Disintegration in a time of conspicuous consumption: or, Burning down the village
Contents
Chapter 3
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
The fiction this month is very long. To me, it pulls down the curtain on one act in whatever my tacit wisdom gathered together in November 2024 in the immersion part of my Heuristic Inquiry into how we operationalise our m/other tongue, and in response to the foci you asked me to hold in mind.
There are times when I hate doing this. I don’t know what this fiction is about. I don’t get it, I just don’t get it! (Said in despair, not in joy this month.) It’s no good as fiction. It’s no good as a way of generating insight, because I am stuck – I don’t know what it is about. Oh, how I have been avoiding writing this post!
I am stuck and, at the same time, it is fiction. It is not me. It is not real life. So I can be curious about how the whole fiction harks back to where things started after the end of Year 1. The title of that fiction was Tiny Acts of Individual Rebellion. Val seemed like a different character when I read it back – more ballsy, less fearful, more confident that she could make a difference. Unapologetic.
In that fiction, written before the focus on operationalising our m/other tongue came about, Val finds her individual capacity to stand up to a situation she perceives as violent, but she is acting alone. This month’s fiction feels more burdensome because it takes the imperative to act with compassion and love (essential parts of the m/other tongue) beyond the confines of Val’s individual life and into the arena of community.
Saving the children has been and gone, and that was easy. Now the knives come out. Now comes the real battle about what it means to use our m/other tongue to take on those who feel they have the power when we, who care, may feel stuck in a powerless position. (Although I am very aware of perceptions, and how we may be seen as holding power by others even when we do not feel that ourselves, as Alex’s ongoing comments so helpfully remind me.)
I have the privilege of supervising students at both master’s and doctoral level. They teach me so much. I try to be very careful in how I acknowledge their influence on this writing. I do not want to ‘steal’ their ideas or become one of those teachers who takes over the knowledge of their students. At the same time, they are part of my information encountering, and between us, we co-construct meaning across our separate but connected research projects.
One of us is positioned as the tutor and the other as the student. Within my pedagogy of therapist education, this is a particularly interesting dynamic to reflect upon, as my aim is to support the apprentice in becoming a master of their craft, not a master over people. Alex’s comments prompted me to consider the role of supervisors (of all sorts: clinical, pastoral, academic, training) and to recognise that I’ve not fully integrated this role into how we live out our m/other tongue. I touch on this briefly in my reflection, but I will need to revisit it and how I see the use of our m/other tongue within it to enable people to make those nuanced and challenging decisions around the losses and gains of using one’s power in the service of the less powerful other.
On a more concrete note, this month I do need to acknowledge the help of Sam. In their work, they introduced me to a new (purportedly African) proverb that I had not come across before. I knew the one about it taking a village to raise a child. Sam introduced me to what feels like its sister saying: ‘The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.’
This fiction feels as though it ends with some burning, and I don’t know what it means. I just don’t know. But I do know that if I stay with the process, meaning may emerge, and that it is in these places of not knowing and letting go that tacit maternal knowing may be most present.
I am feeling the heat.
Descent
There just seemed more of a lightness. Graham wasn’t sure if that was located in them, or whether the whole mood of the place was shifting somehow. Val and Daniel were ahead of him. He found himself wondering what if - what if they’d met years ago? What if one of them had had a child? What if Daniel had been their child?
He would have been proud.
It didn’t stop him being proud now.
He noticed his heart rate increase as they descended from the bridge into the south service station. He noticed it and smiled to himself. He had laughed when Val had said it was like another continent over there, but now he understood. His body was registering change, difference - priming itself for action.
His head lied, saying that the service stations each side of the motorway were mirror images of each other. His body couldn’t lie: the heat and the smell seemed to rise up the stairway and envelop him. And the noise had a different quality altogether. There was more tension, more dislocation. Churn, it felt like. Churn. Maybe it was simply because the hold-ups had been longer and more complete on this side. Intense but barely held brittle calm.
He watched Val walk over to the grille cutting the newsagent off from the rest of the foyer. She put her palm flat against it and Christiana on the other side did the same. He was too far away to hear what was said, but he saw the smile on the face of the young woman, saw her flush a little as Val appeared to speak earnestly to her. Then she nodded – first to Val, then to Daniel – before looking over at him and smiling too.
Together they picked their way through the people still spread across the floor, sharing what food they had, chatting quietly. Some noticed them.
“Where are the children?”
“Their parents picked them up from the other side.”
“I’m so pleased!”
Each interaction was a bit of personal decompression in the tension of the room.
He felt Val take his hand. It surprised him, but it was pleasant. She nodded towards a table. He looked at her quizzically.
“Remember them?” she asked. “The teenage twins who weren’t twins?”
Graham looked across at the mother and son sitting there. They sat in silence, staring ahead, not connecting with each other at all. He guessed the boy’s phone had run out of charge, because otherwise he was sure he’d have had his head buried in that. The woman glanced tersely at her watch and sighed. The boy shrugged and went back to staring into space.
“I thought they’d long gone. Maybe they didn’t get anywhere and just came back,” Val said.
He shrugged in return, not really sure why she’d noticed them again. He let her lead him, his hand still in hers, towards the pile of bags the children had left behind. Daniel was already there, sorting through them, making the pile taller so it took up less floor space. But to Graham it looked as though he was moving things simply for the sake of moving them, reconnecting with each child through the tangible objects they’d left behind. The change of pace, Graham thought, was probably as difficult for Daniel as it was for him.
He’d never really had much to do with children. His brothers had them – his nephews and nieces – but they’d all stayed away up in Northumberland and he’d rarely seen or heard from them, not even the obligatory exchange of birthday and Christmas cards. Bluntness. It had become a matter of pride, that bluntness. Sad, Graham was beginning to realise. Pride stopped connection, and hurt made him cling to pride. Yet, through his connection with Val, he was starting to think again about that need for disconnect. How absurdly proud he felt of Daniel, who he’d barely met! Boy, he would love to have a dog to stroke now amidst the discombobulating shift of his foundations.
