Co-regulated — dependence/interdependence — co-creative
Contents
It takes a village to raise a child, and to prepare the ground upon which the village is built
Fiction: The end and a beginning
The infinity loop of humankind: The ebb and flow of co-regulation
Introduction
We are at the last core concept of Theraplay, a new concept which was added when The Theraplay Institute brought the wheel back into use at Level 1 trainings in 2023. At first, I thought it wasn’t needed: surely co-regulation was covered under responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective? But as ever, give the unconscious a chance and open a space to one’s tacit knowledge and oceans of insight can emerge.
This month I am again re-integrating the three elements of my practice — that of therapist, therapist educator, and practitioner researcher. As we approach the end of my thoughts and theorisation about Theraplay, it fits with the flow of this explorative endeavour to expand then contract. You will also see I’ve made more cross-links to previous writing to try to support this integration.
The fiction this month is from the end of The Mad Man in the Attic. We finally get to a point where Val is starting to work with the grown up Joe and his two children: his son Sammy, and his daughter Niks (named for Nicola, Joe’s foster carer that we met in A Necessary Life(Story)). Val has managed to retire again and so is in a freer space to be responsive to Joe without the shackles of having to work under an organisation and within a constraining role (see There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.). Joe is being assessed to care for Niks and Sammy because Shell, his long time partner and the children’s mother, has been drawn back into her family of origin. Because of his history of being in care and in secure accommodation, an assumption has been made that the children are not safe with Joe.
Fiction: Faint changes
Sammy shrieked in delight! Joe had just made a plastic penny appear from behind his ear. Grace was over at a table, sitting next to Niks, who was painting and drawing. Niks was quiet, the exuberant defiance that Val remembered tempered by grief over the loss of her mother. Grace was helping her draw it out. Shell had been due to come here today, to the contact centre, to see the children, and she had not arrived. Niks traced her dislocation out in faint pencil marks on the paper. Joe had tried to call the last mobile number he’d had for Shell, but there was no connection. Despite the magic trick, Val could see the pain in Joe’s eyes.
“Do you miss her?” she asked.
Joe nodded, “We all do. She was a good Mummy. I still can’t believe it all went so wrong so quickly.” He lifted Sammy and held him upside down by his ankles. Val was worried, but Sammy laughed.
“Swing me, daddy, swing me!”
“Okay,” Joe said, “just a little.”
Val could see him bring Sammy to the edge of excitement, just to the point where this stopped being fun, and then he brought him back to connection and safety with a cuddle and a snack. He really did embody Theraplay. He didn’t even know he was doing it.
“Why don’t you train as a therapist?” she asked suddenly. She found she had much less of a filter these days. Stuff that once she’d have held in her head now popped out of her mouth. She wasn’t sure if it was old age, or detaching herself from her professional persona, or something to do with the discovery of herself in the discovery of the story of her conception.
The social worker allocated to Joe’s case came bustling in.
“Sorry I’m late! Is the mother not here? I thought she was coming for contact.”
Sammy’s exuberance was suddenly muted; he leaned back into his daddy, holding his daddy’s hand, comforting himself with his thumb in his mouth. In truth, everyone stiffened a bit at the energy the woman brought with her, as well as the meaning of her presence. Sammy had never met her before, but was astute enough to know that she held some power over them and that he wanted to be cautious of her. To her credit, the social worker quickly saw Sammy’s reluctance for what it was: a smart little boy who knew who the safe person in his life was and who wanted to be with that person when a stranger bowled up.
She sat down and started to talk to Val and Joe. As she spoke, she produced a pot of bubble mix from her pocket and blew some bubbles. She didn’t even look at Sammy. Val was impressed. This social worker knew what she was doing!
Slowly, Sammy became interested in the bubbles, and then interested in the blower of the bubbles. She didn’t rush it, and finally she said, “I wonder Sammy, would you like to come and do some drawing with me?”
Sammy looked to Joe.
“It’s okay,” he said, “I’ll stay here, and you can find me if you want me.”
That was enough reassurance for Sammy to go off with the social worker.
“It’ll be okay, Joe,” Val reassured.
“Yeah, I know,” Joe said, but they all knew that until the social worker was satisfied and reassured that Sammy and Niks felt — and really were — safe with Joe, they would continue to live under the shadow of worry that the children might be taken away.
Today was the last part of the assessment: Niks was giving her views and wishes to Grace, and Sammy was doing the same with the social worker. They were all anxious, but also all hopeful, as the social worker did seem to be seeing what was in front of her as more important than what was written in files.
To distract Joe from his rumination, Val asked, “when did you last have a holiday?”
Joe’s laugh was hollow. “Val, when have we ever been able to afford a holiday?”
