Conducting kinship…that’s what mothers do
Contents
Chapter 2: 16:00-17:00
Conducting kinship: finding a language for maternal leadership
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Introduction
Last month I began to rethink how we understand work, grounding it in tacit maternal knowing. My editor joked that reading it was like trying to hold a bar of soap – just as they thought they had something to grip, it slipped away. Their comment made me reread what I had already published on Substack – something I rarely do. Usually, the pressure to generate these posts each month means once one is complete, I am already submerging myself in the next one, but with summer easing my workload, I allowed myself that small luxury.
So what do I think I wrote last month?
That working in our m/other tongue values process over content – though here I am, content-driven, trying to get these posts to you.
That the boring, repetitive, and mundane - the domestic - are the work of our m/other tongue. Yet here I am each month seeking new ways to present old knowledge so it is no longer overlooked or dismissed.
That imagination itself is work, because it fosters empathy by letting us play with the troubled in our imaginal spaces. Like prayer, it keeps hope alive that change is possible.
That the most intractable problem is the least visible. Using our m/other tongue helps make that problem visible - not by being problem-saturated, but by noticing what is working well, then building on that.
Ah, sudden insight! That was why I couldn’t imagine the backstory for the second family! The problems ran so deep that it was harder to see the good stuff to build on. Perhaps that inability itself could serve as a diagnostic tool. If you can’t imagine a backstory that builds on good stuff, then the work ahead will be complex and demanding, as you are going to have to work hard to find the responsive, attuned, empathetic and reflective core concept of Theraplay.
So what about this month? I find myself drawn back to the first two points, because of the paradoxes they contain. This paradoxical positioning sits at the centre of my postdoctoral research: how do we reconcile the values of our m/other tongue with neoliberal, capitalist cultures in the global north – societies that call themselves ‘developed’? Unscrambling this incongruence is central to creating a useable theory that supports us in operationalising our m/other tongue - using our tacit maternal wisdom in our work as therapists, therapist educators, researchers, and leaders in organisations that care.
To be succinct: I’m trying to work out how to be a leader using tacit maternal knowing, when I don’t want to be the kind of person the word leader evokes for me.
Hopefully this month offers another step along that path.
Note: there are quite a few links to previous posts this month. If you’re new to the blog, I’d recommend following them, as they’ll help what you read here make more sense.
Part 1: Light
The rain was still relentless, its hammering on the windows echoing the rising din in the food hall.
Graham lifted his head slowly, dragged from his book by the savage percussion of the downpour and the deepening gloom outside. The clamour of voices felt almost like an assault. Val nodded in acknowledgment of the intensity that was seeping into both of them, and his head dipped again as he returned to his tablet. No longer able to engage with the book, he now prodded the screen with a finger, flicking randomly through apps, hoping for illumination.
“Ah! The forecast says we’re due three months’ worth of rain in the next three hours!” he exclaimed, glancing at the floor-to-ceiling window. The traffic was dense and a lot slower on both sides of the carriageway. The heavy clouds and the recent clock change made the arriving night seem unfamiliar and overwhelming.
“There’ll be a few washed-out Halloweens,” Val said, trying to distance herself from the sense of doom pressing in again. She tried to picture children joyfully knocking on doors with pumpkin lanterns, but here and now, with this black rain, the image faltered. All that would come to her mind was a shivering, skinny seven-year-old in a soaked sheet, clutching a bucket of rainwater rather than sweets.
“I reckon it’ll get more crowded in here too.” Graham commented. “Keep my seat - I’m going to use the gents before it gets too busy.” He stood up and put his bag on the chair for extra presence.
“Good luck!” she responded, not even bothering to feign joviality.
She picked up his tablet and opened the book he’d been reading. She felt exposed being there on her own, which surprised her. Before she’d known Graham, she had travelled extensively for her work, thinking nothing of stopping at places by herself. But now, having got used to there being two of them, she was also aware of his not-presence when he wasn’t there beside her – and she no longer had the mask of her professional self for protection.
She read a couple of paragraphs, not really understanding the words or the way they were put together, but, like Graham, feeling that there was something important within the book. Something that was pertinent to them, individually and together, and to each person in this room. Now she had more time in her life, she thought she could grapple with it - no, play with it - and see if she could entice out the meaning for herself. But not today.
