What is M/otherTongue for Leadership?
Contents
Fiction: Brenna | Brenna in Wells-next-the-Sea
What is M/otherTongue for leadership?
Introduction
Welcome to this next step in this new ‘venture of exploration. I feel I am very much in the first two phases of a heuristic inquiry approach, those of identifying with the focus of the inquiry and the process of self dialogue (see Moving forward, breaking down for the diagram of the heuristic inquiry process). Last month, I said that I had tried to write new fiction and found I wasn’t ready for that yet. However, this month, I am introducing you to a new character who emerged in The Mad Man in the Attic, Brenna. In this fiction, we meet Brenna first as a young teenager, then again as a young adult in Wells-next-the-Sea, the place that Val and Graham go to meet Val’s cousin (see Seeing one’s self in the other).
Fiction:
Brenna
The first time she did it (and she was a she at that point in time), she’d slumped on a garden wall opposite afterwards. There was a bus stop far enough away and close enough at the same time to make it seem that she could, maybe, be waiting for a bus but choosing to sit here under the glowing orange of a street light. A girl alone, in the dusk.
She saw them, the couple, come back to the house, park, walk up the path. Take out their key, talking to each other easily. She was scrabbling in her bag. He seemed to huff as he pulled the car keys back out of his pocket and opened the door for her, momentarily squashing her against the wall.
Brenna was waiting. Would there be some sort of minute reaction? An exclamation? A flicking of lights? A reaction as small as the change she had made? That’s what she did. She broke in, looked around, made sense of what was important to them by what was missing. Then she’d pointed it out by moving or changing or switching something. She’d turned the television on to a children’s channel, sound on silent, before exiting, leaving no trace of herself.
A car pulled up, breaking her focus on the house.
“You okay, love?” The police officer was female, calling to her from the wound-down window.
“Bus.” Brenna answered without making eye contact, without even looking up.
“They’ve finished for the night.”
“Better walk then,” and she got up, stuffing her hands deep in her pockets, her head sunk between her shoulder blades. She cranked her music up loud in her ears, demonstrating to the police car that she was just a teenager, not wanting to hear if they followed or turned around or had been called to the house by the couple wanting to report that, maybe, someone had broken in. Or, maybe, they’d just forgotten, forgotten their…absence of future? No children. They’d decided. Not wanting to bring children into this world.
Brenna in Wells-next-the-Sea
Brenna sat on the quay wall, swinging their legs and eating an ice cream. Next to them, a small boy was dangling a rancid piece of bacon on a string into the water and pulling up crab after crab, which he put into a clear plastic bucket.
Brenna found themself fascinated by the growing number of crustaceans as they crawled over each other in a futile attempt to make sense of their change of circumstances.
“What will you do with them?” they asked impulsively.
The boy looked at them, unsure whether he ought to speak to this person. He looked round and caught his Dad’s eye. It seemed to give him confidence.
“Tip them back,” he replied. Then, studiously, he kept his eyes on the line going back down into the murky, muddy waters in the harbour.
Brenna felt a familiar rage and self-disgust rise within them. They assumed, correctly, that the boy was bracing himself against the not-sureness he felt about them. Man or woman? Threat or no threat? No shape to the space between the two possibilities.
Brenna wanted to say, “I’m safe!” but then they sometimes wondered if they were. They were tempted to just throw the rest of the ice cream into the water and cuff the boy around the head to send him after it. People should, it seemed, have a wariness of them.
Holding feelings in was hard work! They just wanted a place where they could effortlessly be themselves! They’d, she’d, been taken to see someone when they were 13. A doctor of some sort? No one told her what was going on. She just thought she was gay, or mad, or plain normal but weird. Whatever! That’s when they started house breaking.
It was when she was at university that she went to see the college nurse. She took the time to talk with Brenna and helped her access a specialist service. She’d had a scan and discovered that actually she had internal testes rather than ovaries, and no womb, just a vagina. It had a name, PAIS, partial androgen insensitivity syndrome. She’d never realised her genitals were a bit different to others’, it just wasn’t something anyone ever talked about.
