The power of push and pull; no title, just a cry of pain as we journey on
Joe wanted to be carried to the room – thankfully, he was still small for a six-year-old. Whether this was the legacy of neglect or whether his parents were just small, no one seemed to quite know; he certainly ate enough now. In fact, he often couldn’t stop eating, would go away and throw up, and then come back and start again. He had raged at Nickie for days when she put limits on his eating, swearing she was starving him and depriving him of food. Such was the vehemence of his argument that his school had called Grace, thinking it was a safeguarding issue. It could have so easily broken the placement when it had barely begun, but Grace saw a repeating pattern and that was the end of the matter. Joe was told that it was up to Nickie to take care of him and she was the best person to decide what was the right amount for him to eat.
In the Theraplay, they had found all kinds of ways to help Joe realise that food came with a person attached and that the pleasure of being held while being fed and the relaxation of someone knowing your needs was the nurture he needed. Usually, now he didn’t need to find the snack as the very first activity; he had some confidence that he would always have the snack at the end of the session.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 66.
Dear all,
I have so many complicated thoughts going on. This is June, end of one year of these blogs. Some of you want me to continue. Which way shall I go? What shall I continue writing about? Shall I be a researcher? Shall I be a Theraplay therapist and write about that? Shall I be a psychotherapeutic counsellor? Or just a woman exploring…exploring what?
This slightly manic opening to possibilities leads me to despair and confusion more than contentment. It is what underpins Joe’s behaviour in the quote above. There is plenty, and yet there is something unrequitable. It is some kind of felt place that can’t allow contentment, slowing down, not being outcome-driven – because it feels incomplete. These ideas, like Joe’s eating, end up as a defence against connecting thought and feelings, not a pathway to the onward journey.
This maelstrom of thoughts started with Jo’s comment on last month’s post about our armada of small boats communally effecting change for the children and families we work with. For me, a big part of keeping children and families afloat is about how we keep each other afloat in work that is often difficult, with no ‘happy ending’. I think about some of the cases that I feel have been successful; someone who is not in prison for murder, someone who still communicates with their mother but lives independently, albeit precariously, someone who asks their solicitor to get in touch with me many years later, so the story of their childhood can be told. These are mega-successes once the starting point is noted – the devastation of the early lives of these people, the slow rebuilding of their trust in humanity, the care their parents needed as well, as they absorbed the waves of distress their children emitted. If we view ‘success’ through the eyes of those who have not endured such violence, it could feel a thankless, hopeless, failure of a role, this therapy with children experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma. Remember what I said last week about the jury who were let off jury service for life because of the impact of being involved in one trial where an infant was killed by their parents? The children we work with, their parents, us as clinicians; that exposure to horror continues.
As I thought about the next steps for this blog against the background of those thoughts, I wondered, could I write another fiction? A fiction that would help me access the tacit maternal knowledge I might already be holding about how our armada in the sea of tacit maternal knowing might make an impact in our Theraplay practice with children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma?
When I made space to explore writing another fiction, my mind took me to a place where Joe would approach Val again. He’d be asking for Theraplay for him and his children. Shell had left him. Social Care was questioning whether the children should be in foster care, not with him – othering him. How could a child who grew up in care possibly be okay enough to be a good dad?
In my thesis, I wrote about how the production of fiction through the process of inhabiting the body space of the characters I was writing about, by loosening my intentional bonds in writing and just jumping into the fiction, I could ‘foolishly disrupt’ (Gray and Kontos, 2018) my expectations of what research is. I could embrace the “tensions, disorientation, or personal and social ‘wonky moments’” (Gray & Kontos, 2018, p.444) that then arose as a way to use the oddities of fiction to think about why some knowledge is pushed to one side and other knowledge is prized. Within my research, I found the fiction a way to make sense of how maternal knowing and knowledge may be suppressed both within myself and in society through my personal experiences of male-to-female violence and societal male-to-female violence. This was radical and liberating for me, as I became more confident in my identity as a woman professional who uses tacit maternal knowing in the service of the people I see.
As I let my mind riff around armadas and people in extremis – being English, being of my age, being of a certain context – my mind immediately went to Dunkirk: the armada of little ships that took part in the evacuation of stranded troops. How did they do it? Shared purpose? Optimism? Maybe a fair bit of not knowing quite what they were getting into? Possibly quite a lot of just not thinking and just going and doing – people to be got, little boats needed, I have little boat, go… No doubt there were many motivations, and I am influenced by fiction such as The Dolphin Crossing and To Die But Once. What emerged from my unconscious were stories of adolescent boys who defy their mothers to do something that is dangerous and about survival. Unexpectedly, maleness has come into my consciousness.
One component of tacit knowing that was present, but not explored in the thesis, was about use of power. In my development of tacit maternal knowing as a theory to inform practice, power is not held over another, nor power held with/equally, but power is used in the service of the other.
So, if all of this is rumbling around – adolescent boys defying mothers, Theraplay, me, this blog moving on – why did the above passage from A Necessary Life(Story) come to mind?
Milo died. Joe became a dad, and in the novella was showing all the signs of becoming a great dad. Joe and Milo are creations of my inner experience of masculinity. As I continue to explore, and share with you in this writing how I use myself in the service of the children and families that come to me, then I have to go to another dark and difficult place within myself. To be frank, it is easier for me to grieve for Milo and feel relieved he died, as it makes it possible for his partner to have the baby free from his coercive control. Integrating the tender and the aggressive aspects of maleness didn’t seem possible in the fiction, as it emerged at that specific point of time in my self exploration. The process of heuristic inquiry into my Theraplay practice through the formal process of submitting for a doctorate, enabled me to value the choice to prioritise care as a professional discipline. I could ditch the habit of obedience to a more powerful other, feeling this obedience was necessary to protect myself (although ditching habits is always easier said than done). I could take my power back by choosing to use my power in the service of another, to be something of my cherished identity as a carer rather than compulsively caring because I was locked into a reactive cycle. The action of caring might be the same, the reason for caring became radically different.
