REBTOZ

Seven-year-old Eabha (Ava) came by my office. She would occasionally drop in to tell me one of her stories or to sing me a song, but she seemed preoccupied and wasn’t her usual bubbly self. She played with a fidget she found in the toy box and after a short while, without looking in my direction said, ‘my dad has moved out and my mum has been crying a lot.’ She continued to play with the fidget. ‘Things were not right!’ Eabha stopped playing and then she came and sat down opposite me, settled in her seat, and grabbed a teddy that was nearby. Her eyes betrayed how she was feeling, and I wondered how a seven-year-old processes such a traumatic episode unfolding before her and around her and within her. I asked her how she was feeling, and she lowered her eyes and said, ‘When my mum told me that dad was leaving my brain felt sad and then I cried.’ I asked what she meant when she said that her brain felt sad. She said that she was thinking about why this happened and if her mum and...

‘Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. . .. They justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.’ T.S. Elliott The imagined side eyes and murmurings noticed in passing and the alleged corridor conversations fed the managers  paranoia that people were undermining his authority.  ‘There’s a conspiracy afoot! They must not do this to me it’s just not fair,’  he thought. He reflected on the demands he made of staff, seemingly all heaped upon them at once that he told himself had nothing to do with his lack of organisation or paucity of leadership skills, but more to do with the system. Yes, it was the system letting everyone down. How could it be his fault? And then there were his offsiders who were green around the gills and wasn’t he trying to get them up to speed, to develop their leadership capacities?  ‘No, it’s not me he thought.’  He would not dare to even contemplate t...