A World Where There's Only One Set of Footprints
I worked with a group of SEND students who experienced significant challenges with reading social cues, expressing themselves, and engaging with abstract thinking, patterns often associated with ADHD and autism.
Their biographies carried an extra layer of complexity. Navigating a world not always designed for how they experience it added another challenge on top of the two parallel realities neurotypical people struggle to manage.
So last year, I created an art exhibition for them to create art pieces that promoted interoception. Allowing their peers, families, social care workers and school staff to step, however briefly, into their lived experience. It was an attempt to make the invisible visible, to translate internal worlds into something others could feel, not just observe.
A space where there is not one shared map, but only one set of footprints, belonging to the person already navigating a world others are still trying to understand.
Eight pages. A south London school floor. A poem about the two worlds we all live in, and learning about the one that is entirely your own.
The invitation
"Welcome to an exhibition where you can step into the worlds of others, and reflect on and explore your own."
This is where it begins. Feet planted directly on the words. An invitation to every young person, teacher, family member and social care professional who walked through: this space is yours to inhabit.
two worlds
"We all live in two worlds. There is a world that exists whether or not you exist, a world that pre-existed you and will persist beyond you. A world of other people, objects, and events."
Where all honest self-inquiry begins. The world was here before you and will persist after. This is the shared world, the one we are all required to negotiate, together.
the world that is you
"A world of your consciousness, a world that is you. It is a place only you can truly know, if you know it at all. One that others cannot know properly."
The most private place any person will ever inhabit. And yet many young people with learning differences are not encouraged to explore it, let alone given the conditions to begin.
one set of footprints
"It is a world where there is only one set of footprints: the world of your private being. We see the same world, differently."
The line that names the whole exhibition. The inner world is not a problem to solve. It is the lens through which every outer experience is filtered. That is why real empathy must begin here.
the inner journey
"Often, our academic, social, and emotional struggles stem from not knowing ourselves well. We live in a world full of distractions and noise. To improve our lives, we must learn to understand ourselves better."
Not a soft observation, a clinical one. Young people are often told their struggles are behavioural, cognitive, or social. Rarely are they told: it begins with knowing yourself.
the outer journey
"You must be bold, willing to try things you've never tried before, and to put yourself through different kinds of tests."
The inner world and the outer world are not separate. Growth requires both. For young people with SEND vulnerabilities, creating the conditions for safe boldness is one of the most challenging, yet meaningful things we can offer.
a quest
"It's not like saying, 'I'm going from Mitcham to Tooting, and I know the way.' A quest is a journey of discovery. You may find yourself in unexpected…"
Mitcham. Tooting. Two south London areas carrying the weight of something universal. The self-knowledge journey doesn't begin in a lecture hall. It begins on roads these young people already know.
the unexpected shore
"You might also arrive on a foreign shore you hadn't intended to reach, but which turns out to be better than the one you had in mind."
For so many families connected to this work, this is the whole story. The destination they planned for wasn't the one they arrived at. But the shore they're standing on, if supported well, can be extraordinary.
Brief summary
Kevin George, BACP-registered psychotherapist, senior family therapist, and author of Soccology — reflects on The World of Self: an art exhibition drawn from R.D. Laing's phenomenological writing, laid as eight sequential text panels on a south London school floor. Designed for young people with SEND vulnerabilities, their teachers, their families and social care workers, using art to go where words alone so often fail to reach.
We all live in two worlds
That is how the poem begins. Not with a theory. Not with a clinical framework. Just a plain statement of human fact. And for the young people who walked through this exhibition, some of whom have never had the language to describe the gap between who they are inside and how they appear to the world, those six words did something.
They made the invisible visible. They said: your inner world is real. It counts. It has a name.
I didn't plan to write about this. The work itself was personal, close to specific young people, specific rooms, specific moments I'm not in a position to share publicly. But the poem that formed the backbone of the exhibition is public. The thinking behind it belongs to all of us. And now that it has lived in a space, been walked through, been read from the floor upward, it deserves to breathe in the open.