Val was scanning the fast-food outlets, craning her neck.
“I could kill for a cup of tea,“ she said. “I was hoping I’d see Sarfan.”
“Sarfan?”
“The young man who made me tea before when I couldn’t work the screen. He was so sweet.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen again.”
Graham looked at his watch. 20:30. It felt as though they’d been here a lifetime. Perhaps six hours was a lifetime, measured in experiences. He’d never imagined he’d spend the day playing sheepdog to a handful of children, or see knitting used to calm frightened souls, or watch Val moonwalk a whole crowd of lostness across a motorway.
What an extraordinary life.
If she weren’t so magnificent, she’d be embarrassing.
She was sitting on a rucksack, chatting to Daniel. He seemed to have found a smashed Mars bar from the bottom of some bag, and broke it into pieces, waving one towards Graham as an invitation to share in the unexpected feast. Graham shook his head, wanting to keep his distance and watch them. Daniel passed a bottle of water to Val, who took a sip to wash down the fragment of chocolate before passing it back.
Relieved of the responsibility of the children, Daniel was freer in his chatter, asking Val about what she was doing. She told him that she had studied for a doctorate, and that Graham was just a friend, and that they had been going to Stonehenge when they got a flat tyre. She told him how much she missed her work, and how she was still so pleased not to be doing it any more.
Something had changed about her, Graham thought.
She rarely spoke unless she felt it was purposeful. She hardly ever used his name – actually, she never used his name, preferring instead to touch his arm to get his attention, or wait until he turned and catch his eye. It frustrated him, annoyed him, made her seem needy and aloof all at once. She had a superiority that came wrapped up with her charm, and it always left him slightly on edge.
If he revealed his own inner self, would he become nothing more to her than a client?
Could she talk to Daniel like this because she had once been his inspiration?
What really were they to each other, Graham and Val? Somehow, they both seemed to stand back from one another. He’d half expected her to leave when he told her he didn’t want to have sex with her, but she hadn’t. If anything, it seemed to have made her more determined to stick with him.
She was inclining towards Daniel now. He was moving his hands as if he was recounting some story. She laughed.
Graham turned away, looking for somewhere to place himself. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard the laugh, or if the sound was more of an imagination. He found it off-putting. There was nowhere to go.
Then Val was holding out her hand to him, using her fingers to beckon him over. She pulled another rucksack around and patted it. He felt he could do nothing other than go over, although his insides resisted. Politeness won.
“They’re really quite comfortable,” he heard her say, as she patted the rucksack again. Her smile seemed a bit different too.
Daniel was talking and talking, and she was talking too, over each other, under each other.
“Amazing they coped.”
“The noise when we came back down the steps!”
“Mia when she ran to her foster dad’s arms!”
“The poo bags on that statue, who’d do that?”
“Phew, that was tough.”
“So worried about them.”
“Love it!”
“So good, all of you, so good at what you do.”
“Want to go home, want to be with my husband.”
“Miss him?”
“So much. So much.“
Graham didn’t know how or where to join in. He felt excluded. It made him think it was like sex with words. He looked around.
“Graham was brilliant.”
Had he heard that?
She was probably just being kind, trying to include the poor old idiot who didn’t do conversations or Christmas parties at the practice and only spoke to people about work.
Yes, he’d been liked. But his leaving had been a quiet do - kind of what he wanted, but at the same time a damp squib after all those years.
A bit, he mused, like Val is.
He rubbed his ankle.
“Is it hurting?” Val asked.
“Just achy.”
He half smiled, remembering how it had happened. Were they the same people? Or had they changed so much that it had happened to a different couple?
“I brought her a kitten and she sent me away with a flea in my ear,” he said to Daniel, who looked puzzled. “Then I tripped over her dead cat and broke my ankle. She’s been stuck with me ever since.”
Val took his hand again, hers resting on the back of his. He looked down at them, wondering where his touchiness had suddenly come from, how the rigidness was now softening.
He looked up at her, unsure what to say or do, feeling as though there was so much to say and do, but somehow he was stuck.
She wasn’t even looking at him. She was staring over his left shoulder, her mouth slowly falling open.
Knife
Electricity prickles and makes people take notice. Like a bow wave, he was washing electricity. The woman was standing, the boy cowering. The man was ploughing through people, not picking a route with care as Val and Daniel and Graham had done. Icebreaker was too cold a word. He wasn’t breaking through ice; he was driving through volcanic lava.
He must have stormed down the stairs, although she hadn’t seen him arrive. His coat was flying open like a sail catching the full force of a storm. His hair, once slicked back with gel, was now limp against the sides of his face. He steamed. Val wasn’t sure whether it was real steam from the dampness of his clothes and the heat of his rage, or whether she was imagining it, feeling the rolls and waves of anger that seemed to emanate from him.
She started to rise from her rucksack seat, unable to take her eyes off the scene. Daniel and Graham followed her gaze and looked at each other in shock.
The man was in the woman’s face, screaming. Val could see spit flying. The woman screamed back, red-faced, eyes wide, veins in her temples showing. She grabbed the boy’s arm and tried to pull him from his chair. Possession? Removal from danger?
Val moved toward the scene, purposeful. Short steps. Fast.
Graham rose to his feet, ready to stop her. Daniel put a hand on Graham: slowing him down, pulling himself up?
A knife appeared from under the woman’s coat. In her hand. Small, red-handled, straight from a kitchen drawer. Val could even picture the nick in the tip of the short blade; the snapped point where someone had tried to prise something open with a paring knife because it was to hand, and the something had won.
Everyone stopped.
If a pin had dropped, all would have heard it.
The boy’s lips moved. Then hers. Looks sent towards each other.
“Mum, no,” he might have said.
“You are mine,” she might have replied.
