An Arts Therapeutic Approach to Maternal Holding

Developing Healthy Mother and Child Holding Relationships

Ariel Moy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367610951
• eBook ISBN: 9781000414639
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Little research has explored the everyday, simple and long-term experience of maternal holding, particularly after the first year of a child's life. The research that has been undertaken commonly examines holding through the lens of attachment with a focus on the impact of holding upon the child. Employing an arts-based collaborative inquiry approach, participants' stories of holding, as well as the author's own, convey the significant maternal experiences of holding their children over individual arts therapeutic sessions. Optimal moments of holding included strange, powerful and meaningful experiences of expansion into self-in-relationship. Attention is drawn to the ways in which holding can alert us to the current state of mother/child relationships; how we understand, story and structure those relationships; and the ways in which we can attend to holding in order to develop deeply satisfying experiences of a mother/child 'us'.

An Arts Therapeutic Approach to Maternal Holding aims to draw attention to the intersubjective qualities of the mother/child relationship, explore why holding matters, and offer suggestions for therapeutic practice. This book is essential reading for therapeutic practitioners and those in allied health fields who work with mothers and children.

1 How we inquired into maternal holding

An arts and values informed, collaborative approach

DOI: 10.4324/9781003104094-1

Box 1.1 Journal Entries 2009, 2010, 2014

My three-year-old son sits on me as I help him with his colouring book. He’s breathing heavily; he has a mild cold. He crunches his apple loudly in my ear. I feel his tummy against my left hand, inhaling, exhaling, as he chats with me about why I chose the red pencil – ‘because it’s your favourite colour’. It’s raining outside and the warmth of his tummy is comforting, I think about how familiar and safe this kind of holding is.

My four-year-old son asks me what I want to do today. I say: “first I want a cuddle”. I hold him and he quickly makes himself comfortable so that the holding is for both of us. He wriggles to get into position and then goes quiet. His head is nestled under my chin and my hand holds his bottom as he curls into me. He feels heavy and perfectly shaped; I feel content.

My eight-year-old son leans into me at school to say goodbye for the day. We are in his classroom and he puts his arms around me and rests his head on my chest. The other kids are around, and he doesn’t say anything. He’s started doing this lately, just initiating a hug as he says goodbye, it’s still a surprise to me, I expected him to be reserved – that is how I was as a child – but he has never been that way. His hair is warm beneath my hands as I caress his head. I let go when I feel him letting go.

Moustakas (1994) writes that in research: “the question grows out of an intense interest in a particular problem or topic. The researcher’s excitement and curiosity inspire the search” (p. 104). As the above journal entries show, holding my son has been, and continues to be, significant and meaningful for me; on reflection these holding experiences ignited my curiosity and desire to know more.

While my journal entries reveal an ‘intense interest’ in the topic, they also illuminate some of the values that structure my experiencing with my son. These include: a hope that my son feels supported and important to me within our relationship; a deep satisfaction and sense of who he is as I hold him; an awareness of the many ways in which I experience holding him and our relationship together; the ways my own expectations affect my experiencing; an appreciation of the moment and the ways in which our relationship constantly evolves.

This book is based on my doctoral research, and the approach and guiding values, described in this chapter, are highly relevant to therapeutic practice. The MIECAT Form of Inquiry I adapted for this research was created by the MIECAT Institute in Melbourne, Australia, an education facility providing graduate courses in arts therapeutic practice and research.

Dr Warren Lett, along with Dr Jan Allen, Dr Jean Rumbold and Andrew Morrish formed the MIECAT Institute in 1998. Their approach is a kind of “bricolage – a crafting of adaptable inquiry methods to co-construct a preferred spirit and sense of lived experiences” (Lett, 2011, p. 277) designed for both research and counselling.

The approach is based upon a collaborative model where researchers and participants (or co-inquirers) recognise the ways in which their relationships contribute to the research and work together to co-construct inquiry procedures, structure and meaning making. In a therapeutic context, the MIECAT approach reframes clients as co-companions. Though researchers and therapists have different ways of working and different intentions, the underlying values inherent in the MIECAT approach are the same. The approach in its research or therapeutic applications privileges relationship and attention to the present moment.

It has been widely found that the therapeutic alliance or relationship is often the most significant contributor to positive therapeutic outcomes (for example, Lambert & Barley, 2001; Lynch, 2012; Stamoulos, Trepanier, Bourkas, Bradley, Stelmaszczyk, Schwartzman, & Drapeau, 2016). This is in keeping with the MIECAT approach to inquiry and therapy.

Though the goals for this inquiry were exploration with the possibility of an enriched understanding of maternal holding, we did experience therapeutic outcomes. Participants and I did not intend to engage in therapy per se but the act of exploration toward understanding, on a deeply intimate and meaningful topic using the MIECAT approach, resulted in the generation of new information, new perspectives, acceptance and enactment of new understanding in our everyday relationships with our children.

Lett (2011) writes that the MIECAT Form of Inquiry is:

A collage of coherent procedures, to be used creatively in the emergent search for the meanings of human experiencing and potential of these meanings to be used reflectively in preferred ways of being. It is adapted into practice, both as research and therapeutic companioning.

(p. xii–xiii)

The experience and orientation of the researcher/inquirer in the MIECAT approach frequently allies with the that of the therapist, both oriented toward beneficial meaning making by working in ways that value relationship, emergence and adaptivity. The term ‘companioning’ is used to capture a way of being with clients or participants that “no matter what the context, there are motivations, hopefully supported by will, to make meaning of things that matter to the inquirers” (Lett, 2011, p. 277) be they researcher, therapist, co-inquirers or clients.

