Practitioner, researcher, educator, mother, me: Direct, here and now experience
Contents
Practitioner, researcher, educator, mother, me
Introduction
(Please be aware this fiction and the subsequent explication contain non-graphic reference to rape.)
I am very aware that this phase of writing about my understanding of Theraplay as a therapeutic modality is progressing to another pause point. Last month, I pointed out that we only had two more core concepts to think about. This month, the focus is on the core concept of “direct, here and now experience”. Next month, we will finish with “co-regulation”.
The piece of fiction that came to me this month is from near the end of The Mad Man in the Attic. After seeing Sarah, Val is put in touch with extended family who live in Bournemouth. She meets an elderly woman, Alice, who was a young lodger of Val’s father, Gordon, and his wife, Marjorie. Alice was the closest thing Marjorie thought she had to a daughter, so Marjorie left her the house.
Alice dies soon after Val and Graham meet her, and Val discovers Alice has now left the house to her: a legacy, as Marjorie and Gordon never had children of their own and Alice remained a spinster — a term I use to mark the historical and sociocultural period that Alice grew up in.
Elements of the novel are set post-WW2, although there is a lot of jumping back and forth in time in the narrative. Gordon, suffering from shell shock, was subject to psychiatric treatment that today we would consider barbaric. His wife, Marjorie, processed that trauma in her paintings, which she did in a shed at the bottom of their garden. It was while Gordon was being treated for his psychiatric symptoms caused by his war experiences that Val was conceived as a result of non-consensual sexual activity — a rape.
The fiction below follows Val as she explores Marjorie’s painting shed, feeling as though Marjorie has left clues for her to find so she can take the next steps in discovering more about her story.
Fiction: House clearance
It was as if each room or space in this house told her a bit more about the story of these people, and so a bit more about herself. Today, she wanted to be in the garden. The dilapidated shed at the bottom of the garden was calling her because of its neglect, such a contrast to the old but well maintained-ness of the rest of the house. The winter sun made everything shimmer and shine but held little warmth. There was no frost. Val had thought there would be, not realising that the probability of frosts in coastal Dorset was minimal in comparison to the rural landscape she was used to in East Anglia.
As she walked across the lawn, tracing the edge of the border and running her right hand through the tall plants that grew there, she found herself settling. Her head, her therapist head, was saying that discovering she was the child of a rape should be troubling her, unsettling her sense of self. But starting to grasp the stories of Marjorie and Gordon, her father — she had to remember he was her father — had no sense of that. It felt far more that it gave a sense of possibility, a sense that a story had been interrupted by events that were plainly more than could be digested.
She didn’t believe in ghosts. In her career as a therapist, she had cultivated a strong sense of listening to and hearing the unsaid. But usually that was with people. This place though, the place itself was giving her the same feelings, like others were walking alongside her, or even within her, as she sought to find meaning in her story. It was as if there was someone willing her to get to the complexity and the nuance that lay beneath such a bare, brutal, fact.
There were four steps up to the door to the shed, slabs of concrete that had been laid who knows when, and were now a little uneven and ever so slightly wobbly. Val felt the need to grab the handrail that ran beside them, a solid metal pole. She felt her hand resonate as she touched it. Must be the cold, she thought, trying to explain to herself things that she couldn’t understand. Why should a piece of metalwork send such a shiver down her spine and an electric current up her arm?
She laid that hand onto the handle of the shed door, and for a moment it wasn’t her hand. It was that of a younger person, someone with a laugh of delight. Someone she felt in Edwardian dress, almost; old-fashioned. And then the fleeting experience was gone along with the shiver.
The door was locked, but the woodwork was rotten. Val peered through the glass first, seeing dust sheets and an easel. She felt the need to be in that space. She rattled the door. Somewhere she heard the smash of glass as a panel fell, and the whole shed distorted and creaked. It only took one sharp tug for the screws that held the handle to the door to pull out, and with that, the entire locking mechanism fell back into the shed. The door was free to open.
Val stepped in cautiously, aware if the door was that rotten, the floor could be also.
The easel stood solidly in the middle of the octagonal shed. Light still flooded in from each side, dusty where the glass hadn’t been tended for who knew how many years. A canvas, blank and now rotten, stood against a wall. The floor was dotted with vivid colours, as if paint had fallen willy-nilly. There were footprints where Val imagined the painter had accidentally trodden in those dots of paint and then left their mark: the size of the foot, the pointedness of the end of the shoe mark — it must have been a woman.
Val looked around her. The glass panel that had fallen was to her left. The glass had slid down the outside, smashing on the concrete base of the shed. It formed a pile, held in place by the branches of a conifer that must have grown closer over the years.
