单选题
Boundaries have underpinned pretty much every aspect of my life, both past and present. From the profound lack of them in early childhood right through to growing up and discovering ways to create ones clear enough and strong enough to be able to stay off drugs, out of prison and create healthy relationships with friends, family and colleagues.
The emotional and psychological free for all spiraling around me as a kid pretty much guaranteed that I"d develop a series of debilitating addictions, court potentially lethal violence and begin the slow inevitable slide toward prison. An early death was always on the cards. The profound lack of boundaries throughout my father"s own life lead to his suicide. Seeing how his inability to create a safe boundary around his dysfunctional emotional life contributed to his early death, woke me up to what I needed to do to stay off drugs, out of prison and alive.
It"s no surprise to me then that the biggest problem we have when working with young people in prison is around boundaries. Implementing and holding them is key to the work we do in Write to Freedom (W2F). Young people from dysfunctional families who end up in custody seem to have a built in biological default to test any form of boundary presented to them. If there"s a weak boundary in our staff team the young prisoners make it their business to push it to breaking point.
Every weekend we"ve organized has had a problem with the security clearance needed to get the lads out and onto the moors. There are always a variety of reasons for this, not least of all the volatility of the young people themselves. Whatever the reason, each weekend we"ve set up we"ve found ourselves below the minimum number set to make a weekend happen. So we ended up walking onto the wings, going from cell to cell looking for rookies to come on a writing weekend on Dartmoor. Locked cell door or open Devon moor? The decision for them is clearly a no brainer. Doing this has lead to lads coming on the weekend who were far from ready to engage with what we were asking of them. As a result we faced chaos and stress that could easily have been avoided.
So I tightened up the criteria. Each participant had to complete three memoir based assignments before the weekend. All was good till the security board meeting two days before the March weekend. Out of the four lads who"d worked hard, completed the assignments and proved their understanding and commitment to W2F, only one was cleared to leave prison for the weekend. I could easily have done the same thing as last time, gone from wing to wing to build the numbers back up, I wanted to believe me, and Ashfield put pressure on me to do it. But we chose to stick to the assessment criteria. Right or wrong it had to be kept. The weekend has been postponed till May.
The psychology of boundaries, implicit and explicit, for the staff and participants in W2F is crucial to making the work we do safe. It builds trust, even if it means I do something I don"t want to, like cancel a weekend after so much work has gone into its preparation. This is about self esteem; of the staff and the participants. Low self esteem crippled me in my early years and is still prone to erosion if I"m not careful. Boundaries inside and outside were the making of me. Lack of boundaries for these young people led them to prison. Everybody needs a line that must not be crossed. Boundaries create trust. This can and has lead to changed lives and changed relationships, and offers all of us hope in the darkest of times.
单选题
According to the passage, the serious consequence of being short of boundaries would be the following EXCEPT