Health before wealth, peace before power?
Contents
Chapter 3: 17:00
Changes in the landscape [supplementary]
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
I may be situating this blog as a postdoctoral study – an academic exploration – but I do so within the context of a vast, complex world of people and dramatic political events. I may be placing the imagined narrative within a small span of time and in a single location – one of the oldest service stations on the oldest motorway in the UK. I may be focusing on one, or two, or three, or four imagined characters, but I do so having lived a life shaped by the wider world and the personal politics of lived experience.
In light of current global events, I found myself exploring questions of priority: health or wealth as a determining factor in decision-making - peace or power? The fiction, written in November 2024 during NaNoWriMo, shaped both by the prompts you gave me and my own preoccupations with my practice as a clinician, therapist-educator, researcher, and a manager of systems, produced a form of fiction that seems to veer towards magical realism, or even fairy tale. As I try to illuminate the tacit maternal knowing that fuelled the fiction creation, I find myself caught between the desire to ‘get real’ – to confront directly the privileging of wealth over health in the making of war – and something more internal that insists the deeper personal work is necessary in order to situate peace over power.
These feel like heavy, and essential, subjects to consider.
The fiction this month has three distinct parts: the story that is largely from Val’s interior world, a fairy tale/magic realist section, and the supplementary fiction, which is the first time an external point view is introduced as Daniel and one of his pupils observe Val and Graham together.
Ancestral overwhelm
Val pulled her coat tighter around herself. She was now sure the heating wasn’t working. The number of people in the room generated heat, but it was a wet heat, the condensation of so many breaths. Perversely, such heat left her cold. The unease of many people and many generations gathered unwillingly and unexpectedly in this space inhabited her bones. The half-gloom seemed to emphasise the emergence of the underworld. She shuddered again.
Halloween had never meant much to her. Growing up, it had hardly been mentioned. Bonfire Night was the big event. In her devout Christian family, Halloween carried a tinge of evil, something to be avoided. Looking back, she probably conflated the two – Bonfire Night and Halloween. She used to shudder at the bonfire too, always feeling a deep unease at the delight people took in the burning of an effigy of a man. It didn’t matter what he had been trying to do. Somehow she couldn’t block out the imagined smell of searing heat on flesh.
Every memory she had of her parents seemed to end in dismissal of her. She had tried to tell them how it felt.
“You are too sensitive,” her mother said.
“You are scared of the fireworks,” her father said.
He took her into the back garden. He lit a sparkler, making her hold it. He instructed her to wave it around in the dark. Her eyes stung with tears, and the brightness left streaks across her vision. It hurt, the intense light. It was the streaks that didn’t go from her vision even when the sparkler went out that scared her. Do echoes ever go?
“What a brave girl,” her father said. “See, there is nothing to be afraid of. You’ll enjoy the fireworks next year.”
The tears were not from fear, but from the despair of not being understood. They were the despair of absolute aloneness, sharpened by her father’s attempts – kindly meant attempts – to help, which were so utterly wide of the mark that it was horrific. She knew “yes, Daddy” was the right response. She knew lying was wrong. She couldn’t be good, because if she did one thing right, the other was wrong. So she must be bad, and she said nothing. She carried on saying nothing when it mattered most, because she could never get it right, and the only way to preserve something of herself was to find a place of being nothing and hide there.
Professional Val knew what to do. Little Val was terrified. Both cared deeply for those around her – deeply, to the point of pain in her chest – at the joined voices of fear as twilight gave space for the underworld to emerge. Things that could be hidden in the brightness of light could not be hidden in the semi-ness.
Babes in the wood
Once upon a time there were two highly competent professionals, both involved in caring for living souls less powerful than themselves. They liked each other, but their shared experience was of having once been in the less powerful position, ridiculed for their inability, and their lack of desire, to join with that power. They both learned to hide in the woods, preserving their small pieces of honesty in whatever way they could.
