Brighton Oasis Project works with and helps to maximise the potential of women, children and young people who have been affected by substance misuse. This short case study highlights the cross cover between parental substance misuse and imprisonment and the ways that a Brighton Oasis therapist assisted a young person in managing the emotional impacts of these.
Background: M was referred to the project, aged 13 as both his parents had experienced heroin addiction. His father, who played an active role in M’s life, had served a prison sentence for dealing the drug. Social services were concerned that his father was continuing to engage in criminal activity after his release.
Reasons for referral: Professionals felt that his parent’s substance misuse and his father’s time in prison had affected M. His home life was troubled and split between his separated parents. His parent’s relationship with each other continued to be highly volatile. M’s parents had used drugs throughout his early childhood, and he had often been in dangerous situations and around criminal activity. At 13, M was often in trouble for violent conduct at school. He frequently expressed contempt for any form of authority and often spoke openly about highly violent revenge fantasies and his early unsafe childhood experiences in a way that led the professionals working with him to feel concerned for him, and alarmed at what he might do to others.
Support offered: M accessed 30 sessions of individual therapy. This provided him with a confidential meeting each week to build up a healthy relationship with his therapist with whom he could express himself and explore how his life experiences had affected him. It allowed him to explore his fantasies of violence and to think through why he felt the way that he did. It enabled him to have a relationship with an adult who valued his creativity, his independent spirit and his thoughtfulness. Through the sessions, M and his therapist were able to discuss his violent fantasies and make sense of them and how they related to his early childhood experiences and relationship with his parents.
Outcomes: M was able to build a good relationship with his therapist, and had a high attendance level. He was able to safely express his anger towards his parents and explore how his early childhood experience had left him feeling a need to find more extreme ways to protect himself than his peers. He was able to access a space for himself in which he was able to let his guard down. In these moments he could acknowledge some of the challenges he had faced as a young child and the complex ways his parent’s drug use and his father’s prison sentence had affected him currently as a young teenager.
