Transcript for
Building parent-child relationships from behind bars

Linh Nguyen (00:00): 

The challenge is that many fathers, they don’t fully utilise these opportunities to connect with their children and family members, and for those fathers, it’s often the shame and guilt associated with incarceration. They try to hide their situation away from their children. 

Narrator (00:22): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast. 

Jacquelynne Lee (00:27): 

Hi, I’m Jacquie Lee and you’re listening to The Emerging Minds podcast. We’d like to pay our respects to the traditional custodians of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We also pay our respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors, and elders past, present, and emerging from the different First Nations across Australia. In today’s episode, we’re joined by Linh Nguyen to explore the strategies she’s found helpful in supporting incarcerated fathers to rebuild their relationships with their children. Linh is a senior practitioner, mental health counsellor, and accredited mental health social worker with a focus on anger management, behavioural change, and skills training. In her work with Centacare Catholic Country SA, she uses a variety of evidence-based and trauma-focused practises to equip fathers with the tools to overcome physical, mental, and emotional barriers to connection. Linh, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Linh Nguyen (01:27): 

Thanks, Jacquie and Emerging Minds, for having me today. 

Jacquelynne Lee (01:31): 

To begin, can you tell us a bit about your role and what drew you to this work? 

Linh Nguyen (01:37): 

Sure. My name is Linh Nguyen and I’m a mental health counsellor at Centacare Catholic Country South Australia. My role involves providing mental health service to communities and also to incarcerated individuals within prisons across Centacare service areas, which includes the far north area and the Riverland regions. My practise focuses on depression and anxiety, anger management, and behavioural change. I started working with individuals in prisons about… Let me think, about three years ago. What struck me quite early on was that I often see there’s a very high disengagement rate in this population compared to the other client groups in the community, and at the same time, this population often presents with a high degree of complexity, frequently with a history of childhood abuse and significant exposure to drugs and violence since childhood. This contrasts the high level of need for mental healthcare alongside a very low level of engagement. Really prompted me to try to understand how we could make mental health service more effective and more accessible to people in prisons. 

Jacquelynne Lee (03:06): 

I read that, in 2023, over 40,000 Australian children were estimated to have a parent in prison. What impact does parental incarceration have on a child’s mental health? 

Linh Nguyen (03:21): 

I haven’t had the opportunity to work directly with the family members of incarcerated parents, but there has been some evidence from the research in Australia and also in the other countries that discuss the impact of parental imprisonment on children and on their family members. For example, I have a report in here. It’s in 2023, it was done by a group of researchers in Monash University. They did a study of 80 families of imprisoned parents. They felt that the most significant impact on the children was emotional distress and the difficulty in building a secure relationship with the parents in prison. We all know how crucial secure attachment is for healthy child development. One family reported that their daughters cry every night for their dad, or another family said that their daughter shows anger that her dad isn’t at home and misses things she achieved. 

(04:32): 

These comments in this study are similar to what I often hear directly from the incarcerated fathers that I am working with. I remember one father who was jailed for drug-related offence. He was terribly sad when his teenage daughter said to him in a phone call like, “Dad, next time, make sure that you choose your children over drugs,” and that comment really seemed to indicate a deep-seated belief in the girl that she was not important enough for her father to make him overcome the drug issues. Of course, I know that there are many families out there, they are doing an amazing job, taking great care of their children, despite one parent being in prison. However, the insight about those children who are struggling with emotional distress and a lack of secure bonding with one parent in prison, it really highlights the need for strengthening those parent and child relationships from prisons. 

Jacquelynne Lee (05:38): 

Absolutely, and that example that you gave really highlights the complexity in those relationships as well. What are some of the common barriers to incarcerated fathers connecting with their children and building those relationships? 

Linh Nguyen (05:57): 

Well, I want to be clear that we’re focusing specifically on situations where it’s safe for children and families to have those contacts with the imprisoned parents. We are going to be addressing the case where there are intervention orders in place prohibiting that contact, and at the same time, we have to acknowledge that, because of safety reasons. There is inherent physical barriers to parent and child interaction when a parent is in prison, so face-to-face visits can be quite remediate, particularly when fathers are in prison, hundreds of pay away from their families. The most common ways to connect with families from prisons are phone call, video calls, and lawyers, and all those methods of contact come with a set of restrictions. For example, my clients in prison, they typically get a few opportunities for phone calls each day, but actually, each call is limited to 10 minutes only and only available within very specific time. 

