On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
Overview: November 2023
This month’s fiction is: On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
This month’s application posts are:
Cultural sensitivity: So much bigger than the words: Applications for practitioners
Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
This month, the Theraplay core concept that has been in my mind is that of ‘cultural sensitivity’.
The fiction has been running through my head off and on since the end of September, but it has been challenging to be able to sit down and write. I am writing as Israel and Palestine destroy each other's bodies. That is so different in feeling to last month’s exploration of how embodiment and multisensory engagement can help in difficult clinical decision-making.
I had identified the core concept of ‘cultural sensitivity’ as my focus long before the first hideous assault of person on person. It came from my feelings last month, the sense of irreparability that comes from the deep violence that lurks when Othering happens where there is difference, and that difference is only seen in the direction of power-over the other.
This month, I examine that violence in myself as I try to make sense of my experience of being Othered as a woman in the culture I grew up within: the specifics of a white, Christian, individualistic, and patriarchal structure that made it easy for sexual violence to hide by creating stories of women’s inferiority and stupidity. So now I carry on with the story of Val and Viking, Grace, Graham, and underneath all of that Joe, as I grapple with making sense of being ‘culturally sensitive’ in my therapeutic work to support connection, communication, and closeness as a counterbalance to the horror of separation, discord, and violence that the children and families who come to us experience in their pasts, their presents, and in their fear for their futures.
In a departure from usual, it wasn’t the fiction that arrived in your inbox this month, but the practitioner post. This is a bit of an experiment on my part to see if you prefer this to receiving the fiction. Thank you for clicking through to the fiction, and please do let me know what you’d prefer.
During November, I will be taking part in NaNoWriMo, so I will be taking a break from You Do Know. This means there won’t be any new content in December. My novel’s title is The Mad Man in the Attic, and I will be using my writing to play with maleness and how it sits within my practice as someone who prizes tacit maternal knowing as the foundation of how I work. The next post here will be on 1 January 2024, and will focus on the core concept of playfulness.
On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
Grace paused with her hand on the glossy black paint of the scrolled iron gate. She could see the foxgloves and lupins, the rhubarb and the plum tree beyond. And a lilac, a big lilac. All looking so relaxed and rustic. She had grown up in a rural landscape and knew the amount of effort that would have gone into creating the structure that made such an apparently casual cottage garden feel as if it had always been like that, and as if it could maintain itself forever with no external help. She resented being here.
Why had she come, giving up her Saturday afternoon because of an email from someone she’d once worked with? Someone she’d bumped into by a river? Someone who happened to be white?
***
When the email had come to her, Val had been perplexed. At that point, she would usually have reached for Viking. She’d have scratched his ears and said, well that’s a tricky one, isn’t it? And he would somehow have lent her some stillness and space to reflect on how to respond. He was no longer there, and Val felt the gap.
Joe’s terror was palpable through the words.
“They are going to take them away! I’m no good. Shell left me. Niks and Sammy.” The email was incoherent. “I don’t know what to do. I’m not a bad dad, why do they want to take them away?”
The email went on, rambling and scattered. From what she could make out, Shell’s dad had got in touch, and Shell had got caught up, again, in things she’d been able, for a while in her life, to leave behind. Val couldn’t quite work out what. Drugs? Shoplifting? Both, maybe? Whatever the specifics, Shell had been sucked back into her family so much that she’d left Joe with the two children. Val wasn’t quite sure how old they would be now - Niks, maybe 5, Sammy, 18 months? Somehow, social care had been called, and they were questioning whether Joe had the ability to care for two young children on his own.
The thought of asking Grace came to Val in the middle of the night, and she emailed her early the next morning to ask her to come on Saturday afternoon to work out what they could do to support Joe. Grace agreed. Val sent her address. She went to work. Did her daily routines. Grieved Viking. Sent Joe an email to say she’d be in touch.
She never gave things another thought. Barely gave her actions a feel – they happened all in her head and her doing. Her feelings were with Viking under the lilac tree, not under her hand.
***
Grace was as cross with herself as she was with Val. It was just so reactive on her part. It had stuck with her how, when she was Joe’s social worker and Val was seeing Joe for Theraplay, Val’s face had shown such surprise when Grace had told her that she had grown up on a farm in Norfolk. Both she and Val had sat with the deep injury of such white assumption, and they had covered it up with a joke and a professional huffle and fuffle to focus on Joe’s needs. But clearly it had never quite gone away, and here she was again, just accepting the summons of the white woman, only recognising the resentment when her hand rested on the wrought iron gate. Not this time, Grace thought, this time it won’t be ignored. She pushed the gate open with some force and left it gaping.
