Time and healing wait for no man, but tacit maternal knowing might just go with the flow

“I want to be a good one,” he said, and then he looked really serious. “Val, I don’t want to be a dad like my dad was to me and my mum. I’m not going to be like that, am I?”

Val longed to reach out and touch his hand. She could just see the little boy she was unable to catch in school when he was six. “The devil himself” one teacher had called him, but it was said with a smile. Joe somehow had always been able to do that – get people to love him despite his language and behaviour.

“Joe, you want to be a good dad, and you can be. Can you let people help you to do that?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Nickie has said she’ll help me and Shell. She was good to me; she never let me down. Even when I hurt her, she still came to see me. I said she was going to be Granny.”

A Necessary Life(Story), page 7.

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Dear all,

Hello everyone, and hello May! I hope the sun is shining on you – literally or metaphorically. I started these posts in July 2022, and in preparing to write this month’s post, I found myself wondering whether you would like me to continue with this beyond the year. Shall I make July 2023 the last? Do let me know by leaving something in comments.

I am aware that I am reaching the end of the material I produced for the thesis, although nowhere near the end of what I want to say about Theraplay and working with children and their families – whether there is relational and developmental trauma present or not. For me, May Day, or Beltane, is a tipping point from one season to another. Is this a tipping point for the blog? Will these posts be hostage to my doctorate, or will they, with your support and encouragement, become something more? Joe in the quote above is also at a tipping point in terms of his identity as a person, a kind dad; what choice he has in the matter of whether he is going to be hostage to his past and his story. 

This train of thought led me to ponder the meaning of healing and its relationship to endings in our work. What exactly is healing? When does it happen? When do I know my work with a child and their family is at an end? And, yes, how do I know I have been ‘successful’ in the work? I do need to know something of that for my own resilience as a therapist, as well as it being the purpose of the work for the child and for their family. Val struggles with this on page 72 of the novella. 

Last month we thought about manstream and whitestream positions in research and how that creates an excluding lens in how we study. That impact filters down into practice too. The pressure to take some sort of quasi expert/dispassionate position in therapy has been there since Freud; to take on board the impact of empathy is a struggle without a framework of understanding around you (see the October 2022 post for thinking around this) and without feeling you are somehow in the wrong. Taking the term Love and thinking how we use it in professional practice (see January 2023; April 2023) is a way to create a community of practice to make this possible.

In the novella, the work with Joe peters out as the system around him changes. A new head teacher arrives, who can’t be as flexible because OFSTED has deemed the school to be in need of improvement. The work for Milo reaches a ‘proper’ end in Theraplay terms, but also rather peters out, with Val not following up on her final report to the social worker (p.82). So, what is the reality of healing when we are working with children who have been subjected to such annihilatory experiences so early in life?

History can’t be rewritten. As with so many of the children I work with who have been removed from their families of origin, in the novella, the detail of Joe’s early life is blurry, a bit confused. There are the truths of the official reports, and the truths that parents and carers glean in meeting birth parents as part of adoption processes, and in seeing parents at contact sessions if the child remains in the care system. Then there are the truths that each of us construct inside ourselves to try to make sense of the experiences of our lives: the thoughts, the bodily feelings, the emotions. We are a narrative species, us humans: we need stories to give us a ground, a foundational sense of ourselves in our tribal contexts. Joe comes to Val with a story that he will be a bad dad because of his own history, but his internal working model that grew from those early experiences was challenged enough by the delight people had in him – his carer, his education staff, Val, and his peers – for him to have an inkling that he didn’t have to be defined by that.

In the novella, it was hearing a story that gave a different narrative to his fears that made it possible for Joe to express his love for his child in a hands-on way and without fear. As a very small person, he’d developed the non-verbal, pre-verbal, right-brained and social knowing that he had to be in control to survive. This means that in his world view, he was in control of everything, and thus he was also responsible for the violence that was inflicted on him. The relationships he had with Nickie, Val, and others, challenged that, but the difference it made to his self-belief was when the foundation narrative – I’m bad, I hurt things – was activated in a direct and powerful way when he knew he was going to be a dad. This narrative came from the unprocessed experience – the trauma – of being hurt as a baby.

