Engaging: mini-moments of meeting
Contents
Chapter 1 (cont.)
Being seen as we would like to be seen - and the pain of being miss-seen
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
The comments on last month’s post have been preoccupying me a great deal - as they should. What I do here is generate theory through the research method of Heuristic Inquiry. I’ve always hoped this would generate enough discomfort - Challenge as we might call it in Theraplay - to stimulate discussion and extend our practice. Part of why I want to keep writing these posts about my post-doctoral research is that I don’t find writing about Theraplay challenging enough to expand my Theraplaying.
If I keep framing my thinking within Theraplay’s four dimensions. Theory and its underlying philosophy represent our Structure, and Structure helps us consider safe practice. But practicing safely doesn’t have to mean avoiding discomfort. It means being willing to engage with Challenge, to stay open to growth and remain thoughtful about what we are doing, and why we are doing it.
The comments reminded me how important it is to keep restating the purpose behind these posts - the what I am doing and why I am doing it.
In my mind, these posts are part of a continuous journey. I’ve grown and changed since I started this blog, and so has the theory that I have been generating. It has evolved from its beginnings (July 2022 to July 2023) when I simply set out to share my doctoral thesis.
What really struck me was how last month’s comments went straight to the heart of what I am trying to make sense of in this post-doctoral research: how do we take theory and actually live it, especially in a world that often values things very differently from the way I (you, we) do, and that puts a financial figure to that value? How do we trust our own integrity, find an ontological security, develop a secure base, fall in love (pick the term/theory/philosophical stance that works for you), and make caring the centre of our world through the operationalisation of tacit maternal knowing (our m/other tongue)? How can we use money ethically to support those we care for rather than repress them?
These reflections have led me to draft a new set of research questions. I hope they are now clearer and more focused:
How am I putting our m/other tongue into practice as a Theraplayer?
How am I organising myself to be someone who cares for others – particularly within organisational structures that may not prioritise caring for, but do present as caring about others?
How can I share this exploration in a way that encourages others to engage with these questions to discover their own way of being a Theraplayer?
These questions are, of course, a work in progress that grow from the research foci you wanted me to explore. They’ll be revisited and refined as the project unfolds. I’ve tried to frame them via the Theraplay core concepts, particularly direct here and now experience, and being responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective.
And yes, I’m still summoning my courage to share the NaNoWriMo fiction as it emerged in November 2024. This is the first time I’ve not managed to get the post in a sharable state by the first of the month, so I’m sorry this is a few days late. As I am no longer making conscious choices and ‘cherry-picking’ what to share, I am forced to trust the tacit knowing that drove the fiction production. That does make it more ‘raw’ in trying to make sense of it.
In this excerpt from the fiction, Val has just had that encounter with the call centre, and now she and Graham are stuck at the service station, unable to leave while they wait for help. The next sections follow the ‘non-action’ that happens while people are waiting in a transitional space. The titles include the time of the ‘non-action’.
14:00: People-watching
Graham looked at his watch. Val saw his head dip as she walked to the table where he was sitting. She filled him in on the headlines of her conversation with the helpline, unclear how to convey the shuddering sense that she’d done something wrong, unable to shake it, even in the pleasure of being with Graham.
“Two o’clock,” he said, looking at his watch again, working out how long it would be by imagining hands going round on the digital face. “Three hours. That’ll be two to three, to four, then five. Mmm.”
He slid a cup of tea across the table towards Val.
“Let’s see how it goes. We could either go home for the night and try again tomorrow, or press on.”
Val nodded. She prised the plastic lid off the cardboard cup and a surge of steam met her face. She recoiled slightly, then felt the moisture cool on her skin. The tea was black, the tea bag tethered to the side of the container via a carefully engineered slit. She needed milk. The tab of the little plastic milk pot evaded her fingertips. It took effort to get a fingernail underneath and peel back the film lid before she could tip the milk into the cup.
One, two, three dunks of the tea bag on its string. Another pot of milk? Perhaps. Perhaps focusing on the present moment, occupying herself with action, would shift the sense of doom she’d carried from the encounter with the call centre.
One milk pot wasn’t enough, but two? Maybe that would be too much? To be caught between was, was…she looked up at Graham. To be caught between was a fact of life. Unpleasant. Caught between her private world, where she liked and was liked, and the real world, where she was a nothing and felt like a nothing.