(07:10): 

They often have to wait in a long line with other inmates who are also waiting and are watching them during the call, urging them to finish quickly. The challenge is that many fathers, they don’t fully utilise these opportunities to connect with the children and family members, even though they deeply meet their families and they are permitted to have the contact. For those fathers, it’s often about emotional barriers, and I see that a key and frequent emotional barrier is often the shame and guilt associated with incarceration. Many fathers, they try to hide their situation away from their children, because they struggle. When the children keep asking again and again about, “Dad, where are you and when will you come home?” There’s another common barrier, it’s an internal conflict between the pressure of showing a strongman image in prison to hide any signs of weakness in prison. 

(08:19): 

The inner need to be vulnerable sometimes. I have one client who avoided calling his parents and children, because he cried almost every time he heard their voices on the phone and he didn’t want the other inmates waiting in the line to see him cry, which is really, really sad. Finally, a really common barrier is the conflict with the children’s caregivers. Most of the time, they’re their ex-partners or sometimes can be their parents or parents-in-law, and there is a lack of skills in navigating conflicts. I have worked with several men who’ve cut off all the contact with their children, because they feel unable to overcome the conflicts or the difficult conversations with the caregivers. For example, I have one client, one man had no contact with his children for an entire year, because his wife had an affair shortly after he got in prison and he felt like he couldn’t get over the resentment towards her. Some other men, they still contact the caregivers, but they struggle when the caregivers express the disappointment over the phone about their poor choices, or when the mothers, they express their distress of being a single mom. 

(09:40): 

All of these emotional barriers can lead the fathers to avoid contact with their children. They often believe that it is a barrier to just wait until they get released and then they can make it up to their families later. 

Jacquelynne Lee (09:52): 

The physical and logistical barriers to building those relationships are so clear that, yeah, all of those nuanced emotional barriers aren’t as obvious. What approach have you found most helpful then when working to help incarcerated fathers to maintain positive relationships with their kids? 

Linh Nguyen (10:16): 

Actually, there’s a lot of approaches that can help my clients in prisons to overcome the emotional barriers that prevent them from engaging in meaningful daily routines. I find one approach, called distress exposure, to be a significantly effective approach. Let me explain. Distress exposure in psychotherapy, it refers to the approach where a person deliberately push themselves in uncomfortable situations, allowing themselves to feel distressed in a safe way with the aim of achieving a long-term benefit. When you think about this approach, we actually do it all the time in our daily lives. We push ourselves at the gym, embracing the tiredness for better health, and we stay calm during a conflict with our clients or with our colleagues at work. We tolerate the frustration to maintain the professionalism, or you can think back all the time when you were a kid. You see that, when parents, they take their children to kindy, children often get anxious and cry in the first few days in kindy. 

(11:30): 

Is that right? What parents often do is that they comfort their children. They say things like, “You’ll be okay, I will pick you up in the afternoon. I love you.” By doing so, they allowed the children to experience the separation anxiety in a safe manner, and over time, after years of consistent practise, the child grows up and becomes more confident in handling more anxiety-provoking situations, like public speaking or attending a podcast interview. That ability to tolerate distress is really a life skill that we’ve been practising our whole life, so it’s not something new at all. Now, when we look at the fathers in prisons who struggle with emotional barriers, most of the time, the distress we’re dealing within the prison population is quite complex, much more complex than just the tiredness of going to the gym or the frustration from having conflicts at work. 

(12:34): 

Now, let’s take an example of a father that I work with. We’ll call him Chris, just a name that I’m using for this example. Before he started counselling, even a hint of someone blaming him or refusing to take responsibility would make him incredibly angry. Of course, most people would feel upset in the same situation, but for Chris, even a very small comment. Like his ex-partner saying he was irresponsible, something like that, it would escalate him into raising his voice on the phone, or when his tennis partner made a mistake that caused them to lose a competition, he was extremely angry for days, as he felt that the teammate wasn’t taking enough responsibility. If we look at Chris’s childhood experience, it sheds light on why the distress from being blamed or someone denying their wrongdoing was so deeply unbearable for Chris, because during childhood, Chris suffered severe neglect and was sexually abused multiple times by people in authority. 

(13:48): 

The perpetrators keep blaming that it was his fault, and when he tried to tell his parents, they didn’t believe him. They accused him of lying, refused to believe that those in authority were sexually abusing their son and denied their responsibility to protect him. That means that, throughout his childhood, Chris, he just learned that blame, shame, and denial attitude, it means danger. These distresses were often associated with extreme physical pain. Not only emotional pain, but it’s physical pain, nightmares, constant fear, and intense feeling of rejection. He didn’t have enough opportunities to learn that this kind of distress, the frustration from being shamed and blamed, actually can also be tolerable and manageable in the other situations. That’s a very typical example of how we work with distress in the prison populations. How can this distress exposure approach help Chris and others with similar emotional barriers? 

