Merging back to earth: Applications for researchers
Men looked uneasily at each other, feeling compelled to stop. All they’d wanted to do was walk towards the town, walk past the weir as fast as they could to get away from the discomfort of the constant, unavoidable, and overwhelming sound of rushing water. Seeing the two people fighting, though, they were now not sure what to do. They weren’t able to just keep on minding their own business with a hyper-focus on getting past the white noise of the water. They didn’t want to leave, knowing a man beating a woman wasn’t okay, but interfering between a man and women wasn’t okay either.
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
Below is the “Theraplay Wheel”, the four dimensions and the core concepts that give substance and strength to the practice of the model. This iswhat I am researching in these blog posts, taking each core concept and expanding on it using a form of heuristic inquiry.
The following graphic was produced for my thesis to explain the method of heuristic inquiry. I added the processes of wrestling and stripping away as a core part of finding a way to illuminate tacit knowledge in a way that is accessible. This is how I am researching. The doctoral work that informed the posts over the last year had been ‘stripped away’. These posts remain more in the ‘wrestling’ phase. If you read all of the posts for this month, you will get an idea of the sprawling spider’s web of interesting and sticky ideas.
I feel clear on the what and how of being a practitioner researcher but remain more puzzled by the question of why am I researching? What is the motivation that compels me to grapple with the complexities of what lies behind the seemingly simple actions of Theraplay practice? Why does it matter to position this writing as ‘research’, not just an exposition of my practice?
I struggle with how to position myself as a practitioner researcher looking at this particular form of work, where being interactive and relationship-based is such a fundamental core concept. I have found Indigenous research writers supportive and stimulating to read, but I am also aware of my whiteness and Westernness. I don’t want my interest to be another round of ‘exoticism’ and appropriation. I want to find a research position that has that sense of ‘feels right’ but is founded in my own cultural timeline.
Sometimes I feel the ‘feels rightness’ in spaces, churches that are so old that I am aware of the people who have been there through generations, old footpaths that pass bumps in the ground, standing stones that are off the beaten track and tune me into ancient imaginings. Are they imaginings or somatic memories? The sense of the families, peoples, and connections are sometimes very powerful. These feels like interactive and relationship-based knowings that root me to a longer history than I hold within my own lifetime. Put like this, what I am saying sounds whacky or flaky, but isn’t it what humans do? The echoes of the past that come down in traditions, social expectations, and patterns of behaviour that mark people as insiders or ‘others’. Such things are often not said, or even consciously thought about. If raising such things disrupts social norms, then such knowledge might itself be othered to rob it of its power.
The ethics of grappling with these interactive and relationship-based research processes will continue to exercise me for the duration of my heuristic inquiry – or, in other words, for the rest of my life. What I write here is merely one of those punctuation points where the tacit process is paused for a sufficient time for tacit knowledge to emerge into its concrete form. It is one of those chinks in the universe where the light can shine through – that may, or may not, illuminate something profound, or may just be a thing of beauty in itself.
In my many years, as someone unaware that mainstream was manstream, and whitestream, or that I had been wrapped around and hovered over by the binary world view of the straightesphere, colouring everything I thought and saw as valuable and powerful, I found Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helpful in my thinking about enabling people to change.
I was really struck by the stories of how Maslow lived with the Blackfoot at Siksika for six weeks as he struggled with his theory of human development (Michel, 2014). I wondered what I should do about the possibility that he failed to attribute due regard to the learning that the Blackfoot had been enfolding him into. And I look at the model of the First Nations perspective – illustrated as a tipi, not a pyramid – and realise, I am a recovering mainstreamer, and yes, it has applied to me in the past. Growing up in white, Western, patriarchal situations, I have seen individuation and independence and personal self-actualisation as the goal of my life. How could I not, when that is the story that has been peddled to me from birth (and no doubt pre-birth)?
