The answer is not in rescuing children, nor in measuring value by money
Contents
Chapter 3
I don’t get it, I just don’t get it! (said joyfully)
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
Last month, I wrote about how I had expected the ‘rescue’ of the children from their stuckness at the motorway service station to be the answer to this research endeavour – the final outcome that would give insight into how we operationalise our m/other tongue. And, of course, it wasn’t. That part of the story is simply about using Theraplay technique to enable a specific group of people to re-inhabit their felt-sense-of-safety by moving them from a place that was becoming unsafe for them. Their growing sense of unsafety arose from their inner experience of feeling that the outer world did not ‘get them’ or their specific needs. Their felt-sense-of-safety is restored by returning to the people who do ‘get them’ well enough for them to rest.
So now – maybe now – another, deeper iteration of the open-air Heuristic Inquiry begins. Again, thank you to Alex, who commented publicly on the post, and to those who sent comments and thoughts privately. Alex, your comment was so helpful. Why did I foreground that financial aspect of the editorial relationship? How do we engage with questions of legitimacy and value as we continue to clamber out of the sticky Master’s toolbox and work out what the contents of the changing bag might be?
To navigate that requires a shift in authority, away from the ‘Master’ to… I guess this post is about scratching my head over where ‘authority’ sits in seeking a pathway – or indeed pathways – to operationalising our m/other tongue. And where does money sit within all that? Does ‘money’, as a concept, really belong there at all? Or is money an Alephetic mote (in the Borgesian sense of the word – a moment or place where multiple meanings can be seen without hierarchy)? Is money an opener, or a closer? Read on!
June 2026 has brought two other experiences that make me wonder about openings and closings. My friend, colleague, and fellow Theraplayer to her bones, Mary Kennedy, passed away. May she rest in peace, and rise in glory. I also finished my active association with the child and adolescent psychotherapeutic therapist education programme that I have been part of for a long time (perhaps 16 years or more – I still can’t work out exactly when I started). Both are endings that hold sadness. Both also hold the joy of the feels-rightness of having had those relational experiences. What a privilege it has been to have known Mary, and to have been known by Mary. What awe-inspiring professional love she gave to the families and children she worked with over the years. How enriched my life has been by being part of the therapist education programme. Such relationships transmogrify us: yes, in a magical way, but not in a sudden, Damascene manner. Neither ending feels like a severance, only a change, with its sadnesses, warmth, and onward journeying.
This month’s fiction and reflection take me, I think, to the beginning of a transmogrifying pathway within that journey, as the story carries on, even when the children have been rescued. I hope you will journey with me.
20:00 Emptiness
Daniel, Graham, and Val looked at each other. Val shivered a little as she felt dampness seep through the hair against the back of her neck.
“You’re not going with them?” she asked Daniel.
He shook his head. “No. I’ll need to get the minibus back when the traffic moves. And they had to leave a lot of their stuff there, so I need to look after that.”
All three of them knew they should turn around and head back to the south side, back to the place where they were staying. But none of them did.
Anyone looking out from the service station door would have seen three figures, almost grey in that strange darkness that penetrated everything, but with a slight muddy glow from the emergency lighting. Two of the figures, both heavy with weariness, stood closer together, not touching, but as if they were. The other, taller and younger, stood just a little apart. They were all looking into the rain and the darkness as though trying to follow someone or something.
“I hope they all get home okay,” Val said quietly.
Daniel pursed his lips and nodded. There was a strange emptiness inside him. Val had echoed his longing to know for certain that the children he cared for were safe and sound in their homes. He knew he had discharged them all into the safe hands of his colleagues or the children’s carers, but still he felt the gap.
Val touched his arm.
“Let’s get into the dry,” she said gently. She understood his emptiness – the sudden absence of somewhere to direct that instinct to care, that way of being which gave meaning to their presence on this earth. He still didn’t move, so she took his arm.
Daniel, time to go now,” she said more firmly.
“Oh, right,” he said, as if waking from some sort of dream. He cleared his throat.
Val took Graham’s arm too.
“Come on,” she said.
