Peer Support in Action

Like Sister Like Brother

The possibility of therapeutic relationships between young people

by Nick Luxmoore, The Flat, Old Police Station Buildings, Church Green, Witney, Oxon OX8 6AW.

Part of Nick’s work in schools involves helping set up, train and supervise teams of older students (usually called Student Counsellors) whose job for a year is to get to know as many younger students as possible and be available to them as a source of support throughout the year. This is a short version of an article which Nick published with the British Psychodrama Association.

I like the magic number 3,
the way it used to be,
when 1 was Mum
& 2 was Dad
& 3 was only me.
(J. Patrick Lewis. 1992)

Siblings

However reluctantly, we’ll admit to being the product of parents. In fact, we take considerable account of relationships with mothers and fathers but traditionally pay less attention to those other members of the family from whom we also derive an identity: our siblings.

I suspect that so many young people apply to be Student Counsellors (and they do) because on one level they want to repair something about their own sibling relationships, either by re-doing what they didn’t do at the time (being kind to younger siblings) or by offering others what they themselves didn’t get at the time (being looked after by older siblings). Equally, younger students attach themselves to Student Counsellors to get something they’ve not had or not had enough of in their own families.

There are crucial things we learn from siblings which can’t necessarily be learnt from parents. This includes how to play, how to express and resolve conflict, how to understand sexuality, how to manage privacy, how to measure personal achievement, how to cope with transitions and, perhaps most importantly, how to have a best friend.

We see siblings as either presents or punishments from our parents and most of us have decidedly mixed feelings about any siblings we have. We love them as extensions of our parents and hate them as the people who get between us and our parents.

The Need for Reparation

Relationships between Student Counsellors and younger students allow everyone to have another go, to express affectionate feelings towards someone a bit younger or someone a bit older.

The baby/child/Student Counsellor’s need to make reparation must find expression for that person to develop in a healthy way.

Young people often idealise ‘children’ and there’s potential for Student Counsellors and younger students to idealise one another in order not to have to acknowledge mixed (sibling-like) feelings. The Student Counsellors are trained to share any of their own experiences carefully with younger students, always for a reason. While well-meaning stories about personal faults and failures ("Yes, that happened to me too!") can usefully demystify the Student Counsellors, some younger students need to believe in the ideal (this person really understands and cares about me) for a bit longer while their own hurts are being repaired as a result of feeling understood and cared for. But because of this potential for idealisation, it’s always important, as in any therapeutic relationship, for the Student Counsellors to end these relationships properly, gently but firmly giving back any lingering idealisations. ("We’ll always be friends, won’t we...?" "Well, we’ll remember each other but we won’t be meeting any more.") When, the following year, a new team of Student Counsellors emerges, ready to do business, those students who’ve got most out of the previous team appear not to notice at all. They never re-attach. They’ve moved on, having got what they needed.

Friends, Enemies:
Family and Peer Relationships

A sibling’s development might be described in three stages, as learning to acquire, maintain and share status. Like all stages of development these don’t always follow a neat progression. But secondary schools might broadly describe their new Year 7 students as struggling for the first year or so to acquire status, as working to maintain it thereafter and latterly, in the older years of school, as learning to share status with others, no longer in mortal dread of losing it. The Student Counsellors represent this latter stage and, importantly, are able to model this sharing of status lower down the school, being seen to respect younger students by their names, asking people about themselves, telling people some things about themselves. They make time for people. They’re interested. Unlike older siblings, they don’t envy younger students their lives. Rather, they see what a tough time many are having and respond accordingly. Precisely because they’re not in real sibling relationships with students, ensnared by rivalrous feelings, they can offer a compassion which is more straightforward and gives younger students the support they’re needing.

One of the things the Student Counsellors do is to take turns to staff a room every lunchtime where younger students can come and talk in private. They talk about friends and enemies, family and other relationships. Many students use this facility. So it was interesting when a group of girls in Year 7 told their Form Tutor that they wanted to set up a classroom where they would be every lunchtime for people to come and talk with them about being bullied or being a bully. The model they were copying seemed obvious. What happened was that we assigned two Student Counsellors to them as ‘consultants’, so that the girls could feel their enthusiasm being affirmed while talking through the exact practicalities of what they were proposing.

The same developmental process happens in groups. The leader is set up initially to be the parent-figure. Group members idealise or loathe the leader in much the same way as siblings will respond to parents. In this way original family relationships from the past are revived and transferred onto current relationships. This process happens in meetings, teams, classrooms-indeed, at some level, in all relationships. But what’s sometimes underestimated is how much of importance goes on between the so-called siblings themselves. Although the focus is inevitably on the parent-figure when group members are dissatisfied or feeling helpless, this conveniently avoids group members looking at their relationships with each other. In groups I run, whether they’re in educational or other settings, much of the learning, much of what’s ‘therapeutic’ about the group consists in members’ experience of each other: feeling supported for the first time, not being laughed at, finding out that other people feel similarly, being able to challenge people without reprisal... All this can correct or amend what’s gone on before in a person’s life. any group needs a leader/parent to look after it initially, to hold members/siblings until they can do more for themselves and this job is crucial. But equally crucial is what happens thereafter when the siblings, with the parent’s help, begin to encounter each other.

The Need for Supervision

All but one of the teams of Student Counsellors I’ve worked with directly have got on well together, supporting each other and enjoying each other’s company. I haven’t sought to tease out rivalries lurking between team members. Rather, I’ve encouraged people to collaborate and enjoyed their surprise when in training, after years of always seeing one another in set ways, they’ve woken up to skills and qualities they never knew their new colleagues possessed. Being part of the team is a new start, a new family for everyone.