Haraway. She got her phone out and started to search for the author. There were YouTube videos of her talking about the Chthulucene. In her head, though, the word was already becoming the Chthulusphere, as if this place, this moment, belonged to it, and she was inside. She wondered whether Donna Haraway would object to the mutation, or to the fact that Val could not even sound the word, only recognise its shape on the page.
She couldn’t watch the videos now - she didn’t have headphones. She didn’t want to add to the noise of the place, and wouldn’t be able to hear what Haraway was saying anyway. She just continued to explore the word on the internet, suspicious of these new AI summaries and trying to find something that Haraway herself had written that might be shorter and more digestible to her.
As she scrolled, she felt a tingle between her shoulder blades.
She was usually the one doing the watching, assuming others were unaware of her gaze. Her story meant she believed she was invisible, overlooked by every eye. But maybe it was like this – to be seen, to be watched, to know you were noticed. She kept her head bent towards her phone, scanning the room surreptitiously, trying to catch whoever might be looking at her.
By now, every seat was taken.
A group of children were sitting on the floor against the wall that separated the food hall from the serving areas. They were noisy, chattery, but oddly individual in their group. To Val, it looked like a school group. But also not. The group both lacked and had cohesion. It was hard to count the number of children as they never seemed to stop moving. Eight? Ten? Quite a lot of staff it seemed - five? They were all sat on the floor with the children.
Were they doing handstacks?
And that one, he seemed to be putting something on the head of one of the children. It looked like a serviette from the fast food outlet. And look! The child tipped their head forward and the serviette slithered off to be caught by the adult, who punched the air in triumph. Another child slid closer and the adult turned a little to face them and did the same activity. While he did, the first child leanted against him, seeming to enjoy the enjoyment of their peer.
Val realised she was staring openly and deliberately looked away. Theraplay? Here, in a service station? With a school party? Surely she was mistaken.
“Excuse me.”
The voice cut through the background buzz with sharp precision.
She froze, keeping her eyes down. Maybe someone was about to scold her for staring. It wouldn’t be the first time.
“Excuse me. Sorry,” the voice came again. Someone was edging towards her from the group, sidestepping between people, eyes fixed on her.
Val turned to look. A young man - though now anyone under forty felt young to her. He emerged from the crowd as if pulling himself free from sucking mud, shaking himself down. He was wearing jeans, trainers, and a hoodie with St Anthony’s Academy across the chest.
She met his gaze, smiled politely, and gave a small nod – acknowledging him but trying to keep it non-commital in case she was about to be challenged for staring.
But then it struck her: this started because she was the one being looked at.
“Are you Val Ingrams?”
“Yes!” Her voice lifted in surprise. She was trying to place the man but didn’t have a clue.
“You probably don’t remember me. You worked with a boy called Joe, years ago, in a school round here. I was a teaching assistant at the time, getting experience before my PGCE. I never forgot how you cared about him. It’s shaped the way I care for the children I work with now.”
“Did you do Theraplay training?” Val blurted, the question tumbling out before she could stop it. It felt random, but she was trying to make sense of why he was speaking to her, and what she had just seen in this unexpected place.
“Yes. Though I’ve had to adapt it – the training never quite fit with school life, so I’ve ended up doing… odd things with it.”
He was cut off by Graham’s return.
“Graham, this is…” Val faltered. She had no name.
“Daniel,” the young man supplied. “Daniel Partingrew.”
“Daniel uses Theraplay with his children.”
“The children I work with,” Daniel corrected her, as he held out his hand to shake Graham’s.
Val smiled. She recognised the clarity of commitment that stood behind those simply spoken words. They were children he cared for and cared about, and they weren’t ‘his’. He didn’t possess them.
“Do you want to come and meet them?” Daniel asked. Val thought he looked excited, proud - but also like he was seeking approval. There had been a hint of caution in his admission that he’d adapted the model for a school setting.
She looked at Graham. Their conversation was silent.
Do you mind?
Of course not! I’ll keep your seat for you.
So she rose and followed Daniel across the crowded hall, weaving between tables, bags, damp coats, and people hunched over trays.