For all three of them, the sound of the rain suddenly became clear again. While their focus had been on the children, it was as if the noise of the rain had been turned off, along with the coolness of the air outside and, inside, the bustle of the service station. They had been in a world apart, so it felt like an assault to rejoin the melee, pushing through to the stairway.
Val was pleased to be able to take hold of the handrail and use it to haul herself up the steps. The damp had seeped through her trousers, and her knees felt stiff. Each time she tried to bend them and push her weight up onto the next step, she felt a sharp pain, like someone taking a hammer to her kneecap.
She pushed through.
She always pushed through.
Today the lift wouldn’t have worked because the power was off. But even if she had had the choice, she would have taken the stairs.
Pushing through.
It was what she did.
She hadn’t got her head round why the everyday pains of ordinary movement felt like something of a comfort to her. Oh, there’s my knee. Oh, my thumb’s hurting at the joint. Ouch, my back. Maybe they said, Look, I am still striving. Still striving to do my good. I’m still here. I hurt, therefore I am. Familiar. Mine. Not something anyone would take from me, because who would want pain?
She paused at the top of the stairs, partly to catch her breath, partly to ponder a question she had never asked herself before.
Why am I still striving to do my good?
The walkway stretched out in front of her. Childhood was now tangled up in grey gaffer tape holding together ageing modernity.
She pressed on.
The men were ahead of her now, unaware that she had suddenly found herself needing to ask one very big question.
Without children
Spoilt only child. That’s what she thought they called her. Knitted grey jumper with a red band around the V-neck, grey skirt, grey socks, black lace-up shoes. Flat when others were getting stacked soles and adding to their height.
She didn’t fit. It didn’t make sense.
She tried so hard. She wanted to be visible. She put her heart and soul into the project. She wanted the teacher to notice her. She strove.
Val blinked rapidly. She didn’t want random memories coming back now. But such things don’t wait for the right external moment or readiness. Her inner state was saying, now, now is the time. Memories don’t have to wait until you sit down. Nor do their timings have to fit the outside world’s idea of timing. Memory knew she had the length of the bridge to walk, and in that time it must arrive and depart, leaving the necessary trace that changes something and answers the question with yet more questions.
It was the same 60s architecture as this bridge. At the time, clean lines, squared corners, modern materials, metal window frames, and tidy brickwork all signalled post-war progress. Memory evoked a school. A newly built school to cope with the baby boomers, but one that still held on to many of the old school values. Grey for all the clothing, and girls must never wear trousers. Trousers meant they were somehow unacceptable. Too modern, even in this brave modernisation of the post-war era. A bit too loose. Too provocative.
Their house was pre-war. She remembered her dad saying that when they moved in, wanting to reassure her mother that he had done his checks to ensure it was sound and that there had been none of that shoddy, fast, throw-it-up-quick building. Her mother must have responded, but she had no recollection of the words, just a sense of mistrust, a kind of disbelief.
Opposite their new house was a care home, a respite place. That was all modern architecture and rapid build. The architecture contrasted with the damaged men who came out in wheelchairs and made their way to the beach. Val didn’t learn until much later that it had been built for people injured during the Second World War to come and take a holiday, funded by charity, and she hadn’t remembered that until now.
Once her mother learned that the place was worthy, Val was encouraged – regularly, forcefully encouraged – to go and talk to the people who came to stay there. She could remember now the manager and his wife, the office they invited her into, helping clear tables and take glasses out of a dishwasher. The amazing thing was that dishwasher; she hadn’t known they existed.
It was only now, step by step as she crossed that bridge back to the south side, that she questioned why she might have been so encouraged to go. It had scared her – the men missing legs, the people who would sit in chairs arranged with their backs to the wall around the room, the over-friendly, the under-friendly, the loud with laughter or rage. And at the same time, she had felt more at home there than she did in her own home.
She didn’t even know why they had moved there. One day they simply did. A house. A pile of rubbish in the hallway. The tutting of her parents. The realisation that there were no lightbulbs – they had all been taken. And the sockets were still round pinned, so they could plug nothing in.
That night she slept on a mattress on the floor.
“Are we on holiday?” she’d asked.