The team which didn’t get on was interesting. They, too, made a fresh start with the old preconceptions pushed to one side. They, too, were enthusiastic. What gradually undermined that enthusiasm and allowed old rivalries and resentments to re-surface was that, for various reasons, we had no shared working experience. Other teams have always had a slot in the week when we’ve come together to run something, usually a lunchtime for younger students in the local Youth Centre. This has served to demystify team members for one another. Rather than imagine someone else is more popular or more successful with younger students, everyone can see for themselves. This makes it much harder to sustain jealous fantasies. They can also see for themselves who gets on best with me, the parent-figure.

All the teams of Student Counsellors I’ve known have actually been most effective when their work has been closely structured and managed by an adult with at least fortnightly team meetings and monthly supervision. Then the parent-figure is playing his or her appropriate role, not abdicating responsibility to eldest sibling-figures. The eldest sibling, given an explicit role and title, doesn’t have to feel embarrassed or guilty about taking responsibility for younger siblings and sometimes failing because the parent remains ultimately responsible. In the school where I work as the counsellor I see many students whose first important conversations were with one of the Student Counsellors who, knowing his or her own limits, has then suggested they see me. But in schools where everything is left entirely up to the Student Counsellors and the adults back off, the Student Counsellors end up feeling resentful of their role and guilty about things never going to plan. It’s too much. It’s unfair to be expected to parent rather than just to sibling (as it were) younger people. Equally, in schools where there is little shared vision in the staffroom, where the school can’t decide whether to follow the voices of the law and order (often men) or the voices of care and sympathy (often women), the Student Counsellors are again caught in the middle, expected to work miracles. Like the children of warring couples, they end up resenting their own existence.

Gender Issues

Fewer boys than girls apply to be Student Counsellors. Sayers (1998) argues that, to prove their masculinity, boys separate more quickly from their mothers but then find themselves in frightening isolation. They compensate for this awful feeling of isolation with grandiosity (I’m bigger, better, braver then you) but remain fearful that this carefully constructed new world will collapse completely.

I think boys are therefore reluctant to apply to be Student Counsellors, to have the title, the training, the expectation, for fear of being no good, of being unable to live up to something. Perhaps fathers suffer from the same fear. If it seems much clearer how to ‘be’ a mother than a father, then it may seem clearer how to be sisterly rather than brotherly.

In any case, boys and girls express their concern and their friendliness differently. One team of Student Counsellors was telling me about how in school you know you’ve made friends with another girl when she says, "D’you want to come to the toilet with me?" Then you know you’re accepted. We laughed at the thought of boys coping with such an invitation. Yet a group of boys I was working with recently got on to complaining about the girls in their form. "Girls don’t understand boys," they said. I asked what exactly it was that girls didn’t understand. They hesitated. "Well," said one boy, searching, "...football!" I nodded, as if I knew exactly what he meant. The other boys knew what he meant.

There seems to be something about the language of football which equates with a language of relationships, where ‘not passing’ means not sharing, ‘goal hanging’ means taking all the credit, ‘being on the same side’ means being friends and ‘not knowing whose side you’re on’ means being caught between loyalties. The metaphors are many. And they’re enacted every lunchtime on school playing fields. This perhaps, is what the girls didn’t understand.

Luke was a Student Counsellor who didn’t seem much interested in the bits of theory I proffered at team meetings. While the female Student Counsellors were keen to speculate about what was going on emotionally for younger students, Luke said little. He was beloved of many younger students, not because he happened to be captain of the school rugby team but because he played with them, joining in their football and other playground games. He did play-fighting. He arm-wrestled. He had few conversations explicitly about ‘feelings’ but did things instead and younger students, especially boys, knew he was just as concerned for them as were any of the female Student Counsellors.

If masculinity is an outdated concept and ‘masculinities’ a more useful way of thinking, then Luke epitomised one kind of masculinity. Simon epitomised another with his Glastonbury

T-shirt and friendship bracelets. Dale was different again, more formal, smiling nervously as he chatted to younger students in the dinner queue. Jovan was a dude, Mikey was shy, Alan liked organising things. Boys just express their concern in a more coded way. I wonder whether some girls, on the other hand, apply so readily to be Student Counsellors because they’re expected from an early age to be little mothers in their families and find themselves wholly unequipped for the role. So they hate their siblings for the sense of inadequacy they’re stuck with and desperately seek opportunities outside the family to try again.

Conclusion

Among the Student Counsellors I’ve worked with in one school in the last six years, 27 have been the eldest child in their family, 8 the middle child and 18 the youngest child. I don’t think there’s anything very surprising about this. It suggests that eldest children, feeling displaced in their parents’ affections, possibly have most need to make up for hating their younger siblings. What’s interesting, though, is that there have been no ‘only’ children. This may be a complete coincidence or it may be because only children have no need to make up for anything or alternatively lack the confidence to act as sibling-figures. I’m certainly aware of only children, when they’re younger, making plenty of rewarding relationships with Student Counsellors...

I worry with my supervisor about the term ‘student counsellor’. Counsellors are adults, trained over many years. They have their own professional organisation. ‘Student Counsellor’ usually refers to an adult counsellor working in Further or Higher Education. But, like parents who don’t let the children know what’s happening, counsellors shouldn’t hoard the skills and insights they have. Other people can contribute as well. What goes on in the relationships between these Student Counsellors and younger students includes much that is mutually therapeutic, that heals or modifies old experiences and moves people on.

Copies of the longer version are available from Nick Luxmoore.

Back to Peer Support in Action

Copyright © 1998-2004 Peer Support Networker. Legal Notices
Last Update: August 2, 2004