The trauma of life without your family is for anyone, unimaginable, until you suffer it.

So much is said and written about it, all from the safety of well heeled upper income homes! So sad the black art brigade is not incarcerated for a year as part of their job description. Even then, they would not be coming out to such an unknown future, would they?

Unfortunately, this bed is made for us. But you can influence the return home. Both the inmate and the family need to organise your future homecoming, but do it in your visitor's time, this is very important, why tell the system anything you do not need to? Anything they have misgivings about can only be bad news for the family, so keep it simple, stupid as they say in the army.

The hope for all of you is that life can restart from now, but if the system has anything to do with it, life will be "on hold", until you can get them off your backs.

Remember that you and your family will have changed. If the family have older children, particularly boys, they may have slipped into the role of father figure, there needs to be a very gentle "joint" view on difficult issues, slowly weaning them back into their own world again. Girls may have dropped into the mode of protecting "mum" from hurt, so protecting includes putting up barriers!

Mum will have become far more self-reliant; she could even resent any, as she sees it, interference in her way of doing things. Channel all these emotions together with the keen inmate coming out to rebuild his life and prove to his long-suffering family that it was worth the wait. The massive eruption could so very easily happen, but luckily the one emotion not lost in this, is the sheer joy of freedom, it will consummate the family and kick-start the process of rebirth all on it's own.

The freedom to walk, talk, and eat, whenever, wherever and however you wish, is only relished when you have been denied it, more so when you could not do it with your family. Made so much more painful if you were innocent of any wrong!