“No, we live here now,” her father had said, pulling the sheets and blankets over her. “Your bed will arrive in the removal van tomorrow.”
Outside the window that was to become her window, a large tree occasionally sent its branches to tap and inquire about her. They had no light that night, and once her father had left, she got up and went to the window to look out. There were other lights out there, other houses and homes. She felt marooned. That’s why the memory came back now. Everyone else had light, but she was marooned in the seminess, suspended and unable to move.
That house became home because it was where they lived over time. She got used to the pond in the garden, the willow tree that dropped its leaves each autumn and meant the pond had to be cleared. She got used to the vegetable plot that her father tended, which took up at least a third of the garden. Val had never even thought until now that that too was a war legacy – a hand-me-down from the need to be self-sufficient in food as well as in all other parts of life.
Self-sufficiency, it seemed, would become her anchor and a millstone – strive. Always and forever.
Memories of her mother’s utterances were few and far between.
It was in this house that her father washed her ears out, and she learned she had to say the world was alright.
She remembered being in front of a mirror, her mother behind her, pulling a brush through her hair – her long hair, because that’s what girls should have.
“Ow!” she’d said as her mother hit a tangle and pulled hard.
“Stop making a fuss,” her mother had said.
“Ow!” she’d said again, as she stood on a chair and her mother pinned up a hem on a new dress.
Her mother didn’t even have to say the words for Val to know she shouldn’t be making a fuss.
“Look what you’ve done now!” her mother had said when the slow turn Val had been required to make on the chair, to ensure the hem was even, reached its starting point and her mother saw the blood on the new fabric. “I’ll not be able to wash that out.”
Every time Val put on that dress, she saw the stain and knew she was hideously exposed as a child who was ungrateful and of no worth. She hated dresses.
“Well, everyone’s got some talent,” she recalled her mother saying to her father with a smile. They were sitting in the lounge, wine glasses in hand, nibbles on the table, long dress, smart suit, and polo-neck jumper – the very image of the modern family. The fondue bubbling on the table (Val thought she might be pushing that memory just a bit too far, but maybe she needed to introduce the absurdity to counteract the pain). They both looked at her as she came through the door at that unfortunate moment in her nylon nightie, wanting a hot water bottle for her cold bed. She heard the comment, she heard the laugh, she saw the look that to her felt like a glare, and she heard the unspoken – or maybe it was spoken but dressed as tease? – “Just a shame we haven’t found what hers is yet.”
She wanted to be someone’s darling. She wanted to be the apple of someone’s eye. She wanted someone to know she was there.
She had been so excited about the project Miss Stainor gave them. The teacher was young and child-centred, on teaching practice from the teacher training college, full of trendy ideas – giving children free rein to choose what to do, not feel they needed to be told, not needing to be neither seen nor heard.
Val threw her heart into the project. She was so into horses at that stage of her life. She cut up every birthday card she’d saved from years before that had a horse on it. She stuck each picture into the book they’d been given for their project. She wrote and wrote. She wanted Miss Stainor to see how good she was.
She took the book into school and saw the badly stuck-in pictures and the fragments of writing about something she knew nothing about, and wouldn’t know anything about, because riding and horses weren’t for the likes of them.
And she wept and wept and wept.
She went home and saw the destroyed cards – the remainders of small tokens of affection, small moments of recognition from others that she’d trashed to try and please someone else – and she wept and she wept.
Her mother went into school. She, her mother, and Miss Stainor sat together and tried to find out why she was weeping and weeping, but she couldn’t find any words to locate the devastation inside – the pit that had opened at the realisation that she was utterly nothing, and that in trying to be something she’d destroy even the little she had. And so she was a good girl and said she was sad because it wasn’t as good as Elizabeth’s, who sat next to her (which was true), and she’d wanted to do so well.
Miss Stainor gave her a prize for putting in lots of effort. Even at eight, Val knew it was a… what was it? A grown-up missing the point and buying their way out of their distress at her distress. She threw the lovely book with the cardboard pop-out horses and jumps into the bin on the school playground. Then she hid under the weeping willow tree, where she couldn’t be seen, and wept some more, because the book had been really lovely and she really wanted to make the horses and the jumps, but it felt wrong.
