Seeing one’s self in the other
Contents
Fiction: Seeing one’s self in the other
Applications for practitioners: Radical and life changing
Applications for researchers: Seeing the world through a whole new lens
Applications for educators: Play and the arts ARE the work
Introduction
This month we are looking at the core concept of Theraplay being right-brained, pre-verbal, and social. To me, this is the concept that sets Theraplay apart from other theorisation of what we do to enable lives to be transformed through our use of relationship in therapeutic encounters. To truly digest and live this core concept is radical, as it undoes the primary lens through which the white, western, androcentric world is predicated (ooo, I’m getting the big words in right from the start this month!). It is also the most challenging core concept to try to do justice to in the linear, logical, and left-brained form of communication called writing words.
In our fiction this month, we have Val facing her world-shattering, life-changing, pre-verbal experience. For those of you who have read A Necessary Life(Story), you may recall that Val wonders about what she’d find out if she took a DNA test. She worries she might be just ‘bog-standard’. As her friendship with Graham grows, he gifts her a DNA kit, and the life-shattering result is that Val discovers that her father couldn’t have been her father. Graham, still off work due to his broken ankle, engages in some genealogical research and tracks down someone who genetically is Val’s cousin. This month’s fiction is about the first time Val meets her cousin, Sarah.
Fiction: Seeing one’s self in the other
Graham took off his glasses and stretched. He picked up the mug and was surprised to find that the tea had gone cold. He looked back at the genealogy site. It was like chasing rabbits down holes — frustrating, but also fascinating. It made time stand still for him, if not for his tea.
He’d kicked himself at first, after that shattering result had come back…he’d done it again! He’d given something to Val based on what he’d seen or heard, but somehow he’d got the timing, or something, wrong. What he’d planned to give her joy, turned into a bit of a nightmare. Kittens turned to broken ankles, DNA tests to life-changing new knowledge.
He eased his ankle. Three months and he still wasn’t back at work. The ankle still continued to grieve him, making it impossible to stand for any period of time. He was doing bits, enough admin to still feel part of the team at the veterinarian practice. And then this, his research into Val’s past, kept him occupied for the rest of the time. He felt it was the least he could do, given that it was his gift of the DNA kit that had led to the discovery that her father was not her father.
He decided to get up and make another cup of tea. Autumn was setting in. The ache in his ankle was becoming familiar, a weird kind of comforting, as he moved from his desk to the light switch, then toward the kettle in the kitchen. It was starting to become part of his identity.
As he was about to pass the threshold from his study to the kitchen, his computer pinged with an incoming email. He was heading back towards the machine before he even had a conscious thought. In that moment, pain was sidelined by interest. It irked him that the noises of the technology acted like a Pavlovian bell on him.
The message was from the genealogy site — you’ve got a match, a cousin.
He sat down. Thoughtful.
This sitting down, the making his body still, made the feelings that were stirred up containable. It was troubling to him. The word, troubling, helped keep the feelings in a safe, manageable place. Shattering, exploding, destabilising — there were probably better words for what he was about to do, but if he acknowledged that, he probably would not take the next step. At least this time, he’d talked to Val about his plans; she knew he was doing something for her, had agreed, and indeed had seemed grateful that he was looking into the meaning of the DNA test for her. He opened the message.
Cousin, high probability, living in Wells, Norfolk.
Well, nice place to go at least, he thought.
***
Val drove. He still couldn’t. He knew if he had to break suddenly, he’d be compromised, not able to put sufficient pressure through that ankle. He didn’t want to risk anyone getting hurt. He said he’d come along as navigator, and because he had been the one emailing Sarah.
Sarah Mable Mannering, nee Allen. Married to Claude Mannering. Three children: Susan, Andrew, and Rubicon. The email exchanges had given him various, if slightly random, facts.
