Responsive, attuned, empathic, and reflective
Contents
Fiction: A free and protected space
Applications for practitioners: I am seen as I am, therefore I am
Applications for researchers: Building on shoulders, seeing our lineage
Applications for educators: Growing players in ontological security
Introduction
The fiction in the posts for the remaining core concepts is drawn from the work I did during November and the NaNoWriMo challenge — that heuristic inquiry into my own difficulties in forming positive relationships with masculinity and malehood. The resulting novel, The Mad Man in the Attic, is not yet in a shareable form, but follows the story of Val and Graham and how Val discovers things about her early life that help her make sense of her identity. I’d really like to share the whole thing with you as it helped me make sense of a lot of my thinking around maleness, misogyny, and androcentrism. I’ll come back to that new word in the lexicon of these writings in the posts below — androcentrism. It even gets an opposite — gynocentrism!
Because of the way the plot was constructed in The Mad Man in the Attic — jumping back and forth in time — the fiction extracts that I am going to share with you may seem like they are repeating elements of story that you already know. In Mad Man, ‘truth’ or ‘narrative’ is examined from different perspectives, so the plot does jump around. Hopefully what I share gives you enough to both enjoy the developing story for Val and make sense of how it has deepened my thinking and understanding of my clinical practice in therapy through the specific lens of Theraplay. Maybe you can all persuade me to invest time into editing and refining the first draft of The Mad Man in the Attic into something that I could share with you as a sequel to A Necessary Life Story!
You will see I have added a ‘tip jar’ button to the posts. If you would like to contribute to my ongoing writing, then you could use this, or you could purchase a copy of A Necessary Life Story here…or you could leave me comments of encouragement to keep writing! I’d like my writing to be as responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective as I try to make my therapeutic practice.
Fiction: A free and protected space
It had been a painful night for them both. The neighbours had been lovely. Max and Alex, the teenagers who lived two doors down, had brought along their mini goal posts.
“The sun will be above the bushes soon,” Max had said. “It’ll shine right on him. We thought we could drape sheets over this to make a sort of sun shade.”
“Oh!” Val had exclaimed, delighted by their thoughtful inventiveness, “Thank you so much!”
“You’re welcome,” Alex had said. It was an automatic response, but at the same time so utterly genuine. “I’ll tell mum and dad when they get back. They might be able to help more,” he added, and Val was so chuffed to realise that the boys had come up with this plan with no recourse to adult guidance or prompting.
Sally, all 80-odd years of tough living, came out with a flask, snorting and grumbling at everyone. “I’ll bring a flask every two hours — not more, mind — you’ll just have to make do with that.” And she did, on the dot, bring out that fresh flask of tea, taking the empty one away.
***
Time passed. The light started to go. The temperature cooled a bit. Sally kept bringing that two-hourly tea.
“They still not here yet?” she’d ask each time, a grumble about the state of the world and its imposition on her protecting her tender care.
Val phoned the ambulance control people again. Major road traffic accident, they said. Everything has been diverted to that. You are now near the top of the list.
She lay on the ground next to him. She didn’t know why, nor did she think about her action. Joe came to her mind, the first time she saw him; him lying under the chairs in the waiting room, and her having to lie down too and match his swearing until he was ready to follow her into the therapy room. Graham seemed aware of her presence. It seemed the pain in his broken ankle came in waves and then subsided. In those subsiding moments, he noticed and talked.
Alongside each other, they looked at the stars that were starting to come out through the leaves of the lilac tree.
“I used to do this when I was young,” he said. Whatever had been relieved by peeing, in his body, or his soul, or maybe both, had somehow also lessened the pain of the break. He felt more present, Val felt more present to him too. He didn’t really know if it was her or him, or both. They continued to lay there, Val thinking.
“I don’t remember being young,” she said.
It was an astonishing truth. Totally true at that moment, despite the years of therapy she’d undergone as part of her training. She’d dipped back into therapy since her training, too, when children she’d worked with triggered parts of her.
