Challenge: fear and growth
Contents
Chapter 1 (cont.)
Joining the maternal resistance: fear and growth
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
This month’s fiction brings us to the end of the first hour of Val’s ‘captivity’, as she and Graham wait at the service station for the breakdown service to arrive and change her flat tyre.
For me, it marks the first point of crisis in this phase of ‘postdoctoral research’, as I grapple with how tacit maternal knowing might become a meaningful, useful theory. A theory that could help me, and hopefully others, sustain the professional action of care that I want to hold in the world by being a therapist, a therapist educator, a researcher, and a manager of organisations that care.
I firmly believe that reorganising the way we think about caring for the other - through the lens of motherhood, theorised for all - could help the world become a more unified place. It might offer a more sustainable way to address the physical harm people continue to inflict on one another. It’s a lofty ideal, and part of my crisis lies in the question: who am I to offer anything in the face of such overwhelming awfulness? So I am realising that these posts, and this postdoctoral research I am grappling with, is more about how to lead change than how to do therapy or be a therapist.
Then I read this from Adrienne Rich, a feminist I confess I have not read to date:
“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”
― Adrienne Rich (1994)
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich (1995)
Whoever I am, I want to continue. Here’s to grappling with the hard work of how to lead with care.
14:45: Falling deeply
Val glanced at her watch again. 14:45.
These spaces between had always been trying for her - times when she might fall deeply into something and not know what it was or how she’d got there. Maybe that was something of the sympoiesis that Graham was grappling with from his scientific background - things fitting, but no one seeing the fitting until it was too late.
To her, it was a familiar sense of impending doom, as if she’d been enjoying the exhilaration of the roller coaster, and then the drop came - too steep to cope with, leaving her stomach falling away and her head full of terror. No escape.
“I’m just going to stretch my legs,” she heard herself say to Graham as she scrambled awkwardly out from the bench behind the table, inelegantly slithering and stumbling until she was free. Maybe a breath of fresh air would dispel the feeling, offer her some illusion of escape.
When this had happened as a child, she’d tried to tell her father. She had thought her father might be the best one to tell, as he always appeared calm. She saw him as a thinker. Her mother had felt like an ice-cold weight, but at the same time she could see that frozenness was a terror, such a terror that neither she nor her mother could openly acknowledge its existence. So she thought telling her father might help. He had appeared to listen.
“The world just doesn’t seem real. Nothing sounds right. As if something horrible has happened and I don’t know what it is yet.” She had been so earnest, so intense in her fear.
She had been dreadfully scared. Dreadfully, dreadfully scared, her adult self intoned now.
Her father had washed her ears out and said, “That’s better now, isn’t it?” in a tone that made it clear she must not say otherwise.
She stepped outside the service station and felt a sudden change. She didn’t know if that had been a memory. Surely six-year-old-her wouldn't have spoken like that?
The noise, light, and rumble of life remained just on the other side of the worn grey building, which showed its age and wear. That rumble too felt oddly unreal. There, but barely. She breathed deeply – the cooler air grounding her. That air seemed still. Even the leaves weren’t rustling, as if the wind had stopped along with her need to stop. The drone of traffic continued, well away from her and not asking anything of her.
Her phone beeped with a new message. She scrabbled in her bag, not looking – wanting to keep her eyes fixed on whatever patch of nature or reality she could. When her fingers found the familiar shape and weight of the phone, she pulled it out and held it at arm’s length, trying to read the message without also rummaging for her glasses.
It was the breakdown company, informing her that they were aware of her plight and that she was still in the queue. They sent a link to click on to affirm the quality of their service and communication.
Val hit the delete button, angrily.
Joining the maternal resistance: fear and growth
Thank you for your comments - please keep them coming. Laura says I should be brave, write from my heart, and tell you all what I think (not the exact words, but that’s how I’ve read them).
Part of what makes it difficult to theorise and share how our m/other tongue might make a positive difference is my fear that the ‘world’ finds such thinking naive, unrealistic, or just plain stupid. At this stage of the project, I feel burdened by that sense of foolishness. Your perspectives help me step outside my own internal space, aligning with the Heuristic Inquiry phase of external validation – or at least a form of ‘testing out’ the validity of my tacit knowledge. This supports the foundational question in Heuristic Inquiry: “This is what it is like for me. Is it like that for you too?” (Peacock, 2023).
Ann Jernberg (1979, p.4) wrote that “the best way to understand the principles underlying Theraplay is to rediscover the basics of the mother-infant relationship”. I've been reflecting on how early mothering typically happens in private, allowing mother and infant to enter what Winnicott called the primary maternal preoccupation (see Davis and Wallbridge, 2014, for a helpful introduction). If Theraplay is my reference point for theory generation, should this messy, intuitive part of the process also take place in private? Yet, if I don’t share it, how can others engage with it – critique it, test it, and help refine it?
Laura said the characters don’t seem real. I find it fascinating that, in the fiction I’ve shared this month, I write about Val growing up feeling unreal. If I were to evaluate this fiction as research using the criteria offered by Leavy (2013) and Tracy (2010), I’d have to ask whether it can be considered quality qualitative research if it doesn’t achieve verisimilitude. But does that matter?Or is this very entanglement – this push and pull over what counts as 'real' – part of how notions of realness are derailed by systems that define what is legitimate knowledge and what can be dismissed?