It was after our first ever foreign holiday, she’d revealed, exclamation marks suggesting light heartedness. Our parents looked after the kids. We’d got to that age where they were big enough to be left, so we took off. We hadn’t planned for another kid, in fact that holiday was meant to mark the next stage of life, but along she came. We’d never been abroad. We went to Rimini. It was very romantic. We didn’t want her to be plain Ruby.
To Graham, there was a sort of sparkle to the way she wrote that already reminded him of Val. He’d conveyed this story to Val as she drove, but didn’t think she was taking anything in — too focussed on the road, too lost in thoughts about what they may find.
Thanks to the sat nav, they located the house with ease. Val parked and they sat outside for some time, wondering what the view might tell them about the experience that was about to unfold. The house was brick. Away from the seaside parts of the town. New build. Neat. Hardly any garden. Nothing special really. If she was a cousin, Sarah’d be about the same age as her, Val thought. Rubicon could have children of her own. The sat nav gave no guidance on how to negotiate this journey.
“Ready?” She said to Graham, determination in her voice, her hands gripping the steering wheel.
“You?” He responded, knowing her question was to steady herself, not him.
“Yep.”
Val levered herself out of the car, stiff from the drive. She wished they’d stopped at the beach and had a bit of a walk, yet also knew that she had to come here first. She had to know how this woman that she hadn't known existed was so closely related to her.
She got Graham's crutches out of the boot and brought them round to him. He pulled himself out of the car and took them from her, working his way slowly round to the pavement. She shut the car door, all the time keeping her eyes on the front door of the house. She pressed the button on the key fob, hearing the familiar sound of the doors locking, affirming to her that she’d done her job. Familiarity helped, it reassured her that no matter what happened next, some things would remain the same.
They walked the short garden path, Val leading, Graham slowly following. They didn’t need to knock, the door opened. It seemed Sarah was as anxious about this meeting as they were.
It was a shock.
It was the same experience that Val had had during the pandemic when she was working online. It was the realisation that you have a face, and it can be reflected back to you. It was a reminder that you have eyes that can be seen, not just eyes that see; that your head is attached to your chest, not just your arms and legs. It was like looking at her whole being. The hair that problematically wouldn’t stay in one place. The eyes that were pale. Even the stance and the gait. And how the smile started slow and cautious, and then beamed. Val had never realised that she didn’t look anything like her parents. It had never crossed her mind to question that, and no one had raised it. It came to her now because she was seeing herself mirrored back to her from the doorway of a house she’d never visited before.
Sarah summed it up: “Ruddy hell.”
Applications for practitioners: Radical and life changing
This is a lynch pin of Theraplay, this core concept of right-brained, pre-verbal, and social. And I know I am not going to do it justice. How can I, when our grown-up way of communicating is verbal? How can we, writer and reader, connect in the realm of communication that is pre-verbal?
I wish I could draw. In my mind's eye, I have an image of lots of horizontal lines on a page in oil pastels. Not pale colours, but with that smudge that comes with pastels. Embedded in the colours are outlines of human shapes, all sizes, all maturities. And there is one outline shape that moves around, the lens through which we see the world; my outline shape in this case of me trying to write about this concept and how it informs my practice. Right-brained, pre-verbal, social.
I am now stuck for words. This is shattering. This core concept that requires me to let go of something that had been the foundation stone of my striving to fit in, to do well, to play the game of the world, to be, as McGilchrist (2019) might say, aligned with the master, not the emissary.
Val’s whole foundation is shattered by discovering that her father is not her biological father, and, if I ever manage to edit the whole of The Mad Man in the Attic, you will also discover that such an earth-shattering revelation opens the door for an integration of maternal and paternal elements of her inner life. The first step of such a big journey, coming from this piece of the fiction, is Val recognising herself in another and realising there was a truth that no one had ever spoken or even allowed themselves to think.
