My son – an “ordinary devoted father and uncle”
essential care in the absence of the primary caregiver. Traditionally, the primary caregiver is a mother (although not necessarily) – for her to be good enough there have to be others there to support her to cope with the world. Moreover, the child needs to be part of healthy triangles – the child by relating to another apart from the primary caregiver is able to see itself separately from the primary caregiver – and the child is able to see itself as separate from another relationship. This is the pathway to safe individuation where it is safe to be separate and close, and that others can be engaged in safe relationships that do not include oneself. Lydia Borg (2013) examined the concept
of “the good enough mother” in search of implications of what makes a good enough therapist. She suggested these parallel tasks for therapists and caregivers: 1. Creation of a safe/protecting/holding
environment: too great a response or too little can do damage – good enough in this realm is best.
2. Helping to facilitate/develop emotional regulation.
3. Helping to reshape the developmental process – a therapist must not get ahead of the patient developmentally – therapists must be able to assess the patient’s developmental location and trauma and proceed accordingly. So, how do we provide this? It does
not happen only because of individual qualities – it is the context that makes it possible – whether personally or professionally we need to be held in our own safe/protective/holding environments. To what extent do our professional and
personal contexts support or undermine our ability as clinicians to be reliable for our clients? How can we differentiate
between the ordinary devoted practitioner who fails and fails and the practitioner who detrimentally fails to provide what is required? As a practitioner, supervisor and
trainer, I have increasingly frequent conversations in which the preoccupation is about organisational constraints and struggles – my sense is that this is often taking our attention away from attending to our clients and our direct work with them. We run the risk therefore of failing to provide what is adequate and essential, and/or being entangled in professional disagreements arguing about the needs of our clients and services. This dynamic resembles the unhealthy dynamic that can exist between parents where there is couple conflict, with an unequal power structure, thereby creating an unhealthy triad which does not attend well to the needs of the child; the social context
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Context 170, August 2020
The good enough family therapist: We may choose to be family therapists but not necessarily in circumstances of our choosing
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