When the email had come to her, Val had been perplexed. At that point, she would usually have reached for Viking. She’d have scratched his ears and said, well that’s a tricky one, isn’t it? And he would somehow have lent her some stillness and space to reflect on how to respond. He was no longer there, and Val felt the gap.
Overview: November 2023
This month’s fiction is: On being culturally sensitive – you couldn’t make it up!
This month’s application posts are:
Cultural sensitivity: So much bigger than the words: Applications for practitioners
Embodying cultural sensitivity, the path to embedding it: Applications for researchers
Working with our cultural insensitivity: Acknowledging reality: Applications for educators
What knowledge is the fiction mirroring to me about the core concept of being culturally sensitive? What do I know, but just haven’t shifted from the realm of the tacit to the realm of the known?
I am struck by what is not there. No water this month. No Viking. In the process of writing, I struggled to create much ‘felt sense’, and I kept going back to the fiction, trying to ‘show not tell’ and paint a picture with words to provide the canvas on which I can examine the tacit knowing I bring to this core concept of Theraplay.
This month's fiction doesn’t feel so interactive and relationship-based to me. Not multisensory, or even guided by an adult sensibility – and maybe that is something the fiction is showing me: I struggle with a depth of understanding because it is an absence in me, because I do come with the privilege of whiteness, economic stability, and education. I also come with the Othered position of being female, that is the cultural injury I bring. Maybe when we become too immersed in our own world view, cultivated by our own embodied experiences that lead to our own internal working model, then the relational aspects of our work, the need and desire to be able to put ourselves in the body space of the other, gets stuck, and further injury can occur.
I preface the fiction by talking about the pain I’ve been feeling about the situation in Palestine, and in Israel. It made me realise I’ve become somewhat inured to Ukraine and the ongoing violation of the human body that is the lived reality of so many there.
The fiction tells me that the core concept of cultural sensitivity is ultimately about bodies – colour of skin, differences in visual sexual characteristics, the expectations of the Other that are beyond thought and cognition. The fiction doesn’t talk about all of the Social GGRRAAACCEEESSS (Burnham, cited in Krause, 2011). I thought about trying to include each of them in the fiction, then realised that that would mean my conscious was seeking to take over and move the plot in a cognitive direction to serve a purpose – educating you by telling you about a useful piece of theory via narrative.
However, that is not what I have been holding as a central tenet of my practice, the use of power in the service of the less powerful other, and the trust I am putting in my ‘unheard knowledge’. Serving the less powerful other in this case is allowing my still, small, not very clear fumblings about how to be culturally sensitive in my work with the people who come to see me. As I try to ‘hear’ the message of my tacit through the fiction, I keep thinking that this is about the embodied relational empathy that Finlay (2005) talks about.
On reflection, the whole unsureness experience is an important thing in seeking to make our therapeutic work culturally sensitive. Val feels the gap of Viking, that felt-sense of connection to the embodied mammalian form of being-with rather than doing-to another. Without that anchor, she is lost, perplexed when the potential ageism, sexism, classism, and prejudice that could be at play in Joe’s predicament intrudes into her realm via the email. In her unanchored perplexity, she fires off an email to Grace, wanting to help Joe, maybe wanting to be rescued a bit, but in that place of her own loss she can’t, or doesn’t, consider the place her communication might put Grace in. They find, as they did in A Necessary Life(Story) that the reality of racism, not overt but embedded, is a real block between them, as well as a source of distress for both of them. This microaggression is bigger than both of them, but is perpetuated by both of them.
But the inept communications expose something important – for Val and Grace, it is a tipping point in their working relationship. Can they find a way to work together, respecting each other's skills, and work together to use their respective powers (and disempowerments) in the service of Joe’s needs? Can they not know/let go, can they find dependence/interdependence, and can they faithfully work at their connection to serve the needs of a less powerful other – Joe?
I found this more powerful than anything I could write this month as a reflection on the impact of cultural insensitivity, the assault on bodies that can occur as a result, and how we can manage such violence.
Our most powerful response to the horror in Israel and Palestine is to refuse to surrender our humanity.
You will be told by some: The deaths of Israeli children are unfortunate but inevitable, because Israel’s occupation of Palestine is brutal and wrong.
You will be told by others: The deaths of Palestinian children are unfortunate but inevitable, because it is the only way to keep Israel safe from terror, and Hamas brought this on its own people.
Both will say: Our aggression is the only response to their aggression, our fear more justified than their fear, our grief more devastating than theirs ever will be.
But oh my love, the hierarchy of pain is the old way. The moment we allow our hearts to go numb is the moment we shut down our humanity.
I don’t know the solution to the conflict in Israel and Palestine, but I do know the starting point: To grieve “their” children as our children. It’s the only way to break the cycle.
To my loved ones who are Israeli, Jewish, and Palestinian: I see your searing pain. I love you and grieve with you and am reciting my ancestors’ prayers for protection as you search for your families and bear the unbearable. May love find you through the impossible.
To all of us witnessing this story: What does love want you to do?
If you cannot look at the news and the images: It’s okay. Step away, be with the earth, go to the trees, let them breathe through you; remember that you don’t need to do all the things, just the one that’s yours to do.
If you want to help but don’t know how: Begin in relationship. Who in your life is hurting from this? Offer to walk with them, listen to them. There is no fixing grief, only bearing it together. Only then do we know what to do next.
