Glossary
This is a work in progress. If there’s a term you’d like to see added, or a definition you feel needs updating, please get in touch.
Our m/other tongue is an attempt to take the experience of tacit maternal knowing out of the lived reality of early mothering and turn it into a worded theory. This theory can be used by anyone who wants to care for others in a way that is non-hierarchical and promotes the facets of tacit maternal knowing, as highlighted in my doctoral work:
Commitment to not knowing/letting go
Commitment to dependence/interdependence
Faithfulness
These are the foundations to creating relationships that enable a felt sense of security from which people can take risks to explore their world, flourish, and connect to others without using their power over others.
Some definitions draw on others’ work: you can find a Reference List at the end of the Glossary.
Terms
Manstream
A term used to prompt awareness that much of the theory, practice, and research - including what is valued - is grounded in a white, male, Westernized, predominantly Christian perspective. This perspective has become so deeply ingrained and normalised that it is seen as mainstream knowledge and is, therefore, unquestioned in terms of planning or critiquing practice. It is similar to bell hooks' (1984) concept of the ‘white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal’ framework, but tries to be slightly less ‘in your face’. Nonetheless, it still seeks to unsettle and disturb the reader just enough to create a ‘crack for a light to come through’, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen.
Structure
One of the four dimensions of the Theraplay model of work. In her foundational book outlining the method, Ann Jernberg (1979, p.62) discussed Structure as one of the “classifications of maternal behaviour that are being considered for their attachment-promoting and autonomy-enhancing qualities”.” She defines Structure as the actions where a “mother limits, defines, forbids, outlines, reassures, speaks firmly, labels, names, clarified, confines, holds and restrains her baby”.
These days, we might feel a bit uncomfortable with some of those words. It’s important to remember that when any of the four dimensions are used exclusively rather than in balance and harmony with the other three, they fail to contribute to attachment-promoting and autonomy-enhancing experiences. Structure is one vital part of the overall experience of relationship, as are each of the other dimensions.
Structure underpins the internalisation of a felt sense of safety through mother-infant interactions that provide the infant with an outside to inside regulatory experience. This helps the world feel predictable and ensures the infant will not be destroyed by the outside world being 'too much', nor their inside world being 'too much' for themselves or their primary caregiver. The result of such experiences of limits, definitions, boundaries, and preventative actions, combined with reassurance and warmth, is a world that feels stable and predictable. Structure makes for a felt sense of safety or, to use other words, ontological security.
Tacit maternal knowing
Tacit knowing, a term coined by Michael Polanyi (1958), refers to ‘knowing more than you can say’. It is an embodied process of knowing by doing, through innumerable muscular acts that lead to expertise of action. Tacit maternal knowing refers to the specific expert knowledge developed by mothers. Naomi Stadlen writes about this in her books What mothers do (2005), How mothers love (2015), and What mothers learn (2020).
Tacit maternal knowing, as developed in my doctoral work, focuses on the knowledge mothers develop in the very early days of mothering when the interdependence of the embodied experience of mother/infant is vital to the infant’s survival. As I make tacit maternal knowing a theoretical thing, it takes it out of lived reality and turns it into an idea. Ideas are not the same as lived knowing, so tacit maternal knowing as an idea is idealised. Tacit maternal knowing as a lived experience is unique to the messy, muddled, flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, getting-it-wrong-and-doing-your-best-to-put-it-right-and-sometimes-not-succeeding reality of caring for an infant.
Theraplayer
A Theraplayer is someone who embodies the philosophy and attitude of Theraplay, as expressed through the four dimensions and nine core concepts of the model. They may not necessarily be certified as Theraplay therapists/practitioners, nor do Theraplay in a clinical setting, nor utilise Sunshine Circles or group Theraplay in schools or other settings. It refers to being Theraplay, a state of mind and embodied living out of choosing to care for the more vulnerable other, or choosing to use your power in the service of the less powerful other.
Reference List
hooks, b. (1984) Feminist theory from margin to center. South End Press.
Jernberg, A. (1979) Theraplay. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal knowledge. Routledge.