Active witnessing as exercising our m/other tongue
Contents
Chapter 3: 17:00
Keeping going or keeping growing? Still trying to work out the toolbox and the changing mat
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
Last month’s addition for the m/other-us-all was:
Our job is to sit with the challenge of continuing to love when that love is not received by the other. Part of that job is to find the people, the places, and the language that make this possible, even when it feels impossible and we do not know how to love the unlovable. Our job is to keep working at loving the least loveable person, or system, in the room from our maternal position, without losing our choice to use our maternal power in the service of the other growing into interdependence.
How do we do this, and keep working at living it out in a world where these values can feel so far away from practice, policy, and hierarchical expectation?
I also found myself thinking – poor Val. We’ve been at this a year, and she is only up to 18:00 hours in her ordeal at the service station on Halloween. She is going to be there until 22:00. Do I need to speed up the sharing of the fiction with you? I worry it is too fragmented, and yet taking it slowly like this feels like the way this theory of how we operationalise our m/other tongue is growing organically, emerging into early maturity, in parallel with the way a child grows. I am not sure I want to let go of that process of growth.
The voices that say, ‘but more quickly’, ‘people will get bored’, ‘how do I “sell” this theory?’ are the sneaky voices of the manstream. I will resist them – I hope you will resist them with me.
We are now starting to find out a bit more about Graham, and in this, Val is finding out more about herself and how to trust her goodness, not having to keep trying to prove it through her good works. In case you are new to these posts, the house in Bournemouth is something that Val unexpectedly inherits when she finds out who her biological father was. Viking was her cat. She met Graham when he was the vet who put Viking to sleep when he was too old and ill to live comfortably.
When the lights go out
Val pushed the pots of milk into her pocket so she could carry a cup in each hand. Despite the extra cardboard sleeve, she could already feel the heat penetrating her fingers. She made herself walk steadily, not wanting to spill any hot liquid on the people she had to navigate around, not trusting that the plastic lids were fully engaged with the cup rims, trying to ease one finger at a time to minimise the burn. The young man had been clandestinely efficient, and her desire to protect him meant she didn’t stick around to check that his act of generosity hadn’t been pounced on by his superiors.
“Sarfan,” she said to herself, not wanting to forget the name on his identity badge.
She passed Daniel and the children as she carefully worked her way back towards Graham. Daniel still had each arm around a child. She had utterly lost track of time now. She had no idea how long he had been like that. Another member of his team was playing chess on a small travel board, while at the same time keeping a hand on the back of another child who had pulled their sweatshirt hood entirely over their head. Someone else seemed to be playing an online game - four young people gathered around on their phones, the teacher on his, all interacting and enjoying the process. Another was knitting side by side with a child who was immersed in a book; a girl, Val thought, as they had long hair. Val could see the teacher was more focused on keeping the knitting going at a steady rhythm than its accuracy. A regular heartbeat for the girl to read to.
She caught Daniel’s eye as she passed.
Her raised right eyebrow, narrowed right eye, head tilt, and left-side-of-mouth smile inquired - all okay?
Okay, his nod returned.
She was shaking her head as she handed Graham his cup of tea.
“What?” he said.
“They’re amazing,” she replied, waving her now free, but somewhat hot, hand towards the group of children and their teachers. She pulled out a couple of milk cartons and passed them to Graham. “Amazing!” she said again before putting her back to the wall and allowing herself to slide down to a sitting position.
She pulled out another milk carton for her own tea, but her hand remained midair, her mind roaming. Her phone pinged, but she didn’t want to look at it. She shook the little pot of milk, not really having a clue why, then peeled back the lid, pouring it into her tea.
“Drat,” she said as she felt a splash of cool. Thankfully she hadn’t tipped the carton fully, so she was able to stop when she realised she hadn’t removed the lid from the tea. Cross with herself, she huffed as she placed the tea and the milk on the floor. Her gaze was still being pulled outwards, surveying all the people around her, all seemingly settled now despite their shared predicament.