She peeled back the film of the second pot and poured just part of it into her cup. She didn’t have to be channelled by other people’s decisions about what was right, or perfect, or proper. She didn’t want to be channelled.
“Looks like we’re in for a bit of people-watching, then!” she said firmly, straightening her back.
Graham lifted his cup in response, not taking a sip, but placing it down again, letting heat escape with the steam. He sat back in his chair and looked around. People-watching might be the only thing they could do for the next three hours. He wasn’t averse to it - it just wasn’t his thing the way it was for Val. He was, after all, a vet, not a therapist. His curiosity was drawn to the spaniel under the next table, its head resting on its owner’s knee, occasionally rewarded with a treat for its quiet patience. The dog was clearly in a state of bliss to be so close to the leader of its pack.
Val leaned back and took in the people around her. Being Halloween, there were the odd spooks and pumpkins. Plenty of grandparents, she guessed, spending time with grandchildren at the end of half-term, enjoying them or relieving parents of childcare duties - or both.
A little boy, three maybe, rushed towards his mummy, holding a magazine.
“What have you got?!” She exclaimed in an excited voice. He held up the magazine to her, and she looked at it with delight. “Thomas!” she cried at the blue smiling face beaming off the cover page. “How wonderful. We can read it together.”
His daddy chimed in, “And what have you got for Mummy and Nana?”
The little boy turned back and took something from his daddy. Val couldn’t see what, but noted the pleasure amongst them as he handed something to Nana. She registered it as a shuddering pleasure down her own spine and across her shoulders.
As he passed the object to his Nana, the little boy’s demeanour changed. The enthusiastic exuberance at showing the magazine changed to a solemn dignity and shy respect as he handed something to her with hope in his eyes. Hoping that it delighted her, because he couldn’t quite understand the delight himself. Inside, he believed she’d surely have preferred a Thomas magazine too!
Val couldn’t see what they had chosen for Nana, but she imagined a candle, or some nice soap, or an ornament - something that for the little boy was beyond comprehension as pleasure. He’d had to trust his father's guidance that his beloved Nana would be filled with delight, but he just wasn’t sure himself.
Val took a deep breath and let it out in a rush. She was going off into storytelling. It had been a useful skill in her clinical practice - a way to access the stuff that neither she nor the family could put into words yet. Internal story making had been a gentle way to generate possibilities beyond the painful stuckness of the reason a family had come to her. Stories made possibilities available to play with in the space together.
But here, two o’clock in a service station on Halloween, there was no consent to join another family’s play. She was on the outside. Daddy picked up the little boy and the whole group headed to a table. Nana settled in with him while Mummy and Daddy went to order food for them all.
She still watched from her distance. She couldn’t hear, but she imagined: One, two, three, four, five, softly sung. She recognised the hand actions. Once I caught a fish alive.
She moved her attention on. She’d learnt the hard way that her joy in seeing families in tune could be misread. Her look might feel like a stare - intrusive, weird, stalky. She felt a sadness at being unable to share her delight in the fabulous mothering she was seeing. She wished she could go up and say, you are amazing. You are giving your grandchild such a good start in life. All families, surely, would prefer her delight in seeing their relationship to a world of being not seen! But that kind of thinking left her feeling about three year old.
As she withdrew her gaze and drifted inward, she thought about mothering in its many forms. These days, she didn’t quite know where she stood with Joe’s two children. When she went round to Joe’s flat, Sammy would throw himself at her with wild excitement—“Aunty Val! Aunty Val!” Hard to believe he was now at school, thriving on the learning challenge and the social interaction.
Niks had remained a little more subdued since the experience with social care - more reserved, less trusting. Val always wanted to respect Niks’ space. She may still be a child, but she had been far more aware of the jeopardy her family had faced than Sammy. She’d lost her mother with everything that that meant, so much more than one person disappearing. No wonder sadness lingered for Niks. But honorary Aunty, Val smiled without losing touch with the sadness. Honorary Aunty - she did like that. And she was so proud of Joe.
Joe had approached her with a business plan a few weeks after Sammy started school. It was verbal, but clearly thought out. She scribed it for him. He went to banks, and they all turned him down. Grace helped him find other places to go to. Despite the setbacks, he kept going. In the end, Val lent him money to put into a credit union savings account so he could look to getting a loan from them in the future. She also paid for him to take his driving test.
