The world is not a nice place. Can m/other tongue help things to change?
Contents
The world is not a nice place. Can m/other tongue help things to change?
Research update [including a mini experiment that you could report back on here]
Introduction
This month is about the discomfort of not being part of the patriarchy, not submitting to the patriarchal voices and ways of being that dismiss our knowledge (Gilligan, 2013). Gilligan talks about how in adolescence, the phrase ‘I don’t know’ is the cover for this process of self-denial. In my doctoral research, I reclaimed that phrase, ‘I don’t know’, and said it was a maternal place, an important place to be able to resist that patriarchal voice. How does our m/other tongue challenge to enable change, and then support change to the establishment of a place of peace? How can speaking/living from our m/other tongue effect change and make spaces where we can run our lives, our organisations, our businesses, our research, and our clinical practices from the place of tacit maternal knowing?
The fight scene in The Committee 4 precedes this month’s fiction. Brenna and The-character-who-shares-a-name-with-me become close for a bit, but then it becomes too much for them both and they back off from one another. Elsewhere in The Mad Man in the Attic, Fiona expresses how her name sounds like a breath in and a breath out, a breath of nothing. Both characters are trying to make sense of being positioned as nothing in a world that seems to hate the fact that they are who they are. The fiction starts with another in-person meeting of the writers’ group.
Please be warned, the fiction this month contains some strong language. I find it hard when I write things immersed in the space of the characters and then read it back and it makes me uncomfortable. But in my commitment to researching this way, I have to trust the process. Editing out the uncomfortable bits means not addressing the places where change might be needed or could be possible.
Fiction: The Committee 6
It was the first time they’d met in town since the incident. Brenna and Fiona hadn’t agreed to not tell the others, but they didn’t. The rest of the group knew nothing of the threat and fight that they’d gone through last time.
Brenna and Fiona were still in a stand-off position, neither quite trusting the other after the closeness they almost had following the moment of action and then the cooling.
As usual, everyone discussed their work and updated each other.
“Brenna, what are you doing at the moment?” Fiona asked.
She didn’t intend it as a threat. She didn’t mean to pry or spy. She was genuinely interested in what Brenna may be writing. She was curious about the intense stuckness that had grown between them. She wanted to find ways to connect again.
None of them expected the explosion that followed. The whole coffee shop was astonished and embarrassed. Later, the owners asked that the group no longer meet there. As a group, they paid for the two broken chairs, overturned with force as Brenna stormed out of the café. Clare tried to make peace with the management, Rowan tried to soothe the other customers, and Sylvia put her arm around Fiona.
You fucking privileged bitch. Brenna had started. Your cunt so dried out that you have to grease it with moronic words about old made-up stories that don’t matter to anyone. What is it to you, arsehole, what I write, and why would I let your stinking eyes see my work? Up they stood, chair thrown back, expletives flying over their shoulder as they barged their way through the café and out the door.
Fiona was shaking. The venom was unexpected and seemed to flow from her enquiry after Brenna’s work, but it didn’t make sense. They were meeting as a group that considered each other's writing! The outburst was unjust and not true.
After the shaking died down and the disbelieving shock reduced, she stood up tall and strode back to the car. Through the alleyway. She didn’t even give the men a thought. If they were there, or said anything, it completely bypassed her. She drove home.
How strange that world just carried on as if nothing had happened.
…
Brenna tossed and turned restlessly. It was as if every limb had a mind of its own, itching to move in its own way, different from every other limb. When it was like this, it was like fire ants within every vein and artery, every muscle fibre. It felt like every synapse was super conductive, every message being sent out in all directions at once, longing for an answer, any answer.
They couldn’t stay in bed. They got up and paced, wrapping their arms around themself, cursing their big body, the muscles in their arms, the power in their calves and thighs. Why were they cursed with this body that was neither one thing nor another, that gave the best bits of neither? They would never make nor carry a child. There was no creativity in this dark place.
For a moment the energy died down, and Brenna slumped into an armchair. Their breath was coming in gulps, but the momentary bliss of stopping was to be valued, cherished — who knew how long it would last.
When the currents ran, there was nothing they could do but withstand them. No one knew. They felt the shuddering again, they saw the alleyway, the loathing in the eyes of the men. It could have been any alleyway, any men. It was familiar. They were an abomination in the eyes of mankind. Womankind too, if truth be told. And Fiona, how dare she! How dare she step in and expose the failure that they were, big-bodied and muscular but still incapable of being themself.
The ping of their phone threw a lifeline, a link to a solid now. It was from Fiona. How she hated that name. You okay? it said. How dare she, after today?! And yet another part of Brenna was feeling…despite the storm that burst in the coffee shop today, here she was, that breath of nothing, doing something to enquire. They sent back a thumbs up emoji.