Last month, I wrote about wandering hither and thither in my reflection on Theraplay being research. This month, I seem to be wandering hither and thither about the practice. Once again I am feeling the long shadows that are cast by growing up in a culture that marginalises vulnerability and shows of emotion, a culture that pathologies or judges negatively a focus on relationship and love – the OFSTED inspection of Joe’s school ascribes value through the measurableness of things like paperwork, rather than sitting with how to measure the value of what the school is offering to children like Joe. Therapeutically, I am struggling in a culture that I feel is pushing me towards the same. The work with Milo in the novella would be judged a success; his symptoms were reduced, he remained in mainstream education, he was financially successful – but at what cost? Joe’s work may be seen as unsuccessful as he ended up in custody, violent, not engaged, but …

History can’t be rewritten. People who have been exposed to experiences that felt annihilatory and progressed to trauma because there were insufficient relationships of safety (which meant the annihilation continued, and the experience went unprocessed) will be affected for the rest of their lives. In the shadow of a culture that doesn’t like to accept the vulnerability and emotionality of that painful lifelong impact, that wants outcomes to be measured in a short timescale to support the justification of funding, this feels a dangerous thing to say. It is an upsetting thing to say: that for children who have experienced such dire early lives, the impact of relational and developmental trauma will be lifelong, and even where the trauma is processed, there will be pockets that burst to the surface at key moments of development.

So am I writing such children off? Am I being hopeless and pessimistic?

No! I am doing the opposite!

I want to shout that it is not a failure on the part of the child! Remember, we are talking about children here – in the story, the boys are six years old. They are not able to process the absolute killing emotional and/or physical violence that has been done to them by others. It is the failing of others, us grown-ups, to take on board the enormity of what has happened to the Joes and Milos of this world and adapt the systems around the child accordingly. The jury in the trial of Finley Boden was excused by the judge from further jury duty because of the distressing nature of what they had heard. It’s fine to excuse the adults from further exposure to such distress by changing their system, yet it’s not seen as feasible to change the systems around a child: to moderate the school environment they are exposed to, or make long term support available to their families? Really?! Yes, I am angry!

Think how long grown-ups choose to attend therapy because they feel inner distress. Even if they are ‘successful’ in terms of being financially secure and successful (and let’s face it, in our current economic and social climate, it is only those who are financially secure that can access long-term therapeutic relationships that are focussed on inner wellbeing as opposed to outer symptom relief) the distress remains until a relationship is made with it, and it becomes liveable-with. What is this mad blindness of grown-ups to think that, for children, in a short period of therapeutic time, all the damage of early abuse can be ‘cured’? Is it about self-protection from the distress of what some adults do to some children? Is it another process of othering victims and placing the responsibility of fitting into ‘normal’ life on to them?

In saying that the legacy of relational and developmental trauma is lifelong, I want to acknowledge that such children deserve the lifelong care that will enable them to manage the transitions of life from the best bits of their personhood. Joe manages the transition to parenthood. For Milo, part of him knows and desires it (he draws his girlfriend in), but another part of him knows it would be the death of him because it would face him with the reality of what was so utterly and violently damaged within him. I always wondered why, in the novella, he had to die, and now it makes sense.

Joe is somehow contained by his relationships with his carer, Val, his peers, and school, and their delight in him, if not in his behaviour. In my writing of the birth stories of some of the key characters, Joe is contained by his birth mother and her delight in him. Such delight! In her heart, she calls him Emmanuel – God is with us. Last month, I talked about how the commitment to research is a commitment to the inward search for one’s identity, the person a higher power wishes us to be. From my white, western, Christian perspective, I see that as the person God wants me to be. In my practice, that leads me to love each person I am engaged with – child, adult, professional, passer-by – as a child of God (in the broadest sense, translated to our own spiritual practice, whether formal religion or not). It is this broad, long-term, expansive containment with moments of intense meeting that I believe set the field for those who suffer to know that when they need to, they can say “please help me”, and they will be heard not as a jumble of symptoms that must be erased, but as remarkable, brave, strong souls who have had the courage to keep going despite the attempts of grown-ups to kill them off.

So, I started with a thought. Shall I carry these posts on beyond a year or not? And I found myself wandering into – for how long should I see children for therapy?

I come back to “I don’t know” as the humane, truthful, and honest response. Because I never know what will be part of the accumulation of tiny relational things that makes it possible for someone like Joe to reach out, to know that there are relationships that are kind and helpful. To be able to respond to the question “will you let someone help you?” in a way that chooses the story that heals that part of their trauma. And when I am asked “what difference are you making?”, I will say that I am faithfully cultivating dependence/interdependence because on that foundation, when things are good enough, there is hope that someone can choose to go towards a more emotionally rewarding and healthy place where they can give and receive delight in others.