Once they reached the group, there was no choice but to sit on the floor with them. Once she did, it felt good. It felt like her again – not all of her, but a remembered part, an echo of something she had no desire to return to, but which had been such a place of joy.
“Everyone,” Daniel announced, “this is Mrs Ingrams. She helped me decide what sort of teacher I wanted to be, a long time ago.”
There was a gaggle of voices. How do you know Sir? Did you teach him? What was he like when he was little?
She laughed, raising her hands in mock surrender. Should she correct the Mrs? Usually she did. The title Doctor gave her authority, even when she spoke of play, love, fun, and kindness – it made her harder to dismiss. It also shielded her from the lingering shame of still being a Miss at her age.
Daniel stepped in before she could answer. “I was a teaching assistant, and Mrs Ingrams used to come and see a child at the school. It was close to here – that’s how I knew about this service station. That boy was like some of you. He was looked after and found school hard, but Mrs Ingrams helped him, and helped all of us staff understand what was happening for him. I never forgot.”
“Please, call me Val,” she said. That avoided the issue of titles and surnames and let her settle as herself, not as a role. How did she want to be here? Who did she want to care about? She paused… all of them, really. And herself, she realised – surprised that she had included herself at all. She’d clearly made a difference once, though she didn’t even remember this Daniel Partingrew. Another odd feeling, another unfamiliarity.
Daniel introduced all the children and his staff. He did call them that, his staff. Val noted that, knew it was important. How it mattered would emerge in time. For now, her task was simply to be present. She knew she wouldn’t remember all the names, and she was puzzled that neither names nor clothes gave her any easy way of working out who was a boy or who was a girl. Perhaps it didn’t matter.
Her head spun as children and adults chattered at her, sharing fragments about their school, their trip, their teachers, their hopes. Every so often, she stole a glance across at Daniel. He was constantly putting a hand on an arm or shoulder - a small touch of reassurance or guidance, just part of their ordinary conversation. His face lit up with enjoyment and pride at the children he was working with, and, she noticed, the grown-ups too. They seemed to have connection, the same kind of unspoken conversations that she and Graham were learning to trust.
“Tell me more about your school, Mr Partingrew,” she asked, using his formal name as she knew the children would be listening.
“We’re so lucky,” he said. “We have a special unit where children who are finding big classes too much can come and we can help them with how to make friends and how to keep their friends by making things okay again when they go wrong. Once we’ve done that, they usually want to go back to the bigger classrooms again. We’ve just been on a field trip to Norfolk, to see how cliffs are formed and how they’re being eroded.”
“That sounds like fun,” Val said, half-expecting the usual teacherly response – an eye-roll to say that was hard work, paired with the incongruous words, of course it was fun.
Daniel's response was straightforward.
“Yes, it was. We all had to work really hard because it’s difficult to keep your friendships when you’re in a tent together 24/7. But we did keep working at it. I’m so proud of every single member of the team.”
The smile spread across his face unbidden, overtaking him. His pride was genuine, and it was clear that for him “the team” included not just the grown-ups but the children as well.
Val had gathered that the school lay only thirty miles up the road.
“How come you’ve stopped here?” she asked. “You must be nearly home.”
One of the adults interrupted. “Sorry, Mr Partingrew. I’ve got all their orders – can I have the school card to pay?”
Daniel glanced at the tablet that the teacher was holding out, checking that the orders were right for everyone: no-one doing themselves out of pleasure, and no-one over-purchasing.
He nodded, handing a credit card to the teacher. “Thanks for doing that. Can you just check with Mia? That one’s got gherkins – see if she wants them taken out.”
The teacher went off to the ordering screens, pausing to check in with a child on the way. Val was relieved she wasn’t the one trying to input all the various requests and requirements from children and grown-ups alike. She was curious about Daniel's comment on gherkins. Did he really know the children that well? And then, just as impressive, he picked up his thread again as if he hadn’t been interrupted.
“The sat nav showed the motorway blocked ahead,” he said. “We’d just passed the previous turn-off, so there was no way we could find an alternative route, and it would have been too much for everyone to be stuck in the mini bus in a traffic jam.” He rubbed his eyes and let out a quiet sigh. “We are all pretty tired, and I didn’t want our time to end with frustration like that. I thought we could stop for something to eat and enjoy our last bit of time together before everyone goes back to their homes.”