The man stepped back now, his palms pushing the air down, as if trying to take the heat out of the situation. The woman stepped forward, pushing the knife into his space, prodding his chest. He kept moving backwards.
She bared her top teeth. Fear? Power?
Val stepped into the man’s line of vision. She held up her palms, indicating she was there to support, or try to make some difference. She felt too far away. She needed to be closer. It was hard to get there because of people, stuff on the floor.
She kept her voice melodic.
“I can see you want the best for your boy. Let me come to him. Let me come to you. My name is Val. I work with children. I think he’s a bit scared right now.”
The woman gave the slightest glance to her left, towards the boy at the table. Rigid. Too terrified to shake. It was enough of an opportunity. Val moved slowly closer, careful not to provoke the woman into moving from gentle prodding of the knife against the man’s chest to something much worse.
She had no idea what was going on with the grown-ups. Who was the aggressor? Who was controlling? Who was ill? Who was lost?
She did know that the boy looked terrified, and she didn’t want him to feel alone with the violence happening in the middle of all these people. That was the worst kind of abandonment: being overwhelmed by terror while surrounded by people, and no one stepping in to be with you.
She kept talking.
“What are your names? Where are you from? I saw you earlier. It looked like your boy had been staying with his dad.”
That was the wrong thing to say.
The woman screeched.
Words sounding and making no sense.
Val was nearly close enough to put out her hand to the boy. He filled her gaze. She had no idea whether anyone else was moving. Her focus was so tight on this one family and the distress laid out in front of her.
Suddenly there was a crash off to her right.
Her head turned automatically. Everyone in the room, including the woman, the man, and the boy, looked round.
Sarfan was standing in the doorway to the fast food outlet. He had flung the staff door open so violently that it had crashed into the bank of bins. The sound of wood hitting metal, causing a cascade of clattering noise, was apocalyptic.
He stood there, eyes wide, red-rimmed from crying that no one had noticed or cared about. A large, long-bladed knife from the food preparation area of his place of work was in his hand.
“This big knife!” he said in his broken English, his voice both flat and full of barely held feeling.
He took one stride towards the woman.
“You think this knife is hurt? You think you know hurt? You ever see your brother raped until he die? You ever see woman drown, one hand holding her baby above water? You ever see people cut like meat? Like the burgers you all like?”
The woman, shocked, dropped her hand. Her knife, puny now, fell to the ground.
Val stepped forward again.
“Sarfan,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“Never okay again, lady. Never okay again.”
The tears waterfalling down his face seemed endless.
The man leapt at him, swinging a punch towards Sarfan’s head.
To defend himself, Sarfan lifted his hands. The knife was still in them.
The man fell backwards, screaming.
“He stabbed me! The fucking illegal stabbed me!”
Val moved rapidly towards Sarfan, who was staring in horror at the blood on the blade in his hands.
As she moved, she felt beating hands on her back.
“Bitch, you made him do it.”
It was the mother. She was hitting her again and again.
Val tried to turn to face the woman, not wanting to take her eyes away from Sarfan but not able to reach him while being attacked herself.
Then Graham was there.
He wrapped his arms around the woman, his strength holding her arms against her sides so she could no longer vent whatever her overwhelm was onto Val.
Daniel went to the boy and wrapped his arms around him.
Someone was kneeling beside the man shouting, “First aid kit!”
Val turned back to Sarfan. He was on the floor, sobbing.
She knelt beside him and gently removed the knife from his grasp, pushing it away. It slid across the floor and disappeared beneath the bins.
She put her arms around him.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” she kept saying.
“Not okay. Not okay,” he kept responding.
Then the woman from the newsagent was there, tearing open the plastic cover of a pink blanket she had grabbed from the shop stock, wrapping it around Sarfan.
Like Val, she whispered:
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” to the overwhelmed man. To Sarfan.
He recognised her.
He put his arms around the young woman’s neck.
“Do you know him?” Val asked.
“I just see him every day and we say hello,” she said. “That’s as much as anyone knows him, I think.”
The lights came on.
Everyone winced at the sudden brightness. There were some cheers. Lots of movement.
“Blimey, Val. What’s happened here?”
Val looked up, completely baffled.
“Joe?”
Muddle
There was a lot of confusion.
Daniel took the boy over to the space he’d created with the children he cared for – an oasis, where wisps of calm still floated in the air. Daniel could gather those fragments and offer them to the boy.
Val and Joe half carried Sarfan – well, Joe did most of the carrying – as they followed Christiana to the storeroom they had used to gather the children before they had crossed the bridge to be collected.
A gaggle of people gathered around the injured man.
Graham was left holding the woman, who had now stopped fighting and gone limp. He looked around for some sort of help, but everyone attention seemed to be taken elsewhere. He loosened his grip slightly. The woman staggered forward and grabbed the back of the chair where she had once sat with her son, waiting for the road to open so they could go home.
Graham half manoeuvred her into position, helping her sit down. She immediately slumped forward, resting her head in her arms on the table.
Graham just sat beside her, a bit frightened. Wanting Val by his side.
*
Police appeared. No one seemed to have any real sense of where they had come from – maybe the north side of the motorway, maybe some magical way of avoiding the solid rows of traffic on the south side.
People were whisked away, separate cars for the man, the woman, and the boy. Who, or, what, or why - and their safety - now the problem of others.
“Where’s Val?” Daniel and Graham asked each other at almost the same time.
“Don’t go anywhere,” the police officer said. “We’ll need to take statements from everyone.”
Another officer came over and whispered to him. They looked at each other, concern passing between them.
“Hostage situation?” Daniel heard one of them whisper.
“Knife man.”
“Illegal.”
Daniel stepped forward.
“Can I tell you what happened?” he said.
He could already see how the narrative could go in a completely different direction. He had seen it so often with the children he cared for – when facts were viewed through a lens that distorted meaning until the person most injured, the person expressing the pain of that injury, became the one who was vilified, blamed, and punished.
“So where do you think they are now?”
