Blog post
Why ‘Holding Differently’?
The words ‘holding’ and ‘held’, here, mean something much bigger than a physical hold.
Holding Differently, Containing Distress Blog
Laura Steckley
12 August 2026 | First blog post in our series | Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The title of this project – Holding Differently, Containing Distress – reflects a deliberate intention to move beyond simplistic conversations about physical restraint. Our project is not based on a position that restraint can be understood only as something to eliminate. This is not to say that we see physical restraint as a good thing, either. It’s more complicated than either position. This first blog post introduces some of the ideas that shape the project and explains what we mean by holding differently.
What We Mean by Holding Differently
Holding differently can be understood as an invitation to think differently about holding. It also is an acknowledgement of the human need to be held. The words ‘holding’ and ‘held’, here, mean something much bigger than a physical hold. Their meaning is influenced by the work of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion.
Donald Winnicott coined the term ‘holding environment’ to mean an environment that enables a child to develop well and flourish. The holding that goes on in a holding environment may include physical holding. During the first few years of our lives, a great deal of physical holding is necessary. All going well, this physical holding happens within loving relationships, child-centred rhythms, nurturing care, and adequate social, emotional and material resources for those providing this care. It is the fabric of all of these things – relationships, rhythms, resources, and importantly, processes of care – that make up a holding environment.
But there’s more: that fabric of physical holding, relationships, rhythms, resources and processes of care must be effective not just for holding the infant or child. Both Winnicott and Bion also understood that for children to be held well in relationships at home, school and other settings, their parents, carers, teachers, and others also needed to be held in relationships and processes that enabled them to hold children well.
What We Mean by Containing Distress
The second part of the project’s title – Containing Distress – is influenced by the work of Wilfred Bion. He focused on understanding how key relationships ‘hold’ a child so that, over time, that child develops the ability to manage their feelings and experiences. This holding involves the primary care giver making the effort to stay with the child’s feelings, gently wondering about the emotional aspect of their internal world. When the care giver conveys empathetic understanding from this effort back to the child, it makes the experience more manageable for the child. The cumulative effect of these experiences support children’s development of thinking to manage experiences and emotions.
Like Winnicott, Bion focused on processes of care. He also explored somewhat similar processes between therapist and client, and between groups of people. His work has helped us to understand how providing containing processes for adults enables clearer thinking and an improved ability to manage feelings and experiences, in therapeutic services and in people’s places of work.
In residential child care, this word ‘containment’ is sometimes used simplistically to mean keeping a lid on behaviour through restrictions, restraint or confinement. What Bion meant by containment – and what we mean in this project – is quite the opposite: it refers to the coming together of processes that enable people to think more clearly, self- or co-regulate their emotions, and better understand their experiences.
At its heart, containment is about giving and receiving empathic responses to the emotional part of communication – sometimes described as feeling felt or being really seen. Experiences of being understood at an emotional level are containing.
Another good way to understand containment is to think about what it’s like to be uncontained – when experiences and emotions have reduced our ability to think clearly and manage ourselves. People become uncontained when situations and/or circumstances overwhelm them. It happens to everyone throughout our lives, but it’s usually more prominent during early years and childhood, as children gradually develop the ability to use thinking to manage their experiences and emotions. A toddler having a typical temper tantrum can be understood as good example of becoming uncontained.
When normal processes of care are limited or disrupted, or when people experience trauma or other big challenges, they can become uncontained much more frequently by seemingly less significant situations and circumstances. Many of the children cared for in residential services have had had both – disrupted early care, and trauma or other significant adversities. For residential child care workers – if their workplaces do not actively address the impacts of working with children’s trauma and uncontained experiences and emotions – they will be much more susceptible to becoming uncontained themselves.
How Holding and Containing Shape the Project
While our research examines situations involving serious, imminent harm and physical restraint in residential child care, we are equally interested in the wider context that affects these situations. We are looking beyond individual incidents to those relationships, rhythms, resources, and processes of care that make up a holding environment. We are also interested in finding out about the wider contextual features that help or hinder people’s clear thinking and ability to manage the emotional dimension of experiences.
Supporting people to manage the emotional dimension of their experiences is likely to reduce escalation into situations where physical restraint becomes necessary. Evidence from our previous project supports this and can be found here: Developing a Holding Environment.
Reducing physical restraints is not just about what happens between children and workers during those moments of escalating serious, imminent harm. By focusing on holding environments and emotional containment, we can understand better the conditions that improve clarity and compassion, and reduce distress.