Preserving that honesty required them to be dishonest at the core of who they were, and this convinced each of them that, ultimately, they were worthless. Worthlessness became the foundation stone of their lives, no matter how full of worth their professional colleagues knew them to be. When it came to the most important parts of their lives – the intimate relationships that would endure long after their professions ended and their bodies slowed – they were both unable to believe they were more than nothing.
They competed to reach the bottom of the pile, always afraid they simply would not get it right for the other. Their fear made them foolish and uncoordinated, as fear does, and each told themselves they were stupid and ugly, so how could the other possibly desire them in any way? And so they continued to hide in the woods, although aware of each other’s presence. They took comfort in living in the same woods, even though they never told each other they were there together, sharing trees and grass and dappled sunlight.
They passed around each other like shadows, admiring what the other did, yet convincing themselves they were bad, because their hearts were confused about how to care when the world told them they were uncaring for not striving for power. They became accustomed to nothing, and nothing became a place of comfort, because within it there might be no ridicule.
Humiliation was the most feared of feelings, closely followed by the pain they saw in those around them – people they cared for, not professionally but personally – who refused to be aware of themselves. Professional colleagues welcomed their insight, their kindness towards those in pain, and their skill in easing it, but they could never believe they were good people. The most important parts of their inner lives insisted they were not, because good people were powerful and confident. Yet their honesty told them otherwise: that powerful and confident people hurt others, because they were not tender or available.
One day in the woods there was an eclipse. All the light went out. They could not see each other, and they bumped into one another. Each put their arms around the other, thinking they had found someone they should care for. As the light slowly returned, bringing with it an unnerving twilight gloom, they realised their mistake – and then realised it was not a mistake at all. They could care for each other, not only in practical ways, but truly - and they could allow the other to care for them.
Health, wealth, and happiness
This post will be published on 1 April 2026, and I am writing during March 2026. If you read this in the future, what will you make of one country launching an attack on another? What will you make of children in a school being killed by a missile – unintentionally, accidentally – but still dead because a missile hit the school they were in? What will you make of the choices governments make?
Fiction is my source of data as well as my method of research (Peacock, 2023). Heuristic Inquiry is small, local, deep, and contextual, and Moustakas (1990) says that in every such inquiry there may be, and probably is, some sort of universal truth or meaning. I want the operationalisation of our m/other tongue to influence world peace because a mother cannot bear for her child to be killed so pointlessly and violently. The fantasy that my deep personal self search could have such impact can feel like a fairy tale when my source of insight is a fictional Val and Graham, fictionally stuck in a service station because the motorway is closed by rain on 31 October 2024 – fictionally speaking. It feels like an abrupt change of register, just as the shifts of narrative voice and points of view over the two initial pieces of fiction, then the supplementary fiction, might feel a bit disorientating. And my hope is that disorientation - manageable moments of not knowing - can open possibilities of different actions.
So what? How can such small and storied thoughts impact such big world problems?
Some stories stick because they strike a chord and culturally resonate. Babes in the wood appears in this month’s fiction. It has become fairy tale–like, almost a pantomime, reshaped into a happy ending. Yet it comes from a gruesome tale of avarice from my homeland of Norfolk. A dying father asks his brother to raise his children as his own. The brother instead hires assassins to kill them so he can inherit the money. Some say this tale, first told in 1595, later morphed into Hansel and Gretel. Bettelheim (1991), who survived a spell in concentration camps early in the second world war, sees fairy tales as a way of symbolically processing the dark challenges of human existence. (Although, as with many innovators, he also had his personal dark challenges and may have taken his ideas from Heuscher (1974), whom I confess I have not yet read but now feel that I must). Fairy tales are not precursors to Disney movies; they are powerful ways for individuals to manage overwhelming and community-based violence for children.
The story of Babes in the wood is tragedy, full of abandonment and helplessness resulting in the pointless, fiscally-driven destruction of two lives. An uncle who agreed to care for his dying brother’s children chooses instead to have them killed so he can claim their inheritance. Bluntly, his wealth is placed above the health/life of the infants.
I came across two versions of the story. In the first, one of the assassins takes pity on the children, kills the other assassin, and leaves the children in the woods. In a purportedly slightly softer later version, both assassins take pity and leave the children alive. Whichever version, children are still abandoned. In either version the only living being that takes caring action is a robin who covers the dead bodies of the children with leaves. Compassion and dignity in death, but what about justice in life?
