Research is Theraplay: Interactive and relationship-based, a direct here and now experience

I remember, Joe thinks. But maybe he doesn’t, maybe this is what someone thinks he remembers. Something they then wrote down so it became a truth. Val couldn’t even remember if the story was something she’d read in his paperwork, or something Nickie said had been told to her at a contact meeting, or something that just seemed to gather, wraith like, out of the air. 

A Necessary Life(Story), page 49.

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Dear all,

The title for this month's post is inspired by Shawn Wilson’s (2008) book Research is Ceremony. As a white woman based in England, I am wary of offering a précis of his book: that feels a bit too close to appropriating a wisdom that is not mine. However, I am going to tell you about the thoughts and the feeling processes that his book started in me. Before I do, I want to give due thanks to the writers and researchers who have spoken to me, through their writing, from their Indigenous world views.

I took from Wilson that Indigenous ontology is relationship: to others, to the land. This enabled me to see that relationship is my ontology too. 

Ontology may be one of those big research words that seems far away from Theraplay practice, but it is about being, about what there is to know. In holding an ontology of relationship, research becomes Theraplay because Theraplay is relationship. That is what there is to know in what we do. I might even connect the concept of ontology, the nature of being, with the nature of human being. Humans become by being birthed and raised in connection to others. That experience is common to all peoples, Indigenous or white-stream (thank you to Wilson and Wilson (2000) for that useful reframing of the word mainstream).

I was inspired by the sense that Wilson does not seek to justify Indigenous knowledge and research through the white-stream, man-stream lens of the dominant academic position. He confidently owns his own identity and the world view of his own people and speaks, knowing it to be true. He is clear that his identity and his indigenous knowledge mean that the construction of his writing will be different to white-stream, man-stream academic literature, although at times he does choose to write in that register. He looks for points of commonality – not separation – between people and knowledges. 

Last month’s heavy-duty grapple with envy was freeing for me. It hadn’t been a concept I focused on in my thesis. On reflection, I think that when I was writing the thesis, I was in a phase of finding my anger. Maybe I needed that blind fury at the deliberate forgetting and marginalisation of women’s knowing and knowledge to shake me free of some of the stories that bound me. Having found a power in my voice to trust my thoughts because they are my thoughts, I could then contemplate the impact of the years of powerlessness I had felt, where my own goodness was denied to me and culturally shaped as knowledge not worth entertaining in the academic realm. It made me less than a person, denied my identity. Lorde (2018) told me that I can’t dismantle the master's house using the master's tools. I couldn’t reclaim my identity as a woman with a good brain and heartfelt passion for what I offer children and families while the story was that my kind of knowledge was socially dangerous because I was claiming something as true even though it couldn’t be ‘proven’ by white, western, masculine, hierarchical perspectives on what kind of knowledge is acceptable. That anger pushed me to find different ways to research my practice. Ways that I felt honoured myself as well as the children and families I work with, regardless of what received, academic, ‘proper knowledge’ might say.

Stories can become things that preserve identity, or trap others in an identity that is not where they wish to be. Joe struggles because he does remember, not with words, nor with images, but somehow in his body he remembers. It is not until years later when Joe finds Val when he is about to become a father that the desperate need to know his story engulfs him. He is afraid of what is stirred up in him by his baby, trapped by a story that he both knows and does not know. Val has to find the courage to tell him the story, even though there is no ‘proof’ that it is the ‘right’ story. But it is the ‘right story’ because Joe’s distress is relieved when that story gives him a way to make sense of himself.

By digesting envy through last month’s post, I’ve found myself able to address the injustice that happens when the dominant academic position of hierarchical, right/wrong knowledge denies helpful stories of identity to people because they are not ‘proven’ against that normative knowledge position. As Theraplay practitioners (or any other therapist using relationship as our main tool of healing), in taking our position of maternal power, not to deny that normative position but to hold an equal and alternative place, we then have freedom to talk about what we do without self-editing. If we can talk without self-editing, we do justice to ourselves, the model, and most importantly the children we work with because we are not denying their reality and so othering them. So we research. 

