It is time for you to go
Overview: October 2023
This month’s fiction is: It is time for you to go
This month’s application posts are:
Researcher positionality: Grandmothers are other-with: Applications for researchers
This month, I focus on the Theraplay core concept of the work being multisensory.
When I set my intention or focus for the month, I don’t know where my exploration will go, but it is a multisensory process. I go to the internal space, see what imagery arises around the word/s of the core concept I am seeking to be in touch with, and I write. I write what I see, smell, taste, hear, and am touched by in my body, emotions, and thoughts, documenting those through embodied sensations. I trust those to be the channel that the tacit uses to bring the process of knowing to the realm of knowledge – for me, that is fiction.
This month's exploration reminded me how seductive it is to think that the knowledge that emerges through a punctuation point of reflection and capture of knowing is ‘the answer’ when faced with challenging, emotional, and complex situations where action is required. Continuously returning our practice – therapeutic, research, or in therapist education – to the multisensory concept is one way that we can guard against this knowing too certainly, too soon. Such too-certain-too-soon knowledge can underpin a dogmatic stance that feeds ‘Othering’ and a static, singular position. A healthy human way to be is to continuously grow and develop within the context of a safe relationship, not be stuck at one developmental point. Growth and development inevitably involve loss as well as gain.
It is time for you to go
Graham came out of the consulting room, wiping his hands on a paper towel.
“We done?” He asked Priya at the reception desk. She turned the screen towards him.
Graham leaned forwards slightly and squinted at the screen.
“I put her in consulting room 3,” Priya said.
“Is she upset?” He asked.
Priya paused, a slight frown showing between her eyebrows. “Weeell,” she drew the word out, it had been hard to judge. “Not really.”
The pen in Priya’s hand swished from side to side, a bit like a cat’s tail when it was contemplating whether to pounce or not.
“She didn’t have the cat in a carrier,” she said with a sort of finality. The words came with a determined nod of her head, as if she was relieved to find a reason for her actions that didn’t need her to slither around in the hard to grasp feeling that the owner wasn’t upset, but was intensely absorbed in an experience. Priya had wanted to give her privacy, but also wanted to shield herself from that intensity.
Graham patted himself down and found where he’d put his glasses. He stood up straighter, the tension around his eyes relaxing now he could see more clearly. He reached for the mouse and scrolled through the record.
“She was here yesterday…” He said to no one in particular.
***
“What is it, Viking?” Val was quite sharp with him. She’d been in deep slumber when the insistence of fur-in-face, the slight dampness that came from the dribbles of an old cat, and the mixed vibration and rumble of purring interspersed with sharp intense meow piercings pulled her back from sleep to waking.
Viking just stared at her, slow blinked, and sat down. He didn’t need to paw at her any more.
“What do you mean, it is time for you to go?” Val heard his communication as clearly as if he’d said it with human words.
“It’s only four in the morning. Go back to sleep, the sun isn’t up yet.”
Val settled herself, Viking stretching himself out beside her. She kept her hand on his fur. It didn’t feel as soft as usual and, as she stroked down his side, past his ribs and onto his stomach, she felt him tense and, momentarily, the purring stopped. She moved her hand away, returning to scratching his ears. His purrs started again. She dozed, he slept, until her alarm went.
Viking didn’t eat his breakfast. He had come downstairs with her, but then, as she packed up her lunch for work, he returned to the bed and curled up. Before she left for the day, Val went and stoked him again, gazing at him in a puzzled manner.
“You’re really not okay, are you?” She lay her face against his fur. He didn’t even smell like he usually did!
Being back at work had been consuming, she hadn’t been paying him as much attention as usual. She’d call the vet later and try to get an appointment.
***
Big things seem to unravel time, Val thought. Even when she’d managed to secure an appointment for Viking, she found it hard to focus as she sat at her desk. Her mind wandered backwards in time, recalling the day she decided to find herself a cat.
In truth, it was Viking that had selected Val when she visited the cat rescue centre. He’d been skinny and quite timid, having spent the first part of his life as part of a near-feral household. It wasn’t clear if he’d been chased away by the other cats, or chose to leave…but whatever the story was, he was found on his own at the side of a country lane: scraggy, hungry, and demanding to be looked after properly.
When Val took Viking to the vet for the first time, it had been Julie who’d seen them. She remained their vet for the duration of Viking’s life with Val, and had estimated his age when Val had first brought him in all that time ago. Eighteen months, she reckoned. So now he’s probably about 18 years old, Val calculated. It had only been in the last three or four months that Val had felt he’d slowed down, become an aged cat. Julie knew the pair of them, Val and Viking, well enough to take Val seriously when she said he woke me in the night and said it was time to go.
Viking was patient while Julie examined him, grumbling only when she palpated his abdomen. She looked serious.
