There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.
Overview: September 2023
This month’s fiction is: There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.
This month’s application posts are:
Theraplay is guided by the adult: Applications for practitioners
Not a victim or a survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts: Applications for educators
I am tempted to start this month's set of posts by saying ‘hello, fellow grapplers’ in recognition that we are wallowing together in that phase of knowledge discovery through Heuristic Inquiry that I termed wrestling (see Merging back to Earth: Applications for researchers).
This month we are exploring the core concept that Theraplay is guided by the adult. My ‘sinking into’ the concept led to the following piece of fiction. Please don’t judge my plot holes! Remember, this is fiction creation to make space for my tacit knowing to emerge into the realm of tacit knowledge. This instalment takes place a few months after the last. Val learns an unhappy truth about her pension and discovers she has to return to work for a bit. Following the fiction, in the application posts for practitioners, researchers, and educators, I attempt to shift the tacit knowledge illuminated by this fiction into something that is more explicit and usable. It all feels ‘work in progress’, so I’d be delighted for your comments, as this would be part of us co-creating new understandings of our work.
There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.
Val breathed in. The air felt so hot it could stifle her; it was as if she couldn’t tell her in-breath from her out. The river here, just outside County Hall, didn’t flow as fast as it did further upstream. Here, once it had passed the weir and the supermarket, once it had flowed under the town bridge, it sprawled out into the bulging loop that made County Hall feel like being on an island. It was slow, as if it, too, was suffocating. Sound itself seemed sucked into the sluggish water. Leaves floated, spinning around on themselves, not quite sure if they were moving with the water or not. Val let out a sigh as she sat, needing to be outside, needing to seek some air, hoping the river would bring some relief.
It was her first day back at work. She couldn’t help but find her mind pulled back to that day, so long ago, when she struggled to find a parking space here and thought she would be late for her first ever meeting about Milo. That had been a long time ago! When she’d received the letter – well, the email – with her start date, she’d asked about the staff canteen; they used to make fabulous homemade cookies. The receptionist didn’t even know there had been one. Now it was a lounge for the councillors. So Val made her own sandwiches.
Sighing some more, she broke off a crust and threw it toward the river with more intensity than she realised was in her. There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.
“Hello!” It was a stranger's voice, but not unfamiliar. Val looked up, startled, and found that unexpectedly brought her out of her misery.
“Oh, hi!” She said. Her voice and face were suddenly transformed by the voice and the face of the other. It was Grace! She hadn’t seen Grace since… since Joe had to leave his school when the new head arrived, and since she had to draw their work to a close.
Grace clearly had been going somewhere. Her walk was purposeful, and as she strode on, Val could feel herself sinking back into her breadcrumb assault on nothing in particular. Grace must have been about 20 metres beyond Val when she decisively turned around and came back towards her.
“May I sit with you?” She asked.
“Of course!” Val felt the smile return to her face. She’d always valued Grace’s directness. Grace brought Val a smile that filled her soul and lifted the heaviness of her heart that had propelled her to come out into the midday sun when most other people were taking shelter. The heavy silence seemed to lift a little. Was that a dog barking?
“Why don’t we sit around here?” Grace suggested. Val hadn’t seen the bench tucked back in the shade of a bush, even though it was only a couple of metres away. She must have stormed right by it. Grace’s suggested move brought immediate relief from some of the oppressive intensity of the sun.
“I haven’t seen you in ages!” They started to say in unison. “What are you doing now?” They overlapped again. The smiles between them giggled at the perfectly okay-ness of talking over each other.
“What are you doing here? I heard you’d retired.” Grace was asking.
“Well…” Val started, but realised she didn’t want to tell the whole stupid story, not now, not in this sudden pleasurable place of the unexpected meeting with Grace. “The pension didn’t quite work out,” she decided to say. “I need to earn a bit for a while, so I’ve got a temporary post as a family support worker.” A duck quacked. It must have found the soggy crust, Val thought, and was then overwhelmed with guilt as she remembered you weren’t meant to feed bread to ducks. Had she poisoned it?
“Oh, they must feel so lucky to have you!” Grace exclaimed.
Lucky was probably not a word Val would apply to her current situation. She had diligently paid into her pension scheme for the duration of her working life. She even thought that she’d be in a better place than some of her peers who had taken time out to first care for their children and then, later in their careers, had to stop working again to take care of ageing parents.
A child of Thatcher, she hadn’t really thought much about the private pension scheme she entrusted her money to: the annual statements seemed positive. Even when her pension age as a woman was increased by the government, she trusted that she could still retire at 60 because of the payments she’d made. So it had been a heart-sinking shock when she received the news that the company had gone into administration. Yes, she’d get compensation – the company was covered for that – but it might be a couple of years before that came through. In the meantime, she just needed to pay her bills.
So here she was, sitting through a new worker's induction, feeling foolish, embarrassed, and angry, and at the same time so sorry for the young woman who was trying to offer information about health and safety, safeguarding, and record-keeping.
To be a victim. It had been a whole new level of learning at a time in her life when she felt she no longer wanted to learn. She thought she’d done all that in the years of therapy she’d embraced during her training and throughout her working life. Stuff the big stories of ‘I’m a survivor not a victim’, maybe that would come later, but now, yes, she felt she was a victim, subject to power she couldn’t engage with. So here she was – if she wanted to eat and pay her bills – back at the bottom of the ladder, having to learn the basics of how to define different sorts of abuse and at what point she had to tell her line manager.
