Therap/play is interactive and relationship based: Applications for practitioners
Val felt pleased and strong and a bit confused because she knew the others, the crowd, the police, the ambulance people, and probably the man and the woman too, didn’t see her as she saw herself. She made herself a mug of tea and sat down on the sofa. Viking opened an eye. Val swore that he smiled at her. Sleepily, he moved his ageing cat body around and clambered into her lap. She could feel his deep rumble purr and felt his paws knead her thigh in maternal appreciation, pretending he could get some milk out of her, liking the safe base she gave him. She smiled back at him. He knew.
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
This month, my musings have mostly been around the transgression of our own social and cultural norms as part of a commitment to be interactive and relationship-based.
In the fiction, Val, newly retired, is out and about meeting her basic bodily needs when she steps in to break up a fight between a man and a woman. You will recall that last month I started to embark on trying to make sense of the interpersonal relationship between maternal experience, femaleness, and maleness. In the fiction, as a couple fight (co-dependent unhealthy merging of maleness and femaleness), other men gather. They are uncomfortable about the situation but do not take action, afraid of how this would be seen, afraid their desire to stop aggression would itself be judged as aggressive. It is Val who offers the interactive and relationship-based intervention, but is then on the receiving end of the violence herself.
In wondering about what the fiction may be mirroring to me about how to deepen my understanding of my practice, my mind goes to the still face paradigm videos. To me, it feels that there is a deep violence done to people when interaction is not present. Children protest to try to regain the interactive and relationship-based experience they are used to. When this is not forthcoming, they flop or become more insistent and demanding of the relationship. This month's fiction explores something of that insistence, the demand for relationship no matter what.
The fiction is created from my embodied immersion into my own swamp of practice (Finlay 2002). The actions and characters are, therefore, all part of the same complex internal state that I am trying to make sense of. The violence being witnessed in the story between the maleness and the femaleness, with non-violent (violated?) male bystanders and an interactive Val, are all some sort of pact that holds an internal status quo in place inside me. Such a status quo feels like it limits creative living. This status quo does not alleviate distress, but is a repeating pattern that tells me/us something. Something that I would like to change, in myself and with/for the people who come to me for therapy. This exploration of violence and aggression comes from my inner world. As you engage with my musings, I pose the question – is it like that for you too?
What purpose does that violence serve? Winnicott wrote about an unformed ego that has not been enabled to progress and is now in a big body – not that he used those words. He suggests that the desire for comfort and connection is so persistent, and the delight in connection so overwhelming, that there is aggression. What he actually says is this:
“Prior to integration of the personality there is aggression. A baby kicks in the womb; it cannot be assumed that he is trying to kick his way out. A baby of a few weeks thrashes away with his arms; it cannot be assumed that he means to hit. A baby chews the nipple with his gums; it cannot be assumed that he is meaning to destroy or to hurt. At origin aggressiveness is almost synonymous with activity; it is a matter of part-function.” (Winnicott, 2018, 204)
He goes on to say: “It is necessary to describe a theoretical stage of unconcern or ruthlessness in which the child can be said to exist as a person and to have purpose, yet to be unconcerned as to results. He does not yet appreciate the fact that what he destroys when excited is the same as that which he values in quiet intervals between excitements. His excited love includes an imaginative attack on the mother’s body. Here is aggression as a part of love….If aggression is lost at this stage of emotional development there is also some degree of loss of capacity to love, that is to say, to make relationships with objects.” (Winnicott, 2018, 205)
In the story, the woman and man desire each other. The drive for contact is powerful and becomes expressed through a fight for alcohol as a shared, but limited, source of comfort. The desire for comfort leads to aggressive assault on the one who is loved. When this is challenged, when Val offers interactive and relationship-based distraction, the aggressive assault is channelled outwards on to the person who disrupts their usual pattern of contact. The disruption of the usual pattern of contact is felt as if someone is taking away connection and comfort, rather than cultivating something that is less destructive. However, the communal systems around the fighting pair are stimulated into action and become involved in minimising damage.
That is quite a complex set of thoughts around the first concept of the Theraplay model! How on earth does it make a difference when I am sitting on a floor with a child and their family and doing my best to alleviate the distress that they have brought to me?
Theraplay transgresses cultural norms in the UK by being interactive and relationally-focused. It isn’t a problem-saturated way of being with people. It doesn't focus on changing the ‘headline’ issue of the problem child. It gets involved in the action of family relationships rather than just talking about them.