There was talking. There was lots of phone inspection. There were people laughing. Some sitting quietly. A few snoozing. Some sharing packets of crisps. People. People. Just ordinary people. Doing ordinary things. And there, people, teachers, pupils with such deep needs, also doing ordinary things, and the grown-ups doing so much to make that possible; doing so much even though it looked like nothing.
She looked down and took the lid off the tea, pouring the remainder of the milk in. She wiped the milk spill from the plastic lid onto the knee of her trousers so it didn’t run any further. She grappled in her pocket for another milk carton. Experienced an existential pang.
Caring for the children she worked with had got her out of bed each morning. Then caring for Joe and his children. Now it was trying to work out how the house in Bournemouth could be useful to others.
Daniel didn’t need her; he and his team were doing amazing work. These people didn’t need her. She looked across at Graham. He was pinching in his tea, trying to grab the teabag from the hot liquid with his fingernails, having accidentally dropped the string in. He didn’t need her either. He liked her, and she liked him. And she struggled with that. Being liked not needed; wanted not for what she did or supplied, but because she was who she was. That was what she struggled with. But she couldn’t stop the inside chatter.
It scared her, having nothing to get out of bed for each day. She wasn’t sure she’d emerge at all.
“Why did you become a vet?” she asked Graham out of the blue.
Really she wanted to ask, why do you get up each day now you are retired, but that sounded even more weird, and also very infantile, to her mind. She was still unsure enough of their relationship to hide some of the more mad parts of her mind. The parts she had been told were mad. Like the part that said to her she should die if she didn’t keep caring for others because what other worth did she have?
Graham shrugged. “I liked animals? I was good at science? There wasn’t enough farm for all of us? All of the above?” Out of habit he continued to give his stock answer, “I guess I just fell into it.”
But they both knew he was lying. Both took a breath and spoke at the same time.
“Really?” she questioned.
“Actually…” he hedged.
They both paused.
“Well?” Val encouraged, her face softening.
She picked up her tea and leaned back against the wall, knowing this was not a time for eye contact. Not a time for rush. This was familiar – enabling the other by stepping back and making safe space. A bit of her didn’t like that she knew how to make a space for him to talk. A voice inside her said she might be manipulating him. But she knew. She knew she wasn’t.
She did want something for herself, that was true. She wanted a foil to push against, and a mirror to see in, to try to make sense of her own purpose. And she was interested in him. Couldn’t she want something for herself, and something for him, at the same time? This good man who did stupid things and put his foot in stuff, and had been so professionally fabulous when it had been time for Viking to go. Surely that was not just a job he’d fallen into by mistake? And surely she didn’t have to tie herself in knots to care about him as well as for herself?
Graham retrieved the teabag and looked around, not sure what to do with it, not quite sure what to do with this moment. They could either risk and trust, or they could fall back on convention and polite conversation. I didn’t mean to, he wanted to say. He’d never really said it to anyone. Val pushed the lid of her tea towards him with the side of her foot and looked towards it. He followed her eyes and put his teabag there. The steam from his tea cooled on his face. He shut his eyes. He was back there. He wasn’t sure what age. Five, maybe. Early morning sun starting to pour in through the thin curtains against his window. They didn’t need curtains to keep out light, because light meant the day had begun - and as the day began, so did the work.
But today it felt like he was the first up. He thought he must have been younger than five; he recalled pride in pulling on his own clothes without his mother directing him. He saw the Bill and Ben curtains, the flowerpots and colours fading because he was at least the third child to have these curtains in this room. He remembered parting them just a bit and seeing the sun light up the grass, dewy with, in his wondering eyes, diamonds.
He was delight. Not delighted. It felt like the scene filled him and he was the sunshine and the dew and the rabbit who popped up a head in their garden. He was the world!
He remembered gliding down the stairs and bursting into the kitchen.
“Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit in the garden!” He wanted everyone to know his delight. “Rabbit in the diamond garden!”