“What about lessons?” she’d asked.
“Val,” he replied, half serious, half with a twinkle in his eye, “there are some things I’ve done I don’t want to remember—and some things I don’t want you to know about!”
Graham took him for some practice drives and reported back that he was highly competent. He really was. He passed both his written and practical tests first time, coached by the adult education centre. They made sure his reading was up to passing the online highway code test and wrote to support him for additional time due to the level of his dyslexia.
He was proud as punch when the loan came through and he bought his van. Second-hand, but tidy and with a carefully painted sign: JNS Painters and Decorators. A family business.
Work came slowly. He’d had one or two small jobs, mostly for older people who then couldn’t work out how to leave their nice reviews on his social media pages. So Val asked him to go to Bournemouth to decorate Tannery Road for her.
She’d been taking advice, working out the best way to set the house up so it could be used as a holiday home for those who wouldn’t get a holiday otherwise. It had been more complicated than she wanted and she’d had to compromise, making it available for only six weeks per year for those who would pay just a token amount, and letting it at commercial rates at other times to cover all the costs that had come with inheriting a house from people she was, legally speaking, unconnected to. It had been an almighty tangle, exhausting her as she had to deal with yet another aspect of a world that made her so uncomfortable. If money wasn’t so necessary and so useful, and if it didn’t make life more comfortable, then she’d hate it.
She sipped her tea. It was cooling fast. Graham had taken out his tablet and was immersed. She felt momentarily lonely.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
She loved what happened next. Sometimes things caught her by surprise and brought home to her that they were connected. She had a partner!
They were on one of the tables that had a horseshoe shaped bench surrounding it. They just automatically slid towards each other without saying a word, Graham showing her the book he’d downloaded, letting himself be excited. She wasn’t sure if it was excitement about the book, or sharing it with her, or both. Whatever. She caught the excitement and enjoyed feeling close to him.
“It’s called Staying with the trouble by Donna Haraway. She’s a feminist, and she talks about this thing, sympoesis - making things together, humans, the planet, creatures. I’m not sure I get it all, but look…”
He put the tablet on the table for her to see part he had highlighted.
But what happens when a partner involved critically in the life of another disappears from the earth? What happens when holobionts break apart? What happens when entire holobiomes crumble into the rubble of broken symbionts? This kind of question has to be asked in the urgencies of the Anthropocene if we are to nurture arts for living on a damaged planet.
“What does it mean?” Val asked, clueless about what holobiomes or holobionts might be. Although it did make her think of Niks world falling apart when Shell disappeared.
“To be honest,” Graham said, scratching his balding head, “I’m not sure. She uses words I don’t know. But it feels important. Something about us all being entwined - and art reminding us how much that matters.”
He finished with the funny cough that she’d learned meant he was a bit embarrassed that he’d got carried away by an enthusiasm and wasn’t quite ready yet to put it into words.
“She talks about bee orchids - how they look like the female bee’s sex organs, and how it’s like the orchid is telling the story of the extinct bee, even as it becomes extinct too, because without the bee, there’s no one to pollinate it.”
For a moment, Val was transported from the noisy, over-bright service station and the tasteless tea to a hot and steamy jungle laced with such a heavy sense of loss.
“Yes, it is important,” she responded, and she felt it - the loneliness of that orchid pining for its bee that would never be coming again. A love story with no happy ending, like Joe and Niks and Shell. “It is important,” she said again, quietly.
They drifted back into their reveries again, still close to each other on the bench, but Val was back with Joe, his head on her shoulder, his shoulders shaking. But I love her, he’d said, sobbing. Even if she doesn’t care about me—why didn’t she come for the children?
Again, Shell hadn’t shown up for contact and Joe was left trying to field the questions from Niks and Sammy.
Doesn’t Mummy love us any more?
“What do I say, Val?” Joe had asked. “Nickie says I should tell them the truth - that she’s gone back to drugs, that it’s an illness that makes her love the drugs more than them. Can I tell them that? Won’t it hurt them?”
“Cry in front of them,” Val said. “Not like this - when you’ve let your grief go a bit. Let them see you are sad and upset because she was a lovely mummy when she could be, and now you are so sad for them and for you and for her that she can’t do it, and you’ll always love her for what she could do, not blame or hate her for what she couldn’t do.”