Her irritation was increased by the scent of roses and how poppy heads rushed against her legs like eager puppies greeting her as she followed the garden path to the front door. She felt she had been trapped along this path by the insistent informality of the planting. This way, and no other! It cried so sweetly and demurely. How lovely I am! Of course what I say is right!
Val opened the front door. It was a small house, the door opening straight into the main living room. Val barely made eye contact with Grace.
“Come in,” she said, and turned away from Grace, a hand still on the door, but at the same time using her body to point to the couch with a laptop on a small table facing the seating.
Breaths were held. Voices seemed muted in Grace's ears. The sofa, the laptop, reminded Grace of the way she’d set things up for a parent feedback session and the connection, the structuring of the setting, kind of compelled her to just go along with the unworded direction. She sat, she looked at the screen, she saw the email from Joe, she heard Val’s voice, but really wasn’t hearing what was being said. She wanted to speak, she wanted to say, just stop! She felt assaulted and, yes, insulted.
“Grace?” Val had noticed.
“You think this is alright, don’t you? Calling me here, making me come to your house, expecting me to help. Would you have come if I’d done the same to you?”
It pulled Val up in her tracks. She felt hurt by Grace’s tone, she felt shocked by the inelegance of Grace’s language, so different to what she was expecting.
“I don’t know,” she stumbled. And she knew in an instant that she hadn’t even considered travelling to Grace, even though she was asking for her labour. She had no idea where Grace lived, but she’d assumed it was less ‘pleasant’. Not a worded cognitive thought, just an expectation. She’d not offered Grace an option, not thought that…well, just not thought, not felt. Yes, she did assume, deep down, that her place was more acceptable than Grace’s.
“Would you have done this if I was white?” Grace had no questioning tone in her voice. It could have been as much a statement as a question. Her eyes were downcast, her face still, her eyes glistened.
Val again knew, and was disgusted with herself. How subtle was the nature of her racism, how deep the roots that, for all her care and all her efforts to be conscious of prejudice, all her talk of Othering, she still lived it out. She lived as if she was entitled, she lived as if she was more than Grace because Grace was Black.
Val’s body turned until she was side-by-side with Grace, the laptop and the email now irrelevant. She looked beyond it at the point where the wall met the skirting board and her face, like Grace’s, was still. Like Grace, she had tears in her eyes. She was wordless – what could she say? Sorry? Sorry for what? For countless generations of cruelty and disregarding the humanity of Black peoples? She could, she thought, at least take responsibility for herself.
“Grace…” she couldn’t go on. This was beyond words. She screwed up her face with her shame and at the same time didn’t want to…what? How could she not sound patronising and dismissive now her racism had been brought to her attention?
“I know you mean well,” Grace said. “That makes it worse. I can fight the open hostility but this…” Grace looked fiercely at Val, “this unawareness is brutal.”
Val found the courage to look at Grace. “I’ve wounded you. I did mean well, but I didn’t see ‘us’. I didn’t see or think or feel…” Val paused, “or hear, if, whether, ‘my’ communication could be ‘our’ communication. I was selfish. I am sorry.”
It was heartfelt, and Grace did feel it, but they both needed some time to sit it out, to let the waves of awfulness subside a bit.
In the middle of their deep silence, the doorbell was like a clamouring nightmare. Val got up as if she was still caught in the claws of the dream. She opened the door. A man stood there with a pet carrier in his hand, slightly rotund, not a lot of hair, glasses in the hand that wasn’t holding the carrier, that hand still half-suspended in the air where he’d rung the bell.
“Hello,” Graham said.
“This isn’t a good time.” Val stood firmly in the door, Graham just that bit too close, as if he wanted to come in.
“These stray kittens were brought in this morning,” Graham continued undaunted, raising the pet carrier slightly, “they need someone to care for them.”
Val thought her mouth must be dropping open. How crass of the man to think she’d melt at the thought of kittens.
“That’s ridiculous! I can’t care for them, I work! Do you really think it’s okay to turn up unannounced like this and expect me to help?”
Graham looked crestfallen. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think. You…I….” He couldn’t finish his words. His eyes dropped, his face went still. He turned away with a quiet apology.
Val shut the door, leaning her back against it, tipping her head until she felt the wood, hoping the tears would sink back into her eye sockets, missing Viking with a vengeance.
“Would you believe it?” She fumed, anger at Graham's assumption helping quell the bewilderment at his behaviour and close off the multiple injuries she was feeling, injury that she felt had been done to her and injury that she had done to others.