(14:57): 

Well, it helps my clients learn that some distress is safe and tolerable in the present. For those who suffer from past trauma, they start to understand that the distress they are facing here and now differs from the distress that hurt them or damaged them in the past, and they don’t have to avoid anymore. 

Jacquelynne Lee (15:18): 

Sounds like really important work that we’ll see them through once they do get to leave prison. What does this distress exposure work look like when you’re working with this cohort? 

Linh Nguyen (15:33): 

When I worked with Chris, I broke down the distress tolerance exercises into very, very small and manageable steps. He starts with very simple activities, and each activity has two components. First, it needs to generate some emotional distress, and second, it needs to be beneficial for the person in the long run. In counselling sessions, Chris learns skills for emotional regulation, positive communication, conflict resolution, and back in prison, he exposed himself to the distress-provoking situations, used those skills to navigate through the distress. He practised day by day, one distress at a time, until he felt confident in handling that specific distress and was ready to move on to a higher distress level. The crucial principle of designing the exposure exercise is that the person makes a choice, not the practitioner. My clients, they always choose to start with something very simple, very simple tasks related to their daily life, not related to their family immediately. 

(16:49): 

They choose some exercise like they choose to go to the gym, drink more water, or reduce sugar in their diet. These activities are immediately related to their daily need, something that they can do tonight or tomorrow. Now, returning to Chris, he also practised some simple distress exercise to tolerate boredom and procrastination before moving on to tolerate anger. Anger is really a big emotion. He practised staying in a conversation with an inmate he disliked for five minutes a day, gradually increasing to 10 minutes, then 20 and 30 minutes. Let’s call the inmate jack. He didn’t do anything harmful to Chris at all, but what made Chris dislike Jack and avoid Jack was that Jack often bragged about himself. This really triggered Chris, because unconsciously, Chris perceived extreme danger whenever he heard someone lying or denying their wrongdoing. 

(17:54): 

The plan was that, whenever Chris heard Jack brag about himself, just calmly tell Jack, “No, that’s not true. I don’t believe you,” and then simply walk away without need to argue or raise voice or square at jack or force Jack to admit that Jack was wrong. Overall, we assist clients in learning skills to regulate negative emotions, so that they can engage in a routine that is initially distressing, but ultimately, benefits you with the prison context. 

Jacquelynne Lee (18:29): 

What effects have you noticed this work has had on the fathers that you work with and their relationships with their children? 

Linh Nguyen (18:38): 

It’s been really rewarding for me to observe the positive change in the fathers who’ve been engaging in the distress exposure exercises. Initially, they’re often reluctant to undertake any activities directly related to family or to the past trauma, which is really understandable, because those areas often bring up a lot of big distress. However, after several weeks of building their capacity to handle distress, they frequently started choosing to undertake activities aimed at reconnecting with their families. Take Chris’s situation for instance, he mentioned that his consistent effort should navigate those challenging conversations with Jack and with other inmates. It sharpened his skills in active listening, showing empathy and assertive communication. What was particularly encouraging was that these improvements made his own calls with his ex-partner much more positive. He was able to remain calm, even during disagreements with her, or when she said something that might have previously triggered him. 

(19:54): 

As a result, they began communicating more often, which naturally led to him having increased contact with his children. Another truly impressive development that I’ve witnessed in other individuals who started reading books in prison, I really like this exercise. A lot of my clients in prison, they had never completed a book before in their life, and they didn’t believe that they were capable of developing a reading habit. However, when I provided them with a book related to their childhood trauma, just start with just a couple of pages each day for even only one minute of reading per day, they became deeply engaged. They gradually progressed to reading for hours on a daily basis, and through reading, they learn a lot about how much their childhood traumatic experience might have influenced their behaviours and their relationships with family. Then they expanded their vocabulary, expressing emotions to their family, which is as beneficial as several counselling sessions. These fathers have shared with me that the distress exercises made them recognise that negative emotions like shame, guilt, or frustration or even anger, it’s just simply a normal part of relationships. 

(21:24): 

With skill learning, they can become much better at managing those distress through the consistent practise. These examples really underscore how the practise of distress tolerance day by day and through engaging in the very small and relatively simple task can result in a substantial and long-lasting improvements in family relationships over the time. 