“I don’t know, Val,” he’d said, shaking his head.
“You’re a good daddy, Joe. And a good mummy, all in one. Trust that love. You’ll get it right. And if not the first time - you’ll put it right.”
He had sighed deeply. Loving his children was the one thing he did feel sure about. He nodded. Val patted his back, still a bit confused about how she should respond to him at times like this. He had adapted to her no longer being a ‘professional’ involved in his ‘case’ better than she had. Now she was herself, a retired person who cared about him, who would like to care for him in a good way, just not really sure what that looked like. She was thankful Grace was prepared to listen to her. It was like they had peer supervision together at times: Val expressed anxiety about whether it was ‘right’ to help Joe out, and Grace bemoaned the increasingly limited chances she had to do Theraplay within her role and considered whether to go independent.
Val went to take another sip of her tea and was surprised to find the cup empty. She looked at her watch. Two thirty. This was going to be a long afternoon. She looked at Graham, he was absorbed in his book again. She felt herself a bit shy as she looked at him more.
His face was lined around the eyes, his eyebrows grey and unruly, as if they wanted to head off and explore the world by themselves. Since she’d known him, his hair had thinned to the point where he now just kept a ring of short stubble – a bit like a monk with a tonsure. It suited him. His nose was...how do you describe a nose? It suited his face – slightly round; face and nose.
He must have felt her eyes on him because he glanced up, his smile making his cheeks stand out, pushing his glasses up his face just a fraction, letting her see his green eyes. One eyebrow lifted, the other side of his mouth dropped, and his head tilted as if to say, What? She just giggled a bit, feeling like a schoolgirl, and enjoyed that sensation for a moment before looking away – back to all the people around them.
Two boys – young men? – were returning to tables from the fast food outlets, paper bags in their hands. They could have been twins. Twelve? Maybe thirteen? Tall, with legs and arms seemingly too long, as if they’d grown suddenly and hadn’t yet worked out how to manage the extra size. Their bodies looked too skinny for their height, feet huge in white trainers, legs encased in floppy grey tracksuit bottoms that did nothing to disguise the thinness of their frames. The bags of food could have been to feed a family, or merely to feed the calorific need of their own development.
Val kept watching. Were they brothers? Or twins? Their hair flopped over their left eyes in the same way and their gait matched, both with a slight stoop and the air of embarrassment of being on show in the world. Then they peeled off. One sat at a table with what Val guessed to be his younger sister, his mother, and his grandmother. The other made his way deeper into the food hall to sit with a man Val took to be his dad.
The sense of doom that had, for a while, taken a back seat, re-emerged. She sighed.
Being seen as we would like to be seen - and the pain of being miss-seen
What gets in the way of us Engaging with our world in a pure way of love?
In Theraplay theory, Engagement underpins a sense of connection – it involves having the right energy for the moment, and experiencing the pure joy of being in relationship with people for no other purpose other than the pleasure of being together.
Val, no longer constrained by the role of professional therapeutic practitioner, is trying to make sense of how she can care for people from her space in joyful relating, not task-based relating. She wants to be present without her presence being misread as intrusive or hostile. She is unsure how to manage the joy that Sammy shows when he sees her. She sees the boys in the service station at a point of development where they are engaging with the dilemmas of how to be seen*. She is touched by the exquisite pain of being truly known, only to lose the one who held that knowing. This is captured in the story of the bee orchid – which longs for its lost bee – and the horror of others failing to learn from such a profound, annihilating, and irrecoverable loss.
(*Erikson (1995) would see the boys being at the point of working through the tensions of identity versus role confusion: Who am I in this world, outside of my family unit? Who will I identify with? How will my body even grow into that identity?)
Without the structure of her professional role or the independence that came with being single, Val is trying to work out who she is and what that means she wants to do. She now faces the challenge of interdependence that comes from being in relationship with maleness when MEN are actively difficult for her. She is having to work out what is truly meaningful in living her life as a person who cares. No longer guided by a defined role, she must instead work through, by embodied experience, why things happen and whether there is anything she might choose to do to influence systems to promote joyful connection and creativity.
