Tiny acts of individual rebellion
Overview: August 2023
This month’s fiction is: Tiny acts of individual rebellion
This month’s application posts are:
Therap/play is interactive and relationship based: Applications for practitioners
Merging back to Earth: Applications for researchers
Introduction to You Do Know…again!
Before we launch into this month’s main post, a word about the changes you will notice.
After a year of writing the blog, I feel I have shared much of the content from my doctoral thesis. We’re therefore going to venture into new territory, using the same research method I used for my doctoral studies to generate new learning. Writing posts on the back of my doctoral work had the advantage of 6 years of immersion and digestion, and that got me to the point where I could summarise for you. The process of generating and exploring new insight will be far more messy.
To continue my exploration of the tacit knowing I use in my practice, I will once again create fiction as a way to loosen the intentional bonds, take my cognitive brain offline, and just write to access the non-conscious, below the level of cognitive awareness, embodied aspects of what I bring to my practice. The process of creating fiction as a research tool is a combination of intention and then letting go of intentions. It reminds me of Bion’s notion of entering a session without memory or desire, and draws on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas as well as writers about creativity such as Rubin (2023).
So, going forward, each month a new piece of fiction will arrive in your inbox. This is the raw data. The fiction becomes a mirror from which the process of knowing can become little points of reflected back knowledge. In my doctoral research, I termed these ‘punctuation points’, pauses where this transition from process (knowing) to product (knowledge) occurs.
There will then be separate blog posts processing that data and discussing how it can help us understand the minutia of our relational endeavour in using therapeutic practice to alleviate the suffering of others. The these extra posts will be summarised and signposted at the end of the fiction, and I hope in this way you won’t feel overwhelmed by material. I will be applying the fiction to all aspects of my work: as practitioner, as practitioner researcher, and as practitioner educator. They are all entwined but have slightly different emphases. Each of these application posts should make sense on their own, so you can select what is of interest to you.
As I allow new fiction to emerge into this second year of posting, our heroine Val is off on some new adventures, supported by her cat, Viking. If you’ve not read A Necessary Life(Story), some of what she gets up to may not make sense. If you would like to read the novella, it is available for purchase as a print book on eBay, and an eBook on Amazon.
Tiny acts of individual rebellion
It was the pulling power of a crowd. Val hadn’t meant to join the huddle that seemed to be growing at the corner of the supermarket, over there, by the steps that led down to the second car park, the one she never parked in because it had broken bottles and needles lying around.
That car park was by the weir, and the constant sound of water meant most people passed rapidly by, moving to a much nicer spot on the river where ducks could be fed. The Town Council had hailed the path as a way to take pedestrians through this underused ‘riverside jewel’, as it appeared to them on the two-dimensional plan. A vast improvement, in their opinion, over the derelict former factory that had stood there previously, which had become the focus of so much anti-social behaviour. Val had always wondered if they had ever undertaken a site visit before committing her hard-earned council tax to the project. The landscape may have changed, but the space still seemed to attract and repel people in the same old way. Today though, with her cheese and her milk in her bag, carrying a loaf of bread in her other hand so it wouldn’t get squashed, Val found herself drawn there, a sound of shouting rising above the white noise of the cascading water.
Men looked uneasily at each other, feeling compelled to stop. All they’d wanted to do was walk towards the town, walk past the weir as fast as they could to get away from the discomfort of the constant, unavoidable, and overwhelming sound of rushing water. Seeing the two people fighting, though, they were now not sure what to do. They weren’t able to just keep on minding their own business with a hyper-focus on getting past the white noise of the water. They didn’t want to leave, knowing a man beating a woman wasn’t okay, but interfering between a man and women wasn’t okay either.
They looked like they were drunk, the pair that were fighting. He was punching her in the face. She was swearing at him, spitting out blood with her words. This seemed to infuriate him. As well as using his fists, he kicked her hard on the knee, grabbing at the plastic bag she had around her wrist and trying to drag it away from her. She battered him with her other hand.