This is the same tightrope we walk in the therapy room. However a child communicates their truth, our role is to translate it – to hear it as real, no matter how it arrives. Lamott (2020) believes that “writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up”. For me, that’s where fiction sits within my Heuristic process. Not as a cosy maternal fantasy, but more often as the terror of discovery – a visceral rollercoaster drop, like the one Val experiences in the story.
Roller coaster drops are frightening – but if you can find the strength to keep your eyes open, they can reveal new vistas. Right now, I’m not sure what vista is opening. I just know that I’m on an edge, sitting with both fear and anger. Fear holds me back. Anger at how I see children suffering across the globe drives me on.
The focus of these blogs is how to operationalise our m/other tongue. So perhaps these moments of disjuncture – those roller coaster drops – are important explorations. We are navigating a world that is not currently set up to see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the intense impact of maternal leadership. Nor to recognise how the relational imperative asks each of us to take responsibility for our own thinking, doing, and feeling - according to our own ability and developmental appropriateness.
Val is so determined to be nice. I wonder if her roller coaster drop is about the need to be forceful in the world – to be not nice. But doesn’t that run counter to the core of tacit maternal knowing - to attune to the other? I’ve not yet explored the shadow side of maternal functioning, but there must be costs to using one’s power in the service of the other – to choosing not to join the manstream and prioritise self over others.
As I reflect on the fiction and what it means to me, I find myself stuck at Erikson’s (1995) developmental phase of autonomy versus shame. I’m not entirely sure whether I’m thinking about myself or about the process of theory development, but theory always has to come from someone, so that may be a false distinction. Maybe my tacit knowing is telling me that I need to explore the operationalisation of our m/other tongue through that autonomy versus shame lens.
My whole life has been about not rocking the boat – about suppressing autonomy under the weight of shame. I’ve felt unable to move forward into the phase of initiative versus guilt, because shame keeps shutting me down. If only I could bring the presentation of my theory of living by our m/other tongue into that next developmental stage – initiative versus guilt.
The guilt lies in knowing that this work will disturb the status quo. It will shake up norms, challenge expectations, and potentially disrupt livelihoods. Living by our m/other tongue, as professionals in our professional realms, means confronting the deeply embedded belief that care is cheap – that you’ll do it for nothing, and keep doing it simply because you care.
This brings me back to something I’ve reflected on before: what would I do if I had faith, but no fear? There comes a point when the good mother – at the autonomy versus shame stage – must say, no, enough is enough, that is not okay. It’s something mothers say to toddlers as they begin to explore the world. Now, speaking my m/other tongue, I want to find a way to say that professionally.
Professionally, I want to find a way to say: this is not okay. What has happened with the Adoption Support Fund in the UK is not okay. What is happening in education – the way our children are tormented by relentless academic pressure – is not okay. Children waiting months, even years, for CAMHS input, only to receive support that doesn’t meet their needs, instead conforming to what is deemed ‘right’ by a white, Western, male standard – that is not okay.
I want to rage about this. But I want that rage to be heard – not dismissed as madness, not sneered at or diminished.
Autonomy, as a developmental stage in toddlerhood, involves experimenting without experience. Toddlers get themselves into sticky situations, moments of real or perceived risk to themselves, as they explore. In ordinary development, the role of the mother at this stage is to say no and, when necessary, step in quickly. This moment of intervention ruptures the ‘lovely’ sense of connection and often leads the toddler to experience the affect of shame – that deep ontological distress of “I am shameful”.
The good enough maternal figure then repairs the rupture, enabling the toddler to have a felt sense that they are not shameful but that their action was unsafe in some way (Cairns, 2004). Erikson (1995) argues that this stage of development needs to be worked through sufficiently before the stage of initiative versus guilt can be fully engaged with.
So I wonder: in this moment, am I slipping into the manstream’s habitual tendency to dismiss maternal wisdom as of less value because it is ‘immature’? Or can I hold space for valuing the wisdom and raw energy that come from encountering the world as if for the first time?
Tacit maternal knowing has been forged in the background, in places of privacy – both because that is where a mother meets the needs of her infant, and because such knowing has long been marginalised by the manstream. Emerging from that private space into the ‘real world’ of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is painful. It is exposing. It is daring to sit on the roller coaster drop and try to keep my eyes open.
It is me saying to you: okay, my fiction might seem rough around the edges, but that’s not the point. I’m trying to take you beneath the surface, showing you how to go deeper and deeper – not just sharing what I find when I go deep myself.
I don’t really know how this is going, because I’ve chosen to do this research ‘in the open air’ - right here, in front of all of you who choose to read these blogs. It’s hard for both of us - me, the writer, and you, the reader - to engage in this open-air research because you don’t get the polished product.