Val raised her eyebrows. She really was losing her touch, her in-tune-ness. Then she worried that Joe might perceive her eyebrows as some sort of judgement.
“Sorry,” she said, “that was thoughtless of me.”
“Have you got something on your mind?” Joe asked.
“Oh, Joe, it’s me that’s meant to be caring about you!” Val responded with her heart full of both affection at Joe’s awareness, and chagrin that she’d put him in a position where he offered support to her.
“I couldn’t train as a therapist because I have a criminal record,” Joe said, going back to the previous comment. “And I couldn’t afford it. But I can see you aren’t quite here, Val. Not like you usually are.”
Val rubbed her eyes. “I’m not.”
She paused, she wasn’t sure of her relationship with Joe now. She was not a professional to him, but she had been in the past. In the past, she would never have disclosed anything about herself. But he had noticed and asked, and wasn’t it respectful to treat him as an equal? He was not the vulnerable young man he had been even two or three months ago. They had both changed.
“I found out some stuff about my past, and it shook me a bit.”
Joe laughed, warmly and kindly. “Join the club!”
Val joined in with his laughter. It had felt so heavy to her since coming back from Bournemouth, but Joe was right; so many people carried the kind of messed up stories she was discovering about herself. Maybe that is why she had been so drawn to work with young people like Joe and Milo. She really did identify with their stories. Up to now, she hadn’t consciously known to what extent. That was the disorientating bit: the fact that she had known all along, she just hadn't known the facts — only the feelings of not being right, a bodily and emotional missing something about herself.
The whole structure of understanding herself in her training therapy had been about her mother's failure to care for her in the way she needed, not about the wider scheme of things that might have illuminated her mother's strengths.
“I’ll need to go away again for a bit,” she said to Joe, “there is some more stuff I need to sort out.”
It takes a village to raise a child, and to prepare the ground upon which the village is built
This is the last post I will write where I centre Theraplay as the model I am writing about. From next month, it will become one of the models that I have in my mind as I move tacit maternal knowing into a form that I hope is more usable for people. I am aware of a shift, a transition, a movement from something to something. Val and Joe both are wondering about how to flourish given the changes in their lives: Val from discovering her history, Joe from his partner and children’s mother being drawn back into her history. Joe’s history could become a challenge for him and get in the way of his future.
As I said in the introduction, the concept of co-regulation as a core component of the Theraplay model was added in the rewriting of the Level 1 training in 2023. The model is now presented as a ‘wheel’, with the goals of Theraplay being like the tyre of the wheel that absorbs the bumps in the road; the four dimensions being the sturdy rim of the wheel/model; and the core concepts being the spokes that give the wheel strength without being cumbersome.
As I said in the introduction, at first I thought this new core concept wasn’t needed. So what has emerged as I gave my cognitive mind a break and let my pre-verbal, right brained, and creative part space to create the fiction?
There is a shift; we have to allow both the people we work with and ourselves to change.
Co-regulation is different to the responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective core concept because that core concept feels focused on how the more powerful actor is in relation to the less powerful. In the case of Theraplay, this is usually how we as grown-ups choose to respond to the child we are working with or parenting. The use of empathy suggests, to me, intentionality in how the person with greater power chooses to use that in the service of the other, whether that ‘power’ is greater knowledge, or patience, or wisdom, or merely their designation as ‘the professional’ or ‘the helper’.
As the fiction reflects ‘more than I can say’ back to me, co-regulation, as I’ve come to make sense of it, captures the three components of tacit maternal knowing that I identified in my doctoral thesis (What did I do? I don’t know.) — particularly dependence/interdependence. However, as with the core concepts, you can’t have one component of tacit maternal knowing without the others. Faithfulness and not knowing/letting go need to remain in our minds in some form as we reflect on the core concept of co-regulation in the light of dependence/interdependence.
The ‘co-’ bit holds for me that this is a two-way street. If we allow ourselves as the person in the position of leadership or power to absorb the state of the other, the state between us has the potential to become one of interdependence. We can be intentional about adopting this position and way of being, but we have no idea about how we will be changed by the process. Therapeutically, or in our research practice, or our practice as therapist educators, this has the potential to allow for connection in a way that can be tolerated by everyone involved. The social worker (nameless, but I’m not sure why — maybe a more mellow representation of the ‘powers that be’?) slows down to match the tensions of those in the room. She blows bubbles and waits for Sammy to approach her. She chooses to change her state, her bustling busyness, so that she can connect and make herself available to the other.
Co-regulation, then, is allowing yourself to be put out, inconvenienced, led down the garden path (see Responsive, attuned, empathic, and reflective), as this gives a ground for connection at an embodied level, at the level where people feel ‘got’, as slippery as that is to pin down as an experience (see Seeing one’s self in the other). It may well be that, although you are a leader in this, you choose to be led. In allowing yourself to be led, you see that the space of the other is more appropriate than any theoretical or preconceived notion that you had as you seek to make holistic sense of what is before you. You m/other, not other (see From othering to m/othering). The social worker sees beyond the stuff in Joe’s files and so is comfortable with the not knowing/letting go process of tacit maternal knowing to feed a sound, contingent, and humane decision about Joe's capabilities, considering the wishes, feelings, and needs of Sammy and Niks.
Co-regulation is a leveller, it feeds into practising with a commitment to equality, acknowledgment of diversity and inclusiveness. Joe needs to point out to Val that what she is struggling with is what so many people struggle with. Just because she is a professional, an educated white woman, it doesn’t give her story any more importance (or less) than his as a financially stressed young male whose life chances are being limited by an early story imposed on him by the actions of others. Who is the more powerful in this? Their powers, their insights, their strengths, and their skills are just different.
Co-regulation is beyond listening. It is another embodied experience. It happens in the multisensory, right-brained, and pre-verbal. It becomes co-creative because of the readiness of everyone to be interactive and relationship-based in a responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective manner. It gathers together many of the other Theraplay core concepts. It is egalitarian. It is letting oneself as a therapist, as a researcher, and as a therapist educator, be regulated to the state of the other (be that a family, an individual, or a group), then using the core concepts of ‘being guided by the adult’ and ‘playful’ to lead the process towards whatever shared goals you have. Goals may be different in therapy, research, and therapist education, but the process, in my opinion, would be the same. Allow the bidirectional flow of co-regulation and use this, with love, to find the points of human connection and relational overlap and the wheels keep on turning. New things emerge — co-constructed, co-creative. There is movement and there is hope.
I’m beginning to think that the two added core concepts of Theraplay — co-regulation and cultural sensitivity — are more like an inner tube on the wheel, rather than spokes. They wrap around all of the concepts and are part of the process of absorbing the bumps in the road, supported by the embracing framework of the four dimensions. The tyre bit may be the interface between self and life bumps: each of us are ‘pumped up’ on the experience of being ‘got’, and being held in a culturally sensitive and co-regulated way keeps up our tyre pressure (resilience), so the bumps keep being weathered, and our tyres don’t get deflated. Which brings me to think about how I’ve been neglecting the ground, or the earth, in my theorisation of what I do (see Merging back to earth).
Joe’s life chances are limited not by his abilities or capacities but by things beyond his control: his birth story, the birth stories of his parents, the birth story of Shell, economics, housing, access to education as a person who is neurodivergent and whose dyslexia was not picked up, and so on.
Co-regulation has a significant shadow side when there is an invisible or unacknowledged power imbalance that is then allowed to play out in an unchallenged way.
Shell's wounds were such that when her family reappeared in her life, she was co-regulated back into that way of life, a life that meant that she couldn’t stay in touch with the love that Joe and her children had for her. Nor could she hold the love she had for Joe and her children. The shadow side of co-regulation, the intense pull of resonating with the past, the experience of feeling at home, even in that dangerous and destructive home, was of more visceral intensity than the daily battle to let love in by lowering her guard, being vulnerable, and there being change through bidirectional interdependence. Shell was pulled back to a place of static, stuck, destructive independence where it was every person for themselves.
Co-regulation in relationship is in the form of an infinity loop, an ebb and flow.
What happens when a co-regulation that is sought is not one of co-creativity, not one of progression and riffing off each other to make new tunes, not one of joyful building upon building? Co-creation can work in both ways, it can create relationships that can lead to elaboration and building or relationships that lead to destruction.
In pondering the fiction, I found myself wondering, why Bournemouth? Why the beach?
Last month I wrote about the shadow side of all we do and how it needs to be part of our thinking, or things can go wildly off course. The shadow side of co-regulation is to be pulled into a loop that doesn’t really feel authentic to you, but out of attuned empathy you go there and get caught in the rip current. My work, our work, is all about moving people on, creating relationships within which they can flourish. But there is a risk — if we keep going with the metaphor — of the tide or erosion or coastal build-up. Both have issues: erosion might damage but also reveal, and build-up creates, but can block things that are flowing and then require choice between what is best — the new material, or dredging out a channel for the old to continue.
What do you do when co-regulation by someone or something that positions itself as the powerful one leads to stagnation and thwarting of potential? How do we as therapists, researchers, and educators of therapists avoid being co-regulated into connections that feel destructive because we are pulled into a place where there is a misuse of power? How do we integrate more of an understanding of the shadow side of these concepts into our practice?
To help explore this, I am including an additional excerpt from the end of The Mad Man in the Attic. Val and Graham have been reading papers written by Gordon and Marjorie as they clear the house in Bournemouth.