“Good morning to you too, Graham!” his mother had matched his enthusiasm. “Have some porridge.”
He’d chatted and nattered about the rabbit and the diamond lawn and getting dressed, and he’d been a child delighted in life.
His dad came in.
“Graham saw a rabbit in the garden!” his mum told his dad.
His dad nodded. “I’ll deal with it.”
Graham had no idea. He felt he had betrayed the rabbit; he felt betrayed. It had dangled limp in his father’s hand, blood at its mouth. He howled and wept, and his mother soothed him but was also confused.
“But Graham, if there were rabbit holes in the cow field and one of them put their hoof down and broke their leg, we’d lose their milk. Or if it was your pony? How would you feel then?”
The sunshine broke that day for Graham. His parents called it growing up and dealing with life’s reality.
“I betrayed them,” he said out loud. “I betrayed my brothers and my parents and the animals because I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t say one was more valuable than another. I couldn’t birth a calf or a lamb and love it as it grew and then just send it to slaughter. I couldn’t make my head do that. I wimped out and left them to do that.”
He didn’t really know what he’d said out loud and what he’d just allowed himself to say in his head for the first time.
They’d all been sent to boarding school; it was just the way things were when you were on a remote farm but had a father with ambition for you all to carry the farm into modernity. Forward-looking, he was; and at the same time unaware of the fractures that happened within him. Chasms in connection that came each time one of the animals he loved and bred and cared for went to the slaughterhouse, because that’s what farming was: raising food, no sentimentality.
Graham always thought that cultivated disconnect – loving and taking those loved to their death – was what paved the way to early death for both his parents. It had left them hardened. Left them seeing that as a virtue, a pride in the quality of their food production. Left them puzzled at the sensitivity of their third son, and pleased when it seemed to them that boarding school hardened him up too. They didn’t want him to suffer when he had to face the realities of the world.
They’d been proud of him; sad that he didn’t come home to take his part in the farming business, but proud of his qualification. They’d been puzzled that he moved so far down south, not using his skills for the family farm. Puzzled that he cared for cats and dogs mostly, pets that had no function in their eyes. They weren’t working animals.
Graham didn’t want to be broken, and never spoke to them of his sense of betrayal, never quite sure who betrayed who.
Val took a breath in response. The rain was still battering the windows and the roof of the food hall. There was a flash, and a pop, and they were plunged into darkness.
All the lights went out.
Keeping going or keeping growing? Still trying to work out the toolbox and the changing mat
The fiction this month provoked some complex self-searching around the legitimacy and honesty of my motivation to do what I do, in the way I try to do it. Both Val and Graham reflect how I have come to mistrust my desire to care for others. I experience the manstream labelling my desire to care as self-serving. At best, the manstream seems puzzled; at worst, sneering, because I choose not to use power ‘over’ others, but to use that power in the service of others.
In the eyes of the manstream, that is weakness and therefore either needs to be corrected in order to make one strong, or exploited to build up their power, whether that power comes via pity (emotional power) or exploitation (capital power) towards the Other. In the world of the toolbox, such a position either needs to be fixed so the car does what it ‘needs’ to do to serve the purpose of the driver, or, if unfixable, the car needs to be broken up for parts, as it is not fit for purpose.
There are people who have quietly climbed out of the toolbox but would probably never recognise what a monumental, rebellious, and internal system-changing step they have made. They go under the radar, not as a conscious choice to protect who they are and what they are doing, but intuitively. They have found a way to be honest and congruent with themselves while avoiding overt attack.
This is what Graham is doing – getting on with it, finding ways to be comfortable enough with internal conflict to do good in the world. At the same time, he is living with the cost of going under the radar of the manstream and flouting the strictures of the ‘bad mother’ system, and his discomfort emerges when a light is shone on his decision-making. He is a good person, but still doubts himself.