Jacquelynne Lee (21:51): 

Absolutely. You’re not just equipping them with the skills, but you’re also building their confidence as well to tackle those relationships and perhaps more challenging conversations. Of course, there’s just so much to be exploring with fathers who are in prison to support their relationship with their children. Practitioners can also be curious about what a father’s distress might say about what’s important to them as a parent and the kind of father they want to be, even from within prison. If you’re interested in having conversations with parents about what’s important to them, check out our online courses, Practise Strategies for Implementation and Engaging Children Paving the Way With Parents. You can find links to these and other resources in the show notes. Now, back to the episode. Can you briefly explain the zone of proximal development for our listeners and how that relates to this work? 

Linh Nguyen (22:53): 

Sure. It refers to the optimal zone for learning new skills, where the tasks are challenging enough to promote learning, but not so overwhelming that they become discouraging for the learners. This zone is unique to each interview at each stage of learning, and can be tricky to pinpoint in a short amount of time. Coming back to the work that I’m doing with my clients in prisons, maintaining family relationships is a skill that requires learning, and interaction with family from prison completely shifts the dynamics of relationships. Typically, these fathers show care and affection by playing with their children or by providing financial support, but when they have to maintain the relationships from prisons through phone calls, video calls, and letters, they’re suddenly required to learn a brand new set of interpersonal skills. Things like active listening or navigating through the difficult conversations and verbally express their emotions. 

(24:04): 

At the same time, they also have to cope with entirely new kind of distress, like shame, guilt, hopelessness, and even worthlessness. It seems reasonable to think that incarcerated fathers, especially those who experienced trauma during their childhood or maybe they have chronic psychological issues, they might find it incredibly difficult to just immediately implementing all these new interpersonal skills, which mean that these tasks are out of their optimal learning zone. The distress exposure approach, it breaks down the skills into really simple tasks that fall within the learning zone before gradually moving on into a more advanced task, so it might be a more effective way for them to learn those new skills. 

Jacquelynne Lee (25:00): 

Makes sense. What other strategies or approaches have you found beneficial when working with incarcerated fathers? 

Linh Nguyen (25:08): 

Actually, not every client. They need the counsellor to explicitly give them the homework, because for those who already have very good interpersonal skills, like actively listening, navigating difficult conversations, a skill that I just mentioned, usually, I can see there’s a quick process for them to try to rebuild the relationships with their families from prisons. For these clients, even without therapy homework, they often proactively apply the skills that they learn in counselling sessions to adapt to their new environment. With these individuals, we felt that the other approaches that require fewer sessions and minimal homework, like psychoeducation and cognitive restructuring, it can also be really effective. Just for anyone who might not be familiar with these approaches, so psychoeducation is where the counsellors just typically focus on the educating clients and providing knowledge about the distress, and cognitive restructure, on the other hand, we focus on helping clients to identify and challenge and change the negative or unhelpful thought patterns that contribute to their emotional distress. 

Jacquelynne Lee (26:29): 

Do you work with incarcerated mothers as well? 

Linh Nguyen (26:32): 

I haven’t had yet the opportunity to work with incarcerated mothers, but existing research, it does mention some difference between and women in our therapy homework. Some studies suggested that women often engage more in therapy homework that fosters emotional connection and self-exploration, whereas men tend to prefer behaviour-focused tasks and communication skills. These findings are consistent with my experience with my male clients. 

Jacquelynne Lee (27:09): 

You’ve mentioned in the case studies that you’ve shared that a lot of the fathers that you work with have co-existing mental health difficulties, substance use issues, and experiences of trauma. What have you found helpful when working with clients with complex presentations like these? 

Linh Nguyen (27:32): 

I have observed that progress can be particularly challenging with clients whose difficulties are compounded by substance use, and maintaining focus during sessions and adherence to practise like distress exposure can be really difficult if clients are influenced by drugs or by addictive behaviours. In these cases, I believe that we need a strong collaboration with specialist experience in addictive behaviours, which is quite limited in my current area. On the other hand, I have seen more positive outcomes with clients who get significantly impacted by their childhood trauma. Consistent evidence show that trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, or we call it TFCBT, it is a helpful framework. It seems particular, and it seems to me that the clients with very traumatic experience in the past, they can benefit a lot from this approach, because during this approach, they have a chance, they have opportunities to discuss in detail the memories that they have avoided for long time. 

(28:56): 

They start to explore the influence of the traumatic memories on their current behaviours and also on their family relationships. With TFCBT, clients are supported to recall the traumatic memories in detail and develop skills to regulate the emotional responses during the memory recollections. 