Eventually she dried her eyes. She went over the road to the care home. She played Snap with an old lady and wandered around the corridors for a bit. The manager’s wife found her and said everyone was having tea now, and would she like a piece of cake. She politely said, “Thank you, but no. My tea will be ready soon.”
She felt she crossed the road back to their house in a very dignified manner – head high, stiff-backed, a little haughty, maybe. She was unaware of the manager’s wife watching her, and the gleam of tears held in the eyes of the manager’s wife.
It was after that that the world stopped sounding real, and she carried on walking with a stiff, slightly haughty dignity that set her apart from the others, despite the uniform grey. It made her stand out, and people said: snooty only child. Snooty, grasping, selfish, stupid, horrible child who showed no feelings. Her face rigid as a way to keep in the pain. Her face a mask that here, now on this bridge, she realised she had only covered up, never really taken off.
Without taking it off – except for the children who had also had to mask themselves so intensely – no one had been able to get in. So she was a child killer, never making the babies that the good Lord had given her eggs to have. Pretending to make moral decisions, but an abandoned babe in the wood.
Val squeezed her eyes together. A small tear seeped from the right, dampening the corner. She paused for a breath halfway across – the place where she could look out and see the traffic.
She looked to her right. Everything stuck. On one side, the lights were out; on the other, the lights of the cars were still on, as if willing something to move.
She looked to the left and was surprised to see Graham and Daniel only a few paces ahead of her. She had imagined they had gone off somewhere in a different time zone and would be impatiently waiting for her at the other side by now.
She took three paces forward before she could see the traffic to the left.
Her own voice took her by surprise. “I think it’s moving!” she exclaimed.
Graham and Daniel turned around.
“Really?” Graham said – not with sarcasm or scorn as her memories might have dictated, but with curiosity and interest. He and Daniel changed direction and moved energetically back towards where she was now standing, staring at the lights.
She was sure – not quite as far as the eye could see, but a long way ahead – that the lights were less compacted, moving a little. It was hard to tell, with raindrops coursing down the clear Perspex and the scratching and scarring of years of use making it difficult to be sure of what she was seeing.
“I think you’re right,” Daniel said, smiling.
They all felt a small thrill of hope that the end of such an ordeal might be in sight, even if it was for those heading in the opposite direction.
I don’t get it, I just don’t get it! (said joyfully)
The title of this exploration of the tacit knowing contained in fiction this month comes from Adam Phillips’s (2013) book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life. He includes a chapter titled On Not Getting It. What struck me as I read it was that, as much as I value the way Phillips deconstructs ideas and opens up new angles of thinking, his view still feels fundamentally grounded in a deficit model of psychoanalytic thought. Where something is wrong, it needs to be put right.
This is not the same as being a Theraplayer. As a Theraplayer, when something is working well, you do more of it. And once that has filled relational gaps and supported growth, you look for what else works and do more of that too. This is a developmental model of abundance, not a curative model based on deficit. At the same time, I found the idea of being got, getting it, and not getting it, very helpful.
It spurred me on. I found myself wondering (or thinking?) whether I might have made a bit of a breakthrough in this research project on how to operationalise our m/other tongue.
I’ve been asking the wrong question!
Operationalising our m/other tongue is not about getting it but about being ready to not get it. It is not about how we take the (or a) concept of care and make it work. It is about how we take the messy reality of human connectedness and interdependence (aka care) and allow the hearts-and-hands axis of existence to become our primary reference point in knowledge generation. This is getting the forgetting/letting go element of tacit maternal knowing, identified in my doctoral research (Peacock, 2023), in a different, more embodied (or less heady) manner. It is feeling again what Ann Jernberg says– that all we need to know is contained in what we see mothers and infants doing together in a good enough mother–infant relationship (Jernberg, 1979). She was speaking about Theraplay as a clinical model. I use Theraplay to refer to how we enable people to thrive and grow across the lifespan as therapists, therapist educators, researchers, and managers of organisations that care.
