August 2016
There are three stories I want to tell.
The first has to do with Topsy, a rag doll I was given when I was born.
This doll was beautifully made out of brown felt cloth and had a sweet face
sewn on her curly haired head. Her limbs were long and floppy and her body
sturdy and girlish. She wore a red dress. I grew to love her.
Each birthday my mother and I would go into town to buy Topsy a new
face, as the old was well worn with all the kissing she received.
Topsy and I grew up together, though her change was structural.
Eventually
her stuffing came out and the cloth that was her skin became
threadbare.
Topsy, unlike her namesake in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the nineteenth century American
author Harriet Beecher Stowe, wasn’t just born, didn’t just
grow’d, she came with a history, a maker (the lady upstairs in the block of
flats we called home), the cloth maker, the face maker, the
dress maker (my mother), my
history, my family, the context of middle class life in the fifties, in Western
Australia, and so much more.
The second story is about the period when I’d returned to university to
do my Master of Counselling degree and was studying family and couples
counselling. As part of our assessment we had to write a family history
identifying specific characteristics typical to our family. Until that point, I had a rather
general curiosity about genealogy, but nothing more than that. I was amazed to
find in my research definite patterns of behaviour on both sides of my family
of origin. I discovered, for instance, that practically each generation on both
my father’s and mother’s side had at least two, sometimes more, spouses and
that there were split-level families dating back nearly two hundred years. Both
sides of the family were also
adventurers, some travelled across the globe to escape conflicts of war and
ideology.
The third story describes what insight was brought to me while
researching and writing my doctoral dissertation. I’d stumbled upon a book on
Taoism, and was particularly taken by its Acknowledgements section; usually a
place where the writer thanks their husband or wife, or colleagues. The author
of this book, instead, thanked the trees and fungi, the sky, the birds, the pet
dog, family, shopkeepers, library staff, colleagues and friends: all of which
ameliorated the making of this book on the Tao of being in the world, which is
a natural order of life. I was moved to write a similar Tao of acknowledgements
and include in it not only my immediate milieu, but my academic influences:
those thinkers who shaped my work and sense of self.
All three stories are accounts of realizing interrelationships. I’m moved
to tell them because of a certain frustration I have concerning quite a lot of
psychotherapeutic modalities that ignore the context of a person to concentrate
on only individual and isolated behaviour, as for instance, a lot of cognitive behavioural therapy, or
relationships as if they are merely apparent fantasies and disembodied ideas. I’m
thinking here of traditional psychoanalysis and Jungian analysis. A lot of
solution focussed therapies also ignore the living system that is being in the world. An
awareness of the individual is important, but without a sense of the richness,
or paucity, of experiencing others, we leave too much out in our therapeutic
approach to the healing of clients.
We didn’t just grow’d, and our behaviour cannot be extracted from what
else is going on. Our family of origin and our environment make us who we are. We live in a Tao of relationship, and
this is ground that therapy, I believe, needs to work within.
