A respected psychiatrist, working in a project with traumatised young people, tells them ‘Your vulnerability is your power’. But these young folk are so locked into their defensive patterns of behaviour, hiding behind an array of tricky behaviours such as aggression and unresponsive withdrawal that the psychiatrist’s message is a profound challenge to them.
Another mental health professional, when his son sulks or flounces out of the room, immediately follows after him, firmly insisting, despite his protestations and uncooperative rudeness, that they talk. The father instinctively feels he needs to understand what’s going on with his son and won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
So then, how do we help young men, especially in an increasingly toxic and polarised world fuelled by the wild west of the internet?
Adolescence, Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne’s recent four-part drama on Netflix, is an arresting and wonderfully-acted exploration of the undercurrents that can lead to teenage knife crime. The parents have taken their eyes off their son Jamie, leaving him alone, naively thinking he is safe in his bedroom. In fact Jamie is becoming radicalised by the ‘manosphere’ and drinking in toxic masculinity in the form of hate-filled ideas about women having all the power. Like a sponge, he takes in the message of the strong man so prevalent in our world. This mixes with his sense of unattractiveness, unworthiness and self-loathing until his rage boils over into an unspeakable crime against his class-mate Katie.
We forget that the young are vulnerable at our own peril. They may shun adults’ wisdom, or be derogatory about our inept blunderings around the internet. They may isolate themselves and give the appearance of being sages. But as former England football manager Gareth Southgate asserted in his recent Dimbleby Lecture, young people also love hearing those who are older; it reassures them, though they may never let us know it. The truth is they are desperate for role models – even for fathers who pursue them when they flounce out and who don’t take no for an answer.
Southgate focuses on the idea of connection making a difference. And that is true of Adolescence, too. One of Jamie’s deepest wounds is that his father Eddie will not look at him when he is ‘rubbish’ at football. Eddie cannot bear Jamie’s failure so he turns away. And when we’re desperate for connection, somebody turning away can create deep wounds. Mental health speaker Rachel Kelly also advocates for connection in her book The Gift of Teenagers. Her message is that we need to get stuck in, connect more and worry less.
When that psychiatrist said ‘your vulnerability is your power’, he was talking to a group of locked-in traumatised hurting young people who were busy hiding their wounds. Gradually, with this leader’s strong modelling, they learned to put their toe into the water of being open and honest and sharing what they felt. These sharings came out piecemeal at first – that is the pain of trauma; but to their amazement these kids found what it felt like to be taken seriously and heard. In response, their clenched fists opened to receive what they needed. To their astonishment they found others who felt similar things to them. They gradually formed a community.
Vulnerability is power, as Southgate attests, when we face our failures and setbacks openly and honestly and use them to learn from and grow stronger. He is testament to this himself, having spectacularly and publicly failed to land a goal at a penalty shootout in 1996. When he explains how he has grown from the experience, we believe him. Vulnerability, he says, teaches us to develop strong values, like supporting others, being resilient, keeping going through adversity, not giving up and making a difference. Those values shine through as he speaks.
A perfectly pitched drama like Adolescence and a public figure and ex-football manager like Gareth Southgate make timely interventions. They make me feel hopeful about the world. They are alerting our attention powerfully about what we might be missing.