I examined various research approaches and methodologies in order to consider the ways in which I might utilise and adapt the MIECAT Form of Inquiry to explore maternal holding. I recognized that my search for consonant approaches referred back again and again to my own experiences and values. In the same way that a counsellor’s values inform their choice of therapeutic approach alongside a sense of their client’s needs, I elected to privilege values, so that my fundamental orientation to the inquiry and procedures would revolve and evolve around my selected values. Similarly, when choosing particular therapeutic approaches, a counsellor’s values come into play as well as their assessment of client needs.

Traditional positivist research approaches denied the presence and influence of values (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011, p. 101). Inquirers were able to and indeed aimed to find objective and generalizable truths and discover value-free facts about phenomena. In the early 20th century researchers acknowledged the inevitable presence of values, particularly in the social sciences, but maintained a desire for value neutral findings. Christians (2011) described how sociologist Max Weber recognized the inevitability of values in the “discovery phase” (p. 63) at the beginning of an inquiry but that once findings were ready to be presented researchers “should hang up their values along with their coats as they enter their lectures halls” (p. 63). This presupposes that we can strip our inquiry process and findings of values and that it is indeed important to do so.

New inquiry paradigms have emerged acknowledging to varying degrees the presence and influence of values in research and practice including Critical Theory, Constructivism and Participatory Approaches (Lincoln, Lynham and Guba, 2011). In recent years this awareness of the influence of values has developed to include, as Barad (2007) writes, the “inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing and doing, of ontology, epistemology and ethics, of fact and value” (p. 3).

As Lett (2011) notes there is an “integrative flow” of values, ways of being and ways of knowing (p. 278). Our lived experience reflects an ongoing interaction between what we believe can be known, how we come to know it, the tools we use to come to know, the values that inform these and ultimately, what we do with what we know. As such, “the role of axiology (values) in human inquiry is … seen to be inherent, essential and unavoidable” (Lett, 2011, p. 267).

All inquiry and therapeutic approaches are supported by underlying values whether these are implicitly or explicitly stated. As Barad (2009) writes “values are integral to the nature of knowing and being” (p. 37). Acknowledging and privileging my values in this inquiry has implications for my process, my relationships, my understanding and presentation of findings.

My guiding values are:

• Intersubjective being – privileging relationships
• Multimodality – accessing and working with different forms of knowing
• Attentiveness to the present moment.

One overriding value, discussed in more detail in the Valuing Multimodality section later in this chapter, concerns the use and benefits of arts-based approaches to experiencing and knowing. This book is focused on maternal holding, and so I do not linger on arts-based therapy or research theory, many others have written more knowledgably on this topic (see Allen, 1995; Barone & Eisner, 2012; Cole & Knowles, 2008; Leavy, 2015; Lett, 2011; Malchiodi, 2012; McNiff, 1998) However, I hope that through showing how participants and I inquired into maternal holding with the arts as a form of research, therapy, meaning making and presentation, that I meet and generate curiosity on behalf of the reader.

Before exploring my three guiding values, and how they were enacted, I’ll provide a brief biography of each participant and an overview of how a typical session with participants proceeded including descriptions of MIECAT terms used. With a feeling for the ways we worked together, and how sessions progressed, I hope to provide a context for the practical applications of my guiding values.

As Finlay (2011) writes: “if you are evaluating a piece of research, it helps to do so within the frame of its own terms and values” (p. 261). By clearly describing the values around which my inquiry and practice constellate, I hope that you will feel invited into a shared space of curiosity and enriched understanding about mothers’ experiences of holding their children and that you may then consider employing some of these value orientations and their practical enactments into your therapeutic practice.

Inquiry participants

Rosanna:

A mother of four adult daughters Elaina, twins Olivia and Lillian, and Deanna. Rosanna’s children had left home by the time we started our sessions. Deanna had already had a child, the participant’s first grandchild. As our work together progressed, Olivia as well as Elaina gave birth to their own children.

Rosanna is a practising therapist and has also experienced therapy as a client. Deeply curious and compassionate about human experiencing, Rosanna works to help others discover and develop their strengths.

Leni:

A mother of two children, Lucy (9) and Alexander (6) at the time of our sessions. In her early 40s, Leni had been a family day-carer for pre-school children and infants and was moving into an administrative role. She separated from her husband when the children were 6½ and 4 years of age. She has remarried since the completion of our sessions.

Emigrating from the UK and marrying an Australian, Leni had no family living nearby when she had her children and had limited social supports. She experienced post-natal depression and was hospitalized with her son in a Mother-Baby Unit when he was three months old. This is where I met her. She participated in an outpatient program after leaving the unit that included an art therapy component.

Leni was wary of painful emotions but committed to exploring her experiences of holding her children. We had known each other for around six years at the beginning of the inquiry.

Kitty:

In her earl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. How we inquired into maternal holding: An arts and values informed, collaborative approach
• 2. Holding one is holding all: Rosanna, Elaina, Olivia, Lillian and Deanna
• 3. Just us: Leni, Lucy and Alexander
• 4. Interconnectedness: Kitty and Harley
• 5. Inquiry findings
• 6. Holding is purposeful
• 7. Expansion into the mother/child ‘us’
• 8. Stories of us
• 9. Endings and beginnings
• Index