Just as Val seeks to divert the violence between the fighting couple, in my Theraplay practice with children and their families, I divert the enactment of violence caused by emotional abandonment which continues to haunt new relationships like a ghost. Just as Val is somewhat derided and cast as old and batty for stepping in when no one else will, I feel what I do in Theraplay could be seen as ‘odd’ with its focus on ‘just playful activities’, not on being overtly outcome-oriented but seeking, by interaction and relationship, to disrupt old patterns and find the chinks where healing relationship can slip in and make a little difference to the system as a whole.
In the fiction, the couple, when their aggressive connection of love for each other is challenged by Val, turn the aggression onto Val – but they do come together, male right to female left. That brings to my mind the juxtaposition of left-brained ways of being often being perceived as more male, and right-brained as more female (this is significantly challenged in neuroscientific literature, but we are working with cultural folk tales and norm expectations here, things that emerge out of my non-conscious in my fiction writing). In the scene, the top-down, council-created, lovely riverside footpath is the cognitive attempt to make things beautiful, but it hasn’t addressed the underpinning relational poverty that means that the area is still a place of brokenness and drug use. Connection is found in the female-maleness, and male-femaleness colliding with an old, outsider woman who doesn't do what is expected of her – which is to do nothing.
Therapy and Theraplay transgresses social norms because it challenges either the practitioner, or the inner world of the client, or the system within which the therapy is taking place. It challenges the things that keep us in our restricted, self-violent denial of accepting love out of the fear of aggressive expression of love.
Val doing something does make a difference. The violence does come to an end, people do take action on the back of her action: the police are called, the ambulance arrives, Val’s injuries are cared for. We don’t know what happens to the fighting couple. Val drew on her tacit maternal knowing, which transgressed the norm, and, despite her tiny act of rebellion against safe non-action for fear of being seen as interfering, she remains something of an outsider herself. This kind of heroism isn’t really appreciated by those who hold a position of power (the police officer).
Therapeutic practice is about actively getting in the way of what is getting in the way of people in a relationship enjoying each other in an interdependent and inter-facilitative way. The fiction flags that the fighting woman and man are trying to get their needs met by seeing the ghost of the past in each other. Val’s tacit knowing guides her to take action. She addresses the ghost that is between them, which is stopping them from having the connection they want and obliging them to have a connection of violence and aggression, but, if Winnicott is right, this may be a starting point of healing the very early development that is damaged in relational trauma.
In my practice, I continue to transgress the manstream straightespheric norm of white Western culture in providing Theraplay and other therapeutic modalities. By taking what I see as some of the unique core concepts of Theraplay as a therapeutic model, for example in being interactive and relationship-based, I create space between the elements of each family’s story by disrupting habitual patterns. I don’t focus on the concrete points, the people and their ‘problems’ at either the individual or communal level, but remain in a constant state of movement around the individual and communal. By creating opportunities for interaction and desiring relationship, I am obliged to focus on what can be different and changed – what is therefore currently not there – rather than focussing on what is repetitively happening. That kind of focus would collude with avoiding the discomfort of ruthless, aggressive unconcern as a precursor to love.
As therapists, being interactive and relationship-based in our practice leads to moments when we don’t even realise we are transgressing social norms. These are the times when we are compelled, out of our compassion for the people who are in pain, living in a world that feels as if it gets in the way of caring for them, to take action to divert destructive relationship patterns. We transgress because we focus on making spaces between people as a way to remove barriers to relationship by doing attachment-enhancing activity. We are not about problem-solving nor understanding causation. We take action with the intention of it being interactive and thus relational.
The fiction tells me that I am still on the journey of integrating the positive masculine aspects of the overall scene into an understating of my own practice. The caring masculine is, in the projection of my inner position through the fiction, concerned by fear of its own aggression, so remains inactive. The caring masculine, thus constrained, anxiously seeks to use its power to stop the interactive intervention of Val into the scene of distress that is being played out in front of them. The tacit maternal knowing has to again transgress the expectation of the manstream straightesphere to honour her inner sense of validity and value.
It can feel as a practitioner that each time we take action to promote the interpersonal through the meeting of very early dependency needs, we put ourselves in an outsider position because we are potentially transgressing a white, Western, patriarchal norm that wants people to be independent, non-needy, and not-a-problem by being logical and cognitive in accepting the evidenced-based help on offer.
As much as lovely things are provided by the powerful (the riverside path and new car park), they cannot be accessed by those lacking in power if the process of interaction is not actively enabled by those with power, for those without. So how do we as practitioners move towards co-creating something that fulfils both the desires of the powerless for relationship and the desires of a person using their power in the service of the less powerful? How can we ensure that we move towards something that is creative, not destructive, in relationship? Each time I, or you, or we as a community of practice, take a stand and activity enable the less powerful to feel safe and enjoy a relationship with the world around them, we do one tiny act of individual rebellion which, if we keep at it, may eventually change the world.