Brenda was very present again, reminding Val that she gave of herself in her work and that came from her experiences too, not just those of the child. Experiences they might share in some form. Forgotten and lost children, wanting their mummies. Why had something just shifted in that lifelong quest she’d had, to feel her own maternal love towards herself when her mother had been unable to fully show it to her?
***
(I have skipped a large portion here about the remainder of the night under the stars waiting for the ambulance. A miscommunication happens when the paramedics assume Val and Graham are husband and wife, and this is repeated when Val visits Graham in hospital. Val and Graham laughed at the absurdity of the whole situation. The next section follows that hospital visit.)
***
Val phoned Grace.
“I am so sorry,” she said.
“I am too,” Grace replied. Then they tried to talk at the same time as each other through the phone, lacking the visual prompts to help them turn-take; “We,” “I,” ‘Lots,” “You.” Silence.
“You first,” Grace managed.
“I went to see Graham earlier.”
“Who?”
“The vet, with the kittens, who broke his ankle.”
“Oh, him!”
The absurdity of the conversation was getting to Val, the giggle that had consumed her and Graham during her visit to the hospital seemed to be threatening to rise again. Breathe, she thought, get a grip of yourself!
“He wanted to make sure the kittens were okay.”
She could hear the smile in Grace’s voice. “Njeri is loving it! She’s besotted and even stayed up all night for the feeding.”
Val wanted to say, “What a beautiful name! What does it mean? I’m so glad you’ve named your child an African name.”
But she didn’t want to be so white.
“You sound very proud of her,” she ended up saying.
Again, Grace smiled with her voice. “I am. I really am.”
“Are you okay with Njeri looking after them until Graham comes out of hospital?”
“Yeah, sure. And Val?”
“Yes?”
“Can we meet and talk about Joe? Would you come to see me here, at my home?”
“I’d be honoured,” Val said, and she felt deeply honoured, deeply forgiven, and able to forgive herself.
***
Val went out into the garden. She sat under the lilac tree. The boys had taken back their football goal, she could hear them now calling and shouting in fun as they played together. She patted the earth, feeling the presence of Viking. She couldn’t work out why she felt content, smiling. There was some sort of freedom that she realised she had never felt before. It was deep within her. She’d found pleasure as well as meaning in her life. She had strived to do good things and enable those on the margins to feel welcomed and loved, but this? This? What made it possible to stand by the bed of a man she didn’t know and just talk out loud like she talked to herself in her head? Without fear and with delight?
“It’s love,” a voice said.
“What?”
Sally was bent over, leaning heavily on her walking stick. “Love,” she said again. “It makes no sense, and you only know it when it happens. There’s no chasing it.”
Sally moved away slowly, barely able to shuffle but determined to keep moving. She got halfway down her garden and turned. Her voice was still strong despite her body failing her. “And it’s not the same as falling in love,” she said. “Don’t waste it. It’s precious.” She turned away and walked slowly on her daily exercise challenge, down her garden path and then back up to her house.
Applications for practitioners: I am seen as I am, therefore I am
Responsive, attuned, empathic and reflective…. In some ways, this feels like a set of attributes of our work that I barely need to write about. This is the very heart of what we do in Theraplay or any therapy that is relationship-based. We tune into the inner world of the other so they are not alone with their distress and pain. We sit with them in it so they know they are not alone. In that empathic, attuned, responsive, reflective relational space they feel un-alone as they find their way to be with or work through pain that restricts their lives.
We could debate endlessly about how much overlap there is between this core concept and Rogers' (1957) necessary conditions of empathy, unconditional positive regard, and congruence — but that would take us into the realm of theory when this part of the post is about practice, about being a therapist. How does this fiction take my practice into deeper therapeutic realms?
The fiction sets Val in a community: young people, older people, people who are in a myriad of relationships with each other that are ordinary and lay the foundation for that ordinary to be profound. Their ordinariness becomes a platform that enables the deep intimacy that grows from people committing to the endeavour of care. It is those ordinary relationships that make it possible for the ‘play space’ I wrote about last week to become a transformational space by being out of ordinary temporality, liminality, and expectation, but by being safe and managed within a community of relatedness and expectation (the boys and the goalpost, Sally and her tea). This means Val can be focused on the relationship that needs her attention. Similarly, you could think about It’s time for you to go, where Graham uses the structure of his veterinary practice to enable a focus on the relationship needed to allow Viking to go in a dignified and kind manner.
