Deliverables: product or process? Mellowing, melding, and emerging meaning.
Her back was to the camera, so when she later viewed the tape, she wasn’t sure if she went white; she felt like she had. His face – it was so difficult to really know from the video. His face stilled, slackened. It was similar to what they’d witnessed during the MIM: the wanting to but not knowing how. This was more – a deeper distress and confusion. It wasn’t about the bodily mechanics of not knowing how to engage, it was having no possible story other than their joint stories of being wrong. From the moment of being born they, both Val and Milo, were wrong and had to observe others so strongly that they became the woodwork and wallpaper and fabric of the environment. Show no face, make no meaningful sound, don’t breathe, lock it all up in the centre of your chest like a rusty stake through your heart, pinning your front to your back and immobilising you to nothing. To absolute stillness.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 55.
Dear all,
This month has been one of reflection: re-reading my old posts and considering what I’ve said before I launch fully into the new year.
I set out to share my doctoral research. Have I, dear reader, taught you anything about what to DO in your practice of Theraplay with children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma based on that research? Have I delivered a product?
One of the things that really stuck with me as I re-read the posts is that people and relationships are narrative. The process of cherishing people is long-winded and needs space to mellow, meld, and for meaning to emerge. To be too focussed on the end product too quickly loses the relational quality of what we do; love can be missed. As in the extract above, to try to work out what is going on, to move toward a product too quickly, when the process of relating is damaged by relational and developmental trauma, leads to confusion and deeper distress. Sadly, perceiving behaviour change as the positive outcome of therapeutic work in these circumstances leads to the reinforcement of the lived experience of the humiliation of being nothing, the horror of knowing you are just plain wrong. In the fiction, Milo’s presenting difficulties are removed, but the impact of relational and developmental trauma is not.
If I haven’t been clear enough before, I am going to be explicit now: to do Theraplay, or any therapy, for children experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma, don’t be driven by product. Do not be focused on the need to change the behaviour of the children. Instead, be driven by the process of finding any possible way we can keep offering ourselves wholeheartedly in relationship to the child – even if they keep rejecting us. Our job is to find a way to fall in love with the person before us, just as they are, and having sufficient resilience that each time your love is rejected, you pick yourself up and dust yourself down and start all over again.
Our job is to not be co-regulated by the distress of the child into being a still face back to them. To do so perpetuates the trauma. Our job is to keep ourselves present and maternal and digest the distress of the child (whether that is coming to us in the small body of a child or in the big body of a grown up). Bion (1991) calls this containment. We need to stay humane in the deluge of the inhumanity suffered by the other, not necessarily resisting the current (see Time and healing wait for no man, but tacit maternal knowing might just go with the flow), but drawing strength to keep going from the armada of small boats in the communal sea of tacit maternal knowing (see Time and healing wait for no man, but tacit maternal knowing might just go with the flow) that we can choose to belong to.
Our job is to stop the stuckness, to ease the too much for too long with no one to help you, and reduce trauma to fear and anger, so it becomes actionable – unstuck. The work therefore isn’t what you do, it is who you are; how you make yourself available as a person who cares. We sit with the anguish, supported by others (see The call of the Kites: Sitting with anguish. Supported by others.).
Theraplay is a beautiful tool in the hands of the therapeutic professional to enable relational movement as a pathway to unsticking the stuckness. Like good parenting that promotes attachment and a felt sense of safety, Theraplay is a beautiful tool in helping people grow and find their own route into life. To borrow from Audre Lorde, who I have quoted before, Theraplay – and tacit maternal knowing as a function of Theraplay – is a tool that could dismantle the master's house and rebuild a more egalitarian and caring home because tacit maternal knowing is NOT the master’s tool. So, another of the deliverables I am offering from this year of blogging is the understanding that what we do in Theraplay needs a commitment to equality, diversity, and inclusion at the heart of our ethical commitment to caring for the children and families we work with, as well as caring for each other in this difficult work. We can leave the straightesphere, abandon the manstream and whitestream in our theory and practice, and keep contributing to the community of practice that I hope you feel we have been cultivating over this past year.