Jacquelynne Lee (29:19): 

I wonder for how many of these men it might be the first time that they’ve ever talked about those. 

Linh Nguyen (29:26): 

A lot. 

Jacquelynne Lee (29:26): 

Yeah, 

Linh Nguyen (29:27): 

Yeah, it’s a lot. 

Jacquelynne Lee (29:30): 

It’s very powerful for them. How can practitioners use these insights to support non-incarcerated fathers who are looking to rebuild their relationship with their children? 

Linh Nguyen (29:43): 

Of course, we all approach this work with experienced tailoring our intervention for the client populations we typically see, so that means that the approach that works for my clients may not be the best fit for clients from the other backgrounds. A big believer in therapy homework. When I say homework, I’m talking about a written plan that is tailored to the specific client, and the client agrees to stick on to that action plan on a regular basis. Ideally, daily or at least weekly. Their exercise need to be measurable and reportable. Then together, the client and practitioner can track the progress and rebuild the plan in each session. I have had conversations with other low-intensity mental health practitioners in my area, and there is sometimes a concern that being too structured with the therapy homework can make us seem like over-directive, but let me share an example highlighting the benefits of therapy homework for behavioural change. 

(30:58): 

I had several clients who were restricted from visiting their children, because of their problematic drug use. They went to counselling for a year or two years, they learn about the triggers, they learn about the thought patterns and relaxation techniques for managing cravings, and they were never given any therapy homework, aside those general skills. Then the drug user didn’t change much during that time. I have worked with clients like that. One of my clients, I tried something a little bit different. Initially, he didn’t recall much of the past experience that led to his problematic drug use, so I gave him a pocket-sized chart to check his smoking drugs for a week. He just need to tick a box whenever he smoked drugs. We kept working on other therapy skills too at the same time, and after a month, he reported a significant breakthrough. Seven days straight without drugs. 

(32:01): 

He told me that, when cravings hit, all the cognitive and relaxation techniques seemed to vanish, but that little chart that he kept in the pocket, it kept him aware of his habit in the moment. Interestingly, the chart also helped him to explore the connection between his drug use habit and some painful memories that he hadn’t thought about for a long time, and after that session, we move on to explore his painful memories. This really showed me that changing behaviour is complex and so unique to each individual, and sometimes neither the client nor or the practitioner fully grabs the optimal learning zone of the client or the underlying barriers to the learning until we actually put a daily action plan in place and review it together. 

Jacquelynne Lee (32:57): 

It sounds like a very collaborative and iterative flexible process. Yeah. Thinking about everything that we’ve discussed today, what societal and systemic changes do you believe are needed to better support parent-child relationships within the justice system? 

Linh Nguyen (33:17): 

There are some research suggested that parenting educational programmes in prisons don’t consistently lead to stronger family relationships without real opportunities for practising new skills. It makes me believe that a helpful area for development would be increasing opportunities for incarcerated parents to interact with their children, where it’s safe to do so. Only when it’s safe to do so. If increasing the opportunities for parent and child interactions from prisons might not be practical in the short term, particularly in the higher-security prisons, perhaps we could initially focus on creating more opportunities for daily practising the foundational skills that support healthy family relationships. My observation is that resources for cognitive learning in prisons tend to be more accessible to those who are already quite literate and have good comprehension, and are either good at staying focused or maybe really good at socialising. This presents a significant challenge for me when I prepare therapy who work for individuals with low literacy, learning difficulties, or those from migrant backgrounds with immediate English, and especially those with cognitive and intellectual disabilities. 

(34:46): 

I remember having a client in prison who was a classic introvert. He comes from a migrant background and he didn’t really engage in physical or social activities, but however, he was really good at drawing. Really, really good at drawing. Interestingly, after initially experiencing the depressive symptoms upon imprisonment, he gradually started to recover when the other inmates discovered his painting talent and asked him to draw pictures of their family members, which is really interesting. He socialised more. It creates more opportunities for him to learn socialising and positive communication skills, and this makes me wonder if we could really optimise how individuals in prisons can learn new skills by implementing more tailored resources and activities that take into account their diverse backgrounds, learning styles, their existing personal strengths, or daily practise. Imagine a daily painting workshop where people could come to practise drawing together every week or even send their artwork to their children. 

Jacquelynne Lee (36:02): 

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Linh. This has been a fascinating conversation and I’ve really appreciated your insights into what I think is often a misunderstood and invisible population. Yeah, thank you for joining us. 

Linh Nguyen (36:20): 

Thank you for having me. 

Narrator (36:23): 

Visit our website at emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, Led by Emerging Minds. The centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Programme.