At the heart of the piece is the sense of loss that comes to Val when Graham talks about Donna Haraway’s ideas. It is not the ideas themselves that touch Val, but a felt sense she is left with – the irreparable loneliness of the bee orchid, bereft of the one bee that could pollinate it: an experience of perfect fit and interdependence across species that has been irrevocable destroyed without apology or anyone taking responsibility. The bee orchid story poses questions about how we are not just interdependent as human to human, but interdependent with our earth, and with the other species that graciously allow us to inhabit the space alongside them.
Structure can provide safety, but it can also constrain core/ontological thinking if it becomes disconnected from relationship, or the purpose of relationship as helping all beings thrive. When connected to relationship, Structure supports deep exploration of the nature of being, helping us to make sense of not just what we are doing, but why we do things.
This month’s fiction prompts reflection on the tension between getting personal needs met and meeting the needs of the ‘beyond us’ – of family, nature, community – and somehow finding the capacity to meet contrasting needs within the constraints of the place we are put. Val and Graham are obliged to remain in the service station. It is not somewhere they would choose to be. It is somewhere they are removed from their usual ways of Engagement, somewhere they are slightly disconnected.
In this place, they are confronted with the challenge of allowing themselves to be known – even when they are unsure of who they are, having been displaced from their usual context. Allowing yourself to be known and seen when there is fear and uncertainty, when the tender vulnerability necessary for Engagement might be destroyed by the situation you are in, is a raw state. Yet it is also a state where growth is possible when relational Challenge is faced.
Being in such places seems to be part of the process of deepening our practice – as therapists, therapist educators, researchers, or managers in caring organisations. How do we carry on Engaging/loving in a world that feels discordant with our core beliefs about what people need to thrive and grow? A world where my kind of knowing appears to be valued by a seemingly small number of souls – too few for it to be financially viable, or for an organisation to find it worth supporting. In that state of ‘not being quite right for the place’, I could continuously edit myself to make sure I am not seen as intrusive or too weird. But that self-editing can stop the kinds of exchanges where positive interaction might be affirmed, connections with like-minded people might be forged, and new ways of being in the world enjoyed.
What might have happened if Val had found the courage to tell that Nana how fabulous she was? I suspect that, in the ‘real’ world, it would have felt just too strange and would not have landed well. It is a dilemma: how to be a Theraplayer in the ‘real’ world, or at least in the world I feel humankind is being trapped into. A world where these mini-moments of meeting (MOM) are so disconnected from the big picture where connection allows us all to thrive. Part of what drives me to keep writing these posts is a feeling that the ‘real’ world (aka the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy) is killing off the joyfulness of being small and unimportant in the grand scheme of things, even when you know, in your smallness, you are utterly vital.
My current line of thinking is about how to embrace the non-human world within tacit maternal knowing – so that the impact of actions guided by this knowledge can extend beyond the individual, reaching into the wider system, both human and non-human. My information superencountering has already pointed me in that direction via Haraway, Barad, Puig de la Bellacasa, and others. Stories offer a way to playfully explore these interwoven relationships – to create a kind of word tapestry that helps me see and elaborate this complex, messy, beautiful web of connections. An ecotapestry, where our m/other tongue and Mother Earth are woven together.
If you look at the Theraplay wheel, it’s no coincidence that Engagement and Challenge are positioned opposite each other. Experiencing repeated mis-fits, un-meetings, and ruptures in Engagement reduces our ability to maintain the right energy level, whether that’s enthusiasm or focus. Such energy is necessary to meet the demands of Challenge, which drives growth and expands our world of thought. Challenge involves making mistakes and the subsequent repair once a rupture is identified. We have to be willing to take risks, even when we’re unsure of who we are or whether things will work out – as long as we do so within the safety of relationship. Joe, for example, is starting his business with support: Val and Grace are offering Nurture and Structure, enabling him to step into his own experiences of Challenge and Engagement.
The service station, embedded within the framework of capitalism, is full of MOMs – mini moments of meeting – and the potential for them. There’s Val and Graham, the small child with their parents and grandparent, the two young men, and the spaniel with its owner. Most are family groups of some sort, apart from the two young men. Their mini moment of meeting occupies a different space due, I think, to their developmental stage. They are in a transitional space of development, moving from childhood to adulthood, just as everyone is in the transitional space of the service station, and this writing is in a transition space of being research in progress.