This is the equivalent to me unpicking the way in which the patriarchy governed my thinking and judgement — until I did the doctorate. I had been striving to be acceptable to a master that actually I didn’t want to agree with and, in my soul, couldn’t agree with, but felt I had to in order to be acceptable. Giving too much precedence to that left-brained, verbal, logical manstream was in itself destructive, hateful, and misogynistic, to my identity as a person who cares with tacit maternal knowing. To fit in, I felt I had to ‘grow up’ and leave behind play and the arts and be serious about all this serious stuff that I, as a therapist, am meant to sort out.
Before the doctorate, I had no words to say that. I had to feel my way into it via the fiction — feel it, see it, taste it, hear it and smell it, I had to have it reflected back to me. Then there could be a move from the stuck and diminishing position to something that held hope for liberation. Isn’t this what we wish for the people we work with, to enable them to be liberated from whatever binds them to a place of distress?
One of the challenges of Theraplay as a model, and the thing that makes it unique in the pantheon of therapeutic models, is that to truly be a Theraplay practitioner (in white western manstream) one has to slowly and gently restore what feels like one’s true colours, one’s own pre-verbal, right-brained, and social experience. We go back to our earliest experiences and draw from them. Those first experiences may either equip us to draw from positive experiences of getting to know ourselves within the gaze of the people who offered us mothering. Or they may mean we draw on the healing we’ve sought where that early gaze has not mirrored back to us what we feel ourselves to be on the inside.
We can know ourselves because we see ourselves mirrored in the eyes and heart of the other. In the other, we see who they dream us to be, as well as who we know we can be. This is the affirming delight of being known, of being ‘got’ at a fundamental, visceral, unquestionable level. I’ll come back to this notion of being ‘got’ in the educators’ post.
I love watching The Repair Shop. What comes to mind as I write the above is Lucia Scalasi, the person who restores paintings, exclaiming in utter delight as she removes layers of old varnish to reveal the original colours beneath. There are no words at the point of uncovering, only delight and awe and wonder. The words that arrive are inadequate to the experience.
Val is less unsettled than she thought she would be to discover the foundations of her world were not what she’d been told they were. As shattering as it is, it also confirms something within herself. That some of the things she’d experienced, that had remained unworded and unacknowledgable within her family, things that caused memory to disappear even after she thought she’d spoken about it in her therapy (see A free and protected space), are part of who she is. I see a similar thing in many of the adopted children I work with, the ‘ah-ha it fits’ that comes when the outside story they are told matches the lived experiences of their pre-verbal existence, not recorded anywhere in any written record, but held in their very bodies.
This right-brained and pre-verbal stuff is what makes Theraplay so unique. It can act as a buffer to prevent the model getting drawn into the hierarchy of knowledges by pushing things into the left brain as something to strive for. It prizes the right and the non-verbal, but more importantly the pre-verbal, our very earliest experiences. Is that what Val and Sarah get in seeing themselves? A fundamental, pre-verbal connection of belonging mapped out in their bodies that resemble each other?
So what does that all mean for our practice? Be rigorous and courageous in getting rid of words, trust the inner experience. If we are seeking to link this core concept with familiar theory, I can see connections to Marks-Tarlow (2012) and intuition, as well as how we understand countertransference and transference. But I have just used a huge number of words to say what could have been said in a few. This core concept is about how we ‘get’ the person we are with, our deep embodied empathy, but somehow just putting words to it diminishes the searing astonishment of seeing one’s self reflected as one feels oneself to be in the eyes and heart of the other.
Applications for researchers: Seeing the world through a whole new lens
Seeing the world in a whole new way is challenging as you have to let go of the comfort of certainty, the comfort of knowing, and often let go of the power you feel you have. You have to be prepared to trust the process in research, just as much as you need to trust the process in therapy. Set your aims, have your process, and whoosh, off you go on the roller coaster to see what experiences you have on the way, and what that illuminates about the phenomenon that you are curious about. Research is a process, not a destination.