This question of how we operationalise our m/other tongue is not what do we do? but what gets in the way of us caring and sustaining that care in all contexts? because, actually, we do know how to do this. Daniel sustains this caring in the small unit in his school. Val managed it in her Theraplay practice. However, in the context of this project, we are considering how this might work in spaces where not everyone is signed up to the endeavour. The aim is to scale care and understand how it can function without losing its heart in a world organised around money.
In the fiction, care within capitalism appears in small pockets – Christiana, who wants to help and so finds a practical solution; Sarfan, who cannot do anything else but is driven to share, even when it overwhelms him and pushes him to the edge.
But why is Christiana worried about whether she has done the right thing in closing the shop and letting the children use the unused storeroom? In a manstream, where a deficit model is applied, this worry might be read as a failure that needs correcting, because the expectation has become that there is a single correct answer.
Why does it break Sarfan when his co-workers are convinced he will lose his job for giving away food that would otherwise be wasted? In a manstream, where a deficit model is applied, his distress becomes evidence of failure because he is a migrant fleeing a place where death was a probability.
n both situations, from the perspective of the m/otherland, prioritising care seems both obvious and kind. Offering unused space, distributing food that would otherwise go to waste – these actions feel self-evidently right. The gap between the felt rightness of caring action and the operationalisation of a fiscal imperative, as it filters down from business concept level to the coalface, creates a painful, destructive space of “I don’t know if I have served the Master Val is kind and caring but does not feel she is, shaped by the messages of her past – family-based, culture-based, time-, space-, and gender-based. She is left wrong-footed because she wants to care; that is who she is. Yet her desire to care, her vocation, is undermined by having to perform care in a particular, constrained form – wife and motherhood, the expected role for a woman of the 1970s. The right deed, for the wrong reason (see Keeping going or keeping growing?).
if care brings fulfilment and can be offered in sustainable abundance, why does it so often fail to be valued as a primary form of knowledge generation at an organisational or systemic level? That lack of valuation shows up in care work being low paid, in hands-on skilled caring not being recognised as knowledge on a par with academic or managerial expertise, and in carers being absorbed into management systems only when they adopt its language and frameworks – often at the cost of stepping away from active care. It’s still hard to talk about the professional use of love in a boardroom!
So, being all Adam Phillips-y and deconstructing everything, what do I really mean when I am saying I am trying to operationalise our m/other tongue?
According to an undifferentiated internet search, a common meaning of operationalisation is about taking a concept and making this work in practice. Operationalisation, it seemed to me, is commonly placed as moving from idea (head) to practice (hands). Where the heart fits, I’m not sure. It certainly doesn’t seem to be the driving force of the head-to-hands direction of travel. (I wimped out of tackling a more academic dive into the concept purely down to time pressure. I’m trying to be transparent and honest here to enhance trustworthiness! This is the smash-and-grab of practitioner research. Of course, most of us do live by quick and incomplete understandings of concepts, which can perpetuate misunderstanding.)
However, I propose that operationalising our m/other tongue is the opposite. It is not about ‘concept’ as a head word. It is about how to take feels-right to create felt-sense-of-safety (hand-to-heart connection) as a central, material process of operationalisation. In operationalising our m/other tongue, we take seriously what it means to sit with I don’t get it as an important aspect of hand–heart connection. Staying with I don’t get it for long enough, and resisting the pressure to act, allows for the unsticking of what is stuck, without shame of not getting it because not getting it is the work.
This directly challenges the manstream need to value what is measurable or countable. The risk of this is that, if you can’t measure or count something, it is treated as if it may not exist or cannot be valued. In this frame, I don’t get it becomes a deficit rather than a space for discovery. In the m/otherland, tracking care is necessary in order to describe how it contributes to what is valuable. What is valued in our m/other tongue is where a more powerful person creates appropriate contexts that enable the growth and thriving of a less powerful other. Within this we are also acknowledging the value in the fulfilment and capacity for sustainable abundance of the more powerful actor in the relationship because of their expression of their vocation of care. Isn’t that what mothers do?