Is my tacit knowing suggesting that the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is best nullified by MOMs? The purchase of a magazine and gifts connects a small child to their caregivers, while the purchase of food offers the young men a reason to return to their caregivers, shifting their focus away from identifying solely with an adolescent identity.
What does this mean in practical terms for how I choose to live as a Theraplayer?
It suggests, to me, that within each large system, this ecotapestry that we are part of, small units are needed that fit together, like a bee orchid and a bee. Remove one, and the other is doomed. Val is attuned to doom - it’s present at the beginning and returns at the end of the fiction. The MOMs in the story don’t seem to be shifting her capacity to feel optimistic about humankind’s future. However, we are at the start of the fiction and at the start of the process of creating theory that might support each of us in taking up our m/other tongue and using it to create practices centred on caring for others.
The term Capitalocene, as far as I can make sense of it, captures a set of ideas about the complex exploitation of the environment by humankind. It highlights how ‘cheap’ resources - non-human resources - are seen as powerless, as things to be exploited rather than related to. This makes me think about the labours of love that mothers undertake: unpaid, unseen, at home behind closed doors, and ‘cheap’. While undervalued in terms of the Capitalocene, these labours are beyond value in the context of human development, fostering positive internal working models, secure attachments, good mental health, positive social skills, self-regulation, and a capacity for continuous learning.
Yes - these are the broad goals of Theraplay, the ones that go round the outer circle of the wheel. Such is the paradox at the heart of what I am trying to get my head round. The thing that is of most value to the survival of the world comes from mothering, but the actions of mothering are not valued because the foundations of mothering, the body of the birthing parent, is exploited and seen as unprofitable. In the manstream, power, money, and exploitation of others have become the markers of security. For those speaking our m/other tongue I wonder if the markers of security are vulnerability, having sufficient (rather than too much in terms of possessions), and trust in the ecotapestry - the interconnectedness of humans and the earth.
Haraway seems to suggest that art can make love possible because it offers another form of mini-moments of meeting – not just between people, but between entities: inter-species, inter-objects, inter-people, inter-spaces, and inter-dependencies (that last one is mine). These moments create possibilities for love, but also awaken a felt sense of loss when love can no longer happen – when one part of an interdependent connection has been destroyed.
My hope is that the awareness of such loss, coupled with an identity that is securely centred on interdependence, can drive a desire to do something different. Namely, to stop the ongoing, future destruction of people and places, and instead give rise to creativity: the birthing of babies in every form – art, ideas, humans! Yet, this sense of loss as a motivator to seek love again must not become overwhelming. If it does, the response in some may be to freeze or flee, while others may fight – using capitalism to accumulate power, regardless of the harm caused.
Theraplay is about calibrating moments of meeting so the person we are working with can tolerate the interaction without feeling the need to retreat or fight. Through the core concepts of being responsive, attuned, empathetic, and reflective, by staying in the here-and-now, and working with the preverbal, social, and right-brained fictions of humankind, Theraplay does not put the person as the central reference point in therapy (as the person-centred counsellors creed suggested in last month’s post). Instead, it places the 'between' - the relationship - as the central reference point in our work.
This brings us back to the question posed at the start of the post: as someone with power, who is striving to use that power in service of the other, I must ask myself – what is getting in the way of my ability to love the other, whoever or whatever they may be, by engaging with the space between us?
When I can truly see, feel, taste, smell, and touch what stands in the way, I can take responsibility for trying to change what’s within me that is creating a barrier to relationship. I can then choose to put myself in the vulnerable place of seeking a moment of meeting with the other across the space between us. Maybe it will be received – now, later – or maybe not. But if I don’t offer it, it feels as though all hope is lost: for me, for the other, and for the space between us that makes up our world.
It is vital that we, as Haraway urges, stay with the trouble. For us as Theraplayers, that means remaining present at the tipping point of interdependence and irretrievable loss, with all the vulnerability that such a place exposes us to.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
What Structure am I putting around love? Does this structure support or obscure Engagement? If it obscures, is it necessary for other reasons? What are those reasons? And so, what co-regulated, playful steps forward to the other can I take?
