What we miss when we think we already know

My first read of a grandmother I was assessing for a Special Guardianship Order, let’s call her Dora, was that she was guarded and hard to reach. 

What I didn't yet understand was the weight she carried into that room: raising two children alone after leaving a relationship marked by domestic violence, migration to a new country, low-paid work, and patterns consistent with an unaddressed learning difference.

She had put herself forward to care for her grandchildren despite knowing she had struggled with her own parenting the first-time round.

A 2025 study by Priya Tah and Julie Selwyn and the book Kinship, Raised by Relatives: The Experiences of Black and Asian Kinship Carers in England, found many kinship carers felt judged by professionals and encountered assumptions that family support was already available. 

Dora's guardedness was not unusual.

I found myself hypothesising: perhaps it was the age gap, since I am closer in age to her children than her. Perhaps it was something else in how we related. 

Both hypotheses were wrong, as more than one honest conversation with her eventually showed. 

What helped most was changing the form of my questions, not their content: small, hypothetical scenarios, gently role-played, with an interpreter who became far more than a language bridge. What became tellable wasn't sitting inside her, waiting to be found; it emerged from what happened between us. Authenticity, I've come to think, isn't fixed, something a person either shows or hides. It’s relational, and it’s a process.

What I had mistaken for guardedness was shame and fear, tangled with a vulnerability she had no reason yet to trust me with.

I explained the differences between the standard route and a more paced, compassionate assessment framework, PAMS or its equivalent, and advocated for it once Dora and her interpreter understood what each would involve. 

Revelations

A family member told me Dora was voicing things now she had never told anyone before; she had long mistaken the way her mother related to her for emotional distance, until hearing her now, and realising that distance had never been about language or closeness, but the shape something takes when it genuinely cannot be told, not until the right conditions make telling possible. 

She hoped continuity could be protected, but the local authority could not fund two practitioners at once, and that resourcing decision ended our work together.

Perhaps my role was never meant to be the whole bridge, only the part that made the crossing possible. I don't know whether the practitioner who continued the assessment had to earn Dora's trust afresh, or whether something of what we'd built travelled with her in the file. Referral pathways rarely ask, and perhaps they should. 

I am Black British, of African heritage. Dora and I shared being Black women, but not the same country, culture, or history, a distinction that did real work: a live check on my assumptions, prompting me to ask more, not less. 

This is not rare terrain in the helping professions: a first impression settling into fact before it's properly tested, and the pull to resolve ambiguity into what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called a single story. What I mistook for guardedness could easily have gone on record as such, shaping every decision made about Dora and her grandchildren from that point forward.

The family therapist Barry Mason named the structure at stake: the difference between safe certainty, a premature closure dressed up as competence, and safe uncertainty, a held, generative not-knowing. 

Safe uncertainty asks something specific of you in the moment, to notice the pull toward a tidy explanation, name it as a hypothesis rather than a fact, and hold it loosely enough that a truer account still has room to surface.

Authenticity, I've come to believe, isn't evenly available to everyone. What it costs someone to be genuinely themselves with a professional depends on where they sit across a constellation of social positions: gender, race, class, disability, migration status, age, faith, sexuality. 

Burnham and Roper-Hall's Social GGRRAAACCEEESSS offers a useful discipline here, a reminder to ask which of those positions are voiced and visible in a given encounter, and which are quietly shaping it while going unnamed. 

Adverse childhood experiences and accumulated trauma add another layer: some stories aren't withheld so much as, for the moment, unable to be told at all, until the right conditions make telling possible. 

None of this was unique to Dora; it runs across many lives at the intersection of more than one disadvantage.

Professor Jason Arday named something close to this in a 2025 university talk, describing “a privilege to being able to say what you want when you want,” and observing that people on the periphery carry far more consequence for speaking honestly. 

He died a year later, a tragedy that unfolded at an institution built, in principle, around growth and possibility. An inquest is still open into his death. But what he said that day remains true regardless.

Quiet power

There is a thread running under all of this, one I only recognised in hindsight. The system read Dora as someone with little power: assessed, isolated, disadvantaged in ways easy to tabulate. 

But power isn't singular, and no one is ever truly without it. Dora was quietly exercising a different, relational power throughout, choosing what to disclose, when, and to whom, a caution that looked like guardedness but was closer to strategy. 

As social work professionals, we all hold power too, institutional and procedural, the power to write reports that shape the future of families, but holding it well can mean tolerating being read as uncertain or indecisive by people who want a faster answer than situations allow. 

Arday's words seem to invite something similar: a reflexivity turned both inward and outward, an invitation to think about privilege and its absence as discursive, taking different shape depending on who is speaking, to whom, and in what setting, authenticity included.

Kant's principle that a person should never be treated merely as a means, but always also as an end in themselves, feels like the right discipline to hold here, for Dora, and for anyone whose story becomes part of someone else's reflection. 

It holds up well as an aspiration; it says less about how you find someone's genuine will when systems, shame, or trauma have obscured it, which is where the harder, slower work lives.

None of this is free. Safe uncertainty takes time, and time is precisely what statutory work often refuses to give: Special Guardianship Order assessments carry court timescales, and a child's living arrangement waits on the report. 

A hypothesis held loosely, in front of a manager who wants a clear answer for a panel next week, does not always read as diligence. Sometimes it reads as indecision. 

I have no formula for weighing a truer account against a missed deadline. What I have is a conviction that an unnamed pressure toward speed will always look more like competence than the slower work of staying honestly uncertain.

Conclusion

Next time someone in front of you seems guarded, or their account has a gap in it, or two things they've said don't quite sit together, try naming your first read aloud, as a guess rather than a conclusion, and ask what it might be missing. 

That won't dissolve the pressure of the clock. It might still change what the report says.

Staying with complexity has to be built structurally into work that often doesn't allow for it: protected time for unhurried, dialogic supervision, genuine peer thinking-space rather than case-management oversight, and interpreters valued as collaborators, not conduits. 

Not everyone has ready access to either, that access is something services need to build deliberately. Without it, reflexivity depends on luck, on having the right colleague, on the day it mattered, before the clock ran out.

There is an announcement on the London Underground, just before the doors close: mind the gap. Transport for London makes it deliberately, every time, at every station, because it decided the gap mattered enough to keep naming out loud. 

In our work, there is rarely anyone to make that announcement for us. Nobody built the equivalent into supervision, caseload allocation, or the 15 minutes before a difficult visit. What falls through an unminded gap is never abstract. It is someone's chance to be truly known.

Elizabeth Stennett is a social worker, systemic psychotherapist and statutory complaints practitioner and consultant