Rupture as Repair
So many of us have become versed in therapy speak through the tiny morsels we gather up and pocket from our never-ending scroll. While I did not set out to become a therapist, I now consider myself literate in therapy discourses through the stream of my algorithms, a Master's degree in the subject, and years of personal therapy with an eclectic bunch of therapy professionals. (These days) I love going to therapy, I love being the kind of therapist I am and I love the form it offers me to tend relational and embodied care. I wouldn’t be writing here without it. Yet, I also have concerns and queries about therapy, including its histories, its shapes, its purposes and its power¹.
Psychological therapy, as we know it in Australia, has a checkered past. Rooted in western, empire-ical approaches, therapy has been a source of terrible harm for many, causing and compounding distress whilst propping up colonial structures that are continuing to grasp for power, prestige and legitimacy². Important voices like Pat Dudgeon & Roz Walker & Dr. Jennifer Mullan have written extensively on these issues. I want to join the chorus in saying, that many of the therapy discourses, diagnoses, therapy jargon, the de-contextualised sound bites so many of us are chewing on and spitting out at each other might be worth considering with a bit more context.
For example, someone recently advised me that “ruptures should be able to see repairs”. Written here, this may sound like well-meaning advice to you. I’ve not told you if this is advice from a qualified mental health practitioner, someone I sat next to on the bus, or both. Since we are swimming in a western psychology saturated soup together, this kind of advice could come from anyone these days. Are you curious about what kind of rupture we might be contemplating in this situation? Who determined the ‘should’ in repairing any said ruptures? What even is a repair?
In my mind, therapy doesn’t have to be a place where you go to hear what you ‘should’ be doing, how you ‘should’ be breathing or how you ‘should’ be thinking. It could be a place where we move beyond ‘five ways to sleep better’ or 'three steps to manage your anxiety'.
Therapy could be a time and place where we explore together the complexities of being human, where we consider what it means to exist in relationships that can both wound and heal, where we can question the very frameworks we've inherited for understanding ‘wellness’ and ‘pathology’.
Therapy could be an interim, liminal place between the (individual and collective) systems we currently live with and those we might yet grow.
I imagine it to be a place where we could be more curious than we are certain, where we can compost ideas and experiences that harm us and experiment with nurturing new (and old) forms of knowing, being and relating.
Despite its murky location, becoming a therapist has offered me a place to ask questions like:
What if the rupture was a movement, a breaking from the status quo, a course correction?
What if the rupture happened because the connection was exploitative and objectifying?
What if the refusal to acquiesce, smooth over, live in denial, or tolerate abuse or manipulation is a repair of trust towards one’s own response-abilities?
What if instead of increasing reciprocity, care and integrity, the connection would have slowly poisoned what is precious?
What if the rupture makes a new, kinder, wiser connection possible somewhere along the way?
What if the rupture is the repair?
Perhaps these are questions that are relevant to your time, place and personhood. Perhaps they are not. They are questions I pose to illustrate the way we can widen our curiosities and diverge from unhelpful expectation. I hope that they might illustrate a little of the way in which we can offer something more to each other than moralising and colonising platitudes³.
Maybe, if you are a therapist or any other kind of helping, educational, or allied health professional, these questions might invite you to become curious about where you might rupture your practice, and create generative space for something new to unfold.
This has been a small start to saying that relationality, context and a strong dose of compassionate scepticism about the words, phrases and ideas which have come to dominate our internal and international worlds, is critical as we grapple with entrenched streams of harm in our lives and communities.
I hope in therapy, and other contexts, questions like these might help us seed careful ways to tend to the ruptures opening up around us and help us discern which ruptures we will work to repair and those we will allow to carve out new and fertile thresholds.
References
- I’m indebted to many voices who have and continue to help me cultivate my thinking and practice. Michel Foucault was among the first to help me see the world is not, and does not have to be, the way my Celtic/Norse/Anglo ancestors had come to believe and act: Michel Foucault
My first degree is in the field of Political Science - where I began to understand the impact of colonisation in Australia and other places around the world.
This piece is an incomplete fragment of my thinking and I'm deliberately scaffolding curiosity about the frameworks we've inherited, rather than drawing from Indigenous knowledge systems. My hope is that by questioning the certainties we've been taught and creating space for messy, muddled up thinking, we might begin to be ready to perceive beyond colonial ways of understanding health and healing that have dominated the field.