This feels important as we unpick the toolbox version of operationalisation, understood as taking a concept and translating it into practice. It helps us hold the changing bag of the m/otherland alongside the toolbox of the manstream, ready to be used whichever is most appropriate to context. As Theraplayers, we are more attuned to the changing bag, working from embodied experience towards thought without losing human connection; heart to hand, and then to head. In this, we work towards the purpose of being and enabling human thriving.
Again, being all Adam Phillips-y and deconstructing things, concept and conception are connected by having the same word at the start, but different meanings. Standing in the m/otherland, clutching the changing bag, gives me a stronger sense that conception is not a head thing, but an embodied and creative act that cannot be owned or built by an individual, and does not produce a single entity (as Winnicott (1975) says, there is no such thing as a baby).
Alex, in their comment on last month’s post, returned me to the conception of this project as an open-air heuristic inquiry, and to how I initially wondered how to protect the idea-baby and help it grow and mature safely. At that point, I was still deeply embedded in manstream ways of thinking. The comment helped me work through something that, for me, obstructs the sustaining of care in all contexts: money and ownership.
When these posts shifted from a way of freely sharing my doctoral research (June 2022 to July 2023) into a post-doctoral research project, via a personal exploration of my relationship to masculinity (August 2023 – November 2024), I attempted to register ‘m/other tongue’ as a trademark. This was partly to explore how the registered service mark aspect of Theraplay interacts with the operationalisation of tacit maternal knowing. It was also an attempt to create potential income from this work, so it could develop without relying on earnings from employment as a therapist educator or self-employed clinician. It also aimed to affirm legitimacy, to make the work feel more real, more proper, and more socially recognised, and to make writing and research feel like ‘real work’ in the eyes of the manstream.
I found the trademark application process bruising. No one did anything wrong, but there was a mismatch between my desire to speak with a person rather than interact with a system when an issue arose with an organisation that had trademarked “mother tongue”.
The objection to me registering ‘m/other tongue’ was that consumers might be confused. The implication was that the value system being applied prioritised possible loss of income for those already using similar words. Although I offered, I never had a direct conversation or personal written exchange. I stopped the process because I didn’t want the sense of threat from legal letters, nor the risk of costs from a legal battle over something that, in essence, was concept rather than practice. I felt insulted that the legal correspondence came from a trainee trademark examiner!
This project is very important to me – and, I believe, to the world: a project about how we sustain care, and centre the needs of the least powerful other without Othering. It is so BIG to me. But, in the legal and fiscal imperatives of trademark registration, the small issue of a / was something that could be given to a trainee. In my fantasy, it, and I, were so small and of so little importance that it was treated as something a trainee could be given to play with, because it wasn’t a big deal – because I, and my desire to care, were LITTLE.
Looking back, I can now position the experience as an iteration of the heuristic inquiry process. It provided a mat on which I was placed, feeling vulnerable and exposed – an embodied experience which later created space to consider how masters’ tools and masters’ toolboxes might be set aside in favour of the changing bag and its supplies (although that metaphor didn’t surface for many months to come). My conception of this project, at the point of applying for a trademark, was still tangled up in the manstream, and it was another painful reminder that you cannot dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools – whether protecting ideas via trademark, or Val needing to be a cherished child when that was impossible for her parents due to the nature of her conception.
No one to blame. And I do not wish to inhabit, or be placed within, a deficit model of existence. I want to situate myself in a system of abundance. But if the systemic power around us says something different about what we can or should be, or who they see we are, how can we thrive, even when we have our felt-sense-of-safety and our feels-right in our connections to others? What can we do when we recognise that the systems we are operating in can create and sustain violence, that Other, even when there are people within them who care? This is the dilemma Sarfan, Christiana and Val face, where I don’t know is destructive because I am not got.
The partially glimpsed memory that the bridge brings back for Val is a right deed for wrong reason experience. She wanted to matter to someone, but in trying to matter to her teacher through her actions, she destroys something that is precious to her: birthday cards that tangibly remind her that people do care about her. She destroys something that is congruent to her sense of who she is, her ontological safety, feels-rightness, in order to please another whom she perceives as more powerful, and who actually does not want Val in the way Val wants to give of herself. The giving is then judged, not at a somaesthetic level but at an aesthetic level by Val, who knows the project she has produced is no good, not fit for HER purpose.
