Not victim nor survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts. Where do we let the abundant ducks incubate their eggs?: Applications for educators
Not a victim or a survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts: Applications for educators
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.
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
Stop poisoning the absent ducks – what is being ‘guided by the adult’ in research?: Applications for researchers
Not a victim or a survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts: Applications for educators
In terms of practitioner education, the fiction this month led me to wonder about how hard it must feel to students to have their identity that is effective and comfortable to them, challenged and unsettled by learning. It is painful to find new ways of being because it means valued identities have to be adapted, but that is what interdependence is. That is also what the neurobiology of motherhood seems to be saying as well: for mother and foetus to be interdependent, the mother is changed. Cultivating this is a place for compassion. Grace has an unverbalised, maybe tacit, compassion for Val even though she doesn’t really know what is going on. She holds a respectful alongsideness that allows for the distress that Val has to work through.
Val pursues a Thaterchite idea of independence in her pension planning, with the expectation of a long, independent, self-contained and slightly hedonistic retirement where she could please herself and do what she wants to do. The fiction tells me how pernicious the man/mainstream is: even when Val’s intentional way of being is to be interdependent, to commit to not knowing, and to have faith that her clinical work with children like Joe and Milo is valuable, even if the results aren’t immediately evident. All three tenets of the doctoral research, three components of the tacit maternal knowing that I propose we bring to our Theraplay practice, keep being challenged by the man/mainstream: faithfulness, not knowing/letting go, and dependence/interdependence.
But maybe that is the way it should be, as I seek to change the antagonistic dynamic between female and male aspects of my functioning. Despite our best efforts to live differently, the dominant perspective sneaks in and catches us out. It ensures we don’t go down some flunky, flaky, shamanistic, culty path as we keep active in the pursuit of the many truths of people's lives through contingent and contextual therapist education. It seems the pursuit of ‘a truth’, that more mainstream position about finding and sharing knowledge, can equally go down a flunky, flaky, science-looking, culty path. Jones’ book is interested in how beliefs about motherhood have obscured, the light of research not shone onto the actual bodily lived experience of being a mother.
Rosa (2019), writing about resonance as a concept in human relationship to the world, is very focused on the bodily experience of connecting to the world. However, there is no consideration of what that means for the pregnant, birthing, feeding, caring body, and what that lived experience may tell the rest of humankind about possibilities for a well-lived, connected life that feels full of milk, love, and abundance. This is one of the things I suggested last month that can help us cultivate practitioners, providing them with a place of abundance, not expecting their motivation to learn to be from getting needs met.
Taking the theorisation, this approach to the pedagogy of therapist education, and reflecting on what I currently do in my teaching practice, I believe that is the way I teach. In the words borrowed from one of my supervisees, I love them into being therapists. I trust that if the attachment needs of trainees are met as best I can in a teaching environment, then students will find their motivation to care for others in that abundance. I trust that with the right conditions (and they may be different for different people), trainees will incubate their own perfect eggs.
I wonder what people I have trained will think of that when they read it – what has it felt like from the learning side?
Theraplay trainings are a great way to offer this form of therapist education because of the deeply embodied aspects of the training and because the focus of the training is on very early developmental stages. The process of education and content of teaching can be very aligned. That makes for a powerful experience for learners. Grace took on board what Val said to her about how you use love in professional practice, and it inspired her enough to go on to train as a Theraplay practitioner herself.
Leadership, or guideship, in therapist education is not about giving certainty but about developing the capacity to work through and sit with not knowing. If we focus on that process, being informed from our maternal epistemology and methodology, then we leave parts of ourselves in each other. Our experience of being educators is one of lived interdependence. If our pedagogy is to love therapeutic practitioners into being, we don’t know what the impact of that is - just as we have no idea of how the exchange of foetal cells between mother and foetus impacts on both (Jones 2023).
The literature I find about maternal neurobiology is largely focused on deficits because it comes from the field of medicine and what can go wrong, because medicine wants to put things right (quite correctly). Therapy and Theraplay, however, focusses on making things better through cultivating creative meaning and connection, not a pursuit of perfection. To be focussed on making things right means insight and new knowledge development is being driven by need or deficit. To focus on making things better and more meaningful, insight and knowledge development is being driven by abundance and builds on skills and attributes.
In therapist education, being guided by the grown-up is about passing on the baton, inspiring trainees to work with love too, being proud of what we have achieved (sitting with back straight and head up) even when it is not seen, understood, or valued – and when that hurts. This is tacit maternal knowing, the use of self in the service of less powerful others. It doesn’t matter if it is with clients or with trainees/students, this is the vocation to humanise that Freire talks about.
Vocation puts me in mind of discipleship, with its root in discipline. That maybe isn’t a popular word for a whole range of reasons. It is rather Christian, and from what I can find holds a lot of negative definitions about who ‘can’t’ hit the mark to be a disciple. But with our pedagogy of abundance for our learners, we can turn negatives around. The can’t/wants/needs can become abundances. Do this, and you get a sense how we might assess who will be the people who can take up the challenging path of being therapists rather than doing therapy, and they fit with the three identified attributes of tacit maternal knowing. They are the fruit of the discipline of diligently doing one’s best to use your power in the service of the more vulnerable other.
Faithfulness – the endeavour to keep trying. Val is able to connect with Grace and process the felt sense of what is happening in her struggles to be grown-up and find her interior leadership in a place where an alternative leadership is underway. It would be easy to give into the power over/power under positions. This is where the bullying notions come in – seeing engagement and the process of relationship formation as a battle, not as an exploration.
Dependence/interdependence – the student needs to be available and have sufficient emotional bandwidth to be able to have space to take on someone else’s distress and process it. This interdependent aspect connects with the more dependent aspects where we assess whether the student is teachable, whether they have the capacity to not know and feel safe enough with unsettlement to explore other aspects of knowing.
Not knowing/letting go – having the ability to not be confident because to know too strongly, too quickly is not a helpful thing. Instead, to have that sense of direction and so select what you need to attend to. Being able to stay with that long enough to see if it does help those we are working with to move in the direction they want to go.
To seek to inhabit this position and this identity is to be neither victim nor survivor. It is about cultivating an identity of many sensitive parts that can be related to as required. That is a lifelong piece of work, not an end point that is reached.