But what is research? Uncovering such personal, storied truths in the context of relationship is research because…?

Looking at the etymology of the word ‘research’, as a noun it originates from 16^th century France, where it meant to seek out or search closely. As a verb, a word of doing, it may come from the Latin ‘circare’. This is related to the term circus and can mean to wander about, circle, or go here and there. In the 18th century, the verb was also connected to seeking a woman in love or marriage (Etymology Online, 2021).

So, research is about finding love and women and finding those things by seeking them out in an all-over-the-place kind of way. I might be tempted to run with research being a word related to the circus and bring in an element of clowning to the process. That gives me the latitude to take the term research at a playful level. In Theraplay we are using tacit maternal knowing, and the actions that such knowledge promotes, which are about birthing and raising people from infancy to end of life. We can take the gender aspect out of research: not men seeking women for marriage, but people seeking women, and their specific knowings, for love and relationship, and play with the notion of play. Who plays with infants/children? How do they play? Why do we need to know their biological sex or sense of gender when two people, a grown-up and a child, play together and fall in love through the play and create lasting affectional bonds through tacit maternal knowing?

Please do note that my tongue was actually in my cheek as I wrote that paragraph!

And now I am going to choose to shift to a more formal tone of writing, reduce my playfulness, be less overtly relational. I worry people may dismiss important ideas because I am not writing in a ‘proper’ way. Did I play too much in the last paragraph?

Theraplay with children and their families who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma is all about the professional use of love. It is about the professional use of the skills that mothers bring, from their tacit knowing and wisdom from doing. Am I being repetitive? Am I being too simple? Why am I worried about being repetitive about something that is central to the emotional wellbeing of people from the time they are infants and across their life span? Surely that is worth repeating? Why am I worrying about my trying to make sense of how to love people? Oh dear, I’ve failed to hold that formal tone of writing and become lost in questions to myself. But then I’ve said in my doctoral thesis, examined by others, approved by the University of Cambridge, that not knowing/letting go is central to the use of tacit maternal knowing!

The shadows cast by living and growing in a culture where it feels shameful to own emotion and accept vulnerability are long. As much as I write here, and in writing change the story of my own internal working models about such issues professionally and personally, I am still pulled up short so often in thinking I’m not right, I’m not good enough, I’m stupid, I’m wrong, I’m a woman.

It is implicit in our white-stream, man-stream world, that mothering means women’s experiences viewed from the position of men. Yes, you need a womb to physically give birth to a baby – but that isn’t the only experience of becoming a mother or using maternal knowledge. Mothering and the professional application of knowledge that arises from tacit maternal knowing is not gender or biology specific. Maybe with a shift in ontology, tacit maternal knowing becomes mainstream knowledge and transcends skin colour because we are all birthed and raised by people.

I feel such weight as I strive to justify what I do in my Theraplay practice in the shadow of the man-stream world. Such weight shifts me from an ontology of joy, connection, and welcome to an ontology of justification, definition, and exclusion. This weight gets in my way when I think about how I wish to be with the children and families I care about, and how to scrutinise and ensure that the tacit maternal knowledge I use to support children is properly tested out in an ontologically congruent framework with academic rigour. To test out – to research – how we construct our Theraplay practice from maternal, relational ground, with confidence in our professional identity, we need to feel safe. It is in feeling safe, as Panksepp tells us, that we can then play (Davis and Montag, 2019; Panksepp, 2010). Play, in this argument I am making, and in the Theraplay model of work, is a central action and core concept in creating attachment-enhancing, healing relationship.