This is not about people being faulty, it is about systems that do not fit the people within them. It is about powerful systems that expect the less powerful individual to adapt to them, not vice versa. It reminds me of where we started in December 2025, with Val trying to get the car breakdown company to be “real” about her needs, not to fit her into the “lump in the middle” of statistics that shows what works for “most” people. When people have to adapt to systems, the particularity of relationship is lost. But where inner state and system align, the I don’t know, I just don’t know of this important-not-to-get-there-too-quickly struggle to operationalise our m/other tongue in a meaningful way becomes a creative space.
Operationalisation of our m/other tongue is not about what do we do but what gets in the way of us caring and sustaining that care in all contexts, and how to ease away those blockages.
The fiction this month, and the reflection prompted by Alex’s comment, has focused me on money and ownership getting in the way of alignment between action and concept. In powerful systems there is no time for particularity, as time is money, and money leading to profit (excess money) is the sign of success or value. Money will not operationalise our m/other tongue in the manstream version of the word, and can’t be ignored in the m/otherland version, as our m/otherland is in relationship with the manstream.
My deconstructing Adam Phillips-y aspect chips in - what is money?
Money is convenient. It means we don’t have to cart around large quantities of bulky goods for barter. But once the hands-on usefulness of money becomes lost in a concept, it creates the potential for a sense of unfairness. Unfairness and hierarchy are not the raw object of money. The object of money is to make life easier.
What if we did not have discs of metal, or oblongs of plastic, but used leaves, stones, or the beans on your bean plants? I suspect that lived experience would still become conceptual because it is convenient. Beans would be reified because transport is inconvenient: “I promise to pay the bearer on demand one metric tonne of green beans if they have a lorry with them!” The problem is the internal attitude of I have, so I will look down on you who have not, because possession is taken as proof of superiority.
Fear of the loss of abundance, loss of the m/otherland, is the problem. Desire for money as a marker of importance, as a sign of mattering, driven by fear of not mattering, creates hierarchies – the haves and the have-nots, those who exercise power over others to try to keep fear at bay. The idea that it is the fault of the individual that they have not is the problem. It is the failure to see that the system creates injustice, and then blames the victim of that injustice, that is the problem. Money is not the problem per se.
There are differences between people. Some people are better at some tasks than others. But task completion is not who a person is. Val gets the children over the bridge to safety – maybe Graham could not. Sarfan manages the technology of selling burgers – Val cannot use it.
All work has a cost. People invest time and commitment, and they deserve to be paid a salary commensurate with their contribution, because our systems run on money. My struggle is with why one form of commitment at work is treated as more ‘valuable’ in monetary terms than another. Money and power. Equity and cost. Not shutting Mummy away in the house with Baby because they are not productive in a money-making world, but instead making care work a value reference point as the use of money in operationalising our m/other tongue takes root.
Operationalising our m/other tongue is not about rescuing children because, from the place of the toolbox, that is using power over less powerful others and not necessarily giving them what they need. It is not about rescuing anyone at all, but about negotiating and moderating power relationships over time through maternal care that celebrates abundance and enables growth for the less powerful person, while also taking into account the fulfilment of the more powerful person. Acknowledging the value of this work, and sustaining services, has to happen, and not with beans.
I now share power with my firstborn in the editing of these posts. Once, they were dependent on me. Now I value their feedback and their recommendations where there are developmental holes, gaps in the literature, and rubbish sentences. I don’t have to rely on my own sense of power-over someone to assign value to the work I do here when I share power-with another, and am enabled by the other, and enable them in return. At the heart of this is trust. Trust, or creative I don’t know, I just don’t know, becomes possible when people are related to within systems which align with their felt-sense-of-safety that comes from feels-right. Money and pay remain a convenient way to reify the value of that relationship, as long as it comes from the changing bag, not the toolbox.
The balance between service and money, in order to maintain financially sustainable services, is a key issue in operationalising our m/other tongue. Service and care have often been treated as low-paid, low-value roles - as if anyone could do them. I disagree with that. Care requires hearts, hands, and heads to be in relationship in a very specific, and highly demanding, way when working from a changing bag, not a toolbox.