The obituary of Claudette Colvin reminded me that some acts of amazing, ordinary rebellion, which come not from being broken but from being strong, can also be quite conscious. In reading this obituary and personal account of Colvin, it seemed to me that she was fully cognisant of the complexity of the position she, and the civil rights movement, were in, and navigated her responses to that complexity with dignity and emotional engagement. She did not lose sight of both personal and bigger-picture imperatives. To me, Colvin did not just keep going; she kept growing.
Val and Graham are more in peril of just keeping going, as they both mistrust the value of their motivations because they are measuring these against their, and my, internalised manstream.
So what makes keeping going change to keeping growing? Can internal rebellions drive change beyond an individual’s inner world or a single person’s circles of connection, into broader professional, organisational, or societal change?
As I reflected on the fiction, T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral came to mind. I must have studied it over forty years ago! The phrase that returned was something about how the greatest treason is to do the right deed for the wrong reason. It is a line that has surfaced for me many times over my practising career. This time, as part of my post-doctoral research here, I went back and re-read the whole play, trusting that my knowing-more-than-I-can-say did know there was something there that mattered.
In Eliot’s play, Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is destined to be murdered on the orders of the King. He is visited by four tempters; the fourth offers martyrdom for self-aggrandisement rather than for the glory of God – for self, not for the bigger scheme of things. It is this fourth temptation that is the greatest treason: doing the right deed for the wrong reason.
His chorus is made up of old women who are ridiculed by the priests (“You are foolish, immodest and babbling women”, p.20), yet Thomas says: “They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding. They know, and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know that acting is suffering, and suffering, action … That pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action and the suffering, that the wheel may turn, and still be forever still” (p.21). The role of the chorus in Murder in the Cathedral, and in Andújar’s (2025) interpretation of the chorus in Greek tragedy, is to challenge privilege by bringing the voice of lived experience into the room – to be earthy, and to show the cracks in formulaic narratives and practices, so that different truths are made visible.
What I hear Becket/Eliot, saying is that the tipping point between keeping going because change at a systemic level feels beyond our reach, and keeping growing within the same circumstance, comes back to prizing process rather than prizing destination. This position – to prize process – is fundamentally, one might say ontologically, different from manstream approaches to theory and practice. In those, the outcome is what is measured and therefore what assigns value.
Our tragedy is that the process of loving, this elusive practice of tacit maternal knowing I am trying to convey, is not a central driver in our strategic, systemic, or organisational choices. Those of us who try to deploy it at a practice level often feel the need to fly under the radar of the manstream. Yet, by keeping my head down, I also fail to assign value to loving and to sticking with the process of operationalising our m/other tongue. In doing so, I become part of my own problem.
The greatest treason? The right deed (love), for the wrong reason (hiding it out of fear)? It feels complex. Focusing on a messy, relational process – loving and caring-for with no intention of producing an outcome – is hard. Having been raised in the manstream, I find it difficult to value this in myself, and it feels as though those around me do not see it as valuable either. The complexity comes because there is no framework to make sense of the experience, no mirror in which to see it, only the untethered experience itself.
Part of what makes a difference when we choose to live using our m/other tongue is our relationship with complexity. Not simply accepting it as necessary and trying to tuck it away as quickly as possible, but actively inviting it, revelling in it, and creating it through relationship. Complexity generates multiple opportunities that arise within relationship and, in doing so, opens possibilities for being different and for making choices. It can do the same for our therapist education practices, research practices, and managerial practices.
One of the skills we use in our m/other land is being attuned to when complexity is creative, and when, as a leader, you need to take the Theraplay position of being “guided by the adult” and limit choice to avoid overload, using the Theraplay dimension of Structure. Structure makes for safety. A felt sense of safety comes from having a secure base (Bowlby, 1988), and a secure base allows us to go out and explore, enjoying complexity. We can listen to the chorus as well as the main actor.
