Introduction to 'You Do Know'
Theraplay and relational & developmental trauma
“He was beautiful. There was something about Joe that took Val’s breath away. Later, she tried to think what it was. He had exceptional eyes. It would be easy for his look to become uncomfortable. It just didn’t waiver. It was as if it pinned you down”
A Necessary Life(Story), page 46.
Dear all,
I finished my doctorate in December 2021, and have been thinking since then about how to share the findings. I wondered about a book, but decided that the most accessible way to disseminate material to therapeutic practitioners would be via a blog. Not that that term actually means much to me. Digital native? — I am not!
The title of my doctorate was What did I do? I don’t know. It felt a brave thing to do, to proudly own my not-knowing as something worthy of studying. It was an access route to illuminate what I actually am doing when working with children. From my place of not knowing, I wrote fiction as part of a heuristic inquiry. The resulting novella, A Necessary Life(Story), was both my research process and the findings. A bit like seeing one’s own face on the screen in video meetings, the novella reflected back to me how I work. Rereading it made it possible for me to see myself, and the work I do, in a different way. The technical document that accompanied the fiction was another aspect of that reflective, reflexive process that deepened my understanding of using Theraplay with children who are experiencing relational and developmental trauma.
I am a Theraplay® therapist. My core training was as a psychodynamic counsellor. Working in a specialist CAMHS team for children who were looked after or adopted, I found that my traditional way of working with children wasn’t succeeding. I seemed unable to help them shift the patterns of behaviour that had once ensured their survival, but that now got in the way of them taking in the kindness and care of new primary attachment figures. It was at this time that I heard about Theraplay and attended a Level 1 training in London.
My first response was – no way, far too American! Touching children! Using lotion and being all bouncy! How could that be therapy? How could that connect with the hard, harrowing distress of the children I was seeing?
It was magic. Not for every child by any means, but for some children and families, things changed at such as rate that it took my breath away. For some children, the gaze they had used to tell everyone to back off, melted. This cynical English woman was a convert.
Since then, I have used Theraplay in increasing amounts, and would now identify myself as a Theraplay therapist. Even when the actions I take in the therapy room look quite different from the core Theraplay protocol, I conceptualise my therapeutic work through the lens of Theraplay.
All the evidence points to Theraplay as a model that works because it is relational. If you are unfamiliar with Theraplay as a model this blog will, as it grows, develops, and emerges, hopefully allow the model to blossom for you too. However, we know from people like Norcross (2011) and Wampold (2015) that whatever the actual model of therapy, it is the quality of the relationship formed and sustained that predicts the outcome of the work.
With this in mind, I came to realise that my research question was not ‘does Theraplay work?’, but: ‘what is it in particular about the nature of the relationship that is created between the child and the therapist that means Theraplay works for the children I see?’.
The writing of the novella was both my research process and my research findings. Through the writing and reading of it, it showed me the knowledge that I was bringing to my work. Without even realising, I was exercising a form of expert knowledge that is ignored and invisible in psychotherapeutic theory. This is what I would like to share with you, in the hope it will help you to see the expert knowledge you bring to your work and thus support your provision of high quality therapeutic relationships to children and their families.
Each month I will take an excerpt from the novella, A Necessary Life(Story), and write about it. In small, digestible, and – I hope – interesting bits, I hope to share my learning from my doctoral research in a way that is useful to therapeutic practitioners.
I don’t have to construct a narrative that leaves you hanging on the edge of your seat, waiting for the great reveal of what I found out. In fact, what I wrote about in my formal thesis is just a fraction of the transformative knowledge that milled around, floated to the surface, and multiplied in the beams of daylight. What I came to realise is just how much my therapeutic practice draws on tacit maternal knowing – not just in my Theraplay practice but so much of the work I have done in being a therapist educator, a clinical supervisor, a trainer of Theraplay practitioners, a course lead for training psychotherapeutic counsellors for children and adolescents, and a director of Theraplay UK. All of these roles draw on my tacit maternal knowing as a way to support me to work from a set of values and ethics that are my compass.
But that very form of knowledge, I came to realise via my research, is knowledge that has been subject to the process of agnogenesis, a construction of forgetting and ignoring knowledge (Proctor & Schiebinger, 2008). Specifically, I found that the knowledge of mothers – who for millennia have borne and raised infants – is not seen as ‘real’ knowledge, so this source of valuable data has been dismissed. In my opinion, to sideline such data is to deprive people in need of care, the most appropriate form of care.
So, through this blog, I will share my opinion. You can decide whether it is one you might agree with, or if not, be part of the discussion about maternal knowledge and knowing and its place in therapeutic process.
I will publish a new post on the first of each month. If you are intrigued by the prospect of sharing the findings of my doctoral research in this way, do sign up to receive the blog and do pass on the link to friends and colleagues.
If you do wish to purchase a copy of the novella, it is available as an eBook on Amazon or, in the UK, as a paperback from eBay.
See you next month,
Fiona Peacock
Next month
In August’s blog, I will focus on Chapter 1: Birth Stories. Here is a taster:
Joe is born.
It was a moment.
For just that moment everything stopped: sound, speed, confusions.
And then there was light.
She had done it.
The baby was hers, here.
Him.
She hadn’t been that sure there was a baby. She hadn’t been sure if it was a baby that it would be OK. It – he – had been injured into her, or loved into her, by someone, by its/his father. Who? Dark confusions.
And then she saw him. He was given to her. The noise, the rush, the muddle started all over again.
In that still moment, he had named himself.
Emmanuel.
He would never be called that except in her heart. In that one still moment, he had filled her whole heart.
Held in light, silence and stillness.
He opened his eyes, closed them, turned his head and pushed it into her. For that moment he, too, knew in his flesh that he had filled her whole heart.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 46.
References
Norcross, J. C. (2011). Psychotherapy relationships that work. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199737208.001.0001
Proctor, R. & Schiebinger, L. L. (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.
Wampold, B. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.