Identity formation: Helping practitioners develop the skills needed for this work: Applications for educators
Val had not been idle in retirement. Viking had been amused at first when she started practising Tai Chi in the living room while he watched from the sofa. As she carried on over the weeks, he got bored and would sleep through her practice after licking his paws and placing his tail carefully over his eyes. Val sometimes wondered why she was doing it – it hardly seemed a martial art, but it was gentle on her creaky knees. And now it worked for her.
Overview: August 2023
This month’s fiction is: Tiny acts of individual rebellion
This month’s application posts are:
Therap/play is interactive and relationship based: Applications for practitioners
Merging back to Earth: Applications for researchers
Much of my thinking this month has focused on the development of a different understanding of what could contribute to the flow of interpersonal healing action by focussing on doing the unexpected. These transgressions of social or cultural norms highlight what is not present in a relationship but could be if there was sufficient capacity for old patterns to be discharged and new ones practised.
As therapist educators, cultivating this process in trainees requires a focus on spaces, not on actions/skills, while at the same time the actions/skills are what create the spaces. Like an artist, cultivating an ‘eye’ for what is to be depicted is less about drawing what is there, and more about tending to the mark making of what is not there, so an image will emerge. I have to write fiction to see the spaces that show me what my tacit knowing guides me to do, while at the same time I need to embrace not knowing in order to write the fiction. I have to feel unconcerned about outcomes and whether they will make sense to anyone else in order to find new insights. It is at points of safe unsafety that creativity and insight can be cultivated and wisdom harnessed in our trainees.
In the diagram included in Merging back to Earth, I try to reimagine Maslow's theory of motivation, creating four peak points. Where change and safety come together in a peak point, new material can be generated either individually or communally. The illumination of that material takes place at the point where safety meets safety and change meets change, and I can try to articulate the insights through the interdependent interface of individual and communal.
I would suggest, on the basis of my mulling this month, that it is at the interface of body and earth, in the old Maslow terms, where physiological needs are being met in a good enough way that the dynamic of connection and insight is powered in the flow cycle of abundance.
What that means in considering how we educate therapeutic practitioners is that we formulate our pedagogy around taking the non-problem seriously, as Garland (1982) would say. Again, we are transgressing the norms of ‘teaching people what to do’ and moving into the realm of educating people to be, on the basis that if we get that right, they will move into the flow of abundance. They will then be able to impact on the interpersonal barriers that lead to suffering in the people we see. As practitioners and as practitioner educators, we first enable people to learn to be, rather than prioritising teaching them what to do. Our focus is on cultivating the identity of a practitioner.
Val is okay because she is secure in her identity. She has been seen by others in the way she sees herself. In the past this was affirmed by her supervisor, in the present by her cat. Both see her as a hero, even if the world sees her as an interfering old woman who should be dismissed as batty or deluded. The couple is seen as deviant for fighting over their needs in public, when really they’re expressing that we’ve been given the wrong drink, not the milk of kindness but the intoxicant of insufficiency, and have to fight over what little there is.
How often on our courses do we think that there is never enough time to fit in everything we need to teach? And the reality is that we will never be able to teach all the content that a therapist, Theraplay or otherwise, needs in their practice via a time-limited teaching programme. Even if we could, our students wouldn’t be able to digest it all. But we can cultivate the abundance of identity as a therapeutic practitioner with a commitment to caring for our clients and addressing what prevents them from feeling in harmony with themselves and each other. I would suggest this happens most powerfully at the place where the body of the trainee is in connection to the communal body (what I call the earth in the diagram). At this point, there is an abundance of safety and an abundance of change.
It is subtle and powerful (like the Tai Chi Val takes up). It can be glitchy and off balance in the early part of educating and cultivating such practitioners. Like the deliverables I spoke about last month, it is about having the courage to be process-focussed first rather than prioritising tick-box competences as the thing that has to lead our practice as therapist educators. There has to be a dynamic flow of safety and un-safety that allows for change and growth in practitioners’ development. That creation of the permissive, abundant, but safe space to develop the embodied identity of being a therapist or Theraplay practitioner has to be the driver of the educative process, and that requires trust and openness on the parts of both educator and person being educated, as the educator uses their power in the service of the person learning, who is at that point less powerful.
Poor Viking, who has that flow in abundance as a cat, has to cover his eyes while Val fumbles through her learning of Tai Chi, but he sticks with her. It doesn’t seem much to Val until she finds it gives her exactly what she needs in the heat of the moment of action as she intervenes in the interpersonal stuckness of the violent couple. Viking represents a masculinity that is not caught into the patriarchy, but does want orderly, calm, and connected interpersonal action (at the end he expresses his appreciation of Val’s use of her tacit maternal knowing by sitting on her lap and kneading her leg) but has to let go of the need for order, calmness, and precision in the process of the learning. He does this by first offering amused, warm, and containing, oversight (unconditional positive regard), then by giving space to the more messy not knowing aspects of practising the practice in a safe space so that the learners learn how to be practitioners.
As therapist educators, we can create the spaces where our trainees can learn to become – to identify with being – a therapist. With that identity they can accept the flow of abundance that perpetuates the process of change intrapsychically, interpersonally, and communally. The interactions that are needed to support and change interpersonal connection are contingent and contextual to the person, with all of their internalised and current communal landscape. We bring the same loving disruption to training practitioners as we take into our therapeutic practice.