In my interpretation of their motivation, the men (assassins and uncle) can’t face the guilt of killing helpless people with their own hands, so they hide their responsibility behind paying others off or an unreasonable hope that death will not occur. I imagine them salving their consciences – not me, I didn’t kill them! I am a good man. I just left them (even though death is the most likely outcome). In reality, whether by one assassin or two, abandonment is killing by indirect means. Two small children will not survive alone in the wild. They die. This is still killing those less powerful by those with power. Killing by avoidance rather than by action, but the outcome is the same. Still wealth (a killer’s fee, an inheritance) above the health of the infant. Still adults prioritising action through fiscal constructs over constructs of children’s thriving and healthy development. One construct is prioritised over another without deeply challenging its value structure and the human consequences of such prioritisation.
The hired killers do not stand up to the uncle who hires them and say, “You can’t do that.” It still feels like a story of our time. Our failure of corporate and institutional parenting, the failure to care for children and the vulnerable. Our failure, from our m/other tongue as well as the tongues of the manstream, to stand up and say you can’t do that. Sins of omission as well as commission. Dismissal, by ourselves as well as our society, of the babbling, immodest fools who are telling us that we are slaves to money, not collaborators in care, and that it is not good enough. We can’t do that. We can’t kill children (physically or emotionally, in big bodies or small bodies - for children read those who at moments need our care).
If we want to be a caring society, we have to pay the price of that (see the Franklin quote below). Caring is slow, painstaking, and repetitive. It cannot be scaled up without losing its contextualisation and empathetic engagement with individual need. It is complicated. It is hard work – thinking and, more importantly feeling, into, then actively witnessing, the experience of the other.
Especially when they are more vulnerable and less powerful than we are.
Especially when we say we are facilitating their growth, wellbeing, and health.
We may have to set aside our convenience, our preferred direction, and our avarice. The price of peace is compromise and that may mean we don’t get what we want.
Ursula Franklin, a Canadian Quaker, wrote:
The definition of peace as the absence of fear illustrates that the central element needed to bring peace on all levels and to reduce fear is justice. Justice means freedom from arbitrary interference but it also implies a fundamental equality of caring. In God’s eyes all creatures have value and are subjects of equal care and love; similarly, in a society of justice and peace, all people matter equally. A true commitment to peace—by individuals, groups, churches, or governments—means a commitment to equal justice for all. Such a commitment entails two constituent components. One is that peace, like true justice, is indivisible. Peace, if it comes, will come to all: to those who work with us and those who work against us. Bertrand Russell defined the indivisibility of peace in his statement that “the price of peace is the happiness of our enemies,” and added that he was not at all sure whether humanity was prepared to pay that price. (Franklin, 2006, Removing the Causes of War section).
If we want to be a caring society, we have to pay that price. A society that puts health before wealth incurs emotional as well as financial costs. If they want a caring relationship, Val and Graham must risk vulnerability before any shift in their perspective can occur so they can find peace together. They must be honest with themselves and with each other. This is a significant risk, given their established patterns of self-protection in a world that they have experienced as hostile. I think it may have been Rogers who suggested we can only take those we work with as far as we have gone ourselves.
This is what mothers do in deploying their tacit maternal wisdom, and for some the price is very high. Some mothers regret having children. I understand that. As much as I value motherhood and see the mother–infant relationship as my primary reference point for knowledge, becoming a mother in British culture is not valued as highly as having a career, earning money, or being individually fulfilled and ambitious. Neither position is right or wrong. Both have affordances and constraints. Both can liberate or enslave. It comes down to the ability, and freedom, to be a self that feels honest to one’s internal sense of probity. Choosing to live our professional lives by prioritising our m/other tongue is a choice.