R.D. Laing (& Mary Stevenson), the thinking behind the exhibition
Ronald David Laing (1927–1989). Scottish psychiatrist. Radical phenomenologist. Born in Glasgow, trained in medicine, drawn early and irreversibly into the question that would define his life's work: what does it actually feel like to be you? Not what your symptoms suggest. Not what your diagnosis implies. What is the texture of your inner world, from the inside?
Where mainstream psychiatry of the mid-20th century viewed mental distress as something to classify and manage, Laing insisted on something simpler and far more demanding: that the subjective experience of the person in front of you is the starting point, not an inconvenience. His landmark work The Divided Self gave language to the experience of ontological insecurity, the sense of being fundamentally disconnected from a world that seems designed for other people.
For young people with SEND vulnerabilities, that phrase lands differently than Laing may have intended. The school system, however well-meaning, is in many ways a world built for a particular kind of mind. Young people who don't fit that template are not broken. They are navigating an additional layer to the two worlds simultaneously, every single day, with often very little support for the one that is entirely and irreducibly their own.
That is why Laing belongs in a school corridor.
The exhibition also leans on Footprints in the Sand by Mary Stevenson.
Eight pages on a floor
The visual form of the exhibition was deliberately simple. Eight A4 text panels, printed and placed in footpath sequence on a warm oak school floor. Where people moved their feet through the panels one by one, whilst reading.
“We all know from our personal experience that we can be ourselves only in and through our world and there is a sense in which 'our' world will die with us although 'the' world will go on without us.”
- R.D. Laing
The feet are not incidental. The feet are the one set of footprints. Every time a person stood over one of these pages and read it, they stepped out of the shared world and into their own world. Running simulations of the past, explorations of the present and tweaking the landscape.
When you look at something on a wall, you observe it. When you stand over it on the floor, you inhabit it. Looking downward usually refers to eye-accessing cues for accessing feelings or internal self-talk. For people whose inner lives are so rarely given physical form, that difference is not aesthetic. It is psychological.
Once people completed their journey on the path, they progressed onto the artwork. Where they were not looking at someone else's inner world from a distance. They were now sensorially primed to experience the world of others.
Two Worlds, The Opening of A World Where There's Only One Set of Footprints
The World That Is You, Consciousness, Belief and Private Being
We See the Same World, Differently
The Inner Journey, Self-Knowledge as the Root of Wellbeing
The Outer Journey, Boldness, Discovery and New Experience
Not a Journey, A Quest. From Mitcham to Tooting and Beyond
Setting Sail: Unexpected Places and the Shore You Hadn't Planned For
Welcome: Step Into the Worlds of Others, and Your Own
Kevin George at ‘A World Where There's Only One Set of Footprints’ Art Exhibition for SEND Students
From Mitcham to Tooting, and why that matters
Buried in panel six of the poem is a reference that might look like a throwaway line. "It's not like saying, 'I'm going from Mitcham to Tooting, and I know the way." It isn't throwaway at all. Mitcham. Tooting. Two places in south London that anyone from this part of the world knows on their skin, the roads, the bus routes, the particular texture of those streets. For a young person from Lewisham, from Mitcham, from Tooting itself, those names do something that abstract philosophical language cannot: they say this is about you. This world is your world. This quest begins on streets you already know.
That grounding is something I am committed to across all of my work, clinical, creative, and community. Growing up in south London, working in south London, building projects in and for south London communities. I've seen what happens when young people encounter ideas or frameworks that seem designed for someone else's geography, someone else's culture, someone else's experience of the world.
They disengage. Not because they're not intelligent, often extraordinarily so. But because nothing in what they're being shown is showing them back to themselves.
Mitcham to Tooting says: I see where you're from. And this quest, this inner journey with no guaranteed outcome, starts on your roads, not someone else's.
"It is a world where there is only one set of footprints: the world of your private being. We see the outer world, the one we share, through this inner world. We see the same world, differently."
From the exhibition poem
An Art Piece from Kevin George’s ‘A World Where There's Only One Set of Footprints’ Art Exhibition for SEND Students
A quest, not a journey
The exhibition refuses the comfort of a map. It names what self-discovery actually is: not a journey, a quest. A journey implies a known route and a predictable arrival. A quest is something else entirely, you set off in good faith, you encounter what you encounter, and you may arrive somewhere you never intended, which turns out to be better than the place you had in mind.
