Revisiting the Silence Attached to the Earlier Violence of Assaults and the Co-construction of New Meanings

Language becomes 'one's own' only when the speaker populates it with her own intention, her own accent, when she appropriates the world, adopting it to her own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language ... but rather exists in other people's mouths, in other people's contexts, serving other people's intentions. (Mikhail Bakhtin as cited in Narayan, 1972, p. 2).

I struggle to come into the moment with the totality of myself, and the resistance to this is "killing me softly" because "his" words tell a story that is not my own. It's the story of his abuse. My death occurs in the code of silence set up by the perpetrators' threat of continued violence if I tell what has happened. These killings create gaps in my story like the unseen movement of pebbles beneath the flowing water of a brook, a river. These same pebbles shift in the water, a mutual dance - the dance of text and subtext. The water appears crystal clear, and yet its frothing movement obscures and distorts the time-honoured movement of pebbles. My narrations, my tellings of self are like the water and pebbles, a metaphor for my story (and yet I pretend it is not). I am the dance between pebble and water, text and subtext. In my pretence, I hide my story that went something like this: "If I close my eyes, maybe this horror will go away ... If I were a better person, these horrible things wouldn't be happening to me ... If I let them have their way, maybe I'll be loved". But I struggle deeply against entering this dance, even as I know that the alternative, that of hiding, results in a disembodied voice and the "soft death" of silence. I know now that hiding in secret results in a false appearance of perfection where no one knows my story, like the appearance of the pebbles when the observer looks into the river at any given moment. I look perfect, the observer feels that the pebbles have never moved, but the expression "you can never step into the same river twice" seeps into my mind.

The struggle is two-fold. I am contained and bound by fear that saps my breath, so that speaking becomes an almost insurmountable chasm. I stand on one side of it in the shadow of silence; the images and voices of the past scream and screech out from the depth of memories desperately and frantically wanting to be heard. On the other side of the silence is a tongue paralyzed and held still by the strength of fear. Within this struggle, like the ripples in the water, is the push and pull between the knowings I carry in my mind - the studies - and that which is now being planted in my body - the mentorship and the challenge being offered to live and know this knowledge differently, as a holistic integration of both intellects (an embodiment of mind and body). My mind snaps up these bits of knowledge, but my embodied self lags behind, caught in the resistance found in allowing the implications of what I know to bridge the chasm between silence and narrative. If I find myself in these words, I must, as Bakhtin says, make them mine - populate them with my intonations, with the vibrations of my own voice and my own expression. I do find myself reflected in the studies before me, in my learnings about the intersubjective approach to psychotherapy. I grasp how it is through relationships that our narratives are shared and meanings are co-created and generated, and I struggle to embody this. I want to first share with you the bits of knowledge that my mind has come to understand about this paradigm, and then I want to embody it as I share aspects of my narrative within the co-creative potential of you as a reader and myself as a writer.

Intersubjective psychotherapy focuses not on inner drives, unconscious conflicts or the provision of appropriately maintained selfobject relations (although these theoretical paradigms might be helpful models from time to time), but rather focuses on the organization of subjective experience and the meanings derived from these experiences as they are illuminated within the therapeutic relationship (Buirski and Haglund, 2001). Both the relational aspect and the work of meaning making are fundamental to this particular perspective. Within the context of my healing journey, I have begun to explore my experiences of assault and the narratives that have held them locked into my being in a particular way (the organization of my subjective experience). My narratives are being redrawn within the relation to my mentor as we explore the meanings that they hold for me. I can only speak about these memories in the safe spaces of the session room, the school classroom and in trust with my mentors. Within this relational perspective, the subjectivity of my mentor and myself (each of us containing our own specific history, social location and context) meet within the relationship and we create an intersubjective field that is dynamic and unique. This relationship is conceptualized as an open system with mutuality of influence (Buirski & Haglund, 2001; Dewar & Campbell, 2004; O'Sullivan & Taylor, 2004). Chessick (2000) illustrates this relationship as:

...a new focus on a two-person psychology in the consulting room that creates spaces ... whereby two subjectivities are legitimized, each with its own history, script, and cast of characters. We are interested in the influence of one on the other, for there is no way to avoid the fact that the patient and the analyst continuously and mutually influence one another
(Chessick, 2000, p. 284).