Val looked at the crowd. It was mostly men. They were still looking uncomfortably at each other, the words unspoken. We should do something! Should we do something? But they didn’t move, not sure enough, not wanting to put themselves in harm's way, and the man and woman were still hitting each other, swearing loudly, obscenely, the woman screeching like a baby in agony. Was it more heroic to stand back and put yourself first, or to, what? Wade in and be seen as part of the violence?
With a sigh, Val put the milk and cheese and loaf of bread on the wall that ran down the side of the steps.
“Please call the police,” she said generally to the people standing there. She didn’t make eye contact, didn’t check that someone was taking action rather than remaining stuck in the bystander space. Her voice was matter of fact, in line with her sigh of resignation, but still steady and holding. She couldn’t stand by and let these two strangers Milo it out in front of her.
She walked firmly and calmly up to them, noting with an inward smile that she had invented a whole new term - Miloing. She’d have to define it in words one day; for now she just knew she couldn’t let herself pass by, despite the “don’t interfere, love” comments that she thought she heard. Her focus was fully on the fighters, and her senses fine-tuned to pick up on the cues from them of how she needed to respond. The closer she got, the stronger the smell of alcohol became, along with the nauseating stench of unwashedness and terrible neglect. She wasn’t sure if the prickling in her eyes was a reaction to this or tears starting to press themselves from inside her at the distress that was on display in so many people. She carried on walking purposefully and steadily. The fighters were taking no notice of her.
“Hello,” she said, her head up, her shoulders back, “my name is Val.” She held out her hand, vaguely between them, as if seeking to shake the hand of whatever ghost it was that they were seeing in each other and trying to exorcise through the beating. She didn’t want to make eye contact. She did want to keep smiling.
It was enough to disrupt the flow: the words, and the hand. Both the man and the woman turned towards her, off-guard for a moment. The usual rules of human interaction had been disrupted – the crowd, although standing by, was no longer bystanding. This slightly haywire old woman was coming at them, hand held out. They looked at each other, and turned to face Val, the woman’s left shoulder next to the man’s right shoulder.
The man took a swing at Val.
His right fist came out to greet Val’s face, ignoring the extended right hand.
Val had not been idle in retirement. Viking had been amused at first when she started practising Tai Chi in the living room while he watched from the sofa. As she carried on over the weeks, he got bored and would sleep through her practice after licking his paws and placing his tail carefully over his eyes. Val sometimes wondered why she was doing it – it hardly seemed a martial art, but it was gentle on her creaky knees. And now it worked for her.
The fist came at her, and she fended it off (later, the kind but young police officer who drove her home would say to her colleague that “he was so drunk he could barely stand up, so it wasn’t such a big deal”). Val and the man spun away to face the river, he with the weight of his punch, she with the flowing movement that directed his energy into thin air; a handshake turning to self-protection.
It meant her back was turned to the woman.
The woman hit her over the head with the bottle from the plastic bag around her wrist, the one the man had been trying to wrestle off of her. Val wasn’t sure if the flashing was in her head or if it was the sparkle of sunshine on the river water. It was a bit of a jewel, this place; the Council weren’t wrong. Were those police sirens, or was it tinnitus? She hoped no one was squashing her bread as footsteps thudded towards her. She felt the cold grittiness of tarmac slam against her face. A bit of tooth chipped away as her jaws crashed together.
The ambulance didn’t even bother taking her to hospital. At one level, she felt quite aggrieved by that; it would have been a mark of her action. At another, she was just relieved that she hadn’t received too much of the damage that had been on display. They put a cold compress on her bruised chin and the chip was pretty small – she’d survive. The police shook their heads at her with a mix of disbelief, admiration, and disbelief again. Surely the old biddy had just wandered into something; surely, she hadn’t actually meant to walk between those two drunken twats and their domestic.