Val and Graham’s relational health, in the form of how they have ended up living out that probity, carries a cost. Neither has sustained long-term relationships because of their driving need to preserve a sense of self, their “true self” in Winnicott’s (1990) terms. One might argue that their position as white, middle-class individuals buffers them from some financial consequences of choosing to care and rejecting the pressures of their particular manstreams. They do have sufficient safety in terms of enough to eat, a roof over their head, intellectual fulfilment. Both could likely have earned more in other fields, given their capabilities. Yet neither is motivated by that path, and at the same time, up to this point, both have been escaping the fundamental part of their distress rather than processing it.
Val and Graham have been practising internal assassination, abandoning their own inner infants. Circumstances have caused both to be caught in shame about who they are. They only see the good they do through the veil of shame. Instead of feeling pleasure in their professionalism, they feel guilt that it is insufficient or comes from a place of insincerity. They feel powerless to change the positions imposed on them by others.
In Daniel, we see a hint of another way. Placing health before wealth in managing his unit within a school does not necessarily cost more money, but it does require more attention to individual children’s needs, and a willingness to go out of one’s way to meet them. It costs Daniel and his team in terms of the effort they put into understanding and meeting the needs of the children they are caring for by creating the conditions that enable peace in each child, and might be different for each child. They are creating the space where each child can experience a felt-sense-of-safety via the particular relationship they have with another. I am using felt-sense-of-safety as a term to link the idea with core attachment theory.
Defining peace in this way, a felt-sense-of-safety from which one can flexibly and non-defensively relate to another means that peace is small and particular. It is not transferable and generalisable as it is about the accurate seeing of each other, as well as oneself. It is about being known for who your intrinsic self is, so you can feel you are being honest with yourself about who you are.
Honesty about who you are requires an experience of not feeling threatened simply for being yourself by someone who believes, and behaves, as though they have power over you. This threat need not be explicit; it can take the form of implied disapproval or exclusion. Exclusion from the tribe is a fundamental attachment threat. If an infant’s cries go unanswered, they will not survive.
The fiction marks a turning point in Val and Graham’s inner lives because they find each other in the ‘woods’. They no longer feel excluded from one another, even if they still feel abandoned by the wider world, because they take the risk of allowing a safe other to see their vulnerability.
From reflecting on the fiction and the meaning it may hold, I come away with the insight that you can only offer peace to another if you have sufficient internal peace yourself – a felt sense of safety, or ontological security. It does not have to be perfect. In fact, perfect peace is unimaginable, and likely impossible. But if you feel peaceful enough, you can attend to your inner light – your Winnicottian true self – which I would suggest is rooted in the attachment drive, taking the mother–infant relationship as our primary reference point.
From there, you can begin to work out how to connect with others in ways that are growthful for both (or all). We see this in how Daniel interacts with the children he cares for, and how this enables them to ‘see out’ when they feel safe, even though their range of felt safety may be limited by neurodiversity or experiences of abuse (see the supplementary fiction).
For the other to receive peaceful relationship, they too need sufficient internal peace – a felt sense of safety. Without this, no one can risk being vulnerable or flexible enough to allow their inner world to shift and mingle with the peace of another in a bi-directional manner. Curiosity is difficult when there is no inner peace/felt-sense-of-safety, as the need to survive takes over. Fear of the other to preserve the self becomes the driving force, and can lead to a need to hold power over others in order to avoid vulnerability. Care – of self and other – has little space when fear is in the driving seat, no matter how deeply that fear is concealed.
Clinical leader, manager, researcher, therapist, educator – do you have a sufficient felt sense of safety? If not, you are more likely to reach for the toolbox, not the changing bag. You are more likely to try to fix the other according to your own map of the world, rather than enable them to keep growing into themselves. The toolbox, reached for in fear, leads to Othering. The changing bag, reached for in love, enables connection.
Moving towards a way of working that puts health before wealth is about stepping out of helplessness. The next part of the fiction looks at Val and Graham from the outside, and notices something tender between them. That shift in perspective feels important. I’ve included it as supplementary fiction, as I didn’t see the connection until I’d worked through these ideas about peace and felt sense of safety.