Tradition posits that we do research: there is a possessiveness, an ownership; research happens from the outside looking in. Heuristic Inquiry and this Theraplay core concept suggest more that we are possessed by the research, that there is a compulsion, a drive to make sense that is outside the bounds of a project, outside of temporality, liminality, and dimensionality. Research, when viewed from this perspective, becomes a vocation or a spiritual practice in the same way therapy can be an act of faith (see Research is Theraplay; Wilson, 2008).
Why is this linked to the right-brained, pre-verbal, and social aspects of the Theraplay model? I don’t know, but if I am sticking to the model, not knowing is just fine. Not knowing is the research. Immersion in the entire complex mess — the swamp, as Finlay (2002) calls it — to experience, digest, and process the holistic nature of a phenomenon and finding that, somehow, you are no longer researching it, but it is researching you! In good research from this core-concept, you, the researcher, become more visible, more seen, more known as an important part of the relational dance that forms the ontological security of embodied, embedded, practitioner research.
Can I claim motherhood as my indigenous belonging, the land or body from which my ontology derives (see Merging back to earth)? I don’t want anyone to feel I, as a white woman in a global north setting with a Christian underpinning, am trying to appropriate indigenous research paradigms and processes. And yet at the same time, it speaks to me. I feel ‘got’ by the writers in the field (Wilson, 2008; Davidson, 2018; Hallett, 2019; Kovach, 2009; McCaslin and Breton, 2014). Their research processes and outcomes make sense, they feel right, and what they write down is useful to me in a way that some writing in peer-reviewed journals is not. I think indigenous methods and paradigms make sense to me because, using terms of the white western/global north, what I read fits with this pre-verbal, right-brained, social commitment I make in positioning myself as a Theraplay researcher — not a researcher into Theraplay.
Val is research, Graham the researcher. His researching enables Val to live a fuller and deeper understanding of how she has come to be the person she is, and how she can offer Joe her ongoing professional love and care. Research can be practical, research can transform practice, research can transform researcher and researched. Research illuminates the world of the right-brained, pre-verbal, and social experience if it is conducted in a right-brained, pre-verbal, and social way, and both writer and reader feel safe enough to let go of what they know and venture into the unknown.
Applications for educators: Play and the arts ARE the work
Getting out of the assumptions of the left brain being in the driving seat in education (especially university-level therapist education) is really, really hard! It is such a powerful lens through which we have been pushed to see the world for the majority of our learning lives. bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (1994) has been a liberating read to me in thinking about the ways in which curricula become colonised.
How can we dismantle the foundations of the all powerful left brain in a safe way? In the fiction, Graham creates a free and protected space (Kalff 1980) made by his maleness in the way he finds out more about Val’s history. But in the fiction, his maleness is a broken maleness, not misogyny nor androcentrism nor gynocentricism. He and Val are in partnership; broken masculinity and broken femininity combine to enable space where new, shattering but healing, knowing can emerge.
I have recently had the privilege of undertaking final interviews with students who have completed sufficient practice hours to become accredited at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. It has been a moving and delightful journey with them, from new recruits to fully-fledged psychotherapeutic practitioners. Our final interviews are more collegiate dialogues about who they have become over the long and challenging process of learning how to be psychotherapeutic counsellors. One of the themes that has stuck with me is how important it has been for these trainees to feel ‘got’, to feel they are known, valued, and accepted for who they are, as well as being seen for who they can become.
In the fiction, Val and Sarah looking at each other, seeing themselves mirrored in each other, fills a void for Val. An emptiness that she didn’t even realise was there. Sarah gets Val! No words, no doubts: pre-verbal, right-brained, social, and at the level of the viscera.
I have often wanted to do a study on the number of children that have been exposed to relational and developmental experiences that result in trauma who are also left-handed. It has seemed to me during my work as a therapeutic practitioner with such wonderful people, that there are more than expected lefties. My association with this is that lefties are ‘wired up’ a bit differently and that it could be that their right brain is more active than for the right-handed person. I am aware my ‘science’ knowledge of such things is quite limited, and these wonderings are just that, curiosities that light up potentials and break out of the mansteam restrictions of how things ‘should’ be known.