The reflection that the fiction faces me with is around mirroring, mothering, and the importance of being led up and down garden paths.
To be led ‘up the garden path’ (to use that old-fashioned saying brought to mind by Sally’s wisdoms) may not seem like something we want, with its connotations of deception, misleading, and falsehood, but in the context of therapeutic engagement isn’t that the root of the distress that people bring? They are struggling with the ontological consistency I wrote about last month.
To be unknown or, worse still, miss-known, where there is dissonance between who they feel themselves to be and how they are positioned by the world around them is painful (see The life and death of hide and seek). To always have to hide part of yourself that you fear the other would find unacceptable is energy sapping. To be liberated from that, as Val discovered by accident, through Graham’s accident, opens doors or possibilities and the journey down the garden path is reversed: deception (self- or otherwise) is unravelled. To be seen for who you are, means you can be who you are.
The messiness and absurdity that can arise from the commitment to the endeavour of care makes fertile ground for relationship to mature. Interdependence as well as self-knowledge grows in the cycle of attunement/mis-attunement, reflection/distortion, and the empathic responsiveness of the more powerful person to be with the other without diminishing them in any way. There are mini-powers going backwards and forwards all the time — a frail Sally with insight, young men with smart ideas, and Val, a woman who powerfully cares.
So as therapists, what is our route to creating these conditions for the people we work with? We don’t want to just rely on happy accidents, although happy accidents are often at the heart of artistic creativity — as Bob Ross is well known for saying: we don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents. Creating the conditions for happy accidents does require the Structure of safe practice, the creation of the place of play for it to happen.
Once the space has been created and play/ritual activated (as we thought about last month), then the process to me seems to be that of accepting one's capacity to be a mother/draw on the tacit maternal knowing that I am so keen for us to develop as a theory about a way of being. In the free and protected space of community, we can feel safe enough to not know/let go. In our practice, I suggest this then becomes the kind of mirroring that reflects to the other who they feel themselves to be as well, as who the practitioner knows they have the capacity to be. Such intentional mirroring and positive seeing grows out of a sense of inner abundance (see Merging back to earth).
Mirroring as a practice of responsivity, empathy, attunement, and reflection/reflexivity (note the slight changes in terminology there) is not a head activity, although we can fine tune our skills through deliberate practice (Rousmaniere, 2017). It may not even be a heart response beyond our commitment to being in tune with the other. It’s mainly what I would call a ‘hand’ response, a response of actually doing something, growing from the state of being a therapist.
This is where tacit knowing grows. Being a mother (in a theoretical manner) means investing in the mirroring process (see Wright, 2009). Intensive Interaction (Nind, 2006) could be seen as an extension of this idea. The non-verbal children I work with bless me, because they remind me to forget words, which inevitably seem to lead me to headiness rather than presentness, and remind me to use all my powers of mirroring to seek to make sense of their inner state. Posture, breath, tone of sound — mirroring with the intention to connect leads me deeper into their world while retaining my sense of who I am and what I am doing with my body in order to be with them.
Such close mirroring from the outside, rather than the very young child being absorbed into the maternal figure, is a developmental step on from infancy. It is a place where the infant is no longer dependent and has integrated a sufficient sense of self to no longer need that intense maternal embodied external ‘holding together’ of the first five weeks of development. We can observe parallel play in children in pre-schools, children not directly interacting but still affirming individuality and togetherness through the way they play. I see Graham and Val lying alongside each other under the stars as the equivalent of this.
This form of mirroring, equivalent to parallel play, enables something else to grow. However, it needs to grow from the necessary intense mirroring that helps create a sense of self — ontological security — that happens in early mothering and infancy. This next step of mirroring is a stage of interdependence, not of dependence. It is a therapeutic process that allows people to feel seen so they can see themselves, mirrored with love and compassion in the face of the other. If they know they are seen as they see themselves, and they are loved for the way they are, then they become, and can take the opportunities to continue to grow and become.