“Does this mean I’m not a woman?” she’d asked.
“No,” the nurse had replied. “It means you can be whoever you want to be.”
Except, of course, the world had a lot of ideas about who she should be and shouldn’t be and how that meant she should behave. It made her mad in many senses of the word. So she became they and the rage they felt meant that if they saw a convention about how a woman should behave, they flouted it. If people think I might be a danger, then I may as well be one, they’d thought.
But it wasn’t true.
They were just keeping themself safe and keeping others away to avoid the shameful truth as they felt it. That they were a nothing, an in-between, a neither/nor. But just too damn big to fade into the background, legs too long, shoulders too wide, Adam’s apple too big, too many muscles. Too often they were misidentified as trans. They had nothing against trans women, they just weren’t one. So, the only option was to hide in plain sight and thrust themself on others before others thrust themselves on them. But not this little boy, they didn't want to do that to a young child. Inwardly, they glared at the dad, then remembered that dad had given the boy confidence to answer them. Not all the world deserved their rage, but still the rage needed a place.
They made themself finish the ice-cream, get up from the wall of the quay, and start a walk down the path that followed where the river turned into the sea, where they could see across the salt marshes and down to the lifeboat station and the beach. Breathing. Being. Letting their breath go to the part of them, those small pieces of flesh, that made them them. Longing to love themselves, not just with their wishes and their head, but wholly, wholly, wholly.
What is M/otherTongue for ‘leadership’?
Why, you may wonder (as I do!) has this piece of fiction come to mind when my focus is on our operationalisation of M/otherTongue? How is it going to help in our exploration of how tacit maternal knowing can become part of a mainstream way of caring for others, especially around the question of what leadership is in this elusive M/otherTongue?
I am trying to move beyond Theraplay and think about M/otherTongue in a wider sense. I am wanting to theorise tacit maternal knowing, and then use it to shape choices and decisions in our work, whatever that may be, and I am still a Theraplay therapist. Theraplay remains the lens through which I shape my quest to understand the phenomenon before me, whether that is a child and family I am seeking to help in therapy, or this broader, maybe more philosophical and theory-generating conundrum I’m wrestling with: what does M/otherTongue mean for us in our practice as therapists, as therapist educators, as researchers, and as people who run organisations that care for others? (Given that this list of ‘things we do’ is very wordy, from now on when I refer to all of them I’ll just call it ‘our work’. If I am referring to a particular facet of our work, I will specify this.)
In Theraplay, where there is a need for outside to inside regulation, where there is need for a sense of safety and for organisation, I automatically think of the dimension of Structure.
So, to use Structure to help me organise this month's post, here are three things I’ve been doing in my ‘venture to make M/otherTongue usable.
1) The application for a trademark for the term M/otherTongue
2) The application for ethics clearance to situate the ‘venture as Research (yes, I intended to capitalise it to make it clear I am trying to make this a Research Project, not just my hobby).
3) Wrestling to stay with the technique developed in my doctoral research that the fiction will tell me everything I need to know if I trust the process and trust myself.
And, as I work out how to identify with the focus of the inquiry and start the process of self dialogue, here are the three core issues that pondering on the fiction in light of the above actions, have led me to:
1) The problem of envy, of how tackling the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is all well and good if what you are doing is appreciated. But if it is not and you are giving up a lot to create a climate of equity by using your power in the service of the less powerful other and others then exploit your skills, uniqueness, and wisdom and usurp your power by seeing those through their lens, it is really hard not to feel a rage. And that rage can lead to leadership being seen as deviant, possibly dangerous. Or I can feel an element of being a spoiler rise in me.
2) Just how subtle the management of knowledge is by those who already inhabit the spaces of power. And just how deeply my ‘schooling’ as a white, western woman brought up in a patriarchal and misogynistic family and community culture has blinded me to many aspects of how my first language of M/otherTongue has not even been seen as ‘something’ but is a ‘nothing’.
3) Exposure is toe-curlingly painful.