For teachers, that framing has real weight. So much of what happens in educational settings is implicitly map-based: here is the curriculum, here is the target, here is the expected trajectory. For many young people with SEND vulnerabilities, that map doesn't match the territory of their actual experience. They are not failing to follow the route. They are on a different kind of journey altogether, one that requires a different kind of support.
For families, it may feel closer to the bone. The parent who received their child's EHCP for the first time. The one who sat in the assessment waiting room. The one who has moved through exclusion meetings, referral pathways, and tribunal processes, trying to translate the full complexity of who their child is into formats that institutions can process. They know what it is to set off with a clear destination and find themselves somewhere unexpected. The exhibition says: that unexpected shore might be better than the one you had in mind. Hold onto that.
Where words fall short, art steps in
This exhibition was not designed to be aesthetically ambitious. It was designed to be useful. To fill the space that clinical language, parental language, the language of annual reviews and school reports, so often cannot reach.
Many of the young people I work with, and many of the parents I sit with in family therapy, arrive at moments where the words simply run out. Not because they have nothing to say. Because the gap between what they feel and what language can hold is so wide that they fall silent. The conventional response is to try harder with words: to reframe, to clarify, to offer a different vocabulary. What this exhibition tried instead was to offer a form that doesn't require words at all. A floor. A pathway. A pair of feet walking through it.
A teacher who had previously struggled to understand why a particular student seemed so disconnected from classroom life stood over one of these panels for a long time. She didn't say anything afterwards. She didn't need to. Something had moved. That is what art can do that a meeting cannot.
The Soccology thread
If you've followed this work for any length of time, through Soccology or my other public clinical projects, you'll recognise the consistent thread that runs underneath all of it. Whether the medium is football, family therapy, or an exhibition, the question is always the same: what is it like to be you, inside your own experience, and how do we build environments where that inner world is not suppressed but drawn out, held, and made useful?
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the exhibition
What was The World of Self exhibition?
The World of Self was an art exhibition curated by Kevin George, drawing on R.D. Laing's phenomenological writing. It took the form of eight sequential text panels placed on a south London school floor, a poem that visitors read by standing over it, their feet becoming the footprints in the poem itself. It was designed for young people with SEND vulnerabilities and the teachers, families, and supporting agencies who work with them.
Why was the text laid on the floor rather than hung on walls?
The placement was deliberate and therapeutic. Text on a wall is observed. Text on the floor, read by standing over it, your feet in the frame, is inhabited. For young people whose inner worlds so rarely take physical form, the shift from observation to inhabitation is psychologically significant. You are not looking at the poem. You are walking through it.
What is the significance of the Mitcham and Tooting reference in the poem?
The poem uses those two south London place names to ground Laing's universal ideas in the specific, lived geography of the young people this exhibition was designed for. Abstract language about inner worlds and quests can feel designed for someone else's life. Mitcham and Tooting say: this begins where you are, on roads you already know. That local specificity is not decorative, it is the whole point.
Who was R.D. Laing and why is his thinking relevant to SEND education?
R.D. Laing (1927–1989) was a Scottish psychiatrist whose work challenged the psychiatric establishment by insisting that the subjective, inner experience of a person must be understood on its own terms. His writing on the divided self and ontological insecurity applies directly to young people with SEND vulnerabilities, who are often navigating a school system designed for a different kind of mind, with little support for the world that is entirely and irreducibly their own.
How does art support families and teachers where language fails?
Language-based systems, EHCPs, annual reviews, clinical assessments, require a child's inner world to be translated into institutional formats. What gets lost in that translation is often the most important thing. Art that emerges from or speaks directly to a young person's experience offers teachers and families a different entry point: one that doesn't require verbal fluency, doesn't require translation, and can move people in ways that a meeting simply cannot.
Can this approach be used in other schools or services?
Yes. The framework is adaptable. Schools, CAMHS services, family therapy settings, and voluntary organisations working with young people in complex circumstances can use art-based, phenomenologically-informed approaches to create the reflective space this exhibition offered. To explore this for your setting, get in touch via kevingeorge.online.
