Click here to read ‘Listening Mothers Program – what’s it all about Part I’
Listening Mothers is a specific kind of group, a specific solution to these universal problems and more. We start by discussing the early experience of motherhood.
In a typical group, we begin introductions by asking people to share their name, their baby’s name and their experience of the pregnancy and giving birth. Often the first participants will give a short and sweet synopsis of how pregnancy was fine, really, compared to some stories.
As we listen together to each others’ experiences, gradually the idea is communicated that it is all right to speak directly about the felt experience, that things can be healthy enough and normal enough and still difficult or surprising. This often is the opening up of opening up.
By the end of the first meeting when all goes well, the women have begun to appreciate each other’s accomplishments in working to keep their infant alive, and by extension, their own accomplishment. AND I spend time exploring the tremendous accomplishment that it is, and the usefulness of the disorganized emotional state that new parents are reduced to or elevated to.
We also cover the concepts of regulation and state change; the concept of engagement, and falling in love; the concepts of dis-regulation, falling out of love, and containment of infantile distress; the concepts of secure attachment, which includes rupture and repair, and separation; the concepts of how our own growing up experiences may affect our parenting; the question of how to make room for a more complex world for our infants by allowing fathers in and maintaining a partner relationship; and the facts of the need for the group to end, and bearing termination and separation.
As may be obvious, there is a great deal of thematic repetition and building on concepts during the eight weeks of meetings. In all of these topics, the idea that there could be only one right way to do things, that will avoid all problems and distress, is deconstructed. The truth that what we need to offer our children and ourselves is a chance to learn how to move through and recover from disruption is promoted.
Listening Mothers groups, as I conceive of them, thus offer not only the social learning, and validation which is the goal of all groups with a facilitator, but take on the important task of addressing the often unspeakable – the ambivalence, the fact that motherhood and infancy contain all emotional realms.
It never fails to surprise me how mothers comment on how many groups feel closed to any acknowledgement of problems. The existence of ambivalence is culturally/socially seen as problematic in an unacceptable way. Listening Mothers groups provide an important service in discussing ambivalence, addressing the inevitability of it, the usefulness of it, the two-person quality of it, the organizing nature of it, the opportunities it contains for recovery and the learning of repair rather than endless bliss, the source of it, the space it makes for a two-parent system and the beginnings of oedipal tolerance.
As valuable as the groups are, there is no perfection to be achieved. The problem we most often face is that there is too much to be covered within eight weeks. There is not room for the full depth of everyone’s experience. There is always conflict when people have very differing experiences. There is the fact that the psycho-educational format imposes an external structure, which may inhibit a more organic growth for the group’s discovery of their own goals for understanding.
Thus the group lets people down at the same time that it is often helpful. I always experience disappointment when reviewing a group and seeing what was not adequately contained or where the material did not reach. And then I must wonder, what is the value of the failure? I know at the same time that there is disappointment and inadequacy, there are seeds planted by these group experiences.
Individuals may take their experience of discomfort or dissatisfaction to inspiration for individual work. Feelings of not wanting to let go of relationships between participants may create the possibility of true friendships forming after the group structure has ended. And my own feelings, and perhaps those of the participants, may be an opportunity to reinforce the concept of good-enough as a goal, rather than a stultifying perfection. The feeling of looking at what was not ideal certainly inspires me to more thinking, which could at least help me develop my work to the benefit of future groups and myself.
Photo by vbanh