Another member of staff turned to Daniel. “I’ve managed to get through to them now. Sandra is letting parents and carers know we’re going to be late. She’ll get messages back to us to read out to the children so they know home will be waiting for them.”
“Thanks, Gina,” Daniel said. Then to Val: “Some of the children were terrified the trip was a ruse – that we’d use it to change their placements. So we asked carers to send daily messages, just to reassure them their homes would still be there when they got back. And we got the camp to stop using black bin liners.”
Val could see the toll it had taken on him, this relentless attention to detail. She knew exactly why black bin liners would trigger the children but suspected most of the world wouldn’t have a clue. She had felt alongside children the devastation of seeing everything you thought was home jumbled in those throw-away bags and having no idea if what was precious to you had been included.
She reached out and laid a hand on Daniel’s arm. She didn’t think about it; it was simply an acknowledgement, a quiet I know you know. Daniel looked down and then met her eyes and smiled. His body posture changed, enough grown up talk, it said. Time to attend to the important ones here. He wanted Val to see - he needed some validation himself, of how he was caring for the children he was with.
“Did you really teach Sir how to do handstacks?” one of the children asked.
“She sure did!” Daniel chipped in. Val felt both embarrassed and full of pride that her practice had been making such a big difference and she had been utterly unaware of it.
“Has he taught you thumbstacks?” she asked.
“No!” the child shot back, eyes widening, then flicked a cheeky look at Daniel, delighted to expose something he didn’t know.
“I’ll show you,” Val said, the Theraplay way of don’t ask, but look for consent coming straight back to her.
The child - she thought they were a girl, with hair braided and tied back - settled onto their bottom, legs crossed, moving to be directly in front of Val. That was the agreement, the consent, the desire to connect. If ever there was confirmation that the child was open to touch and to play, this was it.
Together, they enjoyed an exhilarating activity of thumb stacking.
Conducting kinship: finding a language for maternal leadership
Last month, I had a little whinge about how the invisible work of m/othering rarely gets noticed or appreciated – and lo and behold, the fiction handed me exactly what I’d been asking for. My heuristic inquiry reflections this month have nudged me to think about the problems that come with being seen, or with seeing yourself differently from how others see you.
Val is confronted with the fact that she made a difference years ago. She can’t avoid the fact that she led Daniel into a career choice that is vocation for him. She has to face the reality that she had an impact – and, crucially, that it was the impact she always wanted. Daniel is now caring for, and caring about, the children entrusted to him.
This is what I wanted for Val in her professional life (and for myself in mine): to make a positive difference for children and families. Yet I find it strangely hard to accept that she is a leader – and that I too might be a leader without betraying my values.
My lived experience is one of feeling that my specialist knowledge has been unseen and ignored, because it arises from conception, gestation, and birth – from being a mother. So I found myself facing yet another paradox, to sit alongside the two I named in this month’s introduction: how can I be a leader while staying true to the values of our m/other tongue, and without losing connection to the driving intention of my vocation - making a positive difference to children and families?
Through bumping into information (Erdelez, 1999), I found myself connected with the literature of followership. That gave me a stepping stone for thinking about what it might mean to lead with our m/other tongue, and whether that can even be expressed in words.
Interestingly, the paper that most shaped my thinking came from the British Army: Followership Doctrine Note, 2023. It stresses the importance of shared values, and of living out those values in action, as aspects of character. This embodiment of a shared value system is presented as central to the servant leader/servant follower relationship. I found myself nodding along with much of it – and at the same time jarred by the fact that it was written by the Army, especially while I’ve been so affected by the devastation of wars around the world.
Another paper, Goel et al. (2025), made a direct link between followership and attachment security, thus connecting the concept to the core theory underpinning Theraplay. Keeley (1992, 2008), often credited with beginning to define followership theory, identifies different types of follower. The table below is my attempt to synthesise these papers through a Theraplay lens.
While this is just my first foray into the literature on followership, it got me thinking about where m/others fit within this leadership/followership framework. I would suggest that operationalising our m/other tongue – that is, leading as Theraplayers in our roles as therapists, educators, researchers, and managers – is essentially a form of being exemplary followers.