More about the book
Last month, I mentioned that I planned to publish the first year of these posts - as a book. I value the feedback in the comments as they pushed me beyond the money/power debate and into a deeper contemplation of knowledge/power. The comments made me think more deeply about why I want to put the posts into the world in book form. Some reasons are:
It gathers the posts into one place, allowing them to be read in the sequence they were written.
Substack is ephemeral - who goes back and reads early posts unless they are specifically linked to? Yet, my understanding of what I am saying, and what I seek to pass on to you, is rooted in those posts.
Publishing a book gives it an ISBN, which means it goes into legal deposit at the British Library and other places. It will end up on a shelf somewhere, should someone want to find it in the future.
In mansteam academia, quoting a Substack post would be seen as of less academic value than quoting a book, even if it has the same words and is self-published, so I am seeking to disrupt the manstream a bit.
If enough people purchase the eBook, it could rise on the bestseller lists in its category and end up in the "you might be interested in this" emails, reaching people who have never heard of our m/other tongue or the endeavour to be a Theraplayer. It could introduce them to the struggle I am engaged in, both personally and professionally, to see how I can organise what I do around caring for others.
Maybe it will cover some costs. Maybe not. That seems far less important now than it did last month when I wrote to you all about the book. What matters more is how to share the process of engaging with knowing - and what happens to that process when it connects with the choices made in the therapy room, in research, in educating other clinicians, and in managing organisations that care.
Yes, I write in a way that is deeply personal because the personal is political (Simone de Beauvoir). In every personal passion examined through the lens of Heuristic Inquiry, there may be, and probably is, universal meaning (Clark Moustakas). Such tacit and personal knowledge (Michael Polanyi) is where totalitarianism, the imposition of single ideas through power over others, can be challenged. In my attempt to theorise tacit maternal knowing (as seen in my doctorate and many of these posts), I am taking a process of knowing, of coming to know another - that of mothering - that evolves in private moments. I seek to make it legitimate academic knowledge, and a foundation for professional practice, because such knowledge has often been subject to deliberate ignorance (Procter and Schiebinger). And of course, there is nothing as practical as a good theory (Kurt Lewin), so long as the theory is used in the service of practice, not the other way around - practice should never be a slave to theory (that one’s mine – I don’t think I’ve ever written it down before, but if I’ve taught you, you’ve almost certainly heard me say it!).
The only insights - new perspectives and new ways they impact my practice - that I can claim are individual to me. I can’t say they are universal or ‘the right answer’. They may be a right answer, or partially right, for someone at a particular time, now or in the future. Presenting this as a personal quest feels to me like the most just and honest way of holding my power without using it over others.
Hence the repeated question: This is how it is for me. Is it like that for you too?
I have faith that you, too, can take your power and say yes, no, maybe, a little, or a lot. Self-search makes the application of the practical wisdom and tacit knowledge that emerges egalitarian, not autocratic.
Research update
What you can do to be part of this research
If you find these blog posts interesting, helpful, or thought-provoking - if they are meaningful to you in some way - please send me two or three sentences that I can use on the back cover of the book of the first year of these posts. If there are enough, I may put some inside the book as well.
These quotes should be about how the posts help you in your practice, whatever that may be, and why you’d encourage others to read them. When you send the quotes, please say what name you want to use and what professional identifier you would like me to add to your name e.g. Fiona, Theraplayer, or FP, Psychotherapeutic Counsellor, or Dr Fiona Peacock, Certified Theraplay Therapist, Trainer, and Supervisor. You can use the comments section or email your endorsement to me.
Bibliography
Barad, K. (with Fulton, A.). (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822388128
Erikson, E. H. (1995). Childhood and society. Vintage.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.
Moustakas, C. E. (1990). Heuristic research: Design, methodology, and applications. Sage.
Polanyi, M. (1973). Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy by Polanyi Published by University of Chicago Press. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Porpora, D. V. (2017). Dehumanization in theory: Anti-humanism, non-humanism, post-humanism, and trans-humanism. Journal of Critical Realism, 16(4), 353–367. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2017.1340010
Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.
"The personal is political" please make it personal, Fiona. I'm afraid the two characters you are writing about just don't feel like real people to me.
Maybe don't worry about rising up bestseller lists or disrupting the "manstream"/academia just now.
As your reader, I would love to read about your experiences, your thoughts, your feelings, no characters or abstractions, just you talking to us simply from the heart. There's nothing braver or more powerful than that.