The life and death of hide and seek.
The scary bit, the unsafe bit, was when he was looked at.
To be seen.
For Joe, that was the pits. Once you were seen, you just didn’t know what might happen next, and inevitably it wasn’t good. But what was good? The people he was with now didn’t seem to know what good was. Not like he did.
Joe felt his insides squirm as this woman looked at him. He fixed her with his look. He was waiting for her to drop her eyes. That’s what they all did when he looked. It was good. It meant they didn’t see him.
But she didn’t break eye contact. She just kept looking. She said she wanted to play with him.
She couldn’t be trusted. She wouldn’t get near him; he wouldn’t let her get near him! He screamed and screamed. He ran to the end of the room. She kept talking. He wanted her to go away but she wouldn’t. He ran to the door, but she was already there. She stood with her back to it.
He could feel things cracking. It was too much. Far too much. She just wouldn’t go away. But weirdly, in that moment, he didn’t hate her. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to disintegrate her. It was as though, in his chest, two channels were running at once: The one that screamed and screamed and screamed and stared and spat and bit and wanted her to go and thought, so cruel. How cruel. Let me out. And another, newer channel that was curious about why, why, why, why did she not go?
A Necessary Life(Story), page 46.
Dear all,
Last month I wrote about why the kites cry and told you that, as I perceive it, they cry when they both want connection and have a hope of it. In my opinion, that also means it is a protest that says “I want!”, a fragment of hope that has survived despite persecution from others. A hope that connections can be made which has survived despite the battering of rejecting experiences. This is reflected in the famous quote from Winnicott (1990, p.186) about hide and seek: “It is a joy to hidden, but disaster not to be found”.
I also said I’d come back to how I believe children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma can be othered and victim-blamed for the smart ways they have, by necessity, developed to continue to have some sort of story, some sort of narrative that we could think of as play. Think about the first experience Val has of Joe (ANLS, p.30). In my experience, children who have had experience of the care system have fabulous problem-solving skills, superior people-reading abilities, and unique ways of interpreting the world. More often than not, these are named as them being manipulative, hypervigilant, and anti-social. Their very survival skills are pathologised, and so who they are is automatically seen as ‘other’. In seeking to change behaviour to something that is more socially acceptable, the personhood of the child is at risk of eradication. If a child feels that, of course they will resist the relational offering.
Through the fiction, I wanted to try to understand what their lived experience might be like, as far as I could. In my thesis, I listed various written definitions of trauma as I tried to understand why the earliest life experiences of the children I work with still have such an enormous impact. But theory words on paper weren’t enough. From a fictional-insider position, as I opened myself to a story emerging, I came to my own narration of trauma. Through the daily practice of fiction writing, by inhabiting the embodied actions of the characters of the novella and letting myself experience the impact of that on me, I located my definition of relational and developmental trauma. The words I originally chose to express it, I formed into fiction to try to evoke empathic responses – whole body responses – in readers. I’ll come back to why I think that is so important. Here, I will try to express, in academic-style words on paper, the meaning of the lived experience of relational and developmental trauma as I discovered it through embodied empathy (Finlay, 2005).
Trauma comes when fear, as an appropriate response to a situation, is too much, for too long, and with no capacity to influence the situation in any way by eliciting and/or accepting helpful relationships from another. The felt experience then becomes one of helplessness in the face of annihilation. An undying dread that you are going to cease to be, physically or emotionally. Trauma is aloneness in facing that disjoining terror, the humiliation and horrific disbelief of being cast out from the safety net of connections to others. Shame and abasement grip you from the experience of not being worth any effort on the part of others to keep you as part of the tribe and so keep you alive. But it is worse than being dead, it is experiencing living-deadness without the relief of death.
I use the term ‘experience’ because, for the children I work with, these annihilatory situations are put on them when they are pre-verbal, before they have organised ‘thoughts’, because thoughts require the capacity to form words. It is their bodies that experience the sensation that they are going to die. They have lived through helplessness and abandonment. They couldn’t do anything to extricate themselves. The experience is stuck: in bodies, in imaginations, in dreams, in the construction of a worldview.
With such an all consuming terror, avoiding the experience of annihilation becomes the thing that you organise your life around, often without any awareness of this because you haven't known anything else.
This is your normal. Separation isn’t painful, it is ordinary. It is a safe place because it is known. There is no cry of anguish seeking connection.
This is your necessary adaptation for survival. The life story that is yours. You are the one and only in your world.
And then the Theraplay practitioner and child come together. One with hope of relationship, one without conception of relationship. One offering and receiving vulnerability, one defending against it.
