s the norm.
Colby 1:10:24
No.
Concrete Ways To Contain Kids And Staff
Laura 1:10:25
But thankfully and this is a good plug for some of the other uh podcast episodes uh one you know one that I mean there’s more than one but one that did particularly come to mind was our Lighthouse Foundation here in Australia and um that Simon Benjamin actually was CEO of for a time um but uh Susan Barton started that organization and they do this they do they do um leadership supervision um they have the group supervision at all levels through the organization and and people really get a lot out of it they wrote a great book too based on the Lighthouse yeah with Patrick um Tomlinson yeah that’s a great book yeah definitely and and the it’s very theory rich but also very grounded and practical and tangible they really did a nice synthesis there it’s been a really enjoyable conversation Laura and hopefully of of um great usefulness to people who listen to it um but I’m wondering if we could you know before we finish up if we can just talk a little bit about being an effective container for children and and for adults. Okay okay um maybe some concrete things to think about and I’ll I’ll probably repeat myself a little bit but is thinking about for for children um the kind of things that will help make the unmanageable more manageable and even starting with that curiosity and wonder like what would help this child be able to man like what would make this a bit more manageable what would help them to access their reflective thinking capacities so um it could be touch or even proximity with some kids how close you are to them or giving them a bit more physical distance could be um could be the the kinds of routines like I think getting up in the morning and facing the day is a really difficult part of life for children in in care. And so um having routines that make them feel special and seen and acknowledges how hard it is to get up and start the day, whether it’s a cup of tea by the bedside or bringing in a joke each morning or a little story or even a humor exchange that it becomes a bit of a ritual. Tense like a little one person tent in the bedroom or in a space tents can feel very containing for children. But also then where you help them make sense of what happened and this doesn’t have to be like connecting back with terrible things that happened in childhood. Sometimes that does that kind of insight-oriented connecting past with present functioning work does happen. But even just kind of making sense of what they’re feeling and being able to put um words to emotions is part of that making sense for children. And sometimes it’s holding it in your own mind and if a child isn’t ready to talk about it and actually it was Patrick Tomlinson who in a piece of writing that I did suggested that I include and even offered a form of words for including that sometimes just holding in your own mind a bit of understanding consciously is is helpful for in ways that we don’t fully understand. So those are some concrete things there’s tons more but beginning to think about what helps emotionally what helps rhythms routines wise and what helps making sense of and then for adults I mentioned supervision and it’s a nice one that can hold all three of those facets of containment so if you make sure it happens regularly and it’s reliable and predictable for people at that organizational level and when they go into supervision they are able to experience their emotions or to express emotions but then make sense of those emotions in a way that can and just the experiences of the work in a way that they feel seen and understood and are plugged back into a more thinking reflective position themselves. But other things that we can do for adults I think is having multiple forms of reflective forums spaces so informal as well as formal whether that’s bringing in a consultant having someone they can talk to that isn’t also responsible for managing them I think is really important.
Hopeful Closing And Next Topics
Colby 1:15:14
And then at group level like how do you run your team meetings do you know do you run your team meetings only at the practical level or is there space for emotions to be absorbed and processed and reflected back so that the group can function more effectively those are just some concrete things but just beginning to use that lens and thinking about oh that really worked what went on there how can we replicate that or make sure that we’re more consistent in doing that is probably a really good strategy as well I’ve got great optimism I think that notwithstanding social acceleration theory and uh other pressures that that we’re there we are chipping away at at uh reintroducing uh psychodynamic models um re reintroducing the importance of pausing and reflecting and then uh carrying on with the work in a in a more grounded and thoughtful way yeah yeah I hope so I hope so I think the experience of it makes people want more and that makes that is good reason then for optimism. Yeah yeah well thank you Laura like I said well then I I did mention maybe next time projective identification but I don’t know whether that’s something that you’d like to talk uh for a whole podcast about but it was yeah it was a treat to have you back uh on the podcast and it’s a treat to get to talk about this with you I really enjoyed it yeah I recall recall from our last conversation how much you really love to talk about containment. So yeah so so yeah thank you very much and look forward to future opportunities to speak to you again.
Laura 1:17:04
Super thanks Colby
Laura’s Bio:
Laura joined the University of Strathclyde in 2003 and is simultaneously part of the School of Social Work & Social Policy and CELCIS (the Centre of Excellence for Looked After Children in Scotland).
Before coming to the University, Laura worked in direct practice, management and training in residential treatment for adolescents in the United States and residential child care in Scotland.
Laura’s research interests broadly involve deepening our understanding of key areas of practice in order to improve the experiences and life chances of children and young people in residential child care.
Laura is currently involved in research looking to identify potential threshold concepts in education for residential child care practitioners. Her largest study to date involved in-depth exploration and theorisation around physical restraint in residential child care.
Laura’s teaching is mostly on residential child care, with supporting research, theory and social policy related to child development and the impact of trauma and other forms of adversity on that development.
Laura leads the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care and serves as Vice Convener on the University’s research ethics committee.
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Disclaimer: Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce. Finally, all references to case examples are anonymised to the extent that the actual case could not be identified, or are fictional but based on real-life examples for illustrative purposes.
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