This idea feels paradoxical to me, so I’ve spent time reflecting on what I mean by it over the course of my research this month. I return to Ann Jernberg, who, to paraphrase, suggests that everything we need to know about being a Theraplayer can be learned by looking at the basics of how a mother interacts with an infant (Jernberg 1979, p.4). Mothers, in the idealised sense I am using to inform this theory of our m/other tongue, are exemplary followers of their baby’s needs. Their mission is to enable the defenceless infant to survive and thrive through maturation. As the child grows, the mother (and, developmentally appropriately, the father) gradually begin to delegate to the infant the tasks that they are developmentally able to achieve.
Through such followership, the m/other is also fulfilled, because of the values and purpose shared between her and the infant, between her and her immediate group or family, and, in an ideal world, between her, her immediate group/family, and wider society. Over the course of the month, however, I began to question whether this idea might be too simplistic – but I don’t have an answer yet. The concept is too new to me. I have to remind myself that these posts are ‘open air’ research; I can’t present the fully formed theory all at once. I’ve deliberately chosen not to do all the research in private and then present polished conclusions to the world. Instead, I invite you to watch my ideas grow in fits and starts, with stumbles and moments of incomplete development – yes, much like watching children grow.
Playing around with the idea of exemplary followership as a way to lead with our m/other tongue made me realise that the language of leadership and followership is restrictive at best, disabling at worst. I found Lakoff and Johnson (1999, 2003) useful because they unpack how language reflects inner pictures of meaning and, potentially, power – that is, metaphors. Revisiting their ideas while constructing this post, helped by Frazer & Yunkaporta (2019) and Rhode et al. (2016) , and questioning whether there is a theory could help us operationalise our m/other tongue, I reached a different conclusion: for me, words are not simply metaphors in the way Lakoff and Johnson describe.
Lakoff and Johnson see language as metaphors related to the embodied mind. For me, words are shortcuts to affective states held at the tacit level which position me in a particular relationship to that word. They are embodied, but not at the level of cognition, because tacit knowledge is acquired through countless bodily actions (Polanyi 2009, p.15: “Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical”).
This distinction is fundamental to my understanding of leading as an exemplary follower: the language of such a theory does not need to be cognitively processed to be real. To share understanding, however – whether between you and me, therapist and client, educator and student – we must connect at an affective level, not a cognitive one. By affective, I mean embodied, non-verbal feeling states. This aligns with the Theraplay core concept of pre-verbal, social and right-brained, but it’s difficult for our language-based culture of work and study to accept that such experiences are real.
For me, words are punctuation points in tacit knowing – little moments when knowing moves from process to product. When knowing becomes knowledge, words become fixed markers - but the knowing has already moved on, because process is never fixed. To be stuck with words, to be too anchored to the product of the process, fossilises knowledge and makes it harder to generate new meaning, and so makes it harder to grow and develop. This then traps me in old patterns of affect responses that are not fulfilling and do not fit with the values that I now hold and prize - bi-directional mutual caring for and caring about.
Consequently, the words leadership and followership take on divided and polarised meanings for me:
No wonder I’m struggling to create a theory of exemplary followership if this is the internal construct I carry. Leadership becomes restrictive for me because it is a shortcut to, and experience of, a power hierarchy shaped by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The terms leadership and followership turn into binary, oppositional pairings.
What I found so helpful about the British Army paper was that it highlighted the internal war I carry inside me all the time. I touched on this in July 2025, when I wrote about how my commitment to care – my values – seemed to be turned against me in the way I construct my place as a woman and a mother who cares in this world. My pre-verbal, right-brained, social sense-making of early experiences left me with an internal working model that says women can’t be leaders unless they become oppressors.
But Val in this story is a leader – she just doesn’t know it, and she didn’t even realise she had a follower. Invisible leadership, in taking the communication of the infant and meeting the needs that the infant doesn’t know they have, is what mothers do to enable children to be and become. This leadership/followership dynamic allows the infant to move from dependence to interdependence via safe experimentation with independence in both toddlerhood and adolescence (see June and August posts of this year).
The challenge is finding language for this that doesn’t trigger unhelpful, oppositional, warlike affective states. Those divisions make me a grumpy leader/follower, feeling like I have no autonomy – I risk becoming a spoiler or alienated follower. I use “I” a lot here because this is such a new way of thinking that I don’t yet want to claim it as theory. I don’t know if it will withstand scrutiny or resonate beyond my own experience. Remember our heuristic question: this is how it is for me – is it like this for you too? As Moustakas (1990, p.15) says, “with every question that matters personally there is also a social – and perhaps universal – significance.”
Foulkes (1990, 2005), the founder of group analytic psychotherapy, doesn’t talk about leading groups; he talks about conducting them. He emphasises that the purpose of a group is therapy for the group, by the group, and of the group, including the conductor. Conducting holds elements of:
Orchestral conducting – drawing together totally different instruments and music to enable purposeful harmony or disharmony.
Bus conductor (for those old enough to remember them) - someone who manages our journey: setting boundaries of acceptable behaviour, telling us where to get on and off, and taking the appropriate fare. (For younger readers, think train conductors – though in my imagination they are less benign than bus conductors!)
Lightning conductor – being present to divert destructive, overwhelming forces, minimising potential damage.
I’m sure in future posts I will expand on the idea of conducting in relation to the four dimensions of Theraplay, as well as on how we discharge our leadership, conductorship, or m/othering role through the nine core concepts.
For now, Foulkes has helped me consolidate my thoughts on what leadership using our m/other tongue aims for, and also on finding a language that works for it. My desire is to make a positive difference for children and families – but what does that really mean? Foulkes identified that the cause of distress in humankind is feeling excluded from the group (2005), and that alleviating distress involves moving from separation into a state of interdependence (to put my words to what he says). He explicitly says that the job of the conductor is to wean the group off their desire to be led (2005, p.134). I’ve always felt that his theory sits comfortably with Theraplay (Peacock, 2023).
The term conducting evokes far more helpful affective states for me than leadership or followership, both of which trigger inner conflict (as illustrated in the second table of this post). When the relationship of the more powerful to the less powerful is framed as a battle, how can it avoid becoming profoundly painful, perpetually antagonistic, and ultimately destructive. Such use of power over others excludes the other - it Others - and can lead to violence – sometimes slow, insidious violence (Cremin 2025) that becomes normalised.
The example that sticks in my mind from Cremin’s work is how access to toilets can be so policed in some schools. It reminded me of where this fiction started - with Val needing to use the toilets at the service station - and how even basic bodily necessities can become sites where toxic leadership exercises power over passive followers.
The patriarchy becomes a battlefield when followers refuse the passive position and stop following, so need to be “put in their place”. In leadership that relies on power over others, I don’t think it’s feasible to be an exemplary follower, because there is no shared focus or mission.
Looking at the characters in the fiction, Val has been an alienated follower, fighting the system for children but doing so with anger and now feeling depleted. Graham is a pragmatic follower, finding ways to survive his childhood (though you don’t know that yet). My tacit wisdom is starting to reveal a number of exemplary followers to study – Daniel, Christiana, and the unnamed young man with his younger sister.
Haraway (2016) introduces a whole new way of thinking about kinship and interdependence – something that goes beyond humankind, suggesting that all of creation is interconnected and interdependent.
Daniel affirms something for Val about her leadership, though the meaning seeps through as slowly for her as it does for me (well, it would, wouldn’t it? I’m writing her!). Later in the fiction, it is this internal shift in the meaning of leadership that allows Val to reconcile with her mother. Something changes within her, and she is no longer “stuck” in the antagonistic position created by the patriarchal view of leadership and followership. In her professional and personal life, she becomes a Theraplayer, able to conduct discord, make connection, and nurture kinship.
Part of this shift involves accepting that discord is a necessary part of human relationships. It is not a failure of leadership or followership. In attachment literature, such moments are called ruptures – unavoidable for humankind, but necessary for maturation and the fulfilment of becoming one’s self. Discord and rupture are not bad: they are the moments where dependence and independence move towards interdependence when the discordance and ruptures are addressed. Distress is alleviated, as Foulkes would say, when a person feels they belong again. This is what Daniel is aware he needs to conduct for the children he works with: the biggest learning and the biggest challenge is discovering how to get along without fighting. That, for him, is the focus of the field trip – not the factual lessons about the formation and erosion of cliffs.