Graham and Daniel looked at each other and had the same thought at the same time. Without speaking, they headed through the food hall towards the newsagent.
Graham gently knocked on the door.
“Val, are you there?”
It was Joe who opened the door a fraction, saw it was Graham, and slipped outside, quietly shutting the door behind him.
He noticed the police officers standing there and immediately pulled back a little, looking at Graham, then at Daniel - his expression becoming puzzled, as if he thought he might somehow know this man.
“Is everything okay in there?” Graham asked.
“Yeah,” Joe said. “He’s one scared guy and none of us speak his language. He’s reliving everything. He needs to get to hospital.”
The police officer reached up to his shoulder and tipped his radio towards his mouth. He turned away as he spoke, as if trying to stop the others hearing.
“Third suspect contained. Ambulance required.”
“Can I go in there?” the second officer asked Joe.
Joe looked surprised again. Police officers treating him like someone whose opinion mattered was a new experience, and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
“Nah, I wouldn’t, mate,” he said. “He’s barely holding it together, and he knows the girl. Val’s super good at soothing people.”
Graham and Daniel both nodded.
“There’s no other way out?”
Joe shrugged.
“No, it just leads into the shop.”
The officer nodded, accepting their assessment.
“We’ll just wait for the ambulance then. Sir, could you go back in and let them know?”
Sir! Joe didn’t think he’d ever been called that before.
“Sure,” he said, unable to stop a small grin appearing.
“Is that little Joe?” Daniel asked once Joe had slipped back through the door, quietly and carefully, trying to minimise any impact on Sarfan.
“Yes!” Graham said.
For the second time that day, he felt something like fatherly pride. Not that he had anything to do with the development of either Joe or Daniel. More that he was proud to be associated with two young men who were so emotionally in tune with others.
Pride and sadness together. He would have liked that for himself, but suspected that particular boat might have sailed.
The three of them – Graham, Daniel, and the second police officer – stood awkwardly outside the door, unsure what to say to one another. Each was preoccupied with thoughts about what might happen next.
The officer occasionally spoke into his radio, receiving updates on the ambulance’s estimated arrival time. It became clear that one would not be able to get through to this side of the motorway any time soon.
He asked Graham to knock on the door again.
Joe emerged once more.
“We can’t get an ambulance here, but a police car can get in from the estate at the back of this place. Do you think he’d get into that?”
“Let me ask Val.”
*
Sarfan was exhausted by the terrors that kept passing in front of his eyes. He just wanted them to stop.
He clutched the pink blanket around himself as if he was trying to crush himself out of existence. He rocked and wept.
Val and Christiana stayed very close, offering their bodily warmth and calmness in the hope that it might reduce the terror Sarfan was clearly experiencing. No words could help here.
“How’s he doing?” Joe asked when he came back into the room.
Instinctively, Joe knew to keep his voice low and his movements slow. He had been in this place before. The events had been different for him, but when he saw it he knew the terror of feeling like you might cease to exist.
Val tilted her head from side to side as if to say ‘so-so’.
The exhaustion was reducing the intensity of Sarfan’s sobbing, but he was still being wracked by tremors, and his breathing remained ragged.
“They can’t get an ambulance here. Do you think he’d cope with a police car?”
“They will take him to hospital though, won’t they?” Christiana asked. “Even if he’s an illegal immigrant?”
“I guess so,” Joe said. He hadn’t really thought about that.
“I’ll go with him,” Christiana said. “No one else knows him. I can at least try to speak for him.”
Val smiled at her, appreciating that she was prepared to put herself out for someone in such desperate need.
“You stay here, Joe. I’ll go out and have a word with the police.”
Val knew this was one of those times when her title as a doctor would be needed – when suffering needed to be heard as a wound not a weapon.
Done
Val leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes, her hand resting around her neck. Exhausted.
“What are you doing here, Joe?”
“Don’t you ever look at your phone?”
Val smiled. “You know I don’t! Where are the children?”
“I needed to finish some bits off without them, so Nickie came to fetch them yesterday. I messaged you when I realised you were stuck here and said I’d stop on the way back to see how things were going.”
“You are a good man, Joe.”
Daniel and Graham came towards them with cups of tea. The tills were working again, and the service had been restored. Statements had been given. There was still no sign of traffic moving north, but people had realised they could travel south and were starting to call family and friends before crossing over to the other side. The police were saying it would be until morning before the accident that had caused the complete closure of the motorway could be cleared.
Val could feel her eyes closing as she stood. She couldn’t remember ever feeling this tired before.
“Sit down, Val,” Joe said. “You too, Graham.”
Val looked across at Graham, the man who had started to become part of her life. She wasn’t sure what, if anything, might have changed in the crossing of the bridge. She looked at him and, maybe for the first time, realised she felt able to look at him without flinching away somehow.
He looked tired.
She realised they were both getting older, both less resilient. If they were going to find joy with each other, there wasn’t much time to waste. The barriers the world had left them with, the barriers their histories had left them with, couldn’t – shouldn’t – be avoided.
“Graham? You okay?” she asked gently.
She used his name naturally, maybe for the first time. Not in anger. Not forcing herself to say it, feeling as though it was somehow the wrong thing to do. She still wasn’t entirely sure where the injunction against a woman using a man’s name had come from.
“That,” Graham said, “was quite an evening.”
She smiled at him.
“That,” she said, “is quite an understatement.”
She placed her hand on top of his, and they sat there, too exhausted to do much else other than being close to one another.
*
Joe and Daniel sat at the table beside Graham and Val. Although the traffic was not yet moving, the lights coming back on and food becoming available again had created more circulation. It felt as though normality had been restored.
“Are you really Joe?” Daniel asked, smiling, knowing it to be true but still amazed at the transformation of the child into the man sitting in front of him.
“Yep, that’s me! Are you really Mr Pettingrew?”
“Yep. I’m amazed you remember my name.”
“Sorry, I didn’t. Val told me.”
Daniel laughed. “That’s my bubble burst! I never forgot you. You were the child who inspired me to teach. You and Val.”
“Why? I was such a pain in the arse. I’m amazed I wasn’t thrown out sooner.”
Daniel leant back in his chair. He had been 19 then, feeling so young and so grown up all at once. Joe had been six, a young child, small but fizzing with energy. Now they were both men. Val and Graham still saw them both as ‘young men’. The 13-year age difference no longer felt like much of a difference at all.
“Do you have children?” Joe asked Daniel.
“No. My husband and I don’t know how we’ll go about it, adoption or surrogacy.”
Joe’s eyes widened slightly as he processed the realisation that Daniel was married to another man.
“What about you?”
“Two,” Joe said, and Daniel could see how completely Joe’s love for his children filled his entire life. It shaped every movement, every breath, every thought.
“Niks is seven now, and Sammy’s five.”
He realised he just wanted to get home to them. He didn’t want to be here in the middle of nowhere any more.
“Hey,” he said to a passing police officer, “can I take my old folks home now, or do you still need them?”
The officer went off to check whether statements had been logged. With Val and Graham being key people in what had happened, the sergeant came back, wanting to make sure everything had been properly processed.
“Don’t I know you?” she said to Val.
Val was too weary to say much. At that moment, the only person she wanted to look at was Graham.
She did turn to look at the female officer. The sergeant took off her hat. Val didn’t think she was doing it to give her a better chance of recognising her. It seemed more like a way for the officer to think clearly. She ran a finger around the inside rim.
“The old car park. A fight. You got hit trying to break up a fight between a pair of drunks.”
Val smiled. That felt like ancient history. A time when she had retired for the first time, full of energy, before having to return to work because of the pension cock-up and having all that energy slowly drained away.
She chuckled.
The sergeant chuckled too.
“You do get yourself into some scrapes, don’t you? Your son wants to take you home. I think that’s a good idea. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”
“Thank you, son,” Val said to Joe with a laugh.
“Come on, you two,” Joe said.
Graham shook his head. “I’ll wait and sort the car out.”
“No,” Joe said firmly. “You need to go home and get some sleep. I’ll come back and change the wheel tomorrow.”
Val stood up wearily. She shook Daniel’s hand. She didn’t need to say anything.
Graham gave Daniel a firm handshake and Daniel returned a clap on the arm.
Joe steered them across the food hall, towards the stairs over the motorway and back to his van, JNS Decorating. The three of them strapped themselves into the front seat and slowly moved out into the traffic, which steadily carried them back to where they had started this whole long and strange journey.
Love, assumption, and power
As I reach what feels like the end of an act in this protracted process of working through the challenges of how to operationalise our m/other tongue and live all aspects of our lives organised around an imperative of care, rather than feeling any sense of triumph, I feel I am facing another cycle of deeper delving into the internal self organisation that makes it hard to just get on with caring. Have I really made a breakthrough in climbing out of the toolbox? I thought I had last month, and then this month… I just don’t know. I feel more of a sense of disintegration than integration. Last month the children were led to safety; this month the fiction is full of violence.
I long to find a way that I can share with you what might make it possible for each of us to be leaders in our parts of the world. To know how to lead others to their own felt-sense-of-safety, to their place of peace. It seems that I must disintegrate and face the painfulness of not knowing how it is done, this living and speaking from our m/other tongue.
Three things struck me as I was reading the fiction before trying to work out what my tacit knowing was trying to communicate to me. The first was the notion of the Mars bar and water being a strange communion. The second was wondering what I was going to do about what I see as a huge plot hole with Sarfan - more on that later. Finally, what really is going on between the people connected to the knife wielding incident: not just the knife wielders but the responses of Val and company, and other bystanders? How much are people’s responses connected to the events that are unfolding in front of them, and how much is about the assumptions that are layered on ‘the Others’, to which people then act ‘as if’ the other were their perception? Hence our title: Love, assumption, and power.
My information encountering (Erdelez, 1999) around the notion of “strange communion” led me to the work of Veblen. To be honest, I am not sure how the AI assistant on Perlego made that connection - it may have been a helpful and creative AI hallucination! Maybe Erdelez can update the notion of information encountering to include the creative use of AI madness.
Veblen is the person who coined the term conspicuous consumption (Camic, 2020). The first thing that struck me were his dates: born in 1857 and died in 1926. It reminded me of what I said last month: there is nothing new under the sun when we think about how humans interact and make sense of the world, only different words and different emphases.
From Veblen, I found myself venturing into literature territory that was new to me: that of economics and contracts. This may be contributing to my sense of coming apart this month. I have no anchors in this literature, and yet I am left feeling economic theory is something I do need to develop a relationship with if I am to take my understanding of how to operationalise our m/other tongue from what could be dismissed as naive and utopian to a place that policymakers may be able to relate to. Thank you to Alex for challenging me to engage with this via their comment on last month’s post.
Draft one of this post took you through all the ups and downs of the process of me getting my heart, hands, and head around what conspicuous consumption might feel and look like as conceptualised by Veblen and more recent writers. Martinez (2016) was particularly helpful. That laying out of my journey into the literature made the post exceedingly long. In terms of operationalising our m/other tongue, I wasn’t sure it would be helpful to share the messy, agonising head-scratching that accompanied my attempts to integrate new-to-me thinking into my evolving perspective and perception of what is important and what I want to use as the foundation for my decision-making. It may, however, help you to know that there was a lot of messy idea-nappies and the changing mat was well-used!
The term conspicuous consumption captures the idea that possessions hold meanings beyond their financial value, serving as part of a process of conveying status and hierarchy. My sense-making led me to understand conspicuous consumption as a visible way of saying, “I belong” – or, indeed, “I do not belong” – to a group that signals its assumed status through external markers or possessions.
It is a reification of money = I exist as someone worthwhile. Things and being fuse. That resonated for me with the way the young men in the fiction duse clothing as a means of constructing and expressing identity; the coercive control I have assumed between the mother and father; Sarfan’s positioning as “an illegal”; and Val’s experience of the painful gap between being treated as valueless (as a woman within the culture of a particular time and context) while believing that what she’s done in her working life has been valuable.
Rather than consumption being the focus of my thinking about how I might offer some ideas on operationalising our m/other tongue, it was the conspicuousness of the act of possessing that became central. Performativity, I suppose, is the term we might use today. Is conspicuousness the defining attribute of how power is deployed non-verbally? Going through the motions, performativity, takes the heart out of the heart/hands/head triad of how meaningful action flows in our m/other tongue.
I am, however, clear that central to living out our m/other tongue is the active, conscious, and persistent centring of the heart – of feeling – in the process of discerning action (what we do with our hands). This shift brings our attention back to the fact that we are Theraplayers. We are people who speak our m/other tongue. We don’t do Theraplay. Doing Theraplay puts the experience of tacit maternal knowing in the cognitive realm in order to drive change from top downwards. (Another information-encountering foray this month led me to the work of Audrey Dussutour and her research on The Blob, or intelligence without a brain. This has opened up further avenues for me to explore; I have included a couple of starting papers in the bibliography if you are interested.)
However, unless we make conscious and conspicuous the non-conscious organisation of our thinking shortcuts – the assumptions we make about people – we risk dancing with a chimera rather than genuinely relating to others. The question that emerges for me is this: rather than consumption becoming conspicuous, how might we make the process of choosing and decision-making in the service of care conspicuous, as a measure of value?
Even then, this is complicated. The ways we think we choose to be who we are, while subtly we are being kept in a place, are disheartening. Val and Graham are subtly kept in a place, not by each other’s actions or their here-and-now experiences, but by the stories taught to them by the past.
As last month’s fiction indicated, Val protects herself by moving into haughty mode, attempting to hold on to fragments of dignity and avoid the humiliation of nothingness. She chose inconspicuous refusal: working undercover, staying small as a way to protect her commitment to care and her sense of self value in that work. But that is not going to operationalise our m/other tongue beyond the therapy room. To become aware of “one’s place” can open opportunities to play with issues of being kept in place or choosing to work within the limitations of place without being Othered (Perry, 2018). The shifting dynamics between Val and Graham in this fiction may appear to make little sense; they can seem almost random, but they are changing position, becoming adrift, and finding their way while change is unfolding.
Ritzer (in Martinez, 2015) talks about the McDonaldisation of consumption, where, subtly, the consumer ends up doing the work of the retailer and not only paying for the privilege of doing the worker’s job, but is also being unwittingly sold the story that this is “a good thing”. The consumer is sold the tale that this piece of consumption, and the way you consume it, is modern, progress, innovation and something of intrinsic value. Calorie dense, nutritionally empty. It’s not intrinsically wrong, but unless the values that drive the position are laid bare, then it can feel manipulative. If it is sold as the only good thing, or the best good thing, then there is risk.
This connected with my thinking when, this week, millionaires in the UK asked the new Prime Minister to tax them more. The response from some sections of the press was to point out that there is a donate button on the HMRC website. To me, this missed the point. The money itself is not the only issue. This is about right deeds for right reasons.
What I heard in the request to be taxed more was a recognition that, as a community, we are committed to those who have (power expressed has money) being in a covenant, not a contract, to share that power in the service of others. Choosing to donate money sits outside that communal commitment: although the funds become available for use, the act of donation does not necessarily acknowledge a mutual obligation to share power.
For me, choosing to donate can echo patriarchal or colonial patterns in which care is bestowed in ways that preserve the giver’s position of power and maintain an Othering stance. Donation, framed as a “charitable” act of giving, can provide a route to avoid the deeper, more challenging commitment to addressing inequity. It can signal caring about, rather than caring for.
Providing money within a covenant of communal commitment to equity through taxation has an entirely different feel. Contributing through tax could become a badge of pride: a visible expression of participation in the shared responsibility of sustaining the community. How revolutionary would it be if the starting assumption of accountancy was how best to pay tax in order to share one’s fortune with the community, rather than how to minimise an individual’s tax bill?! More on covenants rather than contracts later. You can see what I mean about having to venture into new territories: taxation and the legal meaning of contracts!
The issue, as I reflected on this, is not that orders are placed on a screen to reduce waiting times and increase productivity, or that algorithms are used to decide who gets their tyres changed first. The issue is the sense of being deceived that, within these automated systems, your individual personhood matters. The story we are told is that we do this because it is best for you, it’s more efficient as a way to prioritise the things that are important.
But what do you do when your personal lived experience tells you that it is not best for you? What do you do when those same algorithms leave you feeling that decisions are not being made for the wellbeing of you (defined by the service provider as the consumer), but for efficiency, for increasing profit-to-cost ratios, to give more power to those who already have plenty of it, rather than as ways of making more specialist help available to those who do not fit within the norm? The discourse ends up located around consumption, conspicuous or otherwise, not receptivity, need, creativity, curiosity, care, adaptability, diversity, delightfully unique humanity. People feel hard done by, that they are deprived, and so the seeds of violence are sown.
Sarfan breaks the rules to give Val a cup of tea. In the fiction, his actions are not presented as the result of technology having freed up his time from serving a long queue so he can support someone for whom ordering on a screen is unfamiliar. Rather, what he chooses to do, his act of human choice to care for, is seen by his colleagues as an action that sits outside the system, a transgressive act of kindness. His action exposes him to the expectation of negative sanction. I wrote the fiction: clearly this is my digestion of experience in some way. What would a real life manager of a fast food outlet say? I would like to know, I really would. This is how it feels to me - is that what is intended?