But the manstream straightesphere didn’t wholly overwhelm what I felt. My felt sense of rightness continued to bubble away. As a result of the mismatch between that felt sense and the main/manstream expectation of what a woman should be left me feeling rubbish and weird and outside of acceptability. A big part of this ongoing research process is my heuristic focus on not wanting to be angry with men any more. To do that, I have to unpick all the ways I view the world through the lenses that were placed in front of my eyes. Lenses I was told gave a true picture of how the world functions, but now I think maybe not. That means rethinking Maslow, and in doing so perhaps finding a tool that helps me theorise how to integrate those intergenerational felt senses into the story of my practice.
This may be a path to finding my own earth-based research position that walks alongside Indigenous researchers by integrating what is earth-rooted in me and honouring that. I transgress the social norm of research in saying I want to integrate earth-based ideas. Val may have been injured in her close encounter with the earth, her tooth may have been broken in her commitment to her interactive and relationship-based living. But it isn’t the attention of Western medicine that is needed, as the ambulance people don’t take Val to hospital. She is taken home to the care of her cat, Viking. What does that look like if I trust that insight and apply it to research?
In the past, I’ve mapped Theraplay dimensions onto Maslow’s lower layers of motivation. I’ve shown the direction of travel as being about safety to openness to trust to challenge to change. People have found it useful to hear that I work out where a child is stuck, and encourage interactions that support the layer below the layer of stuckness. My thinking is that if you support the lower layer of development, the intrinsic drive to the next layer of Maslow’s hierarchy is released and the person is automatically more able to engage with the change process.
But what would it look like if the motivation wasn’t about getting people to move to the top of the pyramid, but about allowing people to enjoy life for who they are and where they are? Doesn’t that then make it more interactive and relationship-based, rather than focussing on change which inevitably is framed through the lenses of those who hold power in a culture – white, male, financially secure, and so on?
What motivates me to research?
I want to find ways to articulate experiences of connection in a scholarly manner, to elaborate the expansiveness of love in professional practice. The meeting of needs then takes on different directions of travel; it’s not only seen as valuable if it leads onwards to self-actualisation. I see a risk of this feeding into separation between people, and those deeming themselves to be ‘higher up’ the ladder taking power over positions in relation to others. Re-imagining Maslow to try to make sense of my position in relation to practitioner research, my own needs become more about understanding the community to which I belong, and for that community to see what I offer is of value because I am of value. Getting needs met is about interdependence, not independence; connection, not self-actualisation.
Val gives of herself in the service of others to divert violence. It is the animal aspect of my imagining that understands her achievement (Viking, the cat), not the cognitive and self-aggrandising aspects of the community (the police officer). When there is separation of caring maleness and caring femaleness (the men who are bystanders and Val who becomes interactive with the fighting couple), the earth is actually damaging to Val – it breaks her teeth. When emotionally-damaged male and emotionally-damaged female stand shoulder to shoulder, and caring male and caring female are unable to work together, the outcome is violent damage.
So why is Val motivated to intervene? She is satiated, she has all the food she needs (the milk, cheese, and bread), and yet she remains a little on the edge of acceptability. From this place of having both abundance and being slightly neglected she is able to span both an understanding of the violent male/female connection and the ability to be able to transgress the social expectation of her, because of her identification as a bit of an outsider. She can challenge norms because her strength comes from a different source to the mainstream. She doesn’t need to belong to the mainstream. Maybe I need to stop seeing a hierarchy of needs and instead work with a model where there is a flow of abundances, or gifts. Maslow might change, then, to look like this.
Through individual or communal punctuation points created by ritual or repeated practices, I can then take the embodied experiences of physical satiation, a felt sense of safety, love and belonging, and esteem satiation, and capture this concretely, so I can communicate it. That is what I am trying to do in this post and the diagrams created. Academically, this can lead us to a possible exchange between individual and communal in a continual flow of creative connection. We gift back esteem, love and belonging, safety and physiological satiation, just as it is gifted to us. We don’t get stuck in a linear direction of travel that says there is a personal need that must be filled before change can happen.
This is a right jumble of thoughts, but the driving one is that we are interactive and working towards relationship, so we have to be motivated towards finding interdependence not independence. That then becomes the driver for developing a methodology I want to use in research into my practice, finding ways to break apart the unquestioned habits of research to see what is shown by the gaps. We go back to the constituent part of human kindness, the milk: all that is left from Val’s shopping, and the object of Viking’s kneading.