How to operationalise our m/other tongue? Don’t expect answers all in one go, or in a finalised form. We are process people, not product people. We go to the I don’t know, I just don’t know space , and we don’t rush to leave it until the traffic starts to move again.
When stuck, I try not to go to my head. I try not to go to concepts as a primary reference point for knowledge generation. I go to the body, to hands-on experience, or at least I try my best to do that in this open-air, messy, looping-through, convolution of a research project. It is about making sense of how we clamber out of the sticky toolbox and into the changing bag, in order to make wisdom that comes from taking the mother–infant relationship (when it is working in a good enough way) as a primary reference point for knowledge generation.
This is a heuristic inquiry punctuation point – a moment when tacit, more-than-I-can-say knowing, held within this piece of fiction, steps into the world as tacit knowledge. It may need to retreat again for further “feels right” sifting of what is in the changing bag.
There is, however, nothing new under the sun when it comes to people trying to make sense of the human condition. We go round in circles trying to reinvent ourselves in individuality while the world keeps driving us towards interdependence. If only we’d stop giving primacy to concepts and let thinking grow from our hand-to-heart lived experience!
If we insist on holding onto a human-centred worldview, that world may well outstrip our frail bodies (the motorway is closed by rain in the fiction, and this is written during a June heatwave in the UK). Our bodies tell us we are small fry in the ecosphere, within that wider system. If, in fear, we keep trying to make ourselves big through money-making schemes, as if we could assert human power over a mother Earth that is bigger than we could ever be, we will be reminded that we do not matter in that way. However, we do matter exquisitely – on the changing mat, when we can trust mother Earth to care for us with sustainable abundance, when we play in relational space with joy and connection, and when we offer felt-sense-of-safety through experiences that promote attuned feels-rightness.
As T. S. Eliot says in Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
Have I given you enough of a circular walk this month?
Addition for the m/other-us-all
When stuck trying to operationalise our m/other tongue, don’t go to your head. Don’t do concepts. Be messy, loop through, be convoluted, don’t find the answer too quickly, and have no idea. Stay with the troubled, the troubling, and the trouble.
Look out for the wisdom that comes from taking the mother–infant relationship (when it is working in a good enough way) as a primary reference point for knowledge generation. Use any power you have in service of the less powerful to create conditions for ongoing thriving and growth, as that tells us what works. And then do more of that.
Bibliography
Borges, J. L. (2000). The aleph: Including the prose fictions from the Maker (A. Hurley, Trans.). Penguin.
Eliot, T. S. (1990). Collected poems: 1909 - 1962. Faber and Faber.
Jernberg, A. M. (1979). Theraplay: A new treatment using structured play for problem children and their families. Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Peacock, F. (2023). What did I do? I don’t know. Generating fiction to examine the tacit maternal knowing I bring to my Theraplay® practice with children who are experiencing relational and developmental trauma. (Doctoral thesis) [Doctor of Education, University of Cambridge]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80181
Phillips, A. (2013). Missing out: In praise of the unlived life. Penguin Books.
Winnicott, D. W. (1975). The child, the family, and the outside world. Penguin Books.
One thing I sit with is the question of where power actually lies in relation to this project.
Much of the critique is directed towards “the manstream” and the structures of institutional and systemic power. Yet it is clear that you have achieved significant academic and professional success within mainstream systems and institutions. That raises a question of epistemic positioning: what does it mean to critique institutional authority from a position that has been formed and amplified within that authority?
The primary audience of this blog includes students, trainees and practitioners working in therapeutic professions, many of whom occupy comparatively less powerful positions within those systems than yourself. I wonder whether this project sometimes asks more of its readers than it does of its own position. It can feel easier and safer to renounce “manstream” power, money and "the master's toolkit" after building a successful career within those structures than whilst still trying to establish and organise oneself within them.
I find myself increasingly wondering whether the project’s critiques of the “manstream” are being taken into the spaces where the most power is actually held: those in charge of social care bodies, professional institutions, education systems, universities and other structures where decisions that impact our children, families and practitioners are being made. If so, I would be interested to hear more about that work.