Before the first day of her induction, she had worked hard to package up and put to one side her hurt. She worked hard to retain and renew the sense of curiosity that had always been at the heart of her work. In fact, up until now, lunchtime on day one of this three-week induction, she had allowed her curiosity to flow with questions and examples from her practice. She noticed that the trainer was increasingly shuffling papers and pushing her glasses up her nose.
And what would my line manager do then? It had been a genuine question – she’d not been on this side of the system before. She wanted to know where the manager would go with the safeguarding concern. The PowerPoint slide the trainer was showing only showed the system to the point of what they should do if they had concerns.
At lunchtime, the others quickly departed the room. Val gathered her papers, shuffling through, trying to find the first slide again with the name of their trainer. She heard a cough behind her and turned. It was … again she couldn’t recall his name. Her manager-to-be, met at the interview.
“Um, Mrs ….” This name thing seemed to be catching.
“Val.” She helped him, wondering if she should also add “Doctor”.
“Yes, could you step into my office for a moment.” He didn’t make eye contact and seemed to be dusting imaginary dust from his shirt – no tie, sleeves half rolled up.
Nicholas Simon, Family Support Team Manager, his office door declared as he led her in. He didn’t indicate a seat for her and went behind the desk, remaining standing himself.
“Thing is,” he was searching his mind, “Val.” Momentarily, he looked her in the eyes before looking back to his desk, clear except for the computer keyboard and monitor. “Cynthia tells me you are interrupting the learning for others with your constant challenges. We do have an anti-bullying policy in place, it was included in your joining pack.”
He sat down and pulled his keyboard towards him. Val opened her mouth, she had only wanted to ask what her line manager would do if she reported a safeguarding concern; she was still genuinely curious. The face of her manager-to-be told a different story. Questions were not good, questions were disruptive, questions were a form of bullying because they would take people to places that either they couldn’t or would prefer not to go. For the first time in her career, she felt utterly, utterly bereft. Devastated to her core. She turned and left the room, needing some air.
Val became aware that Grace was speaking again.
“I went on to do my Theraplay training. It was what you said when we were working together, it made me want to understand it more. I’m certified now.”
Val tried to smile, but it was difficult to balance out the demands of her face – the cheeks that wobbled with emotion and tears, and the cheeks that wanted to smile with the thought of the delight Grace must bring to the work with the children and families she cared about. Grace didn’t look at her, they remained sitting side by side, and Grace put her hand over Val’s.
“Some things,” she said, “are bigger than us.”
The tears silently slid down Val’s face, but her back was straight and her head up. She felt Grace’s hand gently pat hers as the two women sat silently beside each other and the river moved slowly past them.
Application posts
If you want to read about how this informed my understanding of practice: Theraplay is guided by the adult: Applications for practitioners
As painful as it may be, the core concept of therapy being guided by an adult, when informed by tacit maternal knowing, requires the therapist to commit to interdependence with the people they are working with. This brings about an imperative to integrate all aspects of being. The fiction highlights the challenge of this by bringing the drama out of the therapy room, and points to the self-work that therapists have to undertake.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner research: Stop poisoning the absent ducks – what is being ‘guided by the adult’ in research?: Applications for researchers
This reflection takes on the notion of the mother being a body of knowledge that is creative and protective of that creation. By taking the experience of becoming a mother, it suggests we can reconnect with a re-humanising ontology and epistemology to fulfil the vocation Paulo Freire identifies, and, in the metaphor of the fiction, creativity can be good food to invite research ducks to appear on the scene.
If you want to read about how the fiction informed my understanding of practitioner education: Not a victim or a survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts: Applications for educators
We can choose to bring the right adult functioning to each of our actions as a therapist, and we position ourselves in relation to a specific form of belief about what knowledge is important to know for the purpose of our work as therapist educators. This can underpin how we then select those people who may have the capacity to become Theraplay or therapeutic practitioners. As Theraplay (and more subtly in other models) is guided by the adult, so therapeutic education is guided by the therapist educator to shepherd the trainee into the discipline. Taking that notion of discipline gives us an idea of the qualities of: faithfulness to values; teachability/capacity to not know; availability/capacity to work interdependently; and the capacity to believe or trust in something beyond the concrete and cognitive.
Bibliography
This bibliography covers all four of the September 2023 posts.
Aleknaviciute, J., Evans, T. E., Aribas, E., De Vries, M. W., Steegers, E. A. P., Ikram, M. A., Tiemeier, H., Kavousi, M., Vernooij, M. W., & Kushner, S. A. (2022). Long-term association of pregnancy and maternal brain structure: The Rotterdam Study. European Journal of Epidemiology, 37(3), 271–281. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-021-00818-5
Blakemore, S.-J. (2018). Inventing ourselves: The secret life of the teenage brain. Black Swan.
Cave, N The Red Hand Files (Issue #248) https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster-and-easier/
Freire, P. (1985). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin.
Gerhardt, S. (2004). Why love matters: How affection shapes a baby’s brain. Brunner-Routledge.
Jones, L. F. (2023). Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood. Allen Lane.
Kim, P., Strathearn, L., & Swain, J. E. (2016). The maternal brain and its plasticity in humans. Hormones and Behavior, 77, 113–123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yhbeh.2015.08.001
McKay, S. (2018). Women’s Brain Book: How Your Life Shapes Your Brain and Your Brain Shapes Your Life. Hachette Australia.
Peacock, F. (2020). A Necessary Life(Story): A Novella as Research Process and Findings. Peacock Counselling Ltd.
Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of the relationship to the world (J. C. Wagner, Trans.). Polity.
Sunderland, M. (2006). Science of parenting: Practical guidance on sleep, crying, play, and building emotional well-being for life. Dorling Kindersley.