Last night I spent three hours with a room full of therapits and counsellors (virtually, at least) delivering a training session for nscience: “Why Wasn’t I Kept?” – Working with Adults Shaped by Early Relational Rupture.

It’s a session that’s been sitting with me for a while, and one that draws on something I see constantly in the therapy room – often quietly, often missed.

The question underneath the question

Some clients arrive in therapy able to talk fluently about their history. They can describe the inconsistency of their childhood, the caregiver who was sometimes present and sometimes not, and they can tell you, intellectually, that none of it was their fault.

And yet something different happens in the relationship itself. A subtle bracing when warmth is offered. A quiet monitoring of your tone, your attention, whether you seem distracted. Not resistance exactly,  something closer to self-protection, built long before there was language for it.

For a specific group of clients, this pattern has a very particular root. These are the adults who couldn’t remain with their birth families, or who remained but experienced something functionally similar — caregiving that was unreliable, conditional, or simply absent where it mattered most. Underneath their history sits a question no child should have to answer for themselves:

Why wasn’t I kept?

And beneath that, the conclusion many children reach in the absence of any other explanation: that there must be something in them that makes people leave.

Why this matters beyond looked-after histories

One of the things I wanted last night’s session to land was that this isn’t only relevant to clinicians working with adopted or looked-after adults. The same architecture shows up wherever early caregiving was inconsistent, neglectful, or chronically misattuned, including in clients whose caregivers were physically present but emotionally unavailable.

Left unrecognised, these survival strategies, hypervigilance to a therapist’s mood, an inability to let themselves need anything, warmth that never quite settles into trust — get misread. As ambivalence. As avoidance. As a client “not quite ready.” When really, they’re intelligent adaptations to environments that once offered no other option.

What we covered

Over the three hours we worked through:

• How early relational rupture crystallises into adult attachment templates
• How identity-level shame shapes closeness, vulnerability, and the therapeutic relationship itself
• Reading mistrust, testing, and withdrawal in the room — and understanding what they’re protecting
• Working with rupture without accidentally reinforcing shame or triggering further withdrawal
• Using attunement, psychoeducation, and therapeutic transparency to build safety incrementally
• Repairing ruptures in the relationship and why how we respond matters as much as whether we respond

It was never intended as a formula. It’s something to help therapists and counsellors recognise what’s actually unfolding in front of them, and respond in a way that offers the client something their history didn’t.

Why I keep coming back to this work

I trained originally as a social worker before retraining as a psychotherapeutic counsellor, and it was exactly this, watching systemic work reach its limits when it came to repairing disrupted attachment that pushed me toward this path. Fifteen-plus years on, working with children, foster families, adoptive parents, and now adults carrying this legacy into midlife, it’s still the work that feels most essential.

The child who concluded they weren’t worth keeping so often becomes the adult who can’t quite believe they’re worth staying with. That’s slow, careful, relational work and it’s exactly the kind of thinking VLM Group brings into training rooms, teams, and organisations.

Thank you to everyone who joined last night, and to nscience for hosting. If you missed it, the recording will be available through nscience for those who booked a ticket.