Applications for researchers: Building on shoulders, seeing our lineage
Where would I situate my writing about research this month, if it were to be in a thesis or dissertation? Probably in the methodology section, where I want to make sure I am pinning down the ontological, epistemological, and then the methodological aspects of a research endeavour.
Writing these posts is my play time (building on last month's writing), another free and protected space, to use the phrase attributed to Dora Kalff (1980). I have a wandering time, going hither and thither, following strands, gathering wool, having no plan, but supported by the structure of posts going out on the first of the month, and the idea that I am exploring a particular core concept.
Similarly, situating research within a lineage of other researchers, or intentionally outside that lineage, can give a free and protected space to the researcher to joyfully and extravagantly explore a phenomenon to liberate new insights. It also gives a reader a potential starting point to work through the argument on why the researcher has taken a particular position in delving into a particular phenomenon. I am working out my lineage in my research into the phenomenon I want to understand; others may take a different position.
Trusting play as my methodology throws up lots of serendipitous experiences and readings — no mistakes, only happy accidents. I adopt a position of curiosity and generosity to what comes my way. I am responsive and receptive, attentive, empathetic, and reflective to the material as it arrives, working from a position where I seek what is common, what binds stories together, not what makes those stories distinct. I am not looking for what separates.
My claim to uniqueness in my research is in building on and linking to others, a process. I don’t claim any uniqueness of an outcome or answer, so I don’t have ‘ownership’ of the next steps that may be taken. I birth my ‘idea-baby’ (and it is painful at times), but then, if I am making tacit maternal knowing central to my identity as a researcher as much as a practitioner, that idea-baby needs the initial nurturance of development, from me as it is my idea. Then it needs to be supported into the world, followed by the trust that if I’ve done my maternal work well enough, that idea-baby will grow into a self-sustaining actor that others can, and want to, relate to. The idea-baby grows up, changes until it isn’t the same as me any more but has a life of its own, and becomes another step upon which others can stand as things evolve and grow and develop.
So my particular step, developed in my doctoral thesis, is elucidating how central tacit maternal knowing is to my practice, and thus my research practice too. My thesis made the case that the voice of tacit maternal knowing tends to be sidelined and silenced by misogyny and, when I look back on my writing of the thesis, it was a howl of rage that arose alongside that discovery. In this ongoing writing and seeking, growing to know more deeply what I mean by tacit maternal knowing, I can be more generous. I have seen, mirrored in the fiction I have written, how I have fallen into the positioning of historical, spiritual, and familial stories. Having seen, and let you see me as I was through my writing, I can now become something else. In knowing my place, I can change my place (Perry, 2018). My idea-baby is starting to mature after the punctuation point that was the doctoral thesis.
I am aware I am probably ponderously repeating myself but, like Val in the garden in the fiction, I can’t quite get it, I’m not even sure what it is. Maybe I should listen to Sally. It’s love. It’s precious. Don’t waste it. But how can we make love visible and acceptable in the culture within which we currently live? I can continue to rail, but that feels like an ethically fraught line of engagement. Last month, one of the arguments I developed was that anger leads to violence and is destructive.
The death of Camila Batmanghelidjh in January 2024 reminded me of the conundrum of Kid’s Company. The driving force that Batmanghelidjh brought to the charity was love, a passion for individual people. That was destroyed by becoming visible in a world that couldn’t, or wouldn’t, understand this different ontology that she was living from. Hers is the lineage I want to build on in terms of practice, but how can that be done in a world that seems so antagonistic to this alternative way of seeing things?
I think one way it can be built on is to continue the research and theory-developing practice I am trying to do here: making tacit maternal knowing more visible in the range of knowledges we can freely talk about and choose to bring to our work, whether that is practice, research, or therapist education.