“What’s the difference, Val?” Grace’s tone was harsh, angry. She, too, trying to quell the bewilderment and injury of Val’s behaviour.
There was an almighty crash and weak cry of pain. Val opened the door and Grace rushed to the window. Graham lay groaning on the ground.
“I think I’ve broken my ankle,” he croaked.
The carrier and the kittens were lying on their side.
***
They called an ambulance. Four hours, the controller said, it isn’t life or death. They called the vet's surgery, but it was shut for the weekend. Graham said there was no one to call for him, and as he seemed to be drifting a bit on waves of pain, they dared not move him. Val brought out a blanket, some cushions, a hot water bottle.
Grace offered to take the kittens. “My daughter is doing a small animal care course at college. She’ll love to take care of them until we know what to do.”
She departed, and so Val and Graham were left together, waiting for help to arrive.
“Is this where you buried him?” Graham asked.
“What?”
It looked like it was hard for Graham to form thoughts through the pain. “Viking?”
“Why?”
“Seems like a place…an old cat would like,” Graham replied in gasps around his discomfort. He looked up at the leaves of the lilac. “Beautiful.”
Val looked at the man who had intruded, uninvited, into her space, tried to tempt her with kittens, and now unintentionally demanded her care. A smile started to play around her mouth. You couldn’t make this up, she thought. He was exactly where Viking lay buried. Her eyes were wide, her breathing rapid, and she wept, silently, deeply for the wounds and the love. For herself, for Grace, for Graham who also meant well and had paid a price for trying to connect. It seemed the only place to be, connecting at the site of loss and injury, trying to meet on common ground.
Application posts
If you want to read about how this informed my understanding of practice:
Cultural sensitivity: So much bigger than the words: Applications for practitioners
In finding the places where I am culturally insensitive, and being open to my part in it, I find a place where I can sit with the injury and loss that comes with the irrrepairability of countless generations of Othering that means insensitivity is woven into our cultural fabric. I sit with the painful knowledge that at the extreme of cultural insensitivity there is embodied annihilation – it leads people to kill each other. The part I can play in addressing the intergenerational impact of prejudice is to do my best to not teach it to the next generation, and to do that I have to know what my prejudices are. I have to make those tacit and embodied knowledges explicit to myself as much as the more palatable bits of tacit knowing if I am going to use my power in the service of the other.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner research:
Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
In my reflection on researching in a culturally sensitive way, I find myself exploring corporeality and the interface between the human body and the earth. I suggest we must have a full loop of action, reflection, and reflexivity for the researcher to bring a critical eye to their position in relation to their research. I propose that by embodying the connection between people at their point of commonality, we have a platform for cultural sensitivity to be embedded in our research philosophies and practices: embodying leads to embedding, and perhaps changed research cultures. But first we have to find what our insensitivity or ignorances are.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner education:
Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
I suggest that the transferable skill that we seek to cultivate in our therapist education is to help our students have the resilience and emotional skills to challenge and be challenged on ways-of-being that may seem culturally insensitive. In doing this, as therapist educators, we need to be able to non-defensively hear when our perceived insensitivity is challenged. The modelling of this is an essential part of educating those who will come after us as practitioners. To do this, we need to enable the strength of our students to be able to sit on the ground where the pain and injury are present and work through the complexities of issues of equality, diversity, and inclusion.
Bibliography
This bibliography covers all four of the November 2023 posts.
Beauvoir, S. de, Borde, C., Malovany-Chevallier, S., Reid, M., & Haynes, N. (2015). Extracts from the second sex.
Douglass, B. G., & Moustakas, C. (1985). Heuristic Inquiry: The Internal Search to Know. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25(3), 39–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022167885253004
Finlay, L. (2005). ‘Reflexive embodied empathy’: A phenomenology of participant-researcher intersubjectivity. The Humanistic Psychologist, 33(4), 271–292. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15473333thp3304_4
Frankl, V. E. (2008). Man’s search for meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust (I. Lasch, Trans.). Rider.
Kapadocha, C. (Ed.). (2021). Somatic voices in performance research and beyond. Routledge.
Krause, I.-B. (Ed.). (2011). Burnham, J. (2011) Developments in Social GRRRAAACCEEESSS: visible-invisible and voiced-unvoiced. In Mutual Perspectives: Culture and Reflexivity in Systemic Psychotherapy. Karnac.
LaChance Adams, S. (2014). Mad mothers, bad mothers, & what a ‘good’ mother would do: The ethics of ambivalence. Columbia University Press.
Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.
Marks-Tarlow, T. (2015). Embodied Clinical Truths. International Body Psychotherapy Journal, 14(2), 12–27.
Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.