Moving Beyond Our Mothers

Gestalt Therapy and Movement Workshops for Women

By: Clare Crombie

For Details of Workshops 'Moving Beyond Our Mothers'

A colleague and I had the initial idea for these workshops when we were in the 2nd year of our psychotherapy training. 4 years later the idea is beginning to bear fruit. We ran the first "Moving Beyond our Mothers" weekend at the end of July, one week after I completed the final term of my training. I was literally separating from a 'mother', in graduating, in that I was leaving a community which had held me for 6 years. This made the workshop very meaningful for me on many levels. Chrissie Rickman and I have become aware that leading the workshop is as much a part of moving beyond our own mothers as is the research, planning and personal work we do throughout.

Our aim with our work is to enable women, in becoming more compassionate mothers and witnesses of themselves, to feel more embodied, fuller, autonomous, creative people. My special interest in working with childless women is in helping them to create and to be visible "whole" women, not as a compensation for childlessness but rather as an experience of themselves which, paradoxically, can have it's roots in their loss and mourning.

Coming to this work as a childless woman myself, I have explores the particular ways in which infertility challenges us to face issues of creativity, identity and awareness of mortality. The question "Who am I"? if not a mother, has to be faced. As for mortality, it is not so easy to stay in denial about death when deprived of one of humanity's greatest immortality projects! And in terms of creativity and visibility. I have found myself again and again with a sense of my creativity not yet being born in not giving birth. The struggle to transform that belief (that I am only fully 'born' in giving birth to another) it is almost like a birth process in itself! I know from friends who are mothers, as well as from my therapeutic work with women, that these are issues that don't go away with the birth of a child, however much we may like to believe thay do when we choose not to work exclusively with childless women, in the hope that the experiences of each other can be enriching and challenging for the other.

"Natural separation of daughter from mother (which) allows the daughter to be whole, unto herself, and the mother to continue her life without depletion. In the mythic past, when daughters were faces of women, different aspects of the Great Mother, like phases of the moon; the natural growth of the daughter led out of her mother, she flowed from her mother's womb. And she could return to her mother again and again in being her mother, in creating herself. Each time she returned she was strengthened, so that she might go out again, go further than before, create of herself as her mother had done - be like her mother, but belong to herself. This the cyclic nature of woman". (Arcana 1981 p.151)

Giving birth to a baby brings a woman albeit temporarily into unity with her mother, while at the same time, perhaps marks a separation; as her gaze turns away from her mother and the past towards her child and the future. Judith Arkana, in 'Our Mother's Daughters', suggests that women may even finally gain some of the approval from their mother that they have longed for. How do childless women deal with their unsatisfied longings for these experiences.

In my work as a psychotherapist and in my own personal growth work, it becomes clearer and clearer that the bindings between mother and daughter are strongest within our own psyches. It's not so much our real life, physical mothers from whom we need to separate, so much as the internalisation of the mothering process, or parts of it. This process is at the bottom of all the ways we respond to ourselves and determines whether we can meet our unmet longings creatively and compassionately. The workshops are intended as safe spaces of support for women to explore their inner patterns of relating. The movement we do as part of he work is an important area of the exploration. Until we 'move' we often can't get to know the language of our emotions as we experience it in our bodies. e.g. We may confuse fear with desire or anger. Chrissie and I use some simple movement structures to help tease out the legacies we all carry in our physical being. We aim to help women to find out 'What did my mother teach me (because she was also taught) about embodying joy, fear, desire, anger, hate. envy, grief, sadness etc.'. Then true to Gestalt therapy theory, having more awareness, women are more able to undo fixed Gestalts and take the next step in giving birth to their fulness.