Guilt and shame have kept Val and Graham locked into seeing themselves as unworthy of relationship. Guilt and shame hinder empathy because they trap people in the sense that who I am, and what I do, in the eyes of the manstream, is wrong. Yet guilt is distinct from, as well as connected to, shame. Shame is the experience of existential or ontological wrongness – the feeling that I am wrong simply by existing. Guilt, by contrast, can act as a driver to do something about what is felt to be wrong.
To feel guilt, there must be a sense of self. If there is a self, there is the potential for awareness of others. And if there is awareness of others, there is the possibility of empathy. Empathy involves seeing oneself as others might see you, not only as you see yourself, as well as seeing others as they may see themselves. This shift in perspective – to see, and be seen – is not linear or logical. It emerges from the fairy tale, from the bonkersness of story, and from unmeasurable art tangling with life, drifting from dreamscapes and fragments into daily life. Out of landscapes of mess come moments of “aha” – perspective-shifting insights, where arms entwine in the dark, and care becomes mutual.
There is no master plan, only messiness, opportunity, and the hope that comes from being seen and appreciated as you see yourself. Effective mirroring is essential for moving from shame to autonomy, and through guilt towards initiative, in Eriksonian developmental terms. Without mutual and accurate mirroring that affirms you are fundamentally worthwhile – even if what you do is a bit messy – these developmental stages cannot be negotiated. You become more useful to the manstream when you are dead (emotionally), as you then fill the coffers in an undemanding way.
I return to the changing mat, and what it might offer as a metaphor for operationalising our m/other tongue. It is a constant, repetitive task: cleaning up the by-products of growth – what we call poo, faeces, shit. We work from the bottom up, this repetition of caring for mess becoming a vehicle for relationship formation between infant and caregiver. With every nappy change there is enforced vulnerability and exposure. It has to be done. Neglecting the nappyful is neglecting care and, like the assassins, a form of killing by omission.
The nappyful is the tip of an iceberg, to mix metaphors. Treat it as just a task – the visible thing that needs doing – and it can be quickly resolved. Treat it as the visible part of a much larger whole, most of which lies beneath the surface, and the same small, repeated act takes on a different significance. If you do not hold the whole picture in mind, and focus only on what is visible, what happens?
The assassins “compassionately” act on what they can see, but go no deeper into what has created the situation they face. They do not kill the children directly. But by ignoring the wider context, by not challenging avarice or an immoral contract, and by abandoning the children in the woods where they cannot survive, they remain paid killers.
If you only melt the tip of the iceberg, the immediate, visible risk may diminish. The assassins appear to get away with it. But the unseen mass becomes unstable, generating other, less predictable dangers. What lives did the assassins go on to live? What further harm did the uncle cause in pursuit of wealth? Why is this the part of the story that persists? What cultural resonances are being amplified?
It may be slower, messier, and less logical to take in the whole, partly invisible but deducible, situation – to imagine a story in which the children are taken home, where the assassins risk becoming targets, where they give up their trade and find other ways to live. It is an unknown story. The outcome might be different. You might end up with healthy, thriving children, or with a world that learns it can live with less, remain well fed, and not destroy the planet (yes, I am mixing icebergs, assassins, nappies, and the Strait of Hormuz).
Again and again, I return to the necessity of knowing that I do not know, and of taking that as both foundation and building material – perhaps even as the finished structure itself. To sit comfortably in not knowing requires both sufficient internalised confidence and a sufficient felt sense of safety. From there, exploration into the unknown becomes possible. From there, the creation of peace can take precedence over the exercise of power over others. From that would follow an experience of health, in its widest sense – a felt sense of safety as the touchstone for the choices we make and the actions we take.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
In our m/otherland, change starts from the bottom up. The task of cleaning the nappyful is not a hindrance to peace and connection, it is the vehicle to health above wealth in decision-making and peace instead of using power to subjugate people who are doing things we don’t like.
Changes in the landscape
Daniel looked over towards Val. It had been a joy, then a puzzle, to meet her again. In many ways, she hadn’t changed. She had always been a little dishevelled, but in a way that said, let’s play, we don’t need to stand on ceremony. He had been young himself when he last saw her, just nineteen and testing the waters before university. She had seemed old to him then, but any teacher-type person was old at that point. Looking back, he felt that he had more in common with the children he was working with in the school. It must have been fifteen years ago.