Initiated by my doctorate, and cultivated by our community of practice, I have learned the power of fortitude! I am growing in confidence that the personal is important because the personal informs the communal and makes for connection and interdependence in a way that reduces othering through the way in which power is used. I feel able to transgress the universal and mainstream in theory and practice because I am held by our community, although yes it can be painful. When Ann Jernberg developed Theraplay, I think she envisaged that people would work ethically within the limits of their professional competence out of their personal commitment to caring, hence picking colleagues who were not necessarily ‘qualified’ but showed their ability to connect with children. I worry that an excessive reliance on external controls and universal judgements of validity of practice is unhelpful; it narrows our thinking about how to use our skills and so people who could benefit from our care might miss out. And we need to ensure that the highest quality of practice is provided to the people we work with.
To develop, maintain, and evaluate quality of therapeutic practice, I would like us, somehow, to support the development of the quality of personhood of those we are training to work therapeutically: to enable them to have the confidence and fortitude to not know but faithfully care. This would be a radical approach, challenging the status quo in our current work climate that categorises care as unskilled, while valuing professions that claim to know what they are doing through clear, repeatable, black-and-white thinking. Competence would shift from measuring adherence to a product to evaluating the process that is being entered into in the undertaking of care-full practice. I believe an apprenticeship model of teaching and learning best suits this development of professional wisdom.
Human love is messy, time-consuming, and specific to the people who are cultivating and living that love. When we professionalise such love in our practice as therapists, to be honest and true to that commitment to love, if we were to only look at the product – what we do as a result of that love – it could look random, flaky, and could feel dangerously unaccountable. For human love to be a central part of our professional practice, we do need to articulate and make visible the process. We need to be accountable. We have to be long-winded and descriptive in order that the process is open to scrutiny and critique. This process makes us vulnerable as it exposes our not knowing, and we need colleagues who also commit to hearing the messy, convoluted endeavour of relationship that we need scrutinised. By doing this, we can deliver a therapeutic process with consistency and accountability. That is our work ethic and ethic of work. If we try to get to the ‘what to do’ too quickly, we are missing the point of the job and are buying into measuring our worth against a standard that may be irrelevant to the specific healing relationship that this person and the impact on them of the experiences that left them feeling exposed to too much for too long with no one to help them need us to cultivate.
How different this dynamic, individual, but interdependent process is to the stuck place of Milo and Val in the passage.
I hope I haven’t delivered a product in these posts over the last year. Writing them has been of value to my process of doing Theraplay, whether that has been providing therapy, supervision, or teaching. Do tell me if you have also found they have enhanced your practice, however you practise. I’d love to know in what way they may have supported you. Such feedback will help the ongoing monthly production of posts!
Last month's posts led me to a significant place of transition for me as I came to an uncomfortable realisation about how I have othered maleness in my attempts to understand the tacit knowing I bring to my Theraplay and other therapeutic practice as practitioner, educator, and researcher. Going forward, I commit to being the best caring person I can as I engage with my own hurt and rage as a woman in a misogynistic system. I don’t want to be perpetually angry with men, but I no longer want to live in a place where men take power over me and I just let them.
Going forward, the process I commit to in these monthly posts is to mine my tacit knowing, maternal or otherwise, and to then fearlessly share that with you through the process of fiction writing and reflection on that fiction. I am going to carry on the heuristic research into the passion that drives me: being the best caring psychotherapeutic professional I can for the people who cross my path – children, their families, the students I teach and supervise, and in continuing to develop the theoretical underpinnings of high quality Theraplay practice.
See you next month.
Fiona Peacock
Next month
Theraplay is interactive and relationship-based.
I’m going to muse on this over the month and see what emerges.
Bibliography
Bion, W. R. (1991). Learning from experience. Karnac.
Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Penguin Classics.