Research update — generating data for the year ahead

Dear friends,

Usually you get something in your inboxes on the first of the month, but last month was entirely taken up with data generation via NaNoWriMo.

I thought I’d give you an update on how things went.

56,000 words were produced!

Those words may not form good fiction. However, as is the way with Heuristic Inquiry, I reached that point where I was no longer able to plan or think. That is when the magic happens and the ‘more than you can say’ of tacit personal and professional knowledge starts to emerge.

What did I find? To be honest, yet again I feel back in the place of ‘I don’t know’. Such is the circular nature of Heuristic Inquiry. It will take me time to sift through all those words and see what my ‘more than I can say’ process has pushed out onto the page around the foci you gave me.

There are a few ‘headline’ things that I am aware of that I can share at this point in time.

One theme in the fiction is how our identities as practitioners, and our conscious desire to name our tacit knowledge and claim it, are part of navigating through the world as it stands. I/we challenge the mansteam by being awkward, grumpy, subversive, but above all persistent in identifying ourselves as people who care. We don’t do care, we are caring.

In relation to ‘caring for the bad mother’ — an insight I am stumbling towards is that we don’t have to do everything ourselves. There are some places/feelings that are too much to manage. The seduction of the mansteam invites us to feel like we must be perfect and do everything independently. I think that may be a legacy of years of the ‘angel in the house’ myth that denies the beautiful complexity of humankind. Kind humans can hold a variety of emotional responses that can be contradictory and challenging without detracting from their core humaneness. While I choose to care about people, when my focus is the child injured by distorted maternal care (from a mother, other, or from the system), I can’t care for both the child and the mothering system. Sometimes someone else needs to care for the person who has damaged the child I am working with, even while I care about that person. I pondered blame and responsibility. So often the distorted mothering children receive is founded on the distorted mothering their mothers, others, or systems have received. Hence, rather than ‘bad’ mothering’, I’ve found myself thinking about ‘distortions’ of mothering across different strata of human communities.

There was a little chink of light in trying to make sense of the money side of things. It feels like someone has torn the blackout blind and a little sliver of light is peeking through. I will not turn off the light! I am keen to see what emerges as I work with the ‘data’ of the fiction over the next months. At the moment, that sliver of insight feels very tiny and tenuous.

And finally – innovation? No, thanks! I wonder if the drive for innovation is a manifestation of our culture’s loss of feeling mothered: an endless, restless quest for something that will give us ‘the answer’ to soothe our souls and give us peace. The drive for innovation is telling us that what we have isn’t meeting our needs, so something new or more must be striven for.

I suggest we look at what the need really is and address the deficit, rather than rushing to solutions in hopes of sorting things out. Exploring the need and being responsive to that in a connected, relational way is more likely to produce sustainable, truly attuned practice that transforms the lives of those we work with. If we enable transformation of the inner lives of those we work with, then society will transform too when people feel whole enough to stand up and say ‘no’ to the things they find are destructive of their souls and the souls of others. To be attuned practitioners, we need to have strong identities and practice wisdom that comes from lived experience. Innovation is the theme I will be working on this coming month, and you’ll get to read about it in January 2025.

I hope you enjoy whatever winter festivals you may celebrate, and I truly hope 2025 brings us all, across the globe, connection, care, and communities that grow through the tacit maternal knowing and knowledge we are trying to liberate.

See you next year!