He had already begun to feel that teaching was not for him. He enjoyed the children, enjoyed getting out and kicking balls around with them, enjoyed high-fiving the girl he supported when she managed her maths problems. He did not like the heaviness of filling in forms and papers about progress, when the progress he saw was different – confidence, sassiness, exuberance. The very things he valued in himself, and that his family valued, seemed to the school to be problems.
And that Joe! He had been so close to exclusion, and then Val appeared, and it was like magic - the school fell in love with Joe. Daniel somehow saw behind that and wondered why people were not falling in love with Val instead.
She looked so tired now, grey, and the dishevelment looked a little like she didn’t care for herself as much as she used to. And yet, when she came over and played thumb-stacks with one of the children, he saw the same delight and vibrancy he remembered – how she lit up when someone had fun with her, and how she could make things fun in return.
He looked across to where she sat against the wall, a refugee like all of them from predictability and expectation. He saw her back straighten, her head lift. He smiled. She looked like a tree growing and expanding at once, filling with sap and water, reaching for the light.
The man beside her – Graham, she had called him, without explaining their relationship – seemed to be softening. His stiff, contained posture began to round. Their arms lifted and entwined, like branches of trees planted close together, shaped by the elements until branch grew into branch and trunk pressed into trunk, and it became impossible to tell whether there was one tree or two.
Just as Daniel knew how to erect an invisible but protective shield around the children he was caring for, it seemed Val and Graham had unknowingly and unwordingly discovered that for themselves. They moved closer. In all the time they had known each other, they had never really allowed their bodies to touch. It had been an unspoken fear. Perhaps not the same fear in origin, but a shared fear of its consequences – of vulnerability, and of that vulnerability being met with humiliation.
But something had shifted. Some spirit had moved in the twilight of Halloween, and their bodies drew together. Her rising and his softening meant that neither was stronger nor weaker, neither rigid nor yielding. They were simply together. And together, they were not like mother and child, Daniel thought, but there was a tenderness that felt almost maternal. Like two horses in a herd, bonded, equal, stronger for it, at ease in each other’s company, with any sense of too-much-ness dissolved. They had each other’s backs. They were safe.
He felt Jacob pull away slightly from his side. He loosened his arm to give him space, without taking his eyes from Val and Graham.
“They’re a cute old couple, aren’t they,” Jacob said, snuggling back against his teacher. “How long now, sir?”
Daniel looked down at the boy’s dark hair. A surge of feeling rose in him – love for his role, for the children in his care, for what Val had once shown him about himself, and for the simple loveliness of humankind. Without thinking, he bent and kissed the top of Jacob’s head.
“Sir!” The protest was more laughter than objection.
“Soon. They’ll be coming soon. We’ll get you home, don’t worry.”
Jacob nestled closer, as if he could make the bony side of his teacher softer simply by expecting it, his spine curling and shifting, shoulder to hip pressing into the man who made him feel safe.
“I know, sir. I know.”
Bibliography
Bettelheim, B. (1991). The uses of enchantment: The meaning and importance of fairy tales. Penguin.
Erikson, E. H. (1995). Childhood and society. Vintage.
Franklin, U. M., & Swenarchuk, M. (2006). The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map. Between the Lines.
Heuscher, J. E. (1974). A psychiatric study of myths and fairy tales: Their origin, meaning and usefulness (2 ed.). Thomas.
Moustakas, C. E. (1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology, and applications. Sage.
Peacock, F. (2023). What did I do? I don’t know. Generating fiction to examine the tacit maternal knowing I bring to my Theraplay® practice with children who are experiencing relational and developmental trauma. (Doctoral thesis) [Doctor of Education, University of Cambridge]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80181
Don’t forget, you can access a more approachable version of my doctoral research by ordering the fiction A Necessary Life(Story) and the first year of these posts from me via this Google Form.
Winnicott, D. W. (1990). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Karnac.