Can I come round?
Brenna just wanted her to die.
Really, they just wanted to die themself. What was the point of being in this place that did not want someone like them? Her. It. They’d been called it by doctors. They ignored the text. Another ping. I’m coming round. Be there in 5.
Politeness is evil. Politeness caused them to open the door to the breath of nothing. They ignored her, sat back down in the chair. It was light outside. They were surprised. Last time they had been aware, it was night. Or maybe it was just so dark in their head that it seemed like night.
They just looked at each other, Brenna and the breath of nothing. Fiona didn’t know what to do. It had taken a lot of courage to come here, and now there was nothing left. She could only sit. Brenna was physically spent; the burning curse in the arms and legs having worn them out. But somehow just sitting, being in the same space, saying nothing, thawed something. Pulled out some sort of plug that had kept the rage going. It stole the energy from the fire ants. It was like a meditation together without form, no shape to it, a dance of disconnection longing to connect.
“I hate myself,” Brenna finally said. “I hate my body. I hate my sex. I hate the whole world.”
“I know,” the breath of nothing said. “I do too. Myself, I mean, not you. You, I admire.”
“I thought I scared you.”
“You did.”
The world is not a nice place. Can m/other tongue help things to change?
Blimey, I find that fiction challenging, and I wrote it! How I wish life was ‘nice’ and that the weight of my intellectual reasoning could sway others into creating a better world. A world where we aren’t reflecting on yet another year of conflict in Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. And what other destructions don’t I know about because they are not reported to me in the news outlets I follow? Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in the opening of Father Time writes:
Meanwhile, assumptions about males having evolved to compete with other males for status and mates help explain why men are more likely to take risks, often egged on by a testosterone-fueled overconfidence. Such hubristic inclinations to “deceive up” all too often lure male stockbrokers to trade impulsively, or team captains and military leaders to imagine that they can win a contest or war whose outcome they can’t actually foresee. All this is consistent with Darwin’s original assessment of male competitiveness paired with women’s gentler, more prosocial, other-regarding proclivities.
But if men caring for babies undergo the same neurological transformations, the same increases in prolactin levels and oxytocin-infused sensual pleasure as mothers do; if their testosterone drops and men become as fixated on infant well-being as mothers; if their brains undergo shape-shifting similar to that in mothers, wouldn’t men’s psychological preferences change as well? Might men’s priorities come to more nearly resemble the more prosocial ones mothers are assumed to have? Might such men also be more likely to opt for safer and more sustainable courses of action? (Hrdy, 2024, p.6)
Brenna is ‘not nice’ in this fiction. They are caught into the space between the maleness and femaleness that the patriarchal, capitalist, misogynistic, cisheterosexist, white supremacist world had constructed around their body. I struggled to share all of the fiction with you as the language is ‘not nice’. What will you think of me for using words like that? I am an older woman and a mother, I am meant to be nice!
Nice is an interesting word. Not the word itself, but the felt sense it has stirred up in me this month. I have echoes of primary school teachers saying it was a bland word. A word that didn’t really convey much at all. Maybe vanilla is the current equivalent of nice; bland, common-place, maybe a bit boring. But the word has gripped me this month.
The pressure as a girl to be a ‘good girl’ and, as a woman, to be all giving and accommodating is still within me. Is it like that for you too? It was drilled into me at an embodied level because of the way I (we), as a girl child, would have been held, and held in mind, by those who cared for me (us), as well as those who didn’t care about me (us) and for whom I (we) was just one of the children.
Until I did my doctorate, I didn’t have words to identify the moral injury that came from that positioning. Having no words meant that I didn’t have a voice to speak out about the injustices that were done to me, and that were done to women and girls around me. Becoming a mother gave me a different position and, therefore, a different voice, but one that still felt silenced by my place as a mother/woman. So ‘nice’ does fit — bland, in the background, a bit boring, a nothing. Not even a nobody.
Brenna refuses to be nice.
They are in your face about their neither-man-nor-woman positioning and how the world has positioned them as a monster because their body — their conceived, gestated, and fed body — is the way it is.
Their body is designated by the medical model as a disorder, a defect, a disease. A failure of properness. So Brenna lives out the positioning they have been placed in: morally injured, trying to tell others, not passing on the harm, just breaking into houses and moving objects around. But such positioning and protest doesn’t feel good to them. The embodiment, the physicality of showing the injustice is as much a moral injury to Brenna as it would be to ‘pretend’ to be a woman as that was what was put in their birth certificate, or ‘pretend’ to be a man because their bodily characteristics give people that impression. Brenna wants to be Brenna.