It is simple in practice, but so demanding in process. Recall the beanbag drops from last month; it’s not what you do, it’s the way you do it, and the way you do it is about the investment in the relationship. There is no separation between research and practice. Research is Theraplay because Theraplay is re-searching, RE-searching for and with those who come to see us in their distress. Relationship is, or can be, our fundamental position on what knowledge is of importance or of value to us to seek. Take the core concepts of Theraplay given in the title – interactive and relationship-based; focused on the here and now – Theraplay gives us process, practice, and philosophy on being relational. At the heart of that is the non-defensive confidence to be a person who wants to be in relationship to other people without losing one’s own identity and in delight at seeing the non-defensive, pain-free identity of the other emerge. 

In Research is Ceremony, the message I took was that to be committed to wandering hither and thither, to go in circles, to explore and re-search, is ultimately to look inwards and find one’s identity. I am not Indigenous in the way First Nations peoples use the term, and I thank Wilson for freeing me to be proud of and speak from my identity, of which the most powerful for me is that of being a mother. I can then bring that knowledge to re-search my Theraplay practice. To wander hither and thither, going in circles, and find the commonalities between myself and the children and families I have worked with. We are all struggling to be the person that (insert the most appropriate word for you – God, the universe, Mother Earth, a higher power) wants us to be. Poor Val is so irritated that churchy ideas keep intruding into her thinking about Joe, but now I look back on the story I created and think yes, my tacit knowing was far more aware than my conscious cognitive brain that the spiritual, in its broadest sense, is a part of Theraplay and therapy. 

Birthing and raising infants is about people perpetuating the species and their genetic capital (in man-stream, white-stream ways of science understanding) through keeping an infant alive and well in the present. This long-term goal probably does not become conscious unless there is an observer position; someone who might re-search the meaning of the actions in raising infants. If the person who is mothering is able to give themselves to the cycle of the immediate here and how imperative of feeding, cleaning, enjoying, playing, being absorbed in, being endlessly interrupted by the needs of the other, then the long term goal of a healthy happy small person growing to be a healthy happy big person who passes that on to others will be met (whatever the colour of their skin or gender or income or how that person understands their power in relation to you). The goal is met if the process is honoured.

Language does not really seem up to the task of what I am trying to say. Strip away all the complexities and nuances I’ve tried to address above, and the bottom line is that I am trying to write about love, and the need to bring love into our professional practice as therapists. Love is so simple, but it is so hard. I send you love in this written piece, whoever you are. Be yourself, love yourself, and in your practice, through the here and now direct experience of being with others, love through Theraplay. If you document that inner process, then Theraplay is research and research is Theraplay. If you live love in your practice, you will be making a difference to children and families who are experiencing the impact of relational and developmental trauma.

See you next month,

Fiona Peacock

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Next month

“I want to be a good one,” he said, and then he looked really serious. “Val, I don’t want to be a dad like my dad was to me and my mum. I’m not going to be like that, am I?”

Val longed to reach out and touch his hand. She could just see the little boy she was unable to catch in school when he was six. “The devil himself” one teacher had called him, but it was said with a smile. Joe somehow had always been able to do that – get people to love him despite his language and behaviour.

“Joe, you want to be a good dad, and you can be. Can you let people help you to do that?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Nickie has said she’ll help me and Shell. She was good to me; she never let me down. Even when I hurt her, she still came to see me. I said she was going to be Granny.”

A Necessary Life(Story), page 7.

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Bibliography

Davis, K. L., & Montag, C. (2019). Selected Principles of Pankseppian Affective Neuroscience. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12, 1025. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.01025

Etymology Online. (2018) Research. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/research. [Accessed 4 March 2023]

Lorde, A. (2018). The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. https://www.overdrive.com/search?q=8D57C658-66D4-401C-891E-9BC385F65341

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Panksepp, J. (2010). Affective neuroscience of the emotional BrainMind: Evolutionary perspectives and implications for understanding depression. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 12(4), 533–545. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2010.12.4/jpanksepp

Proctor, R., & Schiebinger, L. L. (Eds.). (2008). Agnotology: The making and unmaking of ignorance. Stanford University Press.

Stadlen, N. (2004). What mothers do: Especially when it looks like nothing. Piatkus.

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Wilson, S. (2008). Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Fernwood Publishing.