Fiction: The end and a beginning
Val and Graham looked at each other. They’d swapped the pages of writing so they knew what the other had read.
“So it was my mother,” Val said, “the watercolour I found.”
Graham nodded. He seemed very affected by what he’d read. He swallowed hard.
“What are you thinking?” Val asked.
“How do I be a man?” Graham said. Then more quietly, “How?”
“I don’t understand?” Val questioned. She also questioned her puzzlement at Graham's distress over what they had read.
Graham was clearly struggling to find the words to express himself.
“Why don’t we go for a walk on the beach,” Val suggested, thinking the movement might help settle the stories they’d been reading.
Graham just nodded; even basic sentences seemed to elude him at the moment.
They drove in silence and then walked in silence, the sound of waves creating a background of distraction, the wind strong enough to be a balancing pain to the inner turmoil.
“Has it changed?” Graham finally said. “Are any of us freer to be who we want to be? You can be independent and strong. Me, I can’t wear a skirt, and if I am kind I’m seen as some sort of pervert. I wouldn’t want to go to war any more than Gordon did — but I bet I’d be called up before you. What is the difference between us? Why can’t I be not-man?”
Val was silent now. She had such a rehearsed story of misogyny and repression of women by men that she’d never thought about how men, too, were repressed by a particular brand of maleness, a hierarchy of maleness, an army of maleness that used war to legitimise the bodily destruction of others.
“I’m done with sex, Val,” he said. “I like you, but I don’t want sex.”
“Thank god for that! I don’t either!” And Val realised from the huge sigh and relaxation inside herself that this had been the awfulness that had haunted her through all her relationships, or lack of them. Sex, that dangly thing between the legs of men that seemed to dominate all the stories of destruction and horror. Sickening, humiliating; a constant threat that if she put a foot wrong, a word wrong, a look wrong, then that would be what she brought down on herself. The invitation of repulsive intrusion. It had kept her bound for years, never daring to be herself. It had been one of the liberations of ageing, being seen as sexless and mad. That had given her some freedom. Working with children who had been hurt by sex meant she kept sex in her thinking as something to be avoided, something that held it in the place of damage rather than accepting it just didn’t have a place in a world as she wanted the world to be for her. The world had always been dangerous. It had been a wound unhealed for her mother, and so a wound unheard for her.
She grabbed Graham's hand. She held their joint hands aloft to salute the sea.
“To us!” she cried. “To being us!”
The infinity loop of humankind: The ebb and flow of co-regulation
Aha! That is why the story goes to the beach at the end, there is ebb and flow. The tide continues no matter what. Each wave is part of a continuous flow of the same material, just each one also utterly different. The shadow side is as much part of the whole thing as the sunny side!
In all my writing to date, I haven’t really considered in any depth the ground upon which the wheel is travelling, the place where the bumps are laid. Why have I not been writing about how to apply my thinking to the organisational processes that surround our work? As well as considering our work as therapists, researchers, and educators of therapists, I am starting to wonder how this applies to us as managers of therapeutic organisations. That interface with the world can often be very bumpy indeed!
In taking the Theraplay wheel, trying to examine each core concept to a depth that I’ve not encountered in other writing, and in seeking to embody it and live it over these last 9 months, I feel I have reached a point of departure: a new birth that is both end and beginning, ebb as well as flow. I feel challenged to really live out openness to others. To see how I can use the core concept of co-regulation to keep the ebb and flow going and allow stories to continue to grow, including the stories that embrace the shadows. I am already thinking that Joe could be enrolling on the Diploma in Child and Adolescent Psychotherapeutic Counselling course at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. Now that could be a story that will inform my next venture in examining my inward journey to find what I do know and share it with you!
From next month, my writing will be about M/otherTongue, a term I am considering using to elaborate on tacit maternal knowing when developing an approach to engaging with people that has attachment theory at the heart. Tacit maternal knowing doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue! The term M/otherTongue captures that within this approach to working with people, I am seeking to find a way to operationalise tacit maternal knowing, as well as continue to develop it as an epistemological stance. I hope it can become a methodology for therapeutic practice, research, and the education of professionals who have care at the heart of their ethics and practice, and, after writing this post, as something that can inform the management of therapeutic services.
M/otherTongue will be grounded in a feminist and social justice perspective, seek to de-patrify the work of attachment informed professionals (admiring the work of those who are decolonising their work and acknowledging the place that I need to start is winkling out the impact of the patriarchy on me and my practice) and look to sit outside the value judgments that are inherent in white, male, western, capitalist organisational structure.
Who wants to come with me on another adventure in heuristic inquiry into our practice, using fiction to understand what we do already know? If you have ideas about what you’d like me to think about, let me know via the comments. I’m up for you suggesting dilemmas that I could ‘play with’ in fiction and see what emerges!