So this m/other tongue, this particular branch of human experience, and knowledge, that comes from the lived reality of one’s body conceiving, gestating, birthing, and caring for an infant (whatever your gender) — what does it offer us as we try to navigate through this world that is not nice? And beyond not nice, a world that is actively destructive of other human bodies and souls? How does the fiction raise a mirror in which I can see what my tacit maternal knowing already holds from my innumerable bodily acts of caring for my infants in conception, gestation, birthing and feeding?
To give a space to m/other tongue — to let it be on an equal footing in the realm of theory as the theories that currently fill our textbooks and our classrooms and our management settings and our practice rooms — does two things. It legitimises the knowledge mothers have discovered through the daily bodily care for those who are immobile and vulnerable. It also legitimises the experience of the immobile, vulnerable infant. This can be used whether we are talking about the actual mother/infant dyad or whether we are taking that knowledge, theorising it, and thinking about situations in our working lives as therapists, managers, researchers, and educators. I believe it can be applied to any situation where one person has knowledge and there is another who is vulnerable. I believe it enables us to co-create an environment where there can be interdependence and creative growth, a place where the person who chooses to use their power in the service of the more vulnerable other can love that other into being.
Brenna’s vulnerability has been exploited and misused, so when insecure and tentative m/othering is offered by Fiona, both feel vulnerable and the mix of the double vulnerability is explosive. So how might m/other tongue start to challenge the violence of the world where vulnerability may also lead to explosive destruction? How can we m/other confidently so such explosion might be avoided?
We are thinking about how operationalising m/other tongue can help us take our maternal place in world change, whether that is the inner world of the person or people we are caring for/about or the wider world. As I grappled with such a big idea, I found myself rethinking Berne’s model of Parent, Adult, Child. How I got there, I am afraid I don’t know — one of those weird intuitive leaps.
Back in May 2023, I had the image of not standing there in the rushing river forcing ourselves to walk upstream — a version of saying we can’t use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. I suggested we needed to find our armada of practitioners to float in and support each other. Some of the masters have been saying the same thing, but it’s not been seen through the lens of m/other tongue. I’ve been reading Wright’s Mirroring and Attunement (2009). He says what I’m saying! I’ll come back to turning a different lens on this shortly. Maybe we can repurpose or resharpen some of the master's tools to help us build a different house or world, one where Hrdy’s last sentence may become lived out.
While I don’t think the master's tools can dismantle the master's house, the fiction made me reflect that we are still working in the master's house, even if we no longer feel we are living in it. My position, expressed in the phrase m/other tongue, is not about finding and explaining division, but about finding and working within the realms of connection. That is what Fiona and Brenna seem drawn to in this fiction. The PAC model perhaps came to mind (from the body) as I digested how to operationalise that conundrum.
The usual graphic of the PAC model is hierarchical. In reflection on this, I produced my own. However, I realised that I have still superimposed a top to bottom hierarchy on the PAC idea. Not just this, but I also created a right to left hierarchy where right was assigned to ‘father’, and left to ‘female’ — yes those words! Not wife or mother! Both wife and mother are words that have a higher order meaning for me in terms of acceptability — I could do a whole blog post on just those meanings. But for now, suffice it to say that my pondering on the fiction seems to have opened some level of new insight in me. So the graphic ended up like this:
I’m not sure about all those directional arrows, but this is something still in formation. I am holding to one of the core notions of m/other tongue — that we have to reside in a place of not knowing/letting go.
My assumptions are derived and lived out from being immersed in the manstream, a place that assumes that equality can be obtained through individual effort. Those of us from Othered groups know that to not be the case. The other assumption I found I’d made about the model is that everyone is the same age. Both Berne and Wright are essentially offering models that are about adult to adult connection, a connection that could be distorted depending on lived experience of parent/child connections.
But whose parent/child constellation? Again, I assume that of the manstream. A place in which those in power use it over the experience of the less powerful other, rather than using it in the service of that other. Not necessarily blatantly, or with intention to harm, but within the subtle structure of Othering — structuring that I still end up ignorant of until something ‘not nice’ shakes me out of that grip.
So what if the model was reimagined from the perspective of m/other tongue? When I played, this is what emerged:
Why is this different?
Because it reimagines the use of power. It doesn’t ignore the reality of power differentials but seeks to care about power differentials in a way that means both parties can be in a state where care can flow in both directions. The purpose of the care is the flourishing of both, while it is the more powerful who uses their power in the service of the other. Caring about leads to caring for.