On the upright of the shed to the right of the missing panel, there was a key on a hook. Just a key: no fob, no ring, no indication of what it might belong to. It seemed oddly dust- and cobweb-free in comparison to the rest of the shed. Beside it was a folded up director’s chair with cream-coloured canvas. She felt like she should be looking for something, a missing link. The key was obvious, but she didn’t want to rush to remove it for fear she might miss the most important thing.
She felt compelled to open out the director’s chair. Not to sit on: she was convinced the fabric would have perished, just like the unpainted canvas, waiting for a picture that was not going to be painted. The joints on the chair were stiff, and it was difficult to pull the sides apart. Where the canvas drooped down, Val found a piece of paper sandwiched. A watercolour of a woman, a young woman. It could have been her, or was it Sarah? She looked more closely. She gasped, stepped back and dropped the paper. A draught from the broken window caught it, and it drifted away, coming to rest under the abandoned easel. The eyes had been the give-away. It was her mother. Those were her mother’s eyes. One of the things that she’d been told they had in common, almost, in fact, the only thing they had in common.
She closed her own eyes just for a moment, wondering if the picture would have gone when she opened her eyes again. But when she did, the paper was still there. She reached out for the key, while at the same time keeping her eyes on where the image had drifted to. She didn’t really want to pick it up, and at the same time knew she needed to. Her remote, cold mother, holding a story that had not been told by her. Did her dad know? She wondered, did they ever talk together about how she had been conceived and what that might mean for Val, for all of them as a family?
She eased the key off its nail, tossing it lightly into the air, and snapped her hand around it as it returned to her palm. She steadied herself, took two strides to the easel and bent to pick up the image, holding it between thumb and forefinger as if it might be an unexploded bomb. In many ways it was. It felt like she was being given a choice – defuse or explode?
There didn’t seem much point in shutting the shed door behind her. She pushed a flowerpot against it to stop the wind from swinging it. She thought if the door bumped just once into the frame, the whole place would collapse in dust and splinters. She marched down the garden, not waiting for ghosts to catch her this time. Through the kitchen, into the front room. She dropped the picture and pushed it under the sofa with her foot and looked at the key. No more today, she thought. Today she could take no more.
She pulled out her laptop and emailed Graham.
I’m coming back today for a few days. Lots here still to sort, but I need to sort myself too. See you later today.
Practitioner, researcher, educator, mother, me
As I reach the penultimate core concept, I find I can’t write separate posts for different aspects of my working life in therapy. Nor can I separate these working roles from ‘being me’. The core concept of direct, here and now experience is another step in the process of pulling all the strands of my thinking together. The fiction makes me think that who we are in the present is always a mixture of all our parts and all our pasts. Those experiences in our own lifetimes, and in the lifetimes of our remembered family and our wider community, all feed into ‘this moment’. We talk about ‘intergenerational trauma’ but situate this as something to be overcome, a deficit — not an opportunity, not something that is part of us that can be integrated as part of our commitment to congruently having unconditional positive regard and empathy towards our own inner lives.
Direct, here and now experience. It seems that this core concept connected to a piece of fiction that leaves Val in a situation where there is a spooky kind of resonance with her past, present inside her, but unknown to her consciousness until now.
How could someone who had never met her mother paint a picture of her? Gordon and Marjorie were connected, attuned to each other. Marjorie stuck with Gordon despite the horrific thing his experiences drove him to do. In the depth of their connection, past, present, and future all combined. Their two separate beings resonated so deeply that it was as if the experience of one was transmitted to the other, pre-verbally, socially, in a right-brained arts-based way. This is the dependence/interdepedence that encompassed both the deep love Gordon and Marjorie had for each other as well as the deep pain that was between them. The depth of their connection enabled this flow of knowing.
This reflection on this core concept, via this fiction, then leads me to ideas of countertransference, clinical intuition, and the Rogerian core condition of congruence with the implications of that for immediacy in therapeutic work. It points to that ineffable quality of most relationally-based therapeutic models that accepts that the unmeasurable aspect of relationship is the source of healing. It seems that this quality in relationship is so important that different clinical traditions all name it in different ways. We can either spend time and energy trying to delineate one theory/idea from another, or let ourselves rest in the overlaps, accepting that if there are lots of overlaps in theories then the concept must be important in healing relationships to enable the other to flourish! (At least for the purposes of thinking practically about how we can make a positive difference for those we are serving and caring for in our clinical and educative practices. We might need to make distinctions for other purposes.)