Let me try to expand on those in a way that makes sense. I am, though, aware that at this early stage of a new heuristic inquiry, part of what I am doing is that aspect of tacit maternal knowing of not knowing/letting go. It is a facet of the process that what follows may be more than a little messy! To keep taking this back to the wisdom of mothers…think poonami! It just all has to come out, and we can clean up the mess later! So the following thoughts may at times sound a bit random. That is because they are. That is heuristic inquiry for you. My first observation on leadership using our M/otherTongue is that messiness is not only okay, but actually being in the messiness is leadership.
Leadership in our M/otherTongue is about process, not product.
M/otherTongue for leadership creates space where people can give their all, become exhausted, and know they are held. An image that came to me when I was pondering what this leadership may look like is one of my children aged two, able to surrender to complete rest after playing. A soul at rest. Something Brenna craves.
Winnicott (1990; 1997) theorises this as the infant being able to be in an un-integrated state, and this being a foundation for creativity. However, as ever, so much of this state is then taken and talked about in terms of what happens when it goes ‘wrong’ and what should then be done to make things ‘right’, the binaries Brenna struggles with when they are in Wells-next-the-Sea. So much in the literature is about the repair of damage, implying that someone or something has done damage, that such damage can be addressed by others. Winnicott talks about the infant who is in an un-integrated state by themself and needs to defend against annihilation and disintegration. Being alone with the need to lose oneself, because it is part of growth and maturation, leads to the need for a defensive position. But the defence also tells us that the good is in a protected space, maternal leadership creates a safe space for un-integration to happen.
Brenna tells me that this unseen shifting and creating of opportunity for the other is a task of speaking the M/otherTongue, but it can be seen as being deviant or downright dangerous. Or just not seen at all, a background that is not recognised as something necessary for the foregrounded process to occur - uniintegration and creativity can’t happen unless someone is watching the space around the vulnerable child.
Humans do need to feel like they belong to survive, we are herd animals. Relationships are what keeps us alive - although we all have different tolerances and styles within relationships. We express our individuality within relationship in a manner that fits with those tolerances and personal capacities. This is the dependence/interdependence element of M/otherTongue.
The message I have carried within me has been that as a person, when I speak M/otherTongue and care about others, when I try to do the background task of making a safe space, that isn’t really what the working world, or the research world, wants to know about. It is less than those ‘proper’ tasks of work where things are produced and, ultimately, create income. I have been fascinated by the thoughts that have come to mind as I’ve completed and submitted the ethics approval. A colleague kindly agreed to look at it for me. I was so aware this was beyond their role because my completing the ethics approval form was beyond my paid role. I struggled with asking someone to do something that is about my ‘hobby’, something I do in my ‘spare time’ when I’m not working, that is to say doing something that leads to the exchange of money. However, if formally accepted, this piece of paper will transform hobby to research, a marker of other people holding a safe space for me.
Mothers are our greatest leaders, and yet they are regularly ‘forgotten’ in leadership thinking or actually negatively considered. I often find myself inwardly cringing or even apologising for daring to care about someone - ‘have you managed to have some lunch?’ feels like a risky thing to say. I mustn't be so ‘mumsy’! People are independent and can make their own choices! (Mumsy somehow being heard as an undermining, infantilising relational position, a taking away of power from the other. But I’m not making choices for others! Not imposing! I am trying to care! I’m trying to notice what may have been missed.)
Leadership in M/otherTongue is not about being out in front blazing a trail, nor about being behind and pushing the other forward, but about being able to take on both those positions if needed, and when needed to be alongside and enabling the other, finding that place that is not either/or, nor both/and, but spans the continuum. And, Brenna tells me that leadership in M/otherTongue is also knowing when to walk away. I’m not even sure English has the words for what I am trying to say here!
Mothers are our first and greatest leaders
That is a big and bold statement. But let’s go back to attachment theory. Let’s go back to the focus on earliest experiences and how they form the foundation of our lives (Holmes, 2001). Think about how our problem-saturated model of looking at human development looks at the legacy of that earliest relationship in providing a foundation that is ‘poor’ in terms of equipping small and developing humans to become part of the manstream. And think about how the manstream is focussed on individual attainment, success being measured by income or status, linear ‘progress’, uniformity, efficiency, and speed. Is that a pressure of production? But what if leadership in M/otherTongue is about not being individual as a singular goal but this being part of the interdependence/dependence part of human existence? What if leadership in M/otherTongue is about equipping people to be part of the humanstream?
