Seeking Fulfilment through our m/other tongue
Contents
Seeking Fulfilment through our m/other tongue
Research update [including a call for suggestions]
Introduction
I can’t separate my writing this month from what I’ve been experiencing in real life. For years, I’ve dreamed of walking Hadrian’s Wall to mark my 60th birthday. This post was drafted as I walked, and edited after completing the 135 km (84-mile) path from England’s east to west coast.
This walk has felt like part of a significant transition in my life. I’m no longer a mother to children but to two incredible young adults. I’m also nearing the final years of my career. I had expected to retire at 60, but the goal posts moved and I will now need to work until 66. Still, I notice my body slowing down, and I’m encountering physical limitations that make it harder to move as fluidly with children during Theraplay sessions as I want/need to.
I will, therefore, be reducing my private practice and focussing more on writing, research, and supporting students to grow into high quality clinicians to work with children, young people, and their families. Such transitions need space to process, and the walk has/is giving me space to do that, to tread the line between the barbarians on my right and the purportedly civilised Romans on my left, metaphorically seeking integration of those two aspects of myself.
The word that kept coming to me during the walk and as this month’s fiction chose itself is ‘fulfilment’. So, this month’s post is gathering thoughts on what fulfilment may look like in our m/other tongue.
Fiction: Ordinary
It had grown slowly, the pleasure of being together. At first, it had come, Val admitted, from a sense of responsibility that it had been her garden that he’d fallen in. But then it was that he just seemed a really easy person to talk to. As a therapist, she was more used to getting people to talk, not vice versa. When she talked it was usually about a case, seeking a sense of direction, or it was with colleagues, like the conversations she was having with Grace about the best way to respond to Joe’s request for help. But with Graham — he just asked simple questions.
Like now.
He couldn’t drive with the cast on his ankle and was going stir-crazy in his house on his own. So Val drove him to the river and they were sitting on a blanket enjoying the evening sun.
“You said you couldn’t remember much of your childhood.”
Val looked at him. “Did I?”
“I think so, when we were lying in your garden…you know, that first night together?” His smile was half, teasing, but still holding the bounds of respect that she’d come to value in him.
“I talked about my childhood incessantly in my therapy when I was training,” she said. It was true — she’d complained about her mother and father without stopping, got insights into how they impacted on her. But…
“But I’m not sure I got to know them any better.”
“What did they do?”
Val lay back on the blanket, trying to call up images. She could picture her father standing over her, looking down at her. Not smiling, but not unhappy either. She felt about 11, not quite a child, but certainly not a woman. He was half silhouetted by the sun. It felt like a snapshot.
“He worked in an office, some kind of administrator. He worked long hours, so I only really saw him on weekends and holidays.”
“Any siblings?”
“No, just me.”
“Tell me more.”
Val hesitated. Was there more to tell? There must be, but it was a bit of a cultivated emptiness that she held from her childhood. She couldn’t recall anyone on her mother’s side — no cousins, no grandparents. Dad, yes, at Christmas. His parents were…stoic, might that be the word? Not poor. There were cousins there, running around, while the grown-ups sat in silence. Val remembered sitting with them, feeling that it was the right thing to do, and having a stony disapproval inside herself of the running children. She could almost hear her mother’s silence that would last for several days after those Christmas family meetings. Steely silence that, to her, to young Val, said, ‘your family should keep more control over those children’.
Had she said that out loud? That voice her mum had, that sounded reasonable yet was so full of judgement was always so present in her head. Maybe she had let it leak out into the world in her own voice.
“What about your mum?”
“It was the early 70s, she was a housewife.”
She was there every day when she got home from school. ‘How was your day? What did you have for lunch? What homework have you got?’ The same questions every day, her acknowledgment of Val coming home. She’d be sitting there reading, or knitting. ‘I’ll get tea in a minute’.
And she did. Val ate alone. Her mother would cook for her father when he got in and they’d eat together, but by then Val would be upstairs in her bedroom, doing her homework or reading or playing with toys to make imaginary worlds. It just seemed an empty set of memories, words delivered in monotone, no eye contact or vivacity.
“Did they tell you how they got together?”
That was a question that did bring a smile to Val’s face.
“Sometimes Mum would show me the wedding photos, probably on their anniversary. They’d gone to the same church. I think they were in the church youth group together. They married in 1960. She was 18. I think it was just how you escaped home back then. Her parents were in those pictures. I don’t know why I never met them, I always thought they must have died. They looked fierce. She did say they were religious. I had this fantasy that I could get a DNA test and discover amazing things about who I am, but I worried, too, that I might just be bog-standard.”
Val paused. They held the silence, sitting on a blanket in the warm sunshine on an evening by the river. It was like two stories that had been running side by side in her all her life. The liveliness and vibrancy of the work she’d done with children. The joy that her cats had brought her. Pleasure with friends and colleagues. The richness of self-knowledge from therapy in her training. And yet. Emptiness. Nothingness. A sense of longing and a deep fear of knowing.
Seeking Fulfilment through our m/other tongue.