Val is surprised that Sarfan breaks “the rules”, if indeed these are rules. Maybe these rules, or contractual obligations, are misinterpretations of the operationalisation process as it is filtered from top down. It disrupts her expectations. She expects to be treated as a failure in this new, modern, progressive, efficient world because she cannot master the challenge of ordering from a screen. She assumes it is a choice between ordering on the screen or getting nothing. But is it?
Similarly, I surprise myself wondering about how to address a big plot hole in the fiction as a whole. Is Sarfan really an undocumented migrant? Why would a fast-food outlet in a service station, generally part of a global brand, risk employing someone who was in the country illegally? Surely their human resources systems would have safeguards to protect the company from the legal and financial risks of such obvious non-compliance?
Could another story be that this is a line spun to Sarfan, a way to keep him in his place and not rise up against people who might be manipulating his vulnerability and lack of understanding of where he stands because of limited language, limited time, and limited energy to pursue those matters? Even I, as his author, have assumed he is outside the law! I could research more, and as an author, repair my plot hole.
But here I am a researcher, not an author. I am using fiction to illuminate the things I non-consciously draw on in making decisions and choices. In discovering that my knowing may be faulty, I can challenge the assumptions that arise from potentially faulty knowing. The plot hole is telling me something: about how assumption, lack of curiosity about things that don’t fit, perception of where we place someone based on what we see, takes us down a path that may impair accurate response to the needs of the other. Even with the best intentions, lack of accurate empathy leads to Othering as power is assumed by adopting an “I know what is going on” position.
And then there is the family – the mother, the father, the young person. Is the mother the perpetrator of domestic abuse because she has come prepared with a knife? Or do we assume the father is the perpetrator because he is the man? How are they being positioned by the gaze of the observer or by the gaze of the author? How am I consuming them?
This is where my information encountering led me to mull over the difference between a contract and a covenant. Alex’s comments made me think about the role of our clinical supervisors in helping practitioners stay resilient in practice that can feel challenging. This thought, along with other explorations, brought me to Mullally (2017).
Mullally holds the notion of covenant as a way of making a different sense of how we might use power in Christian organisations. Being in covenant with others, Mullally implies, requires the discerning application of authority - not in an authoritarian manner, but with inspiration, and in ways that cultivate the other through leading by example. He refers to this as referent power (after French and Raven, 1959). Central to the use of referent power is the understanding that power will be passed on: it is not a possession but a responsibility, something that must be free to flourish and multiply. This is using power in the service of the other. Mullally got me thinking about how this use of power sits in organisational terms. I realised I have mostly thought about it on a smaller scale in the therapy room.
Outside of the dyadic nature of Theraplay/therapy and where the parties in relationship are not actual mother/infant, and in the other places where we take this tacit maternal knowing as a touch stone in planning, organising and delivering care, maybe we can step away we can step away from conspicuous consumption as an (unspoken) contract and move into a realm of conspicuous relational commitment via covenant.
Mullally quotes Pyle and Seal (1995, 50):
Contracts are based on responsibility; covenants are based on relationships. Contracts define boundaries and bind, covenants provide for growth and becoming. Contracts are legalistic and enforceable; covenants focus on accountability and redemption…covenant is intentional. It grows out of our relationship with God. God’s covenant with us colours and shapes our understanding of our covenanting with each other. It provides structure for relationships, with God and others.
Not everyone may be comfortable with the explicitly Christian flavour of this writing, but it offered me a different way of processing my feeling of disintegration this month. It has moved me away from the desperation of trying to find a way to explain this “thing” that I know so deeply but just can’t say, towards something that might offer us another piece of language with which to step into the everyday life represented by the service station.
The violent outcome at the service station results because the young person, mother, father, and Sarfan have no room to manoeuvre. They have no way to avoid the resentments and the hurts they each feel separately, but which have a similar root: a lack of a felt-sense-of-safety. The expectation or contractual belief of having a right to possessions in order to feel a sense of belonging is not a felt-sense but a thought-sense. As such, the mismatch between the human drive for a felt-sense-of-safety and the thought-sense that is on offer is incongruent and liable to rupture. In the moment of not feeling like you belong, as if the village will not accept you, the desire for warm belonging leads to a path of violence as one encounters a sense of deprivation.
In the ordinary everyday life made intense by being trapped in the service station, the humiliation of believing you have been manipulated into accepting a good place, when in fact you have been kept in an exploitative one, becomes a source of violence. The rupture comes from the incongruence: you believed there was a contract, but the boundaries shift to favour the person with power, and the contract no longer keeps you safe.
This is where the other proverb resonated so strongly for me: if the child does not feel embraced by the village, they will burn it down, because somewhere deep within they know they deserve to be embraced. They deserve to belong. Not because of what they contribute or what they can do, nor because of their status or spending power, but because they are part of the community and because they are people.
The starting point for operationalising our m/other tongue is a covenant to care: to embrace the other, rather than injure through exclusion (othering). Where we discover exclusion, even when it has happened inadvertently, our m/other tongue requires us to face it. It asks us not to blame a faceless system, but, like Val, to walk towards it, hold out a hand, and say, “Hello, I’m Val.”
Once the knives come out, thinking becomes too slow, and gut-level problem-solving takes over. That is when tacit orientation emerges. Action ceases to be performance or performativity and becomes a manifestation of underlying values.
A covenant of care makes space for the child even as they burn the village, because it understands the violence as a form of communication. It does not condone the actual damage caused by violence, but it seeks to understand the meaning carried within it. A covenant of care is not nice, neat, or straightforward. It requires engagement with complexity and messiness, with not always knowing what is happening, while still holding trust in the fundamental goodness of humanity.
Covenant comes before contract. Connection comes before the definition of what is right and what is wrong.
At the heart of all of this is: how do we make sense of power, or authority, or experience? How do we manage equity when there is never going to be equal distribution of resources? How do we discern what we can be responsible for? How do we accept appropriate admonition when we don’t take the responsibility that is ours to hold, yet not feel ‘blamed’ for things that fall outside our field of authority and realm of responsibility? How do we enable people to see a conspicuous commitment to care in dialogue with conspicuous consumption?