Heuristic inquiry as a research methodology is fitting for my exploration of M/otherTongue as the greatest form of leadership, as it also eschews ‘product’ in favour of ‘process’. Brenna, in Wells-next-the-Sea starts to move (downstream) towards the ocean. The ‘streams’ do all feed into something big - do our theories for work focus on that something big?
I find myself sighing and that gives me some sort of relaxation response. Slowing gives me more space to go inwards. M/otherTongue for leadership is slow focus on process. It is Bion (1990) saying to enter therapy without memory or desire.
The voice of the world, the manstream is so strong and has so colonised my internal working model, my RIG (Stern, 2006: representations of interactions that have been generalised), the spectacles through which I see the world. And I don’t think it is just me. Trying to reform the construction of what is ‘proper knowledge’ and ‘proper leadership’ feels like trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, risking saying we are getting it terrible wrong in how we are running our worlds at the moment. It’s not the leadership of mothers that is causing such childhood distress, it is the lack of support for mothers to be leaders of the people that most matter for our future, our children, that is the root of distress. If we can’t get some form of M/otherTongue in the mainstream of work - of practice, research, and management - then how is change going to happen?
If I am to follow the lead of my own M/otherTongue and see Brenna as a character who is giving the knowledge that I already hold within myself, M/otherTongue for leadership is causing discomfort to enable insight. But in the fiction, there is something rage-full for Brenna.
The shadow side of this is the potential for rage
Warning! These thoughts seem very random, maybe rage contributes to the incoherence.
Rage is the shadow side of not being known, or probably worse still, being mis-known.
The rage I am trying to make sense of in order to lead with my M/otherTongue is how I can use that energy to fuel the development of theory and the sharing of ideas that we need to lead others by cherishing the beauty of a being, the beauty of a person. Rage, competition, envy, and destruction - spoiling - is a potential outcome if a soul is not cherished and given the free and protected space to flourish. For a person to have nowhere and no-one who can let them feel safe enough to un-integrate, the person will disintegrate and become nothing. I know from the rest of the fiction about Brenna that it is the inner injury that drives them, shown through their behaviour of housebreaking and moving objects to dis-quieten others.
The voice I have in my head is querulous. There is fury in me. And no real answer about what M/otherTongue for leadership is. It is something to do with giving and receiving care and knowing there are costs involved, not just financial but personal and emotional and spiritual. It is something about a holistic identity that means I crave to live my life not feeling one part is more acceptable than another, or one part more valuable than another. That, unconditionally, I and others are seen as worthwhile beings - whatever their salary, whatever their body shape and size. M/otherTongue for leadership is threaded through with a commitment to equity; prizing and enjoying diversity and looking to actively include others.
Recently I submitted a paper to an academic journal. It has been returned as not yet sufficiently formed to be sent out for peer review. I assume this means it should look more like every other academic paper - but the whole point was to subvert the form. The whole point was to do a Brenna and move something so people felt a bit uncomfortable and were made to see what was missing in their lives. Rather than do a break-in like Brenna, I tried to explain the process - maybe that was my error. Maybe leadership in M/otherTongue does need to be more like Brenna and be subversive. At least Brenna opens the possibility for change in the houses they break into.
If what I am doing is just plain rejected as not being ‘good enough’ in the patriarchal mainstream, then no one is hearing this new perspective. How then can I/we take the wisdom of mothers and say this is important knowledge that should be in the mainstream, the humansteam, and should inform our leadership because look at what is happening now in our families, in our schools, and in our world. The fundamental position of current leadership is to say ‘the Other has got it wrong’, if everyone does what we perceive as right, then everything will be okay. The fundamental position of leadership in our M/otherTongue is to say, what does this communication mean, and how shall I respond to it to support interdependence through caring dependence, where that is a necessary part of growth and development?