All this thinking about complexity reminds me of the dilemma Joe faced in relation to his feelings towards Shell. In taking the story back to a farming scenario, what comes to the forefront is that this is life-and-death stuff – the fundamentals of being a human body living in a world with other bodies. The values of the western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic (WEIRD) world have stepped many of us away from those core human dilemmas: the costs of complexity, where there is no right answer, only choice-making carried out with compassion and respect for the dignity of others and for the world that hosts us.
Graham has the capacity to do complexity as a professional veterinarian, but still only feels able to personally manage emotional complexity by getting away from the double bind the fiction presents. He hasn’t found a way of living in, and with, the complexity that comes when compassionate farming means caring for livestock, and their production for food means killing them.
Graham has the capacity to work with complexity as a professional veterinarian, yet he still feels only able to manage emotional complexity by escaping the double bind the fiction presents. He has not yet found a way of living in, and with, the complexity that arises when compassionate farming involves caring for livestock, while their production for food also means killing them.
Graham’s parents are kind and in service to the world, yet they are stuck in a formulaic narrative about how you should manage the rupture between loving and killing: harden your heart, live in the “real” world. These are toolbox solutions, and I’m not saying they don’t have their place, but …
How do you inhabit these difficult spaces without hardening your heart? How do we witness the care that happens in such situations, recognise the cost, and care for those who care, so they do not go to an early death through the burden of containing these double binds? How do we still cherish the innocent delight of the child, alongside the need to protect the livestock that feed us? (Don’t be too concrete in thinking about this – I’m not speaking of “real” farming, but of a more metaphorical feeding.) Complexity, complexity, complexity.
What is betrayed in Graham’s story? The joyful little boy with the arts-based passion for beauty that is not received? Or the adult response to that joy, taking action before explanation? All are right: Graham in his oceanic feeling of oneness, and his parents in protecting their livestock to feed the world – but the action feels too brutal, too quick. Decisions must be made where there are competing desired outcomes, and the process of decision-making matters. Without care, it can lead to structures in which power is used to control and marginalise, to brutalise and push people out, rather than enabling us all to live with the complexity of being part of a multi-verse and a Trans-verse.
Speaking our m/other tongue is about doing the right deed, for the right reason, in the right manner, and at the right time. In our m/other tongue, “rightness” is judged by the Theraplay wheel – our goals, four dimensions, and nine core concepts – which can be summed up as love, or using our power in the service of the other. Love in the multi- and Trans-verse is always painful and unclear, because m/othering is a constant process of letting go, of forgetting, of balancing dependence and interdependence, and of remaining faithful to core beliefs about the purpose of humanity, which I understand as sharing rather than acquiring. There is no certainty about what is right once we step out of the Uni-verse, because in the multi-verse and Trans-verse relationships are always creating spaces and complexities in which we must seek a balance between multiple needs.
When we use our m/other tongue to manage that complexity, “tools-that-fix” are thrown out of the changing bag, because they do not belong there. Foolishness, immodesty, and babbling judgement are not “repaired” simply to make them more palatable or dismissible to the manstream. They do not need fixing; they are talents in themselves, as Thomas Becket identifies. The m/other tongue shows wisdom and understanding by striving to keep meaning fluid and unexpected, flouting restrictive behavioural norms, and playing with metaphorical and artistic uses of language. These are the relational supplies we use to clean up the lived experience of growing, which inevitably includes the elimination of waste products. These are the supplies that belong in our changing bag.
Andújar (2025) led me to consider the chorus as witness. From there, I encountered Middleton (2025), with his notion of active witnessing as requiring engagement with ruptures of the body, ruptures of communication, and ruptures of time. Graham flees because active witnessing cannot happen, because the painfulness cannot be addressed. The pain of the hard decisions would require engagement with the materiality of killing, the need for communication to be appropriate and delivered at a time when it can be digested. But everyone is too immersed in it; there is no earthy perspective of the kind a chorus might bring to provide that active witnessing.