Val did let the police run her home – she’d come and fetch her car later. The police officer said they’d sort out the parking fee for her: the parking attendant would be bound to see her ticket time had run out, and they were hot on collecting fines as it paid for the upgrade to the riverside walk. She didn’t feel up to driving yet. She’d shaken, she’d felt queasy, she’d be okay because the trauma would pass through her. Her cheese had vanished, but not the milk. The bread was squashed flat into the gravel.
The police officer walked Val to her front door and asked when her husband would be home. She felt offended at Val’s snort of derision. If that hadn’t happened, she might have gone inside with Val and made her a cup of tea. She suggested Val check with her GP in the morning and radioed in that she was leaving. Bet she’s demented, the officer thought. But she kept that to herself, thinking it wasn’t something she should commit to the airwaves. The old woman would probably end up being called a hero by the local press. She’d probably been oblivious to what was going on. The officer put the whole thing out of her head. There would be plenty more violent domestics to deal with today.
Val felt pleased and strong and a bit confused because she knew the others, the crowd, the police, the ambulance people, and probably the man and the woman too, didn’t see her as she saw herself. She made herself a mug of tea and sat down on the sofa. Viking opened an eye. Val swore that he smiled at her. Sleepily, he moved his ageing cat body around and clambered into her lap. She could feel his deep rumble purr and felt his paws knead her thigh in maternal appreciation, pretending he could get some milk out of her, liking the safe base she gave him. She smiled back at him. He knew.
Application posts
If you want to read about how this informed my understanding of practice: Therap/play is interactive and relationship based: Applications for practitioners
The key insight is that if, as practitioners, we transgress social norms and the norms created by the internal working models of the people we work with, these tiny acts of individual rebellion can create spaces that allow healing interaction and relationship-based exchange to take place by disrupting repetitive and destructive patterns of behaviour.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner research: Merging back to Earth: Applications for researchers
The key insight is that as practitioner researchers we need to formulate a way to theorise our understanding of why we are researching, our motivation to research. In transgressing the norms of standard white Western research, in breaking apart ideas such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we can combine both hierarchical and maternal/Earth-based ways of understanding into new theories to help us research with interaction while being relationship-based. I have tried to come up with a new way of representing motivation that shows a flow of individual and communal abundances (not needs).
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner education: Identity formation: Helping practitioners develop the skills needed for this work: Applications for educators
The key insight is that in the education of practitioners, we need to create a permissive, abundant, but safe space to develop their embodied identity of being a practitioner. This requires the therapist educator to use themselves in the service of the trainee and the trainees' communal connections, interpersonal and internal, just as much as they do in direct therapeutic work. The transgression of norms here is developing a process that is identity-led, not content-led.
Bibliography
This bibliography covers all four of the August 2023 posts.
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Garland, C. (1982). Group-Analysis: Taking the non-problem seriously. Group Analysis, 15(1), 4–14. https://doi.org/10.1177/053331648201500102
Gill, J. H. (2019). Words, deeds, bodies: L. Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, M. Merleau-Ponty, and M. Polanyi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004412361
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
Merleau-Ponty, M. & Landes, D. A. (2012). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge.
Michel, K. L. (2014). Maslow’s heirachy connected to Blackfoot beliefs. Available from: https://lincolnmichel.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/maslows-hierarchy-connected-to-blackfoot-beliefs/
Moustakas, C. E. (1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology, and applications. Sage.
Music, G. (2019). Nurturing children: From trauma to growth using attachment theory, psychoanalysis and neurobiology. Routledge.
Proctor, R. & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.
Rubin, R. (2023). The creative act: A way of being. Canongate.
Symington, J. & Symington, N. (1996). The clinical thinking of Wilfred Bion. Routledge.
Winnicott, D. W. (1990). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Karnac.
Winnicott, D. W. (2018). Through paediatrics to psycho-analysis. Routledge.
Wright, K. (1991). Vision and separation: Between mother and baby. Free Association Books.