For the one without conception of relationship, who is defending against vulnerability – when someone tries to show you another perspective, it is felt as if it is an attempt to annihilate you. You marshal your defences and remain an outsider, non-social, in a place where you can be in charge of yourself because that feels known, and therefore safe. To let yourself have any vulnerability is to open the door to that annihilation and to move from a place where there is nothing to a place where there is pain. This relationship stuff makes things worse. Relationships hurt and make you vulnerable. Being asked to do developmentally appropriate things means you have to connect, and that makes you vulnerable. Such demands trigger the experience of trauma and, for that person, they are reliving the experience. Not remembering it, not viewing it with distance: they are right back in it.
While I suspect that, if you are reading this blog, you are familiar with the impact of relational and developmental trauma, it still feels important to me to struggle to find words that evoke the cold horror that overwhelmed me as I sought to inhabit the body spaces of people I have worked with so that I could experience what it might be that their muscles and fascia hold for them. Me struggling with words to evoke that experience in you, as my reader, is in some way me bearing witness to the pain of the people I work with. Relational and developmental trauma is not a place of relationships being ‘had and lost’, but a place where they have been ‘never known or desired’. This is not, as Winnicott says, “a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.” but “survival to be hidden, and death to be found”.
It is those of us who wish to connect with someone who is experiencing relational and developmental trauma that suffer in our desire and belief that relationship is not only worth pressing for, but central to human wellbeing, both for individuals and as a community. It is those of us who hold the hope of connection that cry “I want”, and believe it is important for the other to be lovingly held as they face the terror of annihilation so that they can find that hope of connection. So, to ‘be Theraplay’ with the child who is experiencing relational and developmental trauma, we have to go to where they are to understand how to evoke a desire for relationship within them. It can feel like we are causing anguish because experiencing this feeling of being found for the first time is excruciating. What an ethical, painful paradox we face with each child and family we encounter.
I wonder what your response has been to me writing about it in this way?
Like Val, in the face of the rawness, my first thought was ‘I just can’t face it’. Anguish, cry the kites. Aloneness is such a painful place. Utter aloneness and separation.
Returning to the Shakers in last month’s blog – I imagine Ann Lee after her fourth infant bereavement. Will she go under with madness, or by pushing the establishment so hard that she is locked away as a criminal? Or does something radical happen, like moving to a whole new continent?
Brenda is helplessly witnessing Val’s suffering and is taken aback that her response to Val’s vulnerability is one of anger. Brenda is aware of her response but does not act on it, she takes it as a communication that could guide her supervisory response to create a place of reconnection with Val, to find a way where they can together be a community of practice. Thinking doesn’t help get out of this place of contradiction, where separation is a relief for one and the sign of distress to the other. Brenda has to engage with a power shift from being in the supervisor's position that could be felt as ‘power over’ Val, to a place of being alongside Val and sharing power with her. They both have to enter the zone of not knowing – one in the grip of suffering, one to be there alongside the suffering.
This isn’t gentle contemplation. It is wrestling with the horror of this contradiction. This isn’t stereotypical, cute, lovey-dovey mothering. It is the real deal of sweating away, wondering what the fuck you should be doing while everyone else seems to be doing just fine. Of holding your breath when you haven’t a clue whether what you are doing is good enough, because it doesn’t seem to be making any difference, and it would be so much easier to just follow the same pattern of practice as everyone else because at least you’d be sticking to a rule book.
This is hanging in there with the tedium of doing the same thing over and over, faithfully using yourself in the service of the child. This is using maternal forms of power, knowledge, and devotion in choosing to allow yourself to take on the rhythms of the other, so you can feel their needs. This is swallowing your self-doubt, because you don’t know until children aren’t children any more but are grown-up enough to be out there in the world, and you can see how they then take on the challenges of relationship.
This is faithfully committing to not knowing so that you can reach a place of interdependence through the experience of dependence – you, the more powerful other, allowing yourself to be depended on. Through your understanding of the experience of that other, you then enable them to increasingly contribute to your interdependent relationship. To use Ann Lee as a metaphor, this is about changing continents, being radical in the type of knowledge we use in the work. I have come to see it as about trusting the innate power of mother-kind to find a different way of living, being, and working. Theorising tacit maternal knowing gives us language to make a safe space – a community of practice to digest suffering – without being caught up in what others think you should be. It allows the voice of this form of suffering to be heard in a place that affirms maternal knowing, believes that it is worth investing in practical, simple beauty.
This is hanging in there to see if something can turn trauma to fear.
Fear is an appropriate response for the horrors faced in preverbal infancy. Fear can be dealt with because ultimately it is relational: there is a person who is aware of something that impinges on their sense of self. But first the cry of the one who has no conception of the value of relationship and who is defending against the vulnerability of being a ‘self’ must be heard. This cry comes when they feel they are a ‘self’ that could be in relationship with another. It is not a cry of violence, it is a cry of the violence that has been done to them. The kites were mistakenly labelled as predators, when they were actually victims of misunderstanding and prejudice. The child living their necessary life after relational and developmental trauma can be heard, but hearing this is hard in a world that can’t, maybe doesn’t want to, stomach the lasting impact of what has been done to a child who has been physically, sexually, emotionally abused by the people that they are utterly dependent on, and so hears those cries as threatening.
