Theraplay is guided by the adult: Applications for practitioners
“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.
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
In reflecting on the core concept of Theraplay being guided by the adult, I have felt preoccupied with the question of – what is a grown-up? And how do they lead? I’m not sure how I morphed the term adult into grown-up, nor ‘guide’ into ‘lead’, but it feels significant in terms of wondering about the attributes that we bring to the work that draws on … what? What is it that this month's fiction is trying to bring to my conscious attention from the non-verbal, embodied, tacit realm?
I am suggesting, from my EdD work, that in Theraplay the internal material I am drawing on is tacit maternal knowing, a specific process of engagement that for me comes from my experience of being a mother who carried and gave birth and breastfed my infants. I don’t think I really grew up until I became a mother and something changed within me.
Jones (2023) adds a different angle to this lived experience that my body and soul says is utterly significant in my understanding of this ‘guided by the adult’ aspect of my clinical work - Theraplay or otherwise. In Matrescence, she gave me a steer to look at the neurobiology of motherhood. You will see some of the texts and papers that are crossing my path in the bibliography for this month's posts.
Therapeutic theory, including that which informs Theraplay, can focus on the neurobiology and neurodevelopment of people at different stages of development, Gerhardt, Blakemore, and Sunderland being oft quoted in relation to infancy, adolescence, and parenting respectively. But where is the literature on the neurobiology of motherhood? Although Sunderland talks about the science of parenting, her focus is on what the adult does that impacts on the child’s brain, not on what is going on in the brain of the mother and father (or the people who take on those aspects of the parental function).
The interplay between the characters in this fiction reminds me that I do live in a culture where precedence is given to logical, sequential, and ‘science-based’ forms of knowing and knowledge, even though I feel personally devalued by them. If I am to spread the message about working pre-verbally, maternally and with very, very young developmental process, and probably if I am to heal what feels like the aggressive battle between male and female within me – as touched on last month – then I do need to find a way to enable these two sides to dialogue within me, as well as in the professional discourse of our work. It is not either/or. It is both/and.
For maximum benefit for the children we work with, the campaigning, battling voice I found in the more rarefied arena of research during my EdD process now has to find a way to converse with the real lived lives of professionals working in systems that are not familiar with, and don’t value, the way of being that I see as the heart of being a Theraplay practitioner. Val is having a painful coming together of those two parts.
One of the ducks Val is feeding with her poisonous bread is that sense of if she allows in the ‘other’ sort of knowledge, she will be annihilated, and it will devalue all she has done in her professional life. Her worth will only be measured by the monetary comfort she is able to access in retirement.
If we go back to the birth stories for Val and Grace in A Necessary Life(Story), Val is born into financial security but emotional poverty – she has the lived experience of being ‘ghosted’ as ‘the wrong sort’: female. When I use the term ‘ghosted’, I am thinking about the fight from last month's fiction, where Val tries to address the ‘ghost’ between the couple that they are both fighting without realising it.
It was pointed out to me that young people (in comparison to me) who use their phones have a specific meaning for the term ‘ghosting’, and I think it fits well for the experience Val had – a sudden, inexplicable withdrawal of connection when she, as an infant, didn’t know why, leaving her with the emotional response of abandonment and emotional poverty. Val felt othered. In her therapeutic work, she is trying to engage with that othering experience and the hurt that goes with it. Now back in a workplace, she is experiencing the devastation of being othered again.
Grace, however, is born into an experience of abundance where her femaleness is welcomed and delighted in within a household of maleness. My imagination cast her with different othernesses – a Black woman who grew up on a farm in Norfolk and who is very aware of the systemic impact of racism, even between her and Val as they work together to help Joe.
Val struggles to accept and work creatively with the experience of feeling her maternal wisdom is still of value when she comes up against that direct ghost of her early experience. Bumping up against emotional poverty in someone who she perceives to have power over her, namely the young trainer talking about things Val already feels she knows, and who can’t cope with the liberal curiosity Val brings to learning, feels hostile. It puts Val back in touch with her core distress that maybe can never be wholly taken away, just understood and sat alongside: that core distress of being the wrong sort for her mother. Her early experience was that the powerless should be in service of the powerful, not vice versa, which is a fundamental aspect of where I see tacit maternal knowing as an aspect of therapeutic practice being different. It is willingly using our power in the service of the less powerful other.
Is this a learning for how we use our maternal “guided by the adult” skills? Not pretending something doesn’t hurt but staying alongside and creating a forum where there is containment? Creating a space for support and transformation, that means the hurt isn’t a ghost as it is in the first story, barely perceptible, but a duck – something that sits in the boundary between unconscious and consciousness? The duck turns up even when the food being provided is bad for it. As an adult providing guidance in therapy, part of leadership may be to stop feeding the ducks bad food because it will still be consumed and will still perpetuate unhealthy habits of relationship.
The grown-up-ness of Theraplay and therapeutic leadership in the session is to be contingent, is to be aware of where the deep old ghostly, ducky stories still get in the way of connection and valuing of everything of self and everything of other.
As practitioners, we seek to feed ducks healthily, working at that interface between the unconscious/internal working model of those we see, while feeding the above the water level of knowledge and lived experience of attachment as we believe it to be the best thing for people. There is an inherent tension between our assumption of what ‘good’ looks like and what good ‘feels like’ for the less powerful person (in our eyes) who may themselves feel themselves to be powerful.
Val feels powerful, those who know her as a practitioner see her as powerful (Grace saying they are lucky to have you), but in a new environment her power – her desire to be related, connect, explore, be energetic, engaged, what she sees as a proactive normal adult human being – is felt as destructive. It destroys her because she then feels she is destructive by being who she is. What should she do?
Maternal wisdom is one form of being a grown-up. I use the term grown-up as it feels more like an attribute than a term conferred on one by age. I like the grown-up I became when I became a mother, it changed me. Jones (2023) suggests that change is material and is in our brains and bodies (see the quote from Jones that starts Stop poisoning the absent ducks – what is being ‘guided by the adult’ in research?: Applications for researchers, it is mind-blowing).
So, what if being adult isn’t about a designation of someone who is of a certain age, but a description of a process where there is leadership of a certain kind? Leadership that is about guidance, that grows from someone working from their felt sense of safety, which connects with being organised and managing their internal states well. This sort of adult guidance is about having a sense of purpose, knowing where you are heading, and what is and isn’t okay to accept on the pathway to get where you have all agreed that you want to go. It comes back to the position of abundance again, and founding the work on there being a sense of plenty.
If we are working with our tacit maternal knowing and what that means in terms of leadership, the other thing I am taking from Jones is that becoming a mother – biologically – is about an embodied exchange of material between earth, infant, and adult. Each is inevitably changed because of the bodily investment they have in each other, even if that exchange is so invisible and complex we don’t know what it is. A bit like Winnicott, I find myself thinking that there is no such thing a client, just a client/therapist interdependence, and in Theraplay that consists of child, caregiver(s), and therapist. “Guided by the adult” then puts an emphasis on the therapist doing the work of self-understanding at a deep transference and countertransference level (if we want to use those terms from that particular tradition of therapy) so that ghosts and ducks become more visible, and alcohol and bread (unsuitable feeds) are reduced and good feeds made available regularly and in small amounts.