In the process of applying for a trademark I’ve received one unsolicited invoice for nearly £800 that said in small print that paying it would indicate I’d entered a contract with someone for something, but it was made out to look like it was from an official body. I’ve had one email saying I could pay £50 and get legal support if anyone contested the trademark. Someone has made a ‘notice of threatened opposition’ - what a threatening term in itself! I have emailed the company and explained what I want to do with this project of M/otherTongue, that it is a non-commercial process. But in applying for a trademark, I have entered the commercial part of the work. In entering it, all responses so far have been about people making or defending income. I wonder what would happen if one of you issued a notice of threatened opposition on the grounds that morally and ethically the word mother can’t be part of a trademark because everyone has one already? (If you do want to challenge the trademark, its number is UK00004050232 and you can do so via the UK Intellectual Property Office.)
In embarking on this ‘venture, in seeking to obtain a trademark, in trying to explore traditional academic routes to sharing knowledge and ethics clearance, I am trying to be a leader who is wanting to make the theories we work by less Othering and more universal. But I worry about my management of the master’s tools. I end up questioning everything. What do I really mean by leadership in our M/otherTongue?
It is putting it out there in the world, this in-betweenness of the actual role of mothering which is unseen and devalued, yet me seeming to say - I am a hyper mother, I’m banging the drum, I’m demanding you take me seriously when I talk about M/otherTongue. Rage is not a good lead for leadership! It might make my voice loud and give me energy to keep pressing on and challenging the patriarchy. But using the master’s tools brings the master’s responses of threat and risk and confrontation. It wearies me, it isn’t really aligned with how I wish to be in my M/otherTongue, it isn’t the language that comes naturally to me. Brenna, I suspect, as I write about them in the future, will be the character that tells me what I already know about how to channel the rage to being creative rather than it curdling into envy.
Leadership in our M/otherTongue is not related to biological sex
I am talking about an inner experience, not an external provision. I am very aware that I am in the territory where people who have been mothers might feel I am mother bashing and saying they are failing. I am very aware my mother reads this, as do the people I have mothered. This is about how we make theory from our lived experience, our practice based evidence, and do the thing that Bowlby did, and Winnicott did, and Bion did, and Ainsworth too - observe, reflect, think, and theorise; take that back into the world and repeat the cycle to see if the thinking helps our work be humane, creative, and growthful.
Leadership in M/oterTongue is to enable a soul to relax so they find creativity. When I look at the image of my flat-out relaxed child, able to sleep so deeply wherever they land, I feel my face relax, my eyes, the muscles around my eyes move to the place where tears come. Not tears of sadness, but the tears of the soul that adores, and my mouth smiles. I am pleased that I see my child, I am pleased that they exist and are on the face of this planet to make a difference by just being. I am pleased that we have a relationship. Yes, that is harder with the children and parents I work with as a therapist, yes that is harder with a class of many counselling students, yes that is hard in this inner search to allow that for myself as a heuristic researcher, and it is hard as a leader. And it is still what I want.
In being a therapist, leadership in M/otherTongue is to breathe in the distress of the other and not be overwhelmed by it. In research, it is promoting process-driven practice. In management, it is doing something with the master's tools so they can’t be used against M/otherTongue. In therapist education, again process over product but with a different edge - so ensuring that what is truly prized is what is central to good work, relationship rather than prizing what is measurable.
Whatever the type of work on your mind, there has to be a fair amount of getting it wrong to work out where the edges of your skill are. So leadership in M/otherTongue is something around prizing the errors and making safe space to get it wrong. That means there has to be a process of leadership that gives feedback in a way that is maternal/non-shaming, based on relationship and fostering interdependence. I’m thinking toddler rather than infant - I prize you even if what you’ve done is less than ideal! I see your messy, often slightly dangerous exploration in the context of your growth and development and I, as leader/mother, will invisibly set the boundaries to keep the safety so you, the individual finding flourishing, are not impeded in your quest. And I, the mother/leader, will ensure the safe space for you to rest, un-integrate and re-form based on that relational adventure.