This description of what I see as the inner process of using Theraplay for children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma may elicit the ‘yuck’ response in some people. The commitment to not knowing and choosing to accept that the child before you is an amazing example of the life force of humanity in finding any way they can to keep going by incorporating the most bizarre (from the balanced attachment perspective) ways of holding themselves together, is most definitely not tidy or nice. It is easy to distance oneself from the distress: your own distress as a practitioner, and the distress of the child. In fact, dispassion is often seen as a sign of professionalism.
This disconnect from letting ourselves not know and putting ourselves in the position of vulnerability of an infant has led to some inhumane practices. Bowlby, working with the Robertsons, picked up on this as they re-understood the meaning of children being separated from their parents for hospital stays, recognising that feelings of loss are healthy, not a nuisance to be avoided. Olmstead et al (2010) was a useful paper for me: she took a relational ethics perspective to addressing pain relief for children. As a nurse, she was considering physically-experienced pain. As therapists, we are considering emotionally-experienced pain (and the impact of avoiding it). Olmstead et al (2010, p.2) wrote: “The acknowledgment of children's rights to evidence-based management of their pain has not been sufficient to effect meaningful change [in practice]. This incongruence between rights and reality reflects the complexity of practice…Nurses, being ethically and morally responsible for treating children’s pain in their day-to-day practice, are caught amidst this complexity”. So, I suggest, are therapeutic practitioners.
Historical attitudes and complexity of practice leave children suffering in a way that impinges on their right to pain relief due to adult practices of objectivity and professional distancing. Olmstead et al (2010) proposes that it is in letting themselves empathise with the impact of the pain on the child that nurses become sensitised to the moral and ethical dilemma that is evident and can then advocate for appropriate pain relief. Part of this is to “acknowledge the value and significance of sharing engaged and embodied relationships with children who are experiencing pain” (Olmstead et al., 2010, p.7). This is a sort of ah-ha moment. You’ve got to go and walk the route, get the mud on your boots, and hear the kites cry anguish. You have to identify with the people you are working with. And you have to find a way of sharing that with other professionals in a way that enables them to also empathise with the people we are alongside.
Developing our alternative, maternally-based community of practice is, therefore, an essential ethical facet of our work with children experiencing the impact of relationship and developmental trauma. If we don’t engage in the anguish and pain, then we may end up protecting the perpetrators of abuse and violence because we are not letting ourselves feel the impact of these experiences on the children we have come to care about through our work. Going further, Ahmed (2017) would argue that our silence, through not engaging in this way, and not struggling to find the ways to claim and use this knowledge, benefits those who perpetuate these forms of violence towards the vulnerable in our world. While our challenge of the status quo may discomfort some, it also opens the door for others to see something of what we do, and wonder in a positive way about the lives of the people who are in the work.
We should honour this work, not hide it away.
To faithfully do this work, it helps if the hard work of it is acknowledged and appreciated. It will be sustainable if the myths around this maternal way of working are challenged. If this maternal form of work is only theorised through the traditional lens of wo-men being determined as different and subordinate to men, then it will remain difficult for people who do this form of work to develop a strong identity and secure community of practice. If the work is only seen through the white, male, binary, right/wrong aspects of lenses of knowledge, our maternal work can neither be appropriately challenged nor have creative space to develop. To do that, the patriarchal and misogynistic lens that can be turned on the maternal work of caring needs to be challenged.
Maybe we need some separate maternal space to let this happen, so that this way of work can confidently grow a community, and people are free to choose the right form of knowledge for the right purpose at the right time. Next month I will explore further the challenges of integrating maternal and paternal experiences when, as a woman, the patriarchal and misogynistic threads of both professional training and personal experience make it hard to prioritise those voices.
See you next month,
Fiona Peacock
Next month
Milo kicked his heels - not metaphorically but literally.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 70.
Bibliography
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Finlay, L. (2005). ‘Reflexive embodied empathy’: A phenomenology of participant-researcher intersubjectivity. The Humanistic Psychologist, 33(4), 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15473333thp3304_4
Olmstead, D. L., Scott, S. D., & Austin, W. J. (2010). Unresolved pain in children: A relational ethics perspective. Nursing Ethics, 17(6), 695–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733010378932
Winnicott, D. W. (1990). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development. Karnac.
So beautifully written! It is Wonderful to have such a clear explanation of how our children feel and experience life. I hope this reaches every Social Worker, Therapist, Parent and Teacher, for better understanding and overdue change. Thank you