Writing The Mad Man enabled a shift within me around my feelings about malehood. Before, I found I was deeply entwined with seeing the exclusion of tacit maternal knowing from the wisdoms that inform our therapeutic practice as misogynistic (and there is a truth to that too). Now, something has shifted enough for me to move to a position of seeing things as androcentric: the male view is still so much our ‘norm reference’. Knowledge that prioritises slow, quiet, internalised doing nothingness (i.e. the attuned, empathic, reflective parts of the core condition we are focussing on this month) are not seen as foreground to our work.
The saying ‘behind every good man there is a good woman’ previously felt like a dismissal of that woman, an invisibility that diminishes women's contributions to world events, and family events. However, it could be something we, as researchers who are committed to tacit maternal knowing as a fundamental ontological and epistemological underpinning to our methodological choices, decide to bring to the foreground and really champion.
As Polanyi (1966, 7) says, “While tacit knowledge can be possessed by itself, explicit knowledge must rely on being tacitly understood and applied. Hence all knowledge is either tacit or rooted in tacit knowledge. A wholly explicit knowledge is unthinkable.” In taking our tacit maternal knowing seriously, and making it intentionally and proudly visible, we are supporting the development of explicit knowledge. We have to make such knowledge visible because its inherent nature is to be understood and applied, not debated and rarefied.
It feels important at this point to keep at the forefronts of our minds what I mean by tacit maternal knowing. This is embodied, unworded wisdom that is founded in the lived experience of people who birth and care for infants. People like McKay (2018; 2023) from a science-based position remind us about the phenomenal neurobiological changes that occur in the physiological change process that happens in conception, gestation, and birthing — changes that are lifelong. That says nothing of the preparations for conception that happen on a monthly basis for a significant portion of the world’s population.
From an androcentric position of academic knowledge, there is an expectation that the population who does not identify as male is obliged to buy into that androcentric knowledge base. Even if we do not identify as male, in academic life, that is our norm reference. Even in writing this I am aware I am presenting my thinking in a ‘non-standard way’ by choosing to publish as a blog not in a peer-reviewed journal; choosing to undertake an EdD not a PhD; choosing to write in a way that I hope is accessible and readable (despite my convoluted sentences and leaps of connection of ideas). I still remain somewhat apologetic for not being androcentric or, to put it in that word I’ve coined, for not being manstream. I feel that to be visible, I have to work hard to make the tacit acceptable to that manstream partly as the manstream isn’t used to hearing about this sort of knowledge, and partly as this sort of knowledge isn’t used to being centre-stage and is inherently unwordable.
Just as you don’t have to be a man to take on the mantle and research and write from the androcentric perspective, you don’t have to have actually conceived, gestated, and birthed to understand what tacit maternal knowing is. You can learn it if you, and those around you, believe it is knowledge that it is worth learning. Anyone can choose to write and research from a position of tacit knowledge, including tacit maternal knowing.
So that is the research focus that grows out of such methodological rambling! My ongoing research process and writing about research is about being responsive to the androcentric academic world. It is about being attentive to that androcentricism without losing attunement to tacit maternal knowing as well. To be empathic to the challenges of the androcentric world. To understand how missing out on this strand of knowledge is so detrimental to individual and communal wellbeing. To be empathic to the struggles of those who live and breath the ontology and epistemology of tacit maternal knowing, and how hard it is to continue to stand on that ground when you feel you are being looked at — at best with incredulity, at worst with hatred. To be empathic to those who struggle to make sense of that gynocentric place. And of course I will keep reflecting on how we, as practitioner researchers, can keep bridging that gap between research and practice, between thinking and doing, and between separation and connection.
Phew! Do you think I’ve given myself a big job?
Our research is not to define, to find cause and effect and either/or, our research is to create, relate, and celebrate both/and.
Applications for educators: Growing players in ontological security
Can we ‘teach’ or ‘train’ people to have responsivity, empathy, attunement, and reflection?
I guess you can ‘do’ the skills that support those experiences. We can teach mirroring, we can point out how to read bodies, we can teach verbal skills like reflection of content, reflection of feeling, open-ended questions, and so on. If we are working to an apprenticeship model of educating therapeutic practitioners, these are at the outer edge of legitimate peripheral participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991). They are the equivalent of sweeping the hair clippings or passing the right tool to the master, who is creating the environment for the apprentice to grow in as they ‘become’ hairdresser or carpenter.