Relationship with people you lead is a foundation in leadership using our M/otherTongue. You have to love them into being the best they can be so they can be as available as possible in relationship to enable those they work with to be the best they can be. Oooo, I feel resistance even in myself as I write that.
Leadership in our M/otherTongue is lonely, but trying to word this to connect up with you leaves me feeling very exposed
Brenna as a character that has emerged from within me, posing me all sorts of questions. I am not unaware of how close the name Brenna is to Brenda, the matriarchal supervisor Val has in A Necessary Life(Story). Brenda was Val’s anchor, the safe person who can challenge her. In The Mad Man in the Attic, Brenna and Val never meet. In fact, they exist in parallel timelines.
The names, however, make me think that somehow my tacit knowledge is linking Brenda and Brenna, both being leaders of some sort in my quest to make sense of how M/otherTongue can be useful to each of us in our work.
In addition to sharing this fiction, I also found myself very unsettled by what I chose to cut out of the fiction, knowing you would be reading it.
In The Mad Man in the Attic, Brenna is part of a writing group that forms during Covid-19. A person in the fictional writing group shares my name. I am using this heuristic process to understand the personal aspects of working using M/otherTongue in various parts of my professional life. And yet, I felt far too uncomfortable to include the sections that had a character that shared my name. It got too close to the question of what is me, and what do I still need to keep hiding. And why? The ‘what is me’ came spontaneously, and I am not changing it to ‘who’. I am starting to make sense of Brenna’s feelings of objectification in the fiction.
How do we find a way to share this knowledge in our work? I don’t want to be a Brenna, but Brenda dies and Val gives up work because it is too hard for her to cope with the thought of creating a new supervisory relationship. So what can I be? How do I lead without losing touch with this thing, this M/otherTongue?
Where has the care gone? What are we doing to people in our culture when homeless peoples tents are illegally trashed, when children needing medical care have to wait so long that their conditions cause lifelong or fatal damage. We are in an election and the focus is on money all the time! I’d happily pay more tax if it meant such people could be cared for, or if I had the confidence to know that I would be cared for if I needed it, given that I have done my best to care for others in my careers as a mother and a therapist.
This kind of writing is so much harder than all the previous posts. I am not presenting things I’ve digested before, as I did with the posts on the core concepts (August 2023 to May 2024). Nor is it about wanting to share what had already been written in my doctoral thesis, as I did in the posts between August 2022 and July 2023. This is generating new connections, this is living out the concept of being comfortable with not knowing/letting go as a dialect of M/otherTongue. But gosh does it feel exposing! You are seeing my work in progress.
Leadership in M/otherTongue is therefore maybe not contained in the actual content of this writing, but in the act of trying to share the process with you. What M/otherTongue for ‘leadership’ is, is less about the end product and more about exposing the moments and circular regressions, the aspect of wrestling that I added to the heuristic model. It is making me wonder if what I am doing here is a form of theory building heuristic inquiry in the way you can have a theory building case study (Stiles, 2007).
Oh my word, are you still with me? I am resisting the urge to apologise for expressing my need to get across this big, powerful, vital something that I feel so strongly about but can’t quite get into words, but which feels so important as we work together to make a difference to our broken world.
P.S. If anyone is interested in peer reviewing my rejected paper, it is called Silencing Voices; the curation of knowledge and ‘dustification’ of tacit maternal knowing in psychotherapeutic method. I’d be delighted to send you a copy. I’m sure it can be improved if peers do review it.
Bibliography
Bion, W. R. (1990). Notes on Memory and Desire. In Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique (pp. 243–254).
Holmes, J. (2001). The search for the secure base: Attachment theory and psychotherapy. Brunner-Routledge.
Stern, D. N. (2006). The interpersonal world of the infant: A view from psychoanalysis and development psychology. Karnac.
Stiles, W. B. (2007). Theory-building case studies of counselling and psychotherapy. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 7(2), 122–127. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733140701356742.
Winnicott, D. W. (1990). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Karnac .
Winnicott, D. W. (1997). Playing and reality. Routledge.