Graham can’t be an active witness because he is an injured party whose childhood innocence has been ruptured. The right deed, done in the wrong way, is violent and damaging. The right deed, done in the right way, may still be violent, but distress is held in relationship, so damage is mitigated – although the process requires time and a readiness to become entangled with the experience of the Other. I can imagine another story, in which Graham’s mother sits with him and delights in his delight, and then explores with him the need for pest control in their particular environment before he encounters the shot rabbit. His mourning would then be actively witnessed, and both mother and son would be changed by the experience.
Graham has all the external markers of privilege – male, white, professional, financially secure. But that is not his story in this moment. Val facilitates Graham in his storytelling and, in doing so, becomes an active witness, feeling into the ruptures of body, relationship, and time. Graham tells his story with words. Daniel and his teachers enable the children to tell their stories and live their lives fearlessly by facilitating them being in a world that does not understand or take kindly to their differences. They actively witness the children’s ways of processing the embodied world, whether that is via neurodivergence, or the impact of trauma, or a combination of the two. Both forms of telling and hearing story lead to deeper relational connection. Active witnessing enables that connection and makes space for love to flourish.
Love is the foundation of a self’s sense of safety, which in turn enables someone to manage the challenges of the world and keep growing in a way that is not hardened and disconnected. To be an active witness and receive story of ruptures to body, relationship, and time, the witnesser must feel safe enough to hold the inner space required for compassion and empathy – to sit with, and invite, complexity. The active witness needs a home, not a physical one, but a felt sense of safety from which they can step out to undertake the hard task of receiving story: of seeing in other ways (foolish), behaving in other ways (immodest), and speaking in m/other tongues (babbling). I hope this theory-generating Heuristic Inquiry is allowing that theory-home to grow.
Active witnessing is political. It is about getting emotionally involved, with all the risks that brings. Tough decisions do not have right/wrong binary answers, even where action is required. It is about accepting that there are messy things that need to be lovingly explored. If decisions are made and actions taken without connection to ruptures of the body, relationship, and time, they can cause damage and further relational ruptures. The return to home - to a felt sense of safety - for people to seek healing in reconnection ceases to be an option. Creativity and innocence are lost.
But when decision and action are approached more slowly, with engagement with the mess, living the value that we are here to be in community with people and the earth - here for each other – then our purpose is to remain in process. We actively witness the growth that unfolds before our eyes on the changing mat, using the supplies of the changing bag, as we allow process to happen. Dilemmas resolve through communal, relational processes. Keeping going and keeping growing are not separate.
As Becket says of the women: “They speak better than they know, and beyond your understanding. They know, and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know that acting is suffering, and suffering, action … That pattern may subsist, for the pattern is the action and the suffering, that the wheel may turn, and still be forever still” (p.21). I would replace suffering with active witnessing, because what needs to be seen is not only pain, but also joy.
Being an active witness is the operationalising of our m/other tongue. It calls on us to draw on our personal felt sense of safety, our at-home-ness, to encounter the not-at-home-ness of the Other, without seeking meaning or change as an outcome of the encounter. Instead, we trust that by staying with the process of care and love, and by removing the detritus created through digesting what the world forces people to consume, we enable radical, sometimes invisible, but ultimately sustainable relationships of care. We are changed by this process, and so keeping going and keeping growing exist in a complex relationship with action and feeling that keeps our world turning. Small change at the hub, in ourselves, will in time spiral out to the rim. We cannot know the timescales of such change.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Doing the “right” thing, as defined by the Uni-verse, will keep us going, because it does not disturb the status quo. Doing the “useful” thing, with dignity and care, in service of our purpose in the multi-verse and Trans-verse, will keep us growing.
Bibliography
Andújar, R. (2025). Playing the Chorus in Greek Tragedy. Cambridge University Press.
Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Clinical applications of attachment theory. Routledge.
Eliot, T. S. (2014). Murder in the cathedral. Bloomsbury. https://doi.org/10.5040/9780571307302.00000005
Middleton, T. (2025). Witnessing a Wounded World. Fordham University Press.
Richardson, M. (2024). Nonhuman witnessing. Duke University Press.