Philosophical and theoretical orientations | