Session with M; absence, meeting and being met

After the holiday break I am back seeing M. Last week didn't happen though  school was back- because the family extended their break and I was not told. I can't help feeling continually out of the loop. But then I think everyone is out of the loop to one another; the parents do not communicate with the school and then the school- in a state of blurry not knowing, does not pass on the absence to me.

So the question; how to create a communicative link with M in the centre of all these short-circuits?

Perhaps the reason why I feel so strongly about this work is that it puts the wider system of missed meetings in the context where the child- who is always the one diagnosed with the communication problem, at the heart of responsiveness. Communication is re-earthed through a far finer mesh of interdependencies that run through bodies, through neurons, through veins and flesh and in the in-pouring and out-pouring of breath in the most unlikely of places. This creates a porosity that runs through boundaries of skin and walls and social and cultural institutions- to the passageways through which mind is somatized in the here and now- in each minute response and initiation. Action and passivity then flow together- the give and take as hands or minds clasping and unclasping. This has the possibility of changing humour- from the driven seriousness of goals and therapy programs with specific aims and outcomes, to  the wider and more inclusive play of seeing how we meet and the precise moment where an amorphous kind of numb procedural routine becomes alive to itself and to others; how a smile breaks out and disappears unregistered but there; an event so rapid it is not marked in any outcome though it happened because it was felt.

Because it is raining all the children and their learning assistants are piled into the sensory room that I usually use for the sessions. So I agree to use the small adjoining room and set up with two blue mats, a pillow and a small blanket. The class teacher helps me lift M onto the mat from his wheelchair.

I feel drawn to stroking the top of his head and  back over away from his face drawing his hair back to the dip of his neck where his spine begins. I talk to him. His teacher is pleased that he has put on so much weight. Yes I feel this added bulk at M's centre and a kind of thickening of his chest and upper back. I wonder how this will play out in terms of his awareness of his body in contact with mine through the sessions. This is something he has always been so finely attuned to right from the beginning even in illness and discomfort and in his many years of failure to thrive.

M quickly relaxes as always. Yet I do sense a slight withholding- as if the added bulk were a buffer in which his autonomy could be ensured. This is not a bad thing- but it is the slight sluggishness of response that alerts me- a very subtle kind of pushing out at the same time that he receives the touch and the relaxing affects of it. It is somehow as if he received these things a bit on the sly- a back-handed gift that is swiped under the jacket as if stolen and so not fully received. I wonder if he is able right now to fully enter into the event- this kind of dance of life we used to do where he would throw himself into the atmosphere of this co-patterning and use it to go deeply into somatic experience and the feelings/emotions these brought up- his head far back, his throat opened and guttural sounds emitting and dissipating like bubbles from his chest or farts from his bowels. All  this exigenesis seemed to me a kind of passing- like a passageway from hand to hand and from one person to another so that nothing remained too rigidly set and there was an easy exchange and so a patterning of a totality out of each detail visited. In other words nothing remained a detail alone unto itself but become a visit point in tandem with other locations and other intensities of depth. This translation of one point to another as an equivalence allowed for movement in the light mismatch, torsion or adjacent leap- and in this was a playfulness of the spherical turning body even as he lay there mostly still yet somehow with me imagining these torsions and loops in the point of On-Off contact; of embrace and release; of constriction and expansion over and over again.

Was this still in place? I felt a dryness and lack of humour in M and this was the very first time I`d sensed this in the five years I have worked with him. A kind of "I don't need you any more".

The session progressed in silence in that tiny hot room with the blinds down and the constant chatter in the corridor outside of ebullient teenage learning assistants in their excitement and haste and good humour and acting out in relation to the children under their charge.

Yet at another level I felt a deepening into contact and a re-envisioning of the ground rules of this contact- dealing with a more mature more independent and self-sufficient 10 year boy who would now act on choices of attention or of shutting down. I felt the beginnings of a kind of repression of feeling and feeling back; a slight hesitation to create this buffer zone just outside the moment of impact. A way to discharge the excitement of the contact or hold it in abeyance; a kind of self-consciousness that comes with growing up- and of not needing. Yet equally a deep sense of neediness to enter the more somatic patterns of experiencing his body; this basic need so often denied to him when he is buckled into his wheelchair.

How to re-navigate this different kind of boy where food is mostly now automatically implanted directly into his gut with no say-so from him. How to give him choices in the going-with an event and the sense of his mutual co-integration in this patterning?

Somehow the session did pick up and, as I began to sense his second skin and deeper resilience I found myself working more in dynamic patterns of cross-lateral torsion; movements where attention through the head then followed into the body twisting and stretching and the hand extending to feel and feel back his face and at another time to bring two fingers into the mid-line chest area to touch one another and then fly back outwards. To create in other words games and stories out of his more sophisticated attention based on his capacity now to execute gestures and body schemas that mirrored and reinforced these flights and flurries of his now more evenly firing attention.

As this became a game of repetition and invention that scuppered the routine as soon as it became a predicable pattern (but not so much that the pattern was totally lost),  a sense of cohesion through his body and mine acting as one came into play. This acted like a lever that juxtaposed two systems in order to capitalise on traction and volition, I felt M catching into this new level of a game and playing it with me; pretending we were one and then becoming two again.

Then the soundings re-emerged and his head flung back on some cushions so that his body tilted downwards and his neck and throat released. Now some more vigorous ricochetting movements through his feet and into his chest, neck throat and head- and widening into his perceptual areas; sight, hearing, and smell.

That is when M suddenly- or so it seemed to me- opened his eyes; both of them, and with a squinting slit of light filtering back and forth in this allowed-for light-shaft, he looked directly at me- and seemed to discern me- fully - with all my imperfections and areas of awkwardness.

It disarmed me and it was hard for me to meet this directness after all these years of obscuration in which direct perception seemed to be scattered into a myriad of fragments of different states of consciousness; of wakefulness tinged with sleep and sleep tinged with consciousness.. But in this moment I looked back at his looking and so the circle completed itself; just for a fraction of a second.

I feel we will revisit here and that the psychic complication of meeting and not being met or being met but not being able to meet with this or -fractionally- meeting and being met, will play out at a different level now that the somatic material has been so well established. It seems so utterly clear to me that without somatic earthing- which after all is a form of being met- to oneself by oneself in attendance to a wider environment; of ground, of being cared for and deeply received in that moment, no perceptual and psychic honesty is ever going to be possible.

M will fight now to stay in contact or to equally at times refuse certain kinds of contact and handling where this handling feels to be an invasive dismantling of his psyche. He will fight tooth and nail between being awake and being asleep and his right in this eidetic episodic flicker to modulate -like the beating spectrum of light itself this on-off exchange with entering and retracting that is life and death itself as they are wrapped around one another as one in our human living.