It is now striking me that I seem to see a larger than expected proportion of therapy trainees who are left-handed or identify as neurodivergent in some way — dyslexic, dyspraxic, autistic, with sensory processing differences. For many of them, they come to learning to be therapists with the story that they are ‘broken’; stupid, excluded, and that they’ve got to work much harder than the ‘normals’ to fit in. To meet not just the criteria of education, but the process of education as well — sit still, approach writing systematically, concentrate, don’t fidget, try harder, look at me when I’m talking (I could go on and on)!
One of the delights for me as an educator is to support each individual to embrace and love the skills they bring to the therapy room. Their experience of being Othered by an education system may be what sensitises them to the Othered experience of the people we work with and come to call clients. However, the fiction has taken me to a place where I am thinking that to be themselves and become therapists, our job as educators is to give them a mirror to the parts of themselves that they don’t know they are missing — the magnificent access they have to knowing otherwise. We have to work at ‘getting’ our students so we can be a facilitating mirror to find the parts of themselves that have been hiding in plain sight.
Right-brained, pre verbal, and social. To do that in the work, you have to be able to do that yourself. To do that yourself, you have to go there — Val and Graham have to go to Wells to see Sarah. This is the partner of the multisensory core concept in Theraplay. As educators, we have to go to the transgressive spaces as hooks (1994) might say, or draw on the pedagogical writings of Paulo Freire (1985).
If, as therapist educators, we keep implicitly giving dominance to the left brain, the logical, systematic, and traditional ways of affirming and ascribing merit to learning, then my worry is that the important leadership of the right-brained, pre-verbal, and social can never be fully realised by our students. This would be a huge flaw in therapist education because these attributes are central to the high-quality therapy that we are equipping our students to provide. They are what enable the people we are training to be therapists to ‘get’ the people who come to them as clients. This core-concept is so closely connected to the capacity to be empathic.
If only lip service is given to this core concept — because it is associated with childhood and so deemed of less value — then we deprive both our students and their potential clients of something central to the good practice of therapy. Play, and play as expressed through the arts, become a mere background to the healing work, not the work itself. For play and the arts — those right-brained, pre-verbal, and social activities — to be the agents of change in the therapeutic work, they have to be the heart of therapist education programmes as well. I would argue that the knowledge that is needed to enable child-like-ness to come forth as play and creativity in the learning environment is maternal in the manner that I have been presenting throughout these blog posts.
As we get to this stage of the Theraplay wheel (see Merging back to earth), it is getting harder and harder to talk about one concept without referencing the others. Although the concepts are separated into spokes to help with the exploration and understanding of the simple complexity of the model, they only work if they are integrated into a whole. It is like the right brain, left brain debate: do you understand best if you master each part, or do you learn best if you are immersed in the whole? Or vice versa? Or is it like those optical illusions where both are present, but you can only focus on one image at a time (see My Wife and My Mother-in-Law, for example). To hold both, we have to shuttle between them. To train therapeutic practitioners well, we have to shuttle between the maternal and paternal, the right and left brains, the being and doing: all those either/or things need to be ‘both/and’. So yes, most of the time, it can feel like you don’t know what is happening. Logic does not hold sway, play does.
For some trainees, such a process of learning may be acutely uncomfortable. For those, our duty of care is to explain, support, and help them manage and reflect on the discomforts of learning in other ways. Then they can have a broader canvas upon which to picture the inner worlds of the people they work with, and so deepen their relational connection through empathy. Teaching in such a way may also feel acutely uncomfortable, so to have a theory to guide therapist educators — such as applying the Theraplay model to developing a pedagogy of therapist education — can provide a containing structure for us as educators as much as it proves a containing structure for therapeutic practice!
Bibliography
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Wilson, S. (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood.