A Secure Base

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By the age of 4 years, secure children are able to think about other people's thoughts and feelings – key to managing relationships with peers and at school. Therapist should be able to catch signs of distrust and evasion — avoidance patients has a tendency to be emotionally self-contained and insulated against intimate contact with other people, even when they start therapy they keep the therapist at a distance — and will talk about anything BUT emotionally charged relationships (past or present), or say that they have nothing to talk about (i. During the earliest years of our lives, indeed, emotional expression and its reception are the only means of communication we have.

It provides a valuable framework and strengths-based approach for making sense of fostered and adopted children’s needs and behaviours and sets out the dimensions of caregiving that can support children to thrive and to fulfil their potential.

However, feelings of anxiety and fear remain unresolved and reappear in sometimes chaotic and destructive forms at times of stress.

The models are termed ‘working' models because they are subject to change and development according to changing experiences in relationships. The ensuing relationships will provide a secure base, from which children can develop and be supported to explore and maximise their potential.Even now people think first of physical and sexual neglect before emotional neglect (and the book points out how some relatively simple/innocuous can in fact be quite harmful in the long term). Thus to change children's negative expectations of self and others requires caregivers who can sustain availability and sensitive responding in the face of apparent hostility and lack of trust.