“I can feel a mass there. We could X-ray, we could do blood tests, we could even operate if that looks like it would be helpful.”
“But are you telling me that this may be it? “
Julie picked Viking up and put him on the scales. She compared his weight to what it was when he last came for his vaccinations, nine months ago. She double-checked the figures.
“He’s lost a lot of weight, Val.” She paused. “I can’t tell you what to do.”
Viking looked at Val, a very serious expression on his face. She felt he was again saying it’s time for me to go. But she couldn’t, she just couldn’t.
Julie was speaking again. “I can give him a steroid injection, see if that perks him up a bit.” But they both knew that was about buying time. Viking patiently endured it. He didn’t resist going back into his carrier, and curled up with his bottom towards the opening. He didn’t make a sound as Val drove him home.
He did eat, the steroid injection compelled him to. He slept on the sofa downstairs, not on the end of Val’s bed in his usual way. He was heavy and sleepy when she left for work the next morning. The heavy sleepiness got inside Val as well and dampened down the guilt she was feeling and made it easier to ignore the insistent voice that she just didn’t want to hear.
That evening, when she got home, it was hard to open the front door. She realised she was not only pushing the door but the slumped body of Viking. It looked like he’d tried to get out of the cat flap, and it was too much. With tears on her face, Val phoned the vet. She should have had the courage to do this yesterday, not leave him to collapse on his own while she went off to do work she didn’t want to do but had to because her stupid trust in market forces had led to the loss of her pension.
Val didn’t even put Viking into his carrier. He was so weak he allowed himself to be carried without a fuss, wrapped in a warm woollen jersey that was one of Val’s favourites and happened to be in the washing basket in the front room. It was one of the first things she could grab to wrap him and hopefully help him feel warm, contained, and cared about. She was surprised at how cold his paws and his nose felt already. It also gave her the chance to have as much contact with him as humanly – no, bodily – possible.
The receptionist took her straight into a vacant consulting room, and she sat there, holding him close.
***
Graham knocked gently and let himself into the room. She had made herself – no, she’d made the cat – comfortable, pulling a box toward her so that she could raise her feet and make sure he had a horizontal lap to rest on.
Graham felt arrested by her. He wasn’t sure why that was the word that fitted, but it did. Ocean, he thought. She was like the ocean. Again, he had no idea where the thoughts came from. True, she was dressed in blue hues and tones like a flow of water, but it was more than a visual thing. It was palpable. Sort of invisible physical. On her lap was a spreading splash of variegated maroons and purples, a warm swirling bed to hold a ginger cat. The woman and the cat were gazing at each other, slow blinking, the cat wrapped not only in the warm wool but the woman’s hands and gaze. He didn’t want to break the image. He wanted to capture it as a still life, but also didn’t want to because the stillness of an image would take the life out of it.
The woman looked up and he registered – surprise? Disappointment? Maybe shock?
“You saw Julie yesterday, but she isn’t on duty today,” he explained. The woman nodded in acceptance. Words felt unnecessary; the necessity was the focus on the cat. Graham put his papers onto the examination table and went over to where Val and Viking were sitting.
“Hello Viking,” he said softly, running his forefinger over the cat's head.
Val was about to say ‘he’s not keen on men’ (it had been so from the day she brought him home, and she’d made up lots of stories as to why that was), but Viking turned his head and slow blinked at the man, so she said nothing.
Val took a breath, expecting to have to explain – justify – why she didn’t have Viking put to sleep yesterday, expecting to be told off. But Graham looked at her and she felt her breath release. Silence came upon the room again, peacefulness in an incongruent place where there should be bustle and making pets better and a vet knowing what to do. There was agreement, unspoken but felt and known, about what was needed, as hard as it was to face.
“Let me have a look at you,” Graham said to Viking. Val was about to lift Viking up and put him onto the examination table, but Graham put his hand on her forearm.
Her eyes did widen.
She did pull back in shock.
Viking did look quickly between them – Val and Graham.
“I can look at him where he is, he looks most comfortable with you holding him,” Graham said, and they all relaxed again. Little frissons of tension, little moments of reconnection. Old stories, current needs, future possibilities flowing in and out of the embodied communication. Sometimes there was focus, sometimes diffused tangle.
“He’s ready to go now,” Val said. It felt like the whole room had been taken out of the world and suspended in space, all sound around them dampened. They seemed wholly on their own.
Graham didn’t respond, and she felt fine with that as the vet gently looked in Viking's mouth, gently felt his abdomen. Val saw the tightening of Graham’s lips and jaw as he did that. He turned the computer screen mounted on the wall toward him, angling it down, so he could read it without taking his hand away from Viking’s ginger stripes and purring ribs. Viking lay his head back against Val’s arm, rubbed his head against her. The weight, the movement, the eye contact; it was a smile to her. She smiled back at him.
“Yes,” Graham said. “He’s ready to go.”
“Did I hurt him?”
Graham didn’t answer straight away. He thought. He didn’t have to think about what she was asking him. He wanted to think so that he could do such an important question justice.
The silence was neither a long time nor short. It was total, as if they all held their breath. His hand was still on Viking's fur. Then he breathed and time started again.
“I don’t think so,” he said, the wondering and the question still in his voice, his eyes on the computer screen, reviewing the notes left by Julie the day before. “It looks like it gave you this time together.”
Viking sank into Val's arms just a little more.
Graham turned his full attention to the pair of them again.
***
Wrapped in the maroon jumper, Val placed Viking on the passenger seat of her car. It looked like he was curled up asleep, only the snipped away patch of hair on his leg where the vet had made space to give him the final injection told the story of the end of Viking’s life. She stroked his fur. Tonight she’d light a candle for him and wait with him. Tomorrow he would find his resting place under the lilac tree, where he used to roll and delight in scratching his back on the roots. She’d manage to dig through them somehow to make a welcoming space in the ground for her beloved companion.
Application posts
If you want to read about how this informed my understanding of practice:
The bringing together of an aspect of tacit maternal knowing symbolised by Viking with a form of masculine presence that values the importance of maternal knowing, connecting via embodied and multisensory process, lays the ground for sensitive, non-traumatising, decision-making in painful clinical situations. This connection supports maternal wisdom to be ‘other-with’ paternal wisdom rather than being ‘Othered-by’ a patriarchal position.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner research:
Researcher positionality: Grandmothers are other-with: Applications for researchers
The notion of tacit maternal knowing is expanded from the phase of development where primary maternal pre-occupation (mothering) is required for appropriate development, to thinking about tacit maternal knowing as expressed by post reproductive females. In this grandmothering phase, occupation, or doing, is closely connected to the maternal role, and represents growth in my understanding of how tacit maternal knowing can be used. As practitioner researchers, using this grandmotherly form of tacit maternal knowing, we can embed power into positioning ourselves in the ocean of the research world and thinking about how the intimacy of tacit maternal knowing can become sharable.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner education:
If practice draws on ‘mothering’ and research draws on ‘grandmothering’, then the role of the therapist educator may need to draw on an ‘otherly motherly’ position. This otherly motherly position allows tacit maternal knowing to be central to the pedagogy of therapist education in an appropriate way, taking account of the odd contract between educator and trainee. This relationship is not about the meaning of the relationship between the educator and trainee, but the meaning of the relationship for the people who the trainee will eventually see.
Bibliography
This bibliography covers all four of the October 2023 posts.
Brent, L. J. N., Franks, D. W., Foster, E. A., Balcomb, K. C., Cant, M. A., & Croft, D. P. (2015). Ecological Knowledge, Leadership, and the Evolution of Menopause in Killer Whales. Current Biology, 25(6), 746–750. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.01.037
Caper, R. (2020). Bion and the language of the unconscious: Psychoanalysis, suggestion, and thoughts too deep for words. Routledge.
Garcia, M. (2021). We are not born submissive: How patriarchy shapes women’s lives. Princeton University Press.
Grimes, C., Brent, L. J. N., Ellis, S., Weiss, M. N., Franks, D. W., Ellifrit, D. K., & Croft, D. P. (2023). Postreproductive female killer whales reduce socially inflicted injuries in their male offspring. Current Biology, 33(15), 3250-3256.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.06.039
Halton-Hernandez, E. (2023). The Marion Milner method: Psychoanalysis, autobiography, creativity. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Hong, R., Coleman, R., & Booth, P. B. (Eds.). (2023). Theraplay: Innovations and integration. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Jones, L. F. (2023). Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.
Lloyd, S. (2016). Improving sensory processing in traumatized children: Practical ideas to help your child’s movement, co-ordination and body awareness. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Peacock, F. (2023). What did I do? I don’t know. Generating fiction to examine the tacit maternal knowing I bring to my Theraplay® practice with children who are experiencing relational and developmental trauma. (Doctoral thesis) [Doctor of Education, University of Cambridge]. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.80181
Polanyi, M. (2009). The tacit dimension. University of Chicago Press.
SAI (n.d.) https://www.sensoryattachmentintervention.com
Stadlen, N. (2004). What mothers do: Especially when it looks like nothing. Piatkus.
Wright, K. (2009). Mirroring and attunement: Self realization in psychoanalysis and art. Routledge.
(Note on referencing in the text: I was using unpaginated eBooks in my reading, so don’t have page numbers for some quoted text. I’ve given the location of the quote in the eBook I was reading, which I hope is enough for you to locate these quotes should you wish to follow them up.)