If you are falling apart: Your breathlessness is not a sign of your weakness, but of your strength. Of how deeply you feel the horror, how deeply you care. You still feel. And that matters in a world that wants us to feel nothing. Who can feel it with you? Breathe with you?
Opening our hearts to grief— others and our own— is how we hold our humanity in a world that would destroy it. It’s how we will begin to survive this.
Val can’t offer to walk with Graham (He’s broken his ankle! He can’t walk! Is that alright, bringing levity after the pain expressed above? I am already aware that the core concept for next month will be playfulness). She has to sit with him while his body lies on top of Viking's body. At this point of intersection, my theorisation of what my tacit knowing is telling me is that I have to sit with my deepest pain, my injury of misogyny, personal and cultural. My experiences of how males have taken power over me and my kind, and denied my knowledge and my identity, and I have to touch, be in touch, with the irreparability of the injury, because of the enormity of that injury – irreparable for me in my time. I will always have that tinge, that expectation and that fear of what a man can do by intruding into my space. But I can learn to temper it.
I can learn to be non-defensive when my racism is challenged, to listen and let it impact on how I will try to be in the future, but my individual response doesn’t take away the reality of the multi- and intergenerational impact of experiences.
It’s the kittens that can change that, and they need to be cared for by people who are less contaminated by those stories of the past. Each generation will sand down a little more smoothly the damage and we – the older generations, the orcas and the mothers, the Vals and the Graces – have to do the work of sitting with and being in touch with the splinters that have been driven deep into our souls, both from our own experiences and the experiences of the generations that have gone before us. Our job in practice is to not pass that on. To do that, we must know our injuries so that they don’t cloud our view of the Other (as much as we can, given our own individual circumstances). Our legacy is to not teach our cultural insensitivity, but to use our experience of it to be sensitive to the Other. All are our babies, our children, whose pain is to be grieved.
When The Theraplay Institute were looking to update the therapy wheel, initially this core concept was going to be cultural humility. As I write this, I have been pondering what humility I need to bring to my practice to do justice to cultural sensitivity.
I looked up the etymology of the word humble. It links to humus, connected to the earth. What we all have in common is our bodies. We are conceived, gestated, birthed, and raised. In the extreme expression of cultural insensitivity we are seeing, in the violence around us, bodies are destroyed. We come from the earth, and we return to the earth. The fiction tells me that somehow to be culturally sensitive isn’t about growing nice flower gardens that look effortless (but aren’t). It is about being on the earth, close to death – and in that, we are forced to find our humanity.
In my ongoing quest to make sense of what is happening in the world and how I live the core concept of being culturally sensitive in my practice, I came across this.
And I had a long, long trip — or meeting with Golda Meir in her office just before the Yom Kippur War. And I guess she could see the consternation on my face as she described what was being faced — they were facing.
We walked outside in that — that sort of hallway outside her office to have some photos. She looked at me and w- — all of a sudden and said, “Would you like to have a photograph?” And so, I got up and followed her out.
We were standing there silent, looking at the press. She could tell, I guess, I was concerned. She leaned over and whispered to me — she said, “Don’t worry, Senator Biden. We have a secret weapon here in Israel” — my word this is what she said — “We have no place else to go.” “We have no place else to go.”
When we have no place to go, and the courage in that moment to embrace our deepest injury alongside the desire to love, even when it means loving a representation of the cause of that injury because they too are injured, then we will be practising, living, with cultural sensitivity. Maybe it is when our personal experience and our cultural experience combine, either to expect attack (and so we must attack back to ensure survival) or to expect peace (so we have no expectation of seeing microaggressions that can build from past violence and lead to future violence) that systems are stuck. The heroes of the world are those that can see the gaps between personal and cultural, and breathe love into them. All heroes need communities of practice to return to, where fear can be processed, held, and identity as a human who cares can be affirmed.
A beautiful and poignant post, Fiona, so appropriate for these difficult times. Alongside your insights, I found the poem and the Joe Biden quote very moving.
I have been embroiled these past days in an extremely heated exchange regarding the singer/songwriter/ Canadian cultural icon, Buffy Saint Marie. Buffy is now 82 and her whole life has revolved around her persona as a First Nations icon and she has raised awareness and lots of money (since 1968) for various First Nations causes and even created her own trust. What has emerged is that she was clearly born in Massachusetts to a white Family, but has claimed a First Nations persona. Another factor in this sad story is Buffy was undoubtedly adopted by the Piapot people in 1964 and they still are claiming her as one of their own saying “ We claim her as a member of our family and all of our family members are from the Piapot First Nation. To us, that holds far more weight than any paper documentation or colonial record keeping ever could.” However, many people are hurt and outraged calling Buffy a ‘Pretendian’ who adopted a persona, lied repeatedly about who she was and has taken opportunities from First Nations people. So the issues relating to the cultural sensitivities are very apparent in this sad story and it’s curious that the most anger directed currently towards Buffy appears to be from mainly white people who view themselves as First Nations ‘allies’ who seem to me to be riding roughshod over the views expressed by the folk who know and love Buffy - the Piapot people. The irony is quite lost. However, I foresee Buffy being stripped of her many honours, being humiliated, her life work undone and she will most likely be sacrificed on the altar of 2023 (and in this case white colonial) notions of ‘ THE truth’ so that organisations can appear to be culturally sensitive. I am interested to see what unfolds.