“The men I work with at Walk are no different from the senior leaders or CEOs I work with elsewhere. We are more alike than we know.”
AI have spent most of my career working with groups of people that have, for whatever reasons, been marginalised, mistreated or excluded. I spent twenty years as a youth and community worker and for twelve years I led an organisation that created and delivered therapeutic group work with men, women, children and staff in prisons.
Whether I ran sessions with officers, governors or prisoners I witnessed the same dynamics in every group. There was resistance, complicity, collusion, denial, fear, anxiety, disturbance, separation, revelation and connection. After all these years I can honestly say that we are more alike than we know.
My work with people asks questions like what is justice? How does it happen? Who does it? Who gets it? How do you know when it’s real? I like to think I create the conditions for people to think through these questions together, listening and learning from each other as they attempt to find answers. About four years ago I was invited to Walk with a colleague to ask some of those questions, and I have been working with Walk ever since, visiting twice a year to run therapeutic group sessions with the men.
As I look back at my experience of working in prison environments I also ask myself some questions. Do I think that our current justice system responds appropriately to the terrible, egregious things people do to one another? Does it make our society better? Are we safer as a result? Are we moving towards a better future together?
Is justice done because someone is now separated from their family and community, isolated in a rat- infested, not fit for purpose jail where they are fighting for their life, unable to make eye contact because they are terrified they will be threatened, violated, beaten up and made to go into debt? Honestly, that does not seem adequate to me.
Is change more likely there or in an environment of strong boundaries that are clear, consistent and reliable? In an environment where rules and regulations are administered fairly and evenly? In an environment where the houses are beautiful, clean and calm and the standards are high but achievable? Perhaps so, and that is exactly what I see at Walk.
One of the features of babies and infant development is consistent attention and a reliable presence – these are key parts of attachment theory. The men that come into Walk have not often had the luck, opportunity, support and basic investment that many people might take for granted.
They have been let down from the very beginning of their lives. They have been let down by the capacity within their own families, their communities and the social structures around them.
I suppose I see part of my work as helping to repair some of what was broken, and I see that as what Walk does too. I think that Walk helps people repair some of the men’s capacity for
trust, creating a belief in a better future. Now that can sound quite soppy, soft or embarrassing, but the world can feel like a pretty hopeless place at times so it’s actually a vitally important work.
What Walk does, what I do, is to fan that flame a bit and to encourage these men to repair and reintegrate, so they can
trust themselves, trust those around them and to trust that
what lies ahead can be a work of art, not just an old script.
The men I work with at Walk are no different from the senior
leaders or CEOs I work with elsewhere. Most of us struggle with similar things and most of us want the same things from life.
We are more alike than we know.
Stories of hope and of lives changed
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