I am exposing my messy process of deeply falling without it being what Winnicott would call falling into nothingness. I want to be autonomous and manage the fear. What holds me back on roller coasters isn’t the actual danger, but the inner danger of the embodied response to fear - that I won’t be able to contain the feeling, that it will be too much, for too long, with no one there to help me. I carry a helplessness tied to the unresolved autonomy versus shame stage - another way those who wield power over others (rather than in service of them) maintain the status quo.
Am I doing too much? Trying to save the world through my writing? And if I can’t save the world, should I just put a sock in it and stop pestering your inboxes every month?
Where is all that violent self-criticism coming from? How am I keeping myself in my place, doing the manstream’s dirty work for them? In my doctoral research, I call this the subtle process of victim blaming (Peacock, 2023).
One of the questions you set me to explore was: how do we care for the ‘bad’ mother? The baddest mother in my inner world is myself. When I face that roller coaster drop of doubt, it is destructive. I freeze in terror. I fear that the very care I want to offer won’t be affirming, but disabling and destructive. I fear being labelled not as I see myself - a person who cares - but as someone who damages and destroys.
This is the falling into nothingness. I risk abandoning my theory-baby just as it begins to emerge into the real world and perhaps starts to find its way—to be real, and to make a difference for those who want to live their professional lives by rediscovering the basics of infant–mother care.
I find myself caught in a double bind as I try to let this theory grow under the shadow of the manstream: I must care, but I must not show that I care - or I must appear to care, when actually there is no time and money to really care. I think this is the doom that Val senses: the impossibility of pleasing the powerful while staying honest about what it means to be a carer. To care with integrity often means stepping away from the power games that underpin a world driven by neoliberal capitalist imperatives.
Mis-care and the imposition of inappropriate care can lead to abuse - a strong word, especially when the intention is to do good. Yet this is often the outcome when intentions are guided by attunement to the messages of the powerful rather than the needs of the vulnerable.
At this stage of the research, I find that the words of others help. They offer direction and affirmation - reminders that I am not mad. That there is something important in what I’m wittering on about.
Jeanette Winterson (2022, p.310-311) writes:
It's not a stretch to say that every problem in the world is facing it us now our wars, hatred, divisions, nationalism, persecution, separation scarcity, lack and suicidal self-destruction of the planet could be mended by love.
We have the technology, we have the science, we have the knowledge, we have the tools, we have the universities of the institutions, the structures and the money.
Where is the love?
Love is so far from an anti-intellectual response. Love demands every resource we can muster our creativity, our imagination, our compassion as well as our smart shiny thinking self.
Love is a totality.
No one at the end of life regrets love.
I know, in my head, that all I can do is first take care of myself, and then those I care about. But I care for so many people. This too is falling deeply. Can I fall deeply in love?
As I sit on this roller coaster drop, I feel immense doubt. Is this going to be an ending or a beginning? Will I find life or death? Mothering is about survival - for both parents and infant (Hrdy, 2000); they all have skin in the game. Will using our m/other tongue be a dud of a theory, or will it transform the practice of people in meaningful ways?
I return to the three insights from my research: to use our m/other tongue, we must be able to tolerate not knowing and letting go; we have to manage the uncomfortable uncertain experiences of dependence and interdependence (not be fixated on independence); and to balance out that heaviness, there is faithfulness, a daily commitment that goes beyond altruism or capital gain or feeling good about oneself or using power.Faithfulness leads us into the realm of something greater than our attempts to control the world. We are sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) - a dance of poetic intertwinedness that is beyond comprehension in our human sphere, and which is not just limited by individuality and capitalism, but is abusive under those limits.
I have to jump into the abyss to keep trying to untangle useful theory from the messiness of the process. I’m teetering on the edge between seeing that messiness as shameful and apologising for burdening you with ‘my’ theories, or moving forward into the next developmental stage - initiative versus guilt.
I’ll give it a go. And if I get things wrong, I’ll apologise - but I will try not to be destroyed internally by the simple fact of getting something wrong.
I truly value your comments because this is about us, not just about me - or at least, that is what I hope.
And in our pursuit of a better world, as leaders of change, we may need to put our bodies on the line - not as soldiers, but as creative resistors, as mothers who gestate, birth, and nurse new ways of being professionals. We might have to risk shame. We will encounter guilt when we/I get it wrong. And we have to go through that in order to move this m/other tongue theory from shame versus autonomy, through initiative versus guilt, and onwards to Erikson’s next stage: industry versus inferiority.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
What does this mean for the handbook of how to be a person who uses our m/other tongue in professional practice?
Accept fear and not knowing are a sign of getting the process right. Shame comes from someone else making you feel small. Guilt is good, it helps us consider if there is something different we could do that might make things better. Guilt helps with taking the initiative.
Bibliography
Cairns, K. (2004). Attachment, trauma and resilience: Therapeutic caring for children. BAAF.
Davis, M., & Wallbridge, D. (2014). Boundary And Space: An Introduction To The Work of D.W. Winnincott. Taylor and Francis.
Erikson, E. H. (1995). Childhood and society. Vintage.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Hrdy, S. B. (2000). Mother nature. Vintage.
Jernberg, A. M. (1979). Theraplay: A new treatment using structured play for problem children and their families. Jossey-Bass.
Lamott, A. (2020). Bird by Bird. Canongate Canons.
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