If we embody rupture and repair, rather than teach it purely cognitively, this could act as early intervention, preventing the kinds of ruptures that escalate into the extreme violence we see in the world today. Rupture with repair fosters resilience and connection, preventing violence from spiralling into destruction.
To me, conducting – as an umbrella term over those of leadership and followership – captures the complexity of our work. There is space for all tones and tunes in our world, and themes and journeys need time to develop. Daniel takes many years to follow the leadership that Val unknowingly offered through being an exemplary follower of Joe. He matured into a professional who serves. Val doesn’t experience the “feeds” that come from being a leader until Daniel is fully formed as a leader in his own right. She enabled, not dictated, what his leadership could be. Daniel illustrates the fluid shift between leading and following in how he conducts the people he works with. He demonstrates the wisdom to move moment by moment, relationally, from leader to follower and back, to ensure goals are met and all can thrive. He conducts the process of becoming kin, people becoming themselves and learning how to live together in a way that they can process the conflicts that arise without resorting to violence.
So, what have I learnt this month about leading with our m/other tongue – in whatever part of my personal or professional life I might contemplate?
Our leadership is that of conductors. We follow, we guide, and we ensure that challenge is not destructive – by checking in, by making sure people’s choices are manageable, and by gently suggesting alternatives when needed.
The potency of this fluid, situation-dependent, relational, moment-by-moment “flow” is invisible in frameworks that demand things be fixed and predictable.
The gap between influence and maturation is important. The invisibility of the leader may even be a necessary part of conducting, because the focus should be on the process, not the product or the people of the process. Tacit knowing takes time to mature. Just as children need time to grow, leaders who conduct with our m/other tongue also take time to mature.
Disruption, rupture, and conflict are signs of healthy systems – without them there would be no growth. The conductor, the m/other, enables those ruptures to be repaired.
I wonder if one of the tools of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is rigidity – suppressing rebellion by disabling people from declining to follow. By insisting on fixed positions and products rather than processes, the leader/follower dichotomy is perpetuated. If someone stops following, they are cast as spoilers or alienators, marked with negativity, and the pain of exclusion is severe.
The reason I chose not to use Keeley’s term ‘stars’ for exemplary followers is that it felt infantilising, stirring up unhelpful affective responses. It risked suggesting that followers might be emasculated and have limited sense of agency about the focus or mission they are recruited to. To avoid exclusion, they may end up pursuing a mission not fully congruent with their values – which takes me full circle to where I began this month’s reflections.
In conducting kinship, in leading through our m/other tongue, I want to stop simply following and start being part of an orchestra – taking my turn as conductor when I hold expertise in that piece of music (for example, when I promote the idea that we could make a greater positive difference for children and families if we lived by our m/other tongue). Or, what I think I am doing in these posts - being a bus/train conductor: helping people on and off, and offering guidance about the route we’re taking.
As Jernberg reminds us (to expand and paraphrase), everything we need to know about becoming a Theraplayer can be learned by observing a mother and her infant. Infants grow into children, young adults, adults, and, sometimes, parents themselves – whether through raising children or in other forms of mothering and fathering. Parents in turn become cared for by children. How we use our m/other tongue to conduct ourselves in the world is an ever-changing, contextual, and slow process – one that demands both wisdom and connection to others.
Addition for the m/other-us-all
Don’t be seduced by the manstream idea that the purpose of life is completion and harmony. Embrace, as much as you can, and from the place of our m/other tongue, the process of moving between positions. Develop skills in the juggling act of keeping both content and process, repetitive/boring and unique/novel, as equal in value and deserving of internal respect. Juggling is difficult. You will drop balls. But such ruptures are the pathway to the resilience of kinship when repair is embraced.
Announcement
And here's another paradox for you - I am seeking followers! I am enjoying the challenge of being concise and practical as I try to widen the reach of Theraplay to all families.
I have recently started a Facebook page and Instagram account where I am sharing Theraplay tips for families. If this may be of interest to you, please do follow them yourself, and if you are aware of families who you think may benefit, do invite them to follow too!
Facebook: @FionaPeacockCounselling
Instagram: @peacock_counselling
Theraplay UK also have a wonderful programme called Parenting with Theraplay, and if that is of interest, you can contact admin@theraplay.org.uk for more information.
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