Writing partners

when some words seem possible and others impossible

This week I have found myself writing LOTS of impossible things: from passing on bad news, to asking for things I know others will find uncomfortable. I have written about things that make me sad and things that bring indescribable joy. Ecstasy. I have written professional lessons and done new learning. I have written releasing myself from things I have long dreamed of and, finding circumstances have changed, had to let go of. I have written apologies and an email setting boundaries in an old relationship. From tiny text messages where I am at my most open, vulnerable and uncensored to an 8000 character job application, where I consciously consider every word for how it intersects what they’re looking for. Words have power. And at times it has really helped to have a writing partner.

I work with young adults from some of the most marginalised and excluded parts of the city. Many of them have behaviour targets of using ‘school appropriate language’. They swear. A lot. Frequently it is the first sound that they produce when communicating: forming a thought or expressing an emotion. While most adults - parents, families, teachers alike, are aware that children develop when they are listened to, we don't always want to hear them. If children grow up floating on a sea of talk outside school where such words are usual, and they discover that there are some words which make the adults crazy or frightened, in some contexts the words provoke strong responses and make them want to shut the children up: the young people will be compelled to do this. Let alone knowing all we do about trauma informed practice - and how the brain jumps to fight, flight, freeze and fawn: so how it is not just useless but harmful to reprimand a child for bad language when they’re in their in the most basic part of their survival brain. Children learn about the language community by discovering what cannot or should not be said. They learn about prohibition and limits, about punishment, about hiding and secrets, and about privacy. When they discover what cannot be said, they have to learn to lie or conceal their words, often from themselves. Through words their shadows are formed. If they are lucky they become creative and use metaphor: the gold in the shadow. If they are unlucky they internalise, go silent, and the words can fly around their heads like birds locked in a room. All those feelings and no way to get them out. A lifetime of torment and no way to say how or understand why.

I was reminded in an essay I read by Hanif Kureshi of a tale, how in 1906 an English surgeon, talking to Mr Ernest Jones, mentioned, with some astonishment, a strange doctor in Vienna who actually listened with attention to every word his patients said to him, “What Freud realised was that because there are forms of speaking which are radically dangerous and unsettling, which change lives and societies, people don't want to know what those words are. But, he adds, in another sense they do really want to know, because they are made to be aware, by suffering, of a lack; they at least know that they will not be complete without certain forms of self-knowledge, and that this will be liberating, even though the consequences of any liberation could also be catastrophic.

Human beings leak the truth of their desire whether they like it or not: in their dreams, fantasies and drunkenness, in their jokes and mistakes, as well as in delirium, religious ecstasy, in babble and in saying the opposite of what they mean. It takes a rationalist then, to see that rationalism can only fail, that what we need is more, not less, madness in our speaking. Otherwise our bodies take up the cause on our behalf, and bodies can speak in weird ways, through hysteria, for instance in Freud's day, the modern equivalent of which might be fixations, addiction, racism or various phobias.”

Freud invented a new method of speaking, which involved two people going into a room together. One person would speak and the other would listen, trying to see, in the gaps, the repetitions and repetitions, what else, in the guise of the obvious, was being said. What was hiding in plain sight. He would then give these words, translated into other words, back to the speaker. Jung took it further by looking into the great metaphors and archetypes which welled up from our unconscious - individual and collective - in those signs, symbols and upwellings in our dreams.

We are speaking animals, the story telling species, full of words which have a profound effect on others, words that are sometimes welcomed, and sometimes not. The therapeutic couple is one method of discovering who you are by speaking: it is an original and great invention. But a society where everyone was in therapy is not what I am thinking of here. It can really help to have someone to speak our words to; someone who truly listens is a rare and beautiful gift. If they then can us make sense, frame them, find dignity and order and then capture them on the page. They are as rare as a unicorn. Look after them, treasure them and thank them. So thank you to my writing partners, including all of you who are silent readers of this little substack, for being putting a heart and an ear on my words. Helps to get it on the page. And out into the world.