Clinical intuition (Marks Tarlow, 2012), countertransference, empathy — all these notions from therapeutic theory connect to this core concept of direct here and now experience. It holds the hope that within this very moment, if we can stay in relationship with the other and not deflect from the depth of that unwordable connection, if we make ourselves as fully open to such communication, then things change (remember Milo’s adoptive mum in A Necessary Life(Story) ‘getting’ this on pages 21-23).
This is tacit knowing. It is being embodied within, and acting from, the more than we can say experience. We don’t have to talk about the past to feel the impact of the past in the present. We live it, walk it; it surrounds us. It leaks out in our pre-verbal, right-brained, social functioning in the world. Into the world of relationships to other humans and to our companion creatures and the very earth itself (see On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!).
Marjorie keeps processing Gordon’s pain by her direct, here and now experience of immersing herself in artwork. Not to be famous or make money or even for those images to be displayed. She is compelled to paint out the stories that are ‘told’ to her via her relationship with Gordon. Not verbal stories, but ones that come via their embodied, everyday, connection — otherwise known as love for each other. She can be available to carry on loving him, despite his distress, because she can process her own distress.
Val has never been able to have that level of connection with another person in her personal life because she has never been able to be herself, because she has never known the truth of her own story, so has never been able to ‘get’ herself. Starting to engage with how her past connects to her here and now, direct experience gives her that elusive experience we touched on last week of being ‘got’; from that right-brained, pre-verbal, and social context. Unless she can know herself, she can’t experience being known at this depth by another because what then dominates the relationship is the avoidance of untold stories.
Unpredictability helps with our perception of meaning through the direct, here and now experience of our work — clinical, research, or education of therapists. Like Val discovering that things are not as expected on the South Coast if she tries to predict based on her East Anglian knowledge. Unpredictability and being open to getting things wrong opens the possibility for new knowledge to enter the realm of knowing. When knowledge becomes knowing then it can become part of one’s identity and so be sustainable, although it can feel quite explosive and threatening initially. Disrupting the status quo, provoking (kindly and within people’s window of tolerance in our personal lives or by challenging injustice more overtly in our culture) leads to potential for change, and hopefully progress. One focuses not on outcomes (knowledge) but on process (knowing) as the source of security.
Theraplay emphasises a positive way of working, flipping the problem-saturated narratives that are so often attached to family stories when therapy is sought, or taught. Instead, Ann Jernberg (1979) encourages us to take the stance of: What’s going well? Let’s build on that. However, to ignore the shadows is to give them power. The old stories do need to be heard. Val cannot be herself and so can’t have a relationship with Graham until she knows where her animosity to men comes from. Seeing herself, either in the face of Sarah as we had last month, or in the painted eyes of her mother in the shed where her father’s wife painted out the trauma, makes it possible for Val to be whole, flexible, and so open to change and relationship. Being prepared to fully engage in the direct, here and now moment is an essential part of this.
New meanings are created for Val because of the non-congruence of the situation. Now moments are created, beyond cognition — almost spooky, as I say — joint attention, intersubjectivity, over the time span that connects the human story of the past to the human story of the present. Not quite what Stern (2004) was talking about, but similar.
This is what happens in all the spheres of therapeutic practice I have been investigating through this haphazard and curious approach of heuristic inquiry via writing of fiction — practitioner, researcher, educator. Direct here and now experience, as with the preverbal, right-brained, and social aspects of our practice, goes beyond words. It leads us to the multisensory, responsive, nature of human relationships, particularly the maternal/infant human relationship that the kind of work I am trying to share with you, draws on as its anchor point.
All of the past and all of the future are here and now in the present. This is a moment that can unmake or remake our internal working models, our expectation of the world. This is story telling that can never be wrong. It isn’t about remembering who you are meant to be for the other or trying to work out what you should be in their eyes. It is about that feeling of being got that we talked about last month. If you experience that being ‘got’, the past and the future are continuous, and you feel real. I am who I am, wherever I am, whatever I am doing; practitioner, researcher, educator, writer, mother, me. This makes life sustainable.
Story telling, story sharing through non-linear, non-written traditions; the importance of stories told orally, elaborated, adapted, but always full of relational meaning; these stories create a present that then holds the past to make a future.
In all these nearly nine months of writing (this is month eight — birth must be imminent!), we haven’t yet reached the point where Val is going to see Joe and his children. We have danced around it, had conversations about it, examined all kinds of barriers to it. Val has become less sure about herself. We will discover in next month's fiction that this has made her more open and able to meet the needs of Joe and his family.
Bibliography
Jernberg, A. M. (1979). Theraplay: A new treatment using structured play for problem children and their families. Jossey-Bass.
Marks-Tarlow, T. (2012). Clinical intuition in psychotherapy: The neurobiology of embodied response. W. W. Norton.
Stern, D. N. (2004). The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. W.W. Norton.