Unaccompanied Asylum-Seeking Children often known as UASC or separated young people have faced and experienced significant trauma, uncertainty, and separation from their families and what they have known. They require an environment that enables them to feel safe, calm, connected, in control and hopeful. This needs a staff team that also feels this. I have been working alongside a supported living agency that provides care to many UASC young people. We wanted to consider a model that met all their emotional needs whilst respecting their journeys, culture and values. It also needed to recognise the distress that could be expressed around the uncertainty of their futures. We believed that we could achieve this sense of safety and connection for them, through the embodiment of the principles, values and concepts of NVR across all layers of service.
Within this blog I am not able to cover all the work being completed, nor show the depth of thoughtfulness being shown by the team, however, I do hope to summarise a few principles I feel the team are really showing great strength at working towards embedding, and along the way, I would ask that you take a moment to pause and reflect on your thoughts around NVR being used to support the building of a community where there is no one shared language and where uncertainty remains ever present.
To be the anchor for these young people it was paramount that we strove towards building a sense of safety within the staff team, through building their relationships with each other and their communities. Alongside appropriate training, all staff receive regular supervision both as a group and individually. Self-care, compassion and collaboration are key themes within supervision sessions as we explore ways to support young people. Staff are supported to identify what is within their gift to offer the young people and how their own behaviour can impact and effect change. Supervisions are used to offer staff a space to reflect and pause for thought, giving staff an opportunity to consider the emotional world of the young people and the escalations they may be getting invited into, both from the young people and those around them.
Achieving co-regulation of emotion and being the ‘calm within the storm’ of uncertainty for a young person requires support. Time is often automatically given to mapping out and defining the support networks around young people. NVR reminds us to map out our own support networks. The team are active in being each other’s supporter, but for them to be able to offer culturally sensitive support, their networks have needed to stretch out in many different directions. Supporters are required not just from health, education and social care elements, but also through legal organisations, the local community and religious communities, translation and asylum support services. Through staff accessing a wide range of supporters the systemic presence increases for the young people. This is important as some of our young people will not have felt seen, heard and held in mind by a system for a long time. We have found that at times staff have not only needed to draw in these agencies to work alongside them and seek advice, but they have also needed to express their concern to them when they noticed unmet needs for the young people. By approaching this through an NVR lens it is supporting the staff to hold an active position alongside the young person, whilst recognising they can only offer what is within their gift. This has helped them recognise that at times they can not make everything better for the young people, and that they only have control of their own actions.
In building safety, staff ‘presence’ both emotional and physical presence is regularly considered through the NVR lens. Staff thought about how they would maintain their presence in the homes by creating floor maps of the properties. Within this, we have thought about how the young people might experience the staff and others (both professional and non) presence within their home, and how to work towards maintaining a non-oppressive presence, that could support a sense of safety that enabled their growth. We looked at the areas in the house where they might be physically present, what they do in those areas, things they will support young people within their homes and how they will keep emotional connection when not physically available. Young people are aware of who will be in their home and when, and staff reach out and check in on them regularly when on shift but not in the house.
Gestures, expressions of concern, and words of appreciation are not always easily or smoothly translated from one language or cultural understanding to another. Staff use each other, and their support networks and communities to support and guide this understanding. Through joint completion of ‘rainbow baskets’ staff are collectively able to offer gestures to the young people that show them staff have truly seen and heard them. Creativity is often required, and the use of translation apps, notes, and nonverbal communication is often used. The value of silence is something that staff have grown to use more, and the recognition that a shared spoken language isn’t always required in moments of distress. Silence and calm presence can be enough, less is more…..maybe.
To support staff and the young people in their journey towards becoming a connected community the service has regular opportunities to come together. This is offered in the form of weekly house meals, a monthly ‘community meal’ that every member of the service (staff and young people) is invited to, Friday football sessions and regular trips organised to places of interest for the young people.
As a British-born person myself I can at times find some of the British rules, curfews, norms and expectations strange, perplexing or disagreeable. For some of our UASC young people, this can also be the case creating confusion for them and resistance. Staff have a duty to safeguard them and must take an active position in maintaining some of these safeguards even when they feel confusing to young people. Building strength in relationships and confidence in self, is supporting staff to resist conflict with young people around these issues and to sit with the distress as a support network, whilst ensuring the values and cultural norms for each young person are always recognised and respected, ‘connection before correction’.
Supporting a large team to embed NVR, meant I also had to work to increase my presence within the service, through physically being there, gestures within supervisions and at other points, regular curiosity around how staff have offered acts of appreciation to others, their moments of self-care or ways they may have accessed a supporter. I also demonstrate my embodiment of NVR by offering my own expressions of concern when required and by considering policy through the NVR lens. Embracing, believing and being NVR is a journey of persistence that requires everyone to feel connected across every layer of the service. The team have in turn, become my support network, alongside my own supervisor and NVR practitioners that I see as my community.
I feel honoured to witness the growth within each member of the service as they grow in differing ways and take on their own personal journeys. One thing that brings me real joy alongside seeing how they have been able to support the young people through difficult times, is how so many have embraced the concept of self-care and permitted themselves to put their own ‘oxygen masks on first’.
Written by Kelly Skinner,
Dual Diagnosis Specialist Practitioner and
Approved Mental Health Professional
Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (formerly CYPS)
NVR Association (NVRA) Accredited Practitioner
Accreditation Module Participant, 2024
