The call of the kites: Sitting with anguish. Supported by others.
“Can you tell me anything about what is going on at the moment?” she asked.
Val just sat with her eyes on a spot on the floor. For a moment, Brenda wondered if she had actually heard what she’d said. Then it was as if the words were dragged out of her.
“I just don’t know.”
Brenda remembered Edward saying, “Making it.” The action being the mechanism that showed what was there, that provided knowledge of what the material was becoming.
She found herself thinking, if this was Theraplay, what would we need now? Movement, embodiment, play. We need to engage so there is something, anything to connect to. We need to make something. Without some sort of playful engagement with Val, she could feel anger starting to stir within herself, anger at herself for her stupid question and anger at Val. Val seemed so vulnerable. Brenda took a sharp intake of breath. Val was vulnerable and she, Brenda, felt angry with her. That was not what she wanted to feel – but she was.
What a mess. What a muddle. She wanted to bail out. She wanted to return to the soothing serenity of the craft shop with her husband making glorious, solid, beautiful chairs.
So, what did they need to make?
They sat in disconnected silence. Going nowhere, doing nothing. Brenda felt there was nothing she could do but sit with it. She felt as though her whole being was forced up into her head, and it took a focused stream of thought to move her attention back to her whole body.
There was only one thing for it, she had, herself, to find some way to play. The red kites came back to her mind: destruction, misunderstanding, near death, return to life, thriving.
“Anguish,” she heard herself say.
“Sorry?”
“It’s what the kites seem to say to me. When I walk and hear them. The red kites, the birds.” She added, seeing the puzzlement on Val’s face, “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”
A Necessary Life(Story), page 40-1.
Dear all,
Last month, I wrote about apprenticeship as a model of learning that involves forming an identity while growing into skilful practice through engaging in repetitive tasks. Alongside this legitimate peripheral participation, as Lave and Wenger called it, such crafts-people create the community of practice. In that place there can be both robust challenge, to ensure quality of practice, and ongoing, explorative, creative growth. Thank you, Sarah L, for your response to last month's post. Others, please feel free to add any thoughts and comments that emerge as you read these posts. This space can then also become part of our community of practice, where we can rigorously challenge and explore the ideas I am unpicking and playing with. I hope that what I write may provoke debate about what all this means as we use ourselves, through our professional practice of Theraplay (or other therapeutic modalities), in the service of the children and families we see.
This month, I want to reflect on our community of practice and the role it may play in enabling us to 'be Theraplay' with the children and families we are working with. How do our creative, professional relationships, characterised by tacit maternal knowing, help us as practitioners stay with the distress of our clients without 'othering' them? It is for this reason that I struggle with terms like ‘client’ because they emphasise a power difference between us as practitioners and the people who have come to us with the hope that we might help them with their suffering. How do we live out the reality of holding power-with someone who has come to us in a state of vulnerability? How do we stay alert to the risk that we may buffer ourselves against the raw pain such people bring through professional distancing or, as Brenda struggles with, by our reaction to the vulnerability of the other? Without that alertness, we could inadvertently fall into a place of taking power-over the person before us. This opens the risk of ‘othering’ them.
Last month I wrote about how tacit knowing is embodied and introduced the three components of tacit maternal knowing that I explored in my doctoral thesis:
Dependence/interdependence
Not knowing/letting go
Faithfulness
While these are all intertwined, meaning it is impossible to have one without the others, in this post I will focus on not knowing.
One of the more bizarre aspects of the fiction writing process was how strange, unknown knowing emerged. Through the mundane, repetitive task of daily writing, I committed to a framework of practice. It was this apprentice-like legitimate peripheral participation of being a writer that created the space within which tacit knowing could emerge. In many ways, I was having to let myself know nothing, not defend against my lostness in the research process, in order to explore. I had to trust the writing process, let go of any sense of having power-over it, and accept that what came out was relevant and important, even if I didn’t really know why. One of these things was the recurring appearance of the kites.
So what do red kites that cry ‘anguish’ have to do with being a Theraplay practitioner? Like Val, I didn’t have a clue. However, through the process of writing the doctorate, I started to understand, and in writing this post, I have come to realise in more ways and to different depths why Brenda got caught in researching red kites, rather than spending some ‘useful’ time reading white western male philosophers to help guide Val out of her state of lostness.
Brenda processes Val’s lostness in a non-conscious way, using her tacit maternal knowing to try to grasp where Val is stuck. Seduced by the predominance of thinkers in professional practice, she initially wonders if philosophers can help her. For Brenda, Martin Buber and his exploration of I-thou and I-it relationships certainly explained how Val works. However, he didn’t give her something that could actually help Val return from the lostness and to be able to work with the material the children were bringing in Theraplay. At some level, Brenda knows that it is in being drawn to the embodied action in Edward's chair-making, rather than to a cognitive place, she will find a way to help Val. To the making of a Shaker-type chair; a plain, timeless spirituality.
While writing this blog post, I looked up the Shakers because I realised I didn’t know anything about them apart from their name being connected to simple, practical, aesthetic furniture.
Ann Lee, one of the Shaker founders, was a working class woman born to a family of blacksmiths in the latter part of the 1700s. She worked in Manchester’s textile mills and was married to another blacksmith. She lost four children in pregnancy and childbirth. Coming from a family where she was one of eight, I wonder what that was like for her?