As I continue my heuristic inquiry into operationalising the notion of tacit maternal knowing, I remain in the phase of immersion and information gathering. This month, I draw heavily on Susan Gilligan’s In A Human Voice (2023), a book I discovered serendipitously while exploring Brookes et al. (2019) last month.
The idea of Fulfilment arose from the fiction, but I’ve had to keep reminding myself to stick with the process, to keep going back to the fiction and interrogating what is there and what is not. How does this fiction help me explore what fulfilment may be in our m/other tongue?
In my pondering, the more critical question became what stops me feeling a sense of fulfilment in my personal life in the way I do in my professional life? It feels a central question for me as I approach the thought of reducing my clinical work and moving towards partial ‘retirement’. How will I stay motivated without the passion that comes from my direct contact with children? How can I sustain the drive from the knowledge that was affirmed in me through the lived experience of being a mother to children?
Gilligan (2023) prompted me to focus on what is absent in the text, rather than drawing meaning solely from what is there. This led to an insight: a distinction between being cared for and being cared about — or similarly, between caring for and caring about. In my reflections, the fiction seemed to reflect that caring about can be more of an intellectual exercise rooted in responsibility. Val initially cares about Graham because he tripped in her garden, but his asking about her life — his caring for her — creates a different dynamic.
Following last month's wonderings about a "smash and grab" literature review as a maternal frame, my blog editor - who happens to be a librarian and one of my lovely offspring - introduced me to information encountering, or ‘bumping into’ new information (Erdelez, 1999).
The super-encounterers count on information encountering. This habit is, however, not something they are willing to talk about casually, mainly because information encountering does not adhere to the traditionally prescribed methods for finding information. Some super-encounterers are therefore concerned that they may be ridiculed because they rely on bumping into information as a "method" for information acquisition. (Erdelez, 1999, 25)
The manstream carefully curates its knowledge base in a way that confirms its own bias - only certain types of papers written in certain types of ways are acceptable to the ‘top’ journals that have ‘impact’. I would therefore argue that in operationalising our m/other tongue, we should engage with and celebrate the process of super-encountering information to combat the potential invisible centring of deeply embedded patriarchal or androcentric (not femicentric or matrocentric or childcentric) ways of collating and accessing knowledge that has come before. It’s what mothers do all the time in their caring for their infants, the eternal ‘in the moment’ research — what’s wrong, what underpins this state, is it good or not, can I change it, how do I change it?
Erdelez, however, highlights a barrier to this: super-encounterers often silence their own creative and novel methods of knowledge acquisition out of fear of ridicule. For me, this connects directly to the application of mothers' knowledge, their tacit maternal knowing, in the care and support of others. As women, and especially as mothers, it's all too common for our knowledge to be dismissed, minimised, or ignored, leaving us Othered when we trust our felt sense. The feeling that our care is perceived as insignificant is both familiar and deeply disheartening — certainly not a solid foundation for feeling fulfilled!
After reading In a Human Voice, I was struck by a shift in the narrative when Val smiles at the memory of her mother showing wedding photos. This conflicted with the cold image of her mother I’d imagined, as well as Val’s seeming need to side with the stern disapproval of the adults at family Christmases. Where had the childlike joie de vivre gone? Why had it been swallowed?
Gilligan (2023) uses the term ‘moral injury’ to describe how children silence their own voices to fit into the patriarchal expectation of behaviour. In interviews with girls, she noted a shift in vocal tone when she asked them what they really thought, allowing their “under voice” to emerge. I suggest that the patriarchy fears this under voice because it challenges both the speaker and the power base of the patriarchs. For the speaker, it’s dangerous because of the double bind it involves — denying yourself and identifying with the patriarchy. This moral injury — being forced to accept something as right when your heart knows otherwise — creates deep harm, often leading to dissociation. You might carry on caring about, but you can’t care for if you are disconnecting your heart from your hands and your head. It’s equally dangerous for the patriarchal powerholders, as engaging with the under voice requires vulnerability — an openness to caring for others or being cared for, which challenges their authority and control.
This ties back to last month’s exploration of moral development theories, which often prioritize dispassion and rationality as the highest forms of moral reasoning - qualities women and girls are said to rarely develop (Garz, 2009). I can see how that is a useful position in war, where people destroy people. Gordon couldn’t dissociate from the images of death and pointless destruction, so suffered moral injury and was driven mad by it.
In my super-encounterer mode of literature review, I came across a story on the BBC about Indian midwives who were pressured to perform infanticide on female infants. The shift in their actions came through a relationship of trust when they were asked, ‘would you do this to your daughter?’ That moment of empathy, of caring for rather than about, gave them the strength to resist. As a result, female babies were adopted rather than killed. Such change was not without huge consequence (I suspect financial as well as emotional) for the midwives. We don’t know the scale of change in terms of numbers, but for the women whose lives were saved, the impact was profound.
When people move to a position of engaged caring for, there is passion to take action about moral and ethical dilemmas — but it makes you vulnerable. The patriarchy often resists this vulnerability, favouring the safety of disconnection. But when someone is asked to use their power in the service of the other, to move from Othering to m/othering, it is possible to act from a moral place by engaging their emotions. For the human race to stop the destruction of each other and our planet, ethics and morality shouldn't be about choosing the “correct” position. Instead, we should focus on creating dialogue between different ethical perspectives, aiming to find connection and common ground, not emphasising what divides us.
