Ruth Nissim and Kirsten Blow: The family placement consultation service - mutual feedback and change.
A description of the work of the Family Placement Consultation Service (FamPlacs) which was set up in 1991 for foster carers and adoptive parents to address the issues around the placement of children in substitute families.
Monica Duck: Supporting black and transracially-placed children in permanent placements
A description of the work of the Post-Adoption Centre which was founded in 1986 to meet the needs of adults and children experiencing problems arising from adoption. The centre has developed a range of services including an advice line, a contact/mediation service, user workshops and groups.
Carry Gorney: Life's longing - a story of adoption
"When we adopt, we choose to live with the paradox that our children are indeed not our children although they journey through our lives and become part of our narratives. They also carry with them the fragile narratives that have belonged to others, who are destined to remain fragments within our imagination.".
Dorothy Reynolds: The ties that bind - a personal view
"In an adoptive family, there is a significant presence of people outside it. My experience suggests the presence of these others is a factor in the appearance and effects of double binds within adoptive families.
Before I learned of double binds, I used to think of families such as ours as living in the shadow of adoption. Sometimes the shadow is as pale as one in winter sunshine, at other times it has the intensity of one found on a brilliant summer day."
June Buchanan: An adoptee's thoughts on adoption
"As a social worker and therapist, I've always had strong feelings about the trauma around separation and loss...I realise that this is connected to my having been adopted, although this is so close to my heart that I haven't always recognised the connection. Flicking through a social work journal recently, a line from an article on adoption jumped out and hit home. The point being made was that adoptees are people who have had their history amputated."
Caroline Archer: From the other side of the mirror - a worm's eye view of family therapy
"Parents need to be enabled to become the 'steel box with a velvet lining' which provides the prematurely independent child with repeated opportunities to experience appropriate dependency within secure boundaries.....and confirmation from other authoritative adults that their current caregivers are trustworthy and powerful 'containers'."
Barbara Prynn: Family building in adoption
A report of a study into whether there are factors within the family histories of adopters, for example their own attachment histories, which contribute to the outcome of the adoption and whether disruptions in adopters' childhoods would make a family by adoption cause unconscious feelings to come to the surface with possibly damaging consequences.
Personal tributes to Robin Skynner
Previous issues of Context
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