Trust comes before belief; belief seizes trust, first to protect itself, through a thicket of disbelief, and then, through hope, to realise itself.
*
I do not know if the Mulberry Bush Organisation has understood the difficulty that people who have been through the care system, or any of the care systems through which society regulates its capacity to sustain and move along the System of the society as a whole, and its varying competing ideological and cultural assumptions about the nature and purpose of life, and our place as individuals within them - so, children’s homes and youth detention centres; prisons; homes for the infirm and elderly, and all those who fall outside the ability to be cared for by friends and family; psychiatric units....
I do not understand how the Mulberry Bush Organisation can not have understood how profoundly difficult people who have been through the more containment and conformity-based models of institutional response and care, based in reduction of individual response to personal experience and individual agency, and embodied in the umbrella word “authority”, find in coming into, and much less trusting, anything which appears to be an “authority” in the sense of an “up there” looking out and down from a place of apparent Social and societal embeddedness*. In this an “archive” is like all the “up there’s”, the police, the social services, the mental health services, the nurseries, the schools, the many points of contact in our society which light up the warnings from experience: “Do not trust, and do not believe”.
I do not think they have learned from their own experience with children who find the adult world untrustworthy, nor from the experience of their reasonably successful predecessor the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre, nor do I think from the way they have gone about closing down their own Archive and Special Collections, that they have understood, or have not applied what they know, what I think they must know: That it is extremely difficult to get most people whose trust has been destroyed/betrayed time and time again by authority to trust something so strange and foreign as an Archive: first to make contact, which is often one of anticipated conflict and the assumption of some kind of rejection or humiliation, manifested in some kind of retracted sense of hope, or hostility; and then followed up, if it is followed up, and depending on our response to their initial overtures, by a wash of other possibilities, which are forms of testing: of consistency, of sincerity, of the genuineness of interest and commitment; of reliability...of that falling in to trust, and into belief, and then, potentially fatally, given the emotions and foundations of self at play, the hope beyond belief which brings a sense of place and belonging, and even, potentially, rest, a place of being. A place for remembering and working out and through, in one’s own way, and in one’s own time, with one’s own outcomes; a therapeutic community with formal boundaries of its own (which is the beauty of an archive, which is built around the reality - not the hope, but the reality - of how physical and digital materials ring-fenced for as-permanent-as-possible retention and preservation behave in handling and the environment; ring-fenced itself by legal requirements; and more loosely bound by professional standards and expectations, “more loosely” because it is here that the social and cultural collide with the actual, and what is objectively needed and right becomes shielded and obscured by what is “merely” cultural, or “merely” social or, indeed, “merely” personal, or a requirement of the institution; or just standard practice, which begins in that ring-fencing itself: What is, what isn’t: Who is, who isn’t.)
...of the difficulty, awake and visible at the first point of contact and a promise being made (“You can trust us”), of that falling in to trust, and into belief, and then, potentially fatally, given the emotions and foundations of self at play, the hope beyond which belief which brings a sense of place and belonging**, and even, potentially, rest, a place of being; of how difficult that is for many people who have been through the care systems, on all sides of it, not just those who have “been through it”, but those who have been the initiators and implementers of it, those whose friends and family have experienced it directly and vicariously, and even all those who radiate out through direct and indirect contact, who may not ever think of making contact with the Archive unless the Archive, through public programmes and oral history, reach out to them.
At the recent Mulberry Bush Open event (March 17th, 2026), these are points that one psychotherapist raised, of a place that many had discovered as Place of fulfilled promise; but who were now being experientially betrayed (again) by an institution which had given them hope. Having glimpsed the Possibility, and experienced the actuality, one hopes that this replication of loss and exile is not the end of a story, that it does not cut off hope which is met with reality in some other archive facility, although one by nature and history at several removes from the understanding of direct working and living which the Mulberry Bush School has historically embodied.
And one must not forget the difficulty for those in the Archive, to embody the Promise, and fulfill that Trust; and to make a more general point, how much more difficult it is for those working in an environment which is not organised fully around keeping that Promise, and fulfilling that Trust; as colleagues working throughout the world, and in many different fields, can attest.
On the difficulty of trust and coming to trust, there was a blog post on the old PETT website by Len Clarke of the Early Pestalozzi Children Project, which can be seen here: “One Person's Therapy Is Another's Trap, Yeh?”.
Stated even more clearly in their recent book:
“The Village That ^Once Was Our World”: The story of the first children of the British Pestalozzi Children’s Village, in their own words.
by William Eiduks and Leonard Clarke, narratives compiled by Carolyn L. Mears, PhD., Published by the Early Pestalozzi Children Project, 2024. Can be purchased here.
My foreword to the book is here.
* Boy, do I not like the world “Societal”. But when I began this sentence I intended to write Social security or Social Security. There is not - or I do not have - a common and gentle word which embraces all of us, and is not inherently skewed towards political, as “national” is, or something less distinctly boundaried, or boundaried in a harder but less giving way when it comes to the all-of-us, such as “country”. “Community” at the aggregate level is actually just a short hand, and an aspirational one, for “communities” as something somehow unified, as if we can make it so by saying it. “Social”, for me, out loose in the world, precedes; it is the “We” from which the rest follow.
** The implication here is that there is a hope which precedes and is within belief, and is within and extends beyond it.
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