I have been asking myself the very serious question about my own capacity to be cared for. I’m aware of how much I resist it because of my story, personal and cultural, of vulnerability being misused. The abject pain felt emotionally and physically of being humiliated and ridiculed for things I feel are ‘me’.
In therapist education, we say that therapists can only take clients as far as they’ve gone themselves. Has Val’s (has my?) practice been compromised because she couldn't allow herself to be cared for because of the circumstances of her life? Is that why, during training therapy, she endlessly discussed her parents but never truly got to know them? Why she never questioned being an only child or the loss of joy in the marriage she grew up around? I wonder if this explains my confusion about the shift in the fiction from a cold, distant mother to one who suddenly enjoys wedding photos.
How much did Val internalise the moral injury of not being the “right” child? I had always assumed that being female was the issue, but now I wonder: was the deeper injury the fact that she was the product of rape, something her parents couldn’t face or process? Maybe that disconnect defined her entire life.
We talk a great deal about self-care in the education of therapists to help them remain resilient in their work. But perhaps the conversation should shift to how individuals allow themselves to be cared for, and how we, as therapist educators, create spaces where this care can happen. It's essential that our students experience vulnerability and tenderness, ontological security and interdependence. This enables them to walk alongside clients in their own journey toward human connection.
So where am I left in my contemplation of fulfilment?
It comes, I think, from dependence/interdependence, one of the core concepts of tacit maternal knowing that arose from my doctoral research. It's not an individual pursuit, which is a problem in the white Western culture I write from, where success is often measured by individual achievements like financial gain or hierarchical status. In our m/other tongue, however, fulfilment comes from the ordinary and everyday, the conversations and relationships that emerge from them, whether they are conversations of words or bodily connection as in Theraplay.
Fulfilment for me is a daily commitment to care — both giving and receiving. It’s living by the nine core concepts of Theraplay in every aspect of my life as they are a practical rubric for living in kindness and relationship. Fulfilment comes from my endeavours to:
Lead with kindness as a psychotherapist, therapist educator, researcher, and person, using my wisdom in the service of others through careful listening and active understanding of their contextual needs through awareness of interdependence.
Be playful.
Be responsive, attuned, empathic, and reflective
Communicate through, and trusting, the embodied, somatic and right-brained knowledge that is available to me within myself and through my connection to others in caring for them.
Love my body and the bodies of others, appreciating all the senses and how they provide us with information.
Challenge Othering in myself and others as it comes to light.
Use relationships to find the best level of connection to be together kindly.
In those relationships, focus on the direct here and nowness; care for others and allow myself to be cared for, while caring about the histories that might bind us.
Being interactive and relationship-led in my ethical, moral, and practical choices, privileging caring for others above caring about.
I can only endeavour to live to those guiding principles. Loving others and accepting love should be easy. But it is not. I find it hard because I get tired, sad, and grumpy; I’m human. The additional burden of the moral injuries of growing up in the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy makes it even harder. I’ve developed habits of self-censorship to avoid the shame of seeing what is clear but being ostracised for speaking out. It’s no surprise, then, that I often turn to writing instead of speaking. As I enter my seventh decade of life, I feel a deep sadness that we are still struggling to be who we are — free to care for others and to be cared for.
Fulfilment, in our m/other tongue, is no longer editing myself every moment of the day. Fulfilment in our m/other tongue is being able to know myself and know that others see me in the way I see myself. Fulfilment in our m/other tongue is to know that I can care for others and also be cared for, and within each of these experiences feel valued and not have my love for others questioned as somehow corrupt and corrupting. This, I hope, is the integration of the barbarians to the right (the raw emotions and intensity of life) with the purportedly civilised Romans to the left (the hyper rationality of the countless years of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy) that leads to fulfilment in our work and in our personal lives.
Research update
What I’ve done this month
Thought a lot! Walked a lot. Cried a bit.
What you can do to be part of this research
What would you like me to contemplate and generate fiction about in relation to operationalising our m/other tongue?
I am starting to contemplate my next big data generation project, NaNoWriMo in November 2024. You will see I have started to title these posts ‘what is…in our m/other tongue?’ or similar. There will be 30 days of writing and 50,000 words to produce during November 2024.
If you collectively come up with 30 different foci, I will see what my non-conscious produces through generating fiction that will illuminate further and deepen our theorisation of how we use tacit maternal knowing in our professional practice. You can anonymously add your suggestions to the Padlet here.
Bibliography
Brookes, B. L., McCabe, J., & Wanhalla, A. (Eds.). (2019). Past caring?: Women, work and emotion. Otago.
Erdelez, S. (1999). Information Encountering: It’s More Than Just Bumping into Information. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 25(3), 26–29. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.118
Garz, D. (2009). Lawrence Kohlberg—An introduction. Budrich.
Gilligan, C. (2023). In a human voice. Polity Press.