Naming my lived experience of professional care as tacit maternal knowing, reclaiming motherly wisdom in scholarly terms and putting it at the heart of my clinical practice, taking my female lived experience seriously, nurturing something of me that had been not just passively neglected but actively devalued, was empowering. Like Joe, I have had to learn to take in the nurture and affirmation about it being okay to be me. In fact, not just okay, but magnificent to be me, a woman. Feeling this power, I want to wield it. That is a skill to learn. I fear I could wield it to kill or emasculate, to exact revenge for the humiliations, hurts, and pain of misogyny, personally and systemically.
Ouch – that is painful. Painfully, tearfully, I have to face the fact that misogyny leaves me with a legacy of misandry. I can let Joe, in my fictional creating, be a good mother exercising great sensitivity to his children in the final part of the novella. But can I, in my fictional creating, find the inner place that feeds my capacity to write him as a good father?
My experience of misogyny, sadly, has left me feeling in a battle. Although my head and heart have tried to remain in a place of commitment to caring, I’ve got sucked into the ‘power over’ stance and so become misandric. Because I have felt hated as a woman by men, and I have had to fight to reclaim my own respect for myself as a woman, I’ve had to make the internal safe space to do that healing work. To make that safe space, I’ve hated men by fearing them and, therefore, cast them out as ‘other’. I’ve wanted women-only spaces as that saves me from the fear, from the triggering of trauma from misogyny that happens when there are men; whether those men are actively misogynistic or passively misogynistic or not misogynistic at all. That’s one of those things about trauma triggers, there is no discrimination about what is now safe. There is just the activation of that overwhelming annihilatory experience of the core trauma if the trigger is known to be present. Through my research process, I became angry at the suppression of maternal knowledge in academia and clinical theory. Anger changed my trauma to something more usable, but at the expense of rejecting and excluding maleness from my inner construction of self. Just as toxic masculinity robs men of the broad range of human experience because they are positioned to have limited positive connection to certain feelings, so my own misandry (forged for survival, I remind myself, trying to turn my caring to myself too, and accept my own self-nurture) also robs me as a woman of opportunities to engage with the broadest realm of human experiences.
I am in an utter stuckness. Do I still need that defence? To be the person I want to be, to live out my commitment to being a person who cares, someone who uses tacit maternal knowing as a psychotherapist and doesn’t ‘other’, I must challenge my inner misandry. But to do that, I have to feel safe enough to learn, through relationship, what a healthy relationship to male knowledge is – how maleness uses power in the service of the other. Not power over, not shared power, but power in service of others, like those adolescent boys in the novels about Dunkirk, defying their mothers, saving others. As I feel the need to go to this place, at a deep embodied level, I can give this process no worded title, there is just a howl of pain and fear.
I think those last two paragraphs may be incoherent. My head hurts with trying to think them. I’m holding my breath. I must go there, I do not want to go there. I must let my guard down to the source of my trauma, men and maleness. I am pushed. I am pulled. I have to dive in and embrace the “tensions, disorientation, or personal and social ‘wonky moments’” to get to somewhere else, not knowing what that where else might be like. I don’t want to.
And this is what we are asking children who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma to do when they come to therapy with us. I am sitting here in a sweat, struggling to know how to do this myself. I don’t even know how to start the journey. Do I have to grieve for all the lost opportunities and the inability to sort out maleness that is lovely from maleness that is violent – just as the children we work with have to sort out our relationship that is lovely from their expectation and experience that relationship is violent? In touching this confusion, distress and longing, I am gifted such a powerful reminder of the extraordinary work children do with us and a reminder of just how tenderly we must cherish their bravery.
Onwards to future voyages into my world of therapeutic work. This is using ourselves in the service of the people we work with. It is about how we make ourselves available in relationships that heal because we choose to go to the dark places inside ourselves, where the people we work with have had no choice but to go because they were forced to. The seas may get choppy, but I know there is an armada out there with me, a community of practitioners in a sea of tacit maternal knowing.
See you next month.
Fiona Peacock
New publication
I have recently had a peer-reviewed paper published in the European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy:
Peacock, F. (2023). A Heuristic Inquiry into my use of Theraplay® with children experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma. European Journal for Qualitative Research in Psychotherapy, 13. Retrieved from https://ejqrp.org/index.php/ejqrp/article/view/200
Next month
Her back was to the camera, so when she later viewed the tape, she wasn’t sure if she went white; she felt like she had. His face – it was so difficult to really know from the video. His face stilled, slackened. It was similar to what they’d witnessed during the MIM: the wanting to but not knowing how. This was more – a deeper distress and confusion. It wasn’t about the bodily mechanics of not knowing how to engage, it was having no possible story other than their joint stories of being wrong. From the moment of being born they, both Val and Milo, were wrong and had to observe others so strongly that they became the woodwork and wallpaper and fabric of the environment. Show no face, make no meaningful sound, don’t breathe, lock it all up in the centre of your chest like a rusty stake through your heart, pinning your front to your back and immobilising you to nothing. To absolute stillness.
A Necessary Life(Story), page 55.
Bibliography
Gray, J., & Kontos, P. (2018). An Aesthetic of Relationality: Embodiment, Imagination, and the Necessity of Playing the Fool in Research-Informed Theater. Qualitative Inquiry, 24(7), 440–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417736331
Paton Walsh, J. (2012). The dolphin crossing. Faber.
Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.
Winspear, J. (2018). To die but once: A Maisie Dobbs novel. Harper.