Is this well thought through, generalisable, and transferable theory? In the manstream, no. There is no logic, nothing that I can offer you that is a systematic and articulated process that illuminates to you (or me) how I got from one place to another. I don’t even think it is a complete and final sense-making for me of an internal shift of landscape.
The bits I can articulate are how I have been caught into seeing even kind and useful theory through the lens of patriarchy and also childism, an Othering and devaluing the wisdom of children. This gave me a deeper felt sense about something I have said for a long time about training as child and adolescent and family therapeutic practitioners and researchers — we can’t take the theory that is used for grown-ups and think it works for children and families. To do so is inadvertent childism, just as the use of man-made theory has inadvertently marginalised the experience of women. This is the new lens I ended up bringing to my reading of Wright (2009).
This reflective process, growing from my grappling with the fiction, has led me to a revolutionary change (for me). Now in the morning instead of asking myself ‘what should I do today?’ or even ‘what do I want to do today?’, I am asking myself:
Who do I want to care for today?
It is ‘want’, not ‘need’ or ‘should’, because wanting it is something that comes out of my core identity as a person who cares, a m/other who chooses to use power in the service of the other so they can flourish. If I tend to my wanting to care, then this commitment to care means I will attend to that which is within my sphere of influence, who I really can care for (not just care about). ‘Who’ could be interchangeable with ‘what’, because this application of m/other tongue extends to the environment as well as the living beings within it.
This ‘operationalisation’ of my m/other tongue, arrived at as usual in a convoluted and roundabout way, has weirdly opened up a whole lot of time and space! I wonder — might it be like that for you too?
Fully fleshed out as a new paradigm for practice, research, management, and education? Not by any means. But we are at the start of a research project here! This is where we are meant to be as I launch into the big data generation project next month. Since obtaining ethical clearance, the past couple of month of blogs have been a sort of review of the previous positions, highlighting the gaps and developing research questions about how to operationalise m/other tongue. This is ‘open air’ research where you are getting to see all the messy and circular stages of the process.
To be clear, when I am trying to unpick this notion of m/other tongue, I am still holding Theraplay’s four dimensions and nine core concepts at the heart of my thinking. In the early days of Theraplay training, there was an explicit statement that the Theraplay philosophy and attitude could be taught. This is what I am trying to do in thinking about how our m/other tongue can help us change the world. It isn’t what we do, it's who we are. It isn’t doing Theraplay, it is being Theraplay, being people who centre care for others as the driving purpose of our lives. Not because of profit or status but because, as happens with people who are around infants a lot (Hrdy 2024), that becomes our embodied expression of purpose and drives our behaviour to protect and care no matter what.
For now, as we m/other tongue speakers look to change the world, the worlds that we have available are our own internal landscapes and the inner world of those who come to trust us enough to let us care for them when they are vulnerable. World change via m/other tongue is also how we let our inner landscapes change by finding the places where we can be cared for when we are vulnerable. I trust you, as my readers, to care for, as well as care about, the vulnerability I share in my ‘not nice’ writing.
Maybe that is a pathway for The-character-who-shares-a-name-with-me to own her name not as a ‘nothing’ but as a person who cares. She may find she is not disabled by that care and is valued by those around her when she has the courage to go into the not-nice places. She may be admired for her courage to transform the frozenness of trauma into a fear that can be faced. She goes to the not-nice places not expecting a nice response, but because that is who she is — a person who cares, and who believes m/othering, using one's power in the service of the vulnerable other, can change the world.
Research update
What I’ve done this month
I’ve been preparing for the big data generation project next month when I will be writing 50,000 words of fiction as part of NaNoWriMo. The focus will be how we operationalise m/other tongue, including the elements people have suggested on Padlet.The drama will take place in a motorway service station. Val and Graham are stranded there due to a flat tyre. They had been travelling to Stonehenge for a short break together during the school half-term holiday. While they wait for a breakdown service, they observe the people passing through…and then there is a ferocious rainstorm that means no one can arrive or leave! What a place to observe how or whether m/other tongue can be applied to such real world circumstances!
What you can do to be part of this research
Try out the starting point ‘who do I want to care for today?’ and let me know if it brings about anything different for you. Is it a revolution of one (made a big difference to me only), or could it be a revolution for many? Or maybe this is the way you are each day already, and I am just late to the party! There’s a space to anonymously share your comments on Padlet…maybe you could even do it in the form of fiction!
Bibliography
Gilligan, C. (2013) Joining the Resistance. Polity. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1535098.
Hrdy, S. B. (2024) Father Time. Princeton University Press. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/4293414).
Wright, K. (2009) Mirroring and Attunement. Routledge. Available at: https://www.perlego.com/book/1609171.