But our health system is not set up for that kind of healing, nor is our education system, and that undermines those of us who can and want to provide that kind of healing. In the words of one of my supervisees, trying to get others to think about the holistic needs of the child can feel like standing in the river and trying to hold back the flow. It was a powerful image, us standing in the freezing water, holding back the flow – which at the moment is such a flood, with the post-Covid impact on people. And we’re doing it – at a cost to ourselves, I fear – in a system that thrives on in-fighting and power. Do we want to create a community of practice that is about fighting the system? Isn’t that still trying to dismantle the master's house with the masters tools?

What would our practice look like if we stopped trying to block the river and instead allowed the flow to feed the sea? What if we diluted the impact of these fast-flowing rivers by absorbing them into our body/ies of knowing and containment – cradling the child who is suffering from the impact of relational and developmental trauma in strong boats, trusting that these boats will keep floating even when there are times when they float away from us. If our community of practice is made up of many of us who exercise our tacit maternal knowing, we know that the children we have to let go of – because they are not ready, because funding stops, because the child’s system is able to take the pain – will eventually find a safe harbour in the sea of knowing and knowledge that WE have created by elaborating our theory of practice and disseminating it through our research.

The image on the front of A Necessary Life(Story) is a photo I took in a park local to me. It shows a branch of birch leaves. They are the same shape, the same size, the same in every way to the other leaves on the tree except that they are yellow, not green. They are the same and different. 

Today is May Day, or Beltane, which I might argue is an indigenous ceremony from the Celtic lands I grow from. On the website of the Order of the Bards, Ovates and Druids, I found this: 

Beltane is so much about the urge to connect, to blend and merge; to feel a part of something extraordinary; to at once lose one’s sense of self in that merging but also to paradoxically feel more absolutely and truly oneself because of it. In the desire to penetrate life’s mysteries, we need also to open ourselves to them, surrendering to the power of love that it may have the opportunity to transform us. Great things are born in us at such moments of union; this place of merging is where the tap root of our creativity feeds, without it we feel dry and disconnected. If that magical, alchemical moment of connection and merging were a colour, I suspect it might be perceived as many beautiful, vibrant shades but it foundation, I feel sure, would be the green of spring: ecstatically joyful – the irrepressible life and desire that leads us to love. As St Teresa once wrote:

It is love alone that gives worth to all things.

In trusting my tacit knowing and the knowledge that process produces, I have to believe that all elements of the art expressed in the novella tell me something about my inner process in deeply trying to understand my work, including the image I selected for the novella. The Joes and Milos of this world are the same as me, and you, and different from us. The Joes and Milos of this world need something that is different, and not separate from the world. We – you, me, each person reading this post – can create that not by knowing how, and by trusting that it is a humane imperative that if we seek to live as kind humans, this will come about. Time and healing may not wait in relation to the manstream of knowledge flow, but faithful commitment to a sea of tacit maternal knowing can cast the seeds of healing. These can then timelessly flow with a tide of not knowing/letting go, a fundamental aspect of tacit maternal knowing, in our commitment to a community of caring.

Happy May Day, however you mark it.

See you next month,

Fiona Peacock

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Next month

Joe wanted to be carried to the room – thankfully, he was still small for a six-year-old. Whether this was the legacy of neglect or whether his parents were just small, no one seemed to quite know; he certainly ate enough now. In fact, he often couldn’t stop eating, would go away and throw up, and then come back and start again. He had raged at Nickie for days when she put limits on his eating, swearing she was starving him and depriving him of food. Such was the vehemence of his argument that his school had called Grace, thinking it was a safeguarding issue. It could have so easily broken the placement when it had barely begun, but Grace saw a repeating pattern and that was the end of the matter. Joe was told that it was up to Nickie to take care of him and she was the best person to decide what was the right amount for him to eat.

In the Theraplay, they had found all kinds of ways to help Joe realise that food came with a person attached and that the pleasure of being held while being fed and the relaxation of someone knowing your needs was the nurture he needed. Usually, now he didn’t need to find the snack as the very first activity; he had some confidence that he would always have the snack at the end of the session.

A Necessary Life(Story), page 66.

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Bibliography

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.

Bunting, M. (2021). Labours of love: The crisis of care. Granta books.

Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Penguin Modern

Tomlinson, J. (2007). The culture of speed: The coming of immediacy. SAGE.