The creation of this relational space, in which my narrative can be held and legitimated, grants a dignity to me that was stolen by the violation of the sexual assaults. My mentor's engagement with the changing and shifting nuances of my emotional self as I explore these painful memories further creates a sense of safety and relation that begins the shift of this narrative from an isolating horror to a shared and witnessed experience. Thus, the relational aspect of the therapeutic moment is privileged within this paradigm. However, the therapeutic process does not end there as with self-psychology; the work, if you will, of intersubjective psychotherapy is found in the meanings made together within the relational context (Buirski & Haglund, 2001).

The work of meaning making undertaken by therapist and client focuses on the co-constituted or co-created narratives and the subsequent meanings generated within that relationship. There is a movement away from finding the "truths" about a client's past towards a more hermeneutical imperative within the therapeutic process. As Chessick (2000) suggests:

In deprivileging the analyst as the oracle of truth, postmodernism stands in contrast to the positivist interpretation of experience. It moves psychoanalysis away from the place of a scientist uncovering facts and toward the direction of a collaboration in developing personal narratives that assume the interpretive nature of all clinical understanding
(Chessick, 2000, p. 284).

This movement away from finding truths and towards interpretation with a mentor has been a powerful release for me. When examining my assaults, the grasp that I have on my truth is slippery. Did I invite his advances? Should I have been in a different place? He might think we just had good, if a little rough, sex. Whose truth can I grasp? Within this paradigm, my mentor and I can explore my truth. I begin to move away from the voices of patriarchy that blame women and excuse men for their inability to control their "sexual desires". I am combatting the voices that try to tell me that "it really wasn't that bad; after all, there are those who have had it worse". My truth is that these assaults were horrifying. I was a child at the hands of adults and there is no excuse for what was done to me.

My new truth about my sexual assaults is beginning to release the paralyzing grasp of fear that silences my communication. This has fostered knowledge in me about a transformational process based on an exchange of meanings within the relational context, rather than on a process where an expert passes on preconceived knowledge. My transformational process continues, as I am committed to unlocking my past narratives that contain painful experiences. I am learning to break old codes of silence based on the dominance of the perpetrators' threats. Through the challenges of mutual exchange with my mentor and Espritedu colleagues in an intersubjective surround, I am learning about the process of transforming historical pain into the construction of new meanings that are slowly being embodied and turned into rich learnings. The intricate dance of pebble and water is slowly engaged and acknowledged. The learnings reveal the mutual relationship between pebble and water, their constant movement and flow creating the very river that contains them. This river, these tellings of self, creates an endless flow of new meanings. Within these new meanings, like the destination of all rivers, is the finding of community, an ocean of mutually co-constructing narratives.

References

Buirski, Peter & Haglund, Pamela (2001). Making Sense Together: The Intersubjective Approach to Psychotherapy. Northvale: Jason Aronson, Inc.
Chessick, Richard D. (2000). Psychoanalysis at the Millennium. American Journal of Psychotherapy. Vol. 54, No. 3, p. 277-290.
Dewar, Barbara & Campbell, Sandra (2004). From Intersubjectivity Psychotherapy to Esprit Networking: Mapping a Social Practice. Learning Toward an Ecological Consciousness. Edmund O'Sullivan & Marilyn Taylor (eds.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 201-215.
Narayan, Uma (1997). Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism. New York: Routledge.
O'Sullivan, Edmund & Taylor, Marilyn (2004). Conundrum, Challenge, and Choice: Glimpses of an Ecological Consciousness. Learning Toward an Ecological Consciousness: Selected Transformational Practices. Edmund O'Sullivan & Marilyn Taylor (eds.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, p. 1-23.