In our culture where ‘what has been learned’ is measured by naming ‘three reasons that underpin the importance of…’ or ‘by the end of today’s teaching you will be able to…’, absorbing the ‘feel’ of how the master ‘is’ with the person they are caring for, or the material they are shaping, may not be valued because it is hard to measure, and because as tacit knowledge it is not going to develop at the same speed in every student, nor necessarily be measurable by the same tool. It is that age-old adage — do we seek to measure what is valuable, or do we value what is easily measurable?
In our fiction, Alex seems unaware of how thoughtful and inventive he has been. No one would have taught him that a goal post could double up as a shelter — that came out of his experience of being cared for and cared about in his family. The fruits of valuable knowledge were measurable, but the seeds of that may not have looked very prepossessing — his mother singing at nappy changes, being held, listened to, the repetition of the daily acts of mothering performed by maybe the person who he called mother, or maybe the person he called father. Of course there was also the letting go, to enable him to be his own person and manipulate knowledge, through his value-based system, to come up with a creative and unique solution to a problem that no one else had actually thought was a problem.
This is making me think there is another -ism that we must be aware of as we consider our place as therapist educators, that of classism. I am aware I am writing in the UK context, largely white, largely working from the foundation that people don’t starve or have nowhere to live (although it pains me because I am not so sure that even in the UK that we are as a community meeting the basic needs of our community members — we care, limiting our understanding of who is in our community as a way to ration our care). Setting that painful diversion aside, I am also writing as someone who has had the privilege of post-compulsory education.
It feels that over my lifetime, there has been ever more drive to see what is valuable in education as academic in the old-fashioned sense of head learning: measurable via testing that is time-limited and fact-based. Skills-based learning and becoming a professional is sidelined, as seen by measuring the ‘success’ of courses at university by high incomes and not professional satisfaction or contribution to the good of our community.
I do see this as classism, the looking down or Othering of the professionals that actually underpin community: trades, caring, the slow and noticing professions, those that prize reflection, responsiveness, empathy, and attunement. If I truly live those attributes, I can’t help but be political, I can’t help but be upset and cross at what we are doing to people as a society. That in turn makes me think about how we are educating therapists to hold these core values of a socially constructed understanding of therapeutic healing (as opposed to a medical model of seeing distress as a defect to be removed).
If we are cultivating tacit maternal knowing — the process of loving in a specific way to enable growth — then we must surround our students with tacit maternal knowing — could we consider this as gestating them? We as educators have to understand and resist the pressure to fit the manstream, the androcentric way of conceptualising the sort of learning we need our students to engage with to become high quality practitioners. We need to be comfortable with not knowing/letting go, with dependence/interdependence, and we need to robustly be faithful in our adherence to the belief that if we get the process right, then we will have a clear, measurable, and very high quality product in terms of the skills of the practitioners we produce.
Facts are understood more easily, and are retained more easily, if the ground of learning is well-prepared to receive the seeds. A big risk as I see it is that if the skills are prioritised over the values and attitudes, people will think they know what they are doing when they don’t. That sets the conditions for dangerous practice that can lead to further damage to the very people we are setting out to care for.
Maybe all I can do for the moment, in my ongoing explorations of how to develop an appropriate and sustainable pedagogy of therapist education, is to remain in that place of empathy, reflectiveness, attunement, and responsiveness. That can be the foundation on which to engage with the dilemmas of integrating gynocentric and androcentric positions as we enable the growth of our new generation of practitioners. Person-centred was where we started these posts, and person centred seems to be where we are pausing, for now. We can sit with the not knowing exactly how our students will discover their ontological security as therapists, and we can create the play spaces to support that discovery.
Bibliography
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McKay, S. (2023). Baby brain. Hachette Australia.
McKay, S. (2018). Women’s Brain Book: How Your Life Shapes Your Brain and Your Brain Shapes Your Life. Hachette Australia.
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