Such exploration takes me back again to Milgram. Put starkly, uncreative obedience kills. My assumption that I should obey those I perceived to have power meant I would have become a murderer without being prepared for it. If I’d pushed the button, I would have had such a fracture in my soul that I could not have lived with myself. On my own, my way of managing such disastrous violence from the contract of being part of “research”, was to withdraw, not trust myself, feel I was at fault. On reflection, I am human, a product of my unique experiences and unique character. It still hurts though, knowing I would have been that obedient because that was how I was positioned.
Moving to the notion of a covenant of care as a relationship shifts that awful, morally outrageous position into something that draws on the Theraplay core concept of co-regulation. It is mutual and multidirectional, even when some form of hierarchy is needed to enable things to function. This doesn’t mean that things will always be creative, lovely, or nice.
Relationships are about process, not product: how those within the covenant relationship manage and engage with the bumps in the road in order to limit their impact on the movement towards love. This is the strange communion. It acknowledges that we are not isolated individuals, but are bound together and continually shape one another through relationships formed by our shared lived experience.
We will do wrong things. We can take responsibility. Our colleagues – however we define them – can help us. When we are conspicuous in our commitment to a covenant of care, co-regulation enables the appropriate level of arousal for the task at hand, because regulation doesn’t reside in the interior world of just one person, but is a shared space.
Isolation leads towards the construction of a contract, and contracts alone can lead to disaster. The village will burn because we are human beings who need the warmth of belonging. Yet being conspicuous in a covenant of care still feels risky within a landscape shaped by conspicuous consumption. It can feel like pushing against the tide.
It may even feel “regressive” as those of us who hold power take responsibility for big stuff – such as war and climate change – and so become “poorer”, recognising that promoting equity may require saying no to consumption and accepting limits. Ideas of “good enough” and “sufficient for need” would become central within our vocabulary. Compromise would, too.
I find it much easier to balance values in caring work with decisions related to income generation when you work for yourself. It’s one of the (multiple) reasons I chose to run my own business as a clinician rather than be employed and could live by my own values and keep striving to place care above all else. It didn’t take away the fear of having enough money to live on, or the never-ending battle of wondering, can I charge that much? But it did give me a sense of satisfaction: a job well done, families and children feeling loved, and colleagues feeling valued. Never without rupture, but, hopefully, with ruptures acknowledged, addressed, and repairs worked towards.
This is why I hover between rage and relief at not having been employed on a contract with research as a significant component within an organisation that places such value on research. Pay and institutional status signal that I’m not “the right sort” (although I always felt, and deeply valued, the personal recognition and respect shown to me by many colleagues across all kinds of contractual relationships with the institution). This positions this research is a bit transgressive - me, a hobbyist researcher, claiming this as a post-Doctoral project.
Keeping small also meant I avoided the responsibility of employing others - until now, with my editor and my personal assistant. Now I find myself facing the challenge of balancing the values I choose to live by with the need to generate sufficient income to pay them, while also being driven by the more ephemeral desire and passion to support others in doing everything within their power to use that power in the service of those who are more vulnerable. A small scale practical exploration of operationalising our m/other tongue.
So how do love, assumption, and power come together to operationalise our m/other tongue? I am afraid I do not know. I just do not know. I have threads. I am in the middle of weaving.
For the weaving to come together and create a sustainable fabric, I first need to lay all those threads out on the changing mat. This is part of helping the baby-ideas manage the too-muchness of exposure while the necessary developmental mess is cleared away. The “poop” in the fiction this month is the horrible yet understated, almost commonplace, feeling of the violence that takes place. The “poop” of the process of trying to make sense of the fiction is that I am still editing this only hours before it is due to be published (sorry, dear editor), and the number of wet wipes that have been applied to sections needing removal in the hope that I do not overwhelm you, dear reader.
I will not be giving you a contract for how to live your professional lives using our m/other tongue. Contracts require too much fixed knowledge when I/we are all still trying to work things out as we go along. Contracts are voided when they are broken, and people can then walk away from the pain. I have done that: walked away from pain because, at the time, it was the best I could do in making some career choices and tolerating others.
As we learn together how to live by our m/other tongue, I am inviting you to shift away from being a contract-based professional in therapy, therapist education, research, or management. Playing with the notion of being covenant-based may make it more possible to move away from assumption and judgement towards making sense of what is happening in the moment before us.
In inviting you to consider becoming covenant-based, I don’t ask, I don’t expect. I don’t see it as a single choice point, but in that covenant space it doesn’t matter who the perpetrators are, or who the victims are: people need care, and the covenant held by Val and company comes into play. Val is prepared to put herself on the line when there is violence. She steps in. She doesn’t say no this is too much, or you are too bad, or you are the victim I’ll protect you, or you are the perpetrator so I’ll vilify you. She says hello I’m Val.
I also hold an awareness that you may be way ahead of me and may already be doing this.
I recognise in myself a preference to walk away from conflict and avoid the risk of uncertain outcomes. I like contracts because I feel they tell me where I stand, but I am beginning to realise that this can be an illusion. The Val part of me clearly knows how to walk towards hurt within a covenant of love. I need to listen more carefully to what that is about in the rest of the fiction, and then try to work out how to share it with all of you.
Not as a contract that says, Do this or you are not living the m/other tongue, but in the covenant of, This is how it is for me. Is it like that for you too?
Addition for the m/other-us-all
The changing bag is a covenant, not a contract. It is a promise to commit to care for the other to the best of ability no matter what. As a covenant, it can’t be broken beyond repair. The covenant we enter into when we choose to live by our m/other tongue is to strive to be reverent with power, exercise authority with love, and be mindful of how our vision, and the vision of others, might be limited by contractual obedience to perceived power not covenantal commitment to embodied care. We can sign up to this and become our own community of support as we venture into the world to do our best to live this covenant.
Bibliography
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