She was part of a group within the Quaker movement known as the Shaking Quakers because of the spontaneous dance that was part of their meeting for worship. As a female leader of a movement that fell outside the established order, she, and the Shakers, became a target for keepers of the status quo: she had spells in prison and possibly also mental institutions. Following a period of illness and imprisonment, she experienced a divine revelation, prompting her and a group of fellow Shakers to emigrate to America in 1774. In the US, the Shaker community developed into one where men and women lived separately. Members were celibate, and thus children were not conceived and born into the community. Instead, all children were adopted. At the age of 21, these children were given the opportunity to decide whether to remain within the community.
Wondering about the person behind the narrative makes it sound like mothering was an important part of Ann’s identity, through the process of carrying, bearing, and losing her biological children, and the raising of other children to adulthood. I am so struck that without knowing, this story speaks to me of loss and pain, and how that loss and pain is managed through separation. Separation from the mother-land of England. Separation of women from men. Separation of the idealised community of Shakers from the other communities close to where they settled. And somehow, within that separation, there is a lived experience of children being cared for and given choices about where they wished to belong.
Had I, at some level, absorbed this knowledge, with it sinking into my non-consciousness to re-emerge in the fiction? Or could the aesthetic of Shaker furniture, the form of the craft, somehow have conveyed to me the simple, pared back complexity of practical beauty grown from suffering? Does the shape and form convey at a feeling-level a sense of held-togetherness, of carrying on living and loving in the face of anguish, separation, and loss? A necessary getting-on-with-life story? Of course, I am projecting an aspect of my own inner story onto that of another. But that is what artistic craft does. It gives us a mirror to see and make sense of a narrative that both challenges and drives us in our understanding of who we are, and how that impacts what we do. Simple, practical, aesthetic.
So why do the kites call ‘anguish’? And what does this mean when I am grappling with what I do, and who I am, in my practice of Theraplay with children experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma? What more do I need to see in the mirror of the fiction to pull these bits of tacit maternal knowing together to emerge as explicit knowledge and/or skilled practice?
I looked up the reasons why kites call: to look for a mate, to let others know about their presence, and when young, to seek feeding. They call when connection is not there, but is desired, and when they believe it is possible. As Brenda recalls, when kites are first (re-)introduced to an area, there is silence – there aren’t enough kites in the community to make it worth expressing their desire to connect. It made me think that trauma, being misunderstood and alone, is silent. It is when you can cry that there is hope of connection. It made me think that as practitioners using our tacit maternal knowing in the service of our clients, if we don’t know that there are others out there doing the same, then we remain silent about it and end up holding the trauma of the people we work with, without support and at the risk of exhaustion.
The kites’ cry, to Brenda, sounded like ‘anguish’: the separation is so painful.
Val is inflamed by the suffering of Milo. She feels alone because of that. She is lost and just doesn’t know how to reconnect with Brenda who has been, for so long, her connection, her rigorous and robust challenger of her embodied, non-conscious practice, the person who takes the role of master to the apprentice in our model of learning. Val has lost her way. She feels she does not know. She has lost her identity as a compassionate and competent practitioner for Milo in the face of outside pressure from the social care system to know and get ‘it’ sorted in terms of symptom relief and behavioural change. Milo does sleep better, he does wet the bed less, he is more compliant, but it is all a bit joyless (A Necessary Life(Story), p.42). Val has lost her craftsperson-like embodiment in practice and become overly functional.
But Val does know.
She is doing what tacit maternal knowing says to do. To sit by the baby and enter the pain of the injured child, willing the child with her love to stay alive, and by staying alive to keep open the hope of change and growth. Unsupported in this by the wider community, she feels wrong and brings her distress to Brenda through the disconnect between going through the motions of supervision and the deep suffering held within her body. The transformation for both Val and Brenda comes when they can sit together with the not knowing held by maternal connection.
It does feel wrong in our masculine-dominant culture to bring this maternal nous – this ‘just knowing’ what to do because you’ve seen it done or done it before – to the work. This hope, faith, and love. Val feels she is ‘wrong’ in the eyes of the culture – she has no husband, no children – just a cat – and is simply bog-standard (A Necessary Life(Story), p.74). She feels nothing in a world that says maternal skills are not professional skills.
Val is putting the needs of the other first – not in a masochistic way, but through choice – so that she can respond to the children. Unfashionable, unfathomable, and certainly not financially rewarded. To some extent, it’s an unchosen skill. She is the crone, a wise woman who uses her mothering and healing in places other than with a child she has physically birthed. She is a mother, just as many people who have not given birth mother others, whatever their gender, sexual orientation, or personal stories of parenthood.
Val mothers the injured, and their sharp and cutting hurts wound her. How does Brenda help her heal? By staying there and inviting, making space, for the distressing not knowing. This is not nice work. This is not happy work. It is honest work that is for children who have experienced the dishonesty of an adult world that starts to blame them for the smart way in which they have learned to survive what other adults have heaped on them. I will come back to this next month, when I will explore more how the fiction helped me empathise with the lived experience of relational and developmental trauma and how that shifted my understanding of the meaning and value of the trauma response.
If this maternal form of work is only theorised through the traditional lens of wo-men being determined as different and subordinate to men, as de Beauvoir would suggest, 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 lenses of knowledge, our maternal work can neither be appropriately challenged nor have creative space to develop. By sharing my research in these blog posts, our growing community of practice can theorise, as well as practice, tacit maternal knowing in our Theraplay work.
See you next month,
Fiona Peacock
Next month
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.
Bibliography
Andrews, E. D. (1963). The people called the Shakers: A search for the perfect society. Dover.
Beauvoir, S. de, Borde, C., Malovany-Chevallier, S., Reid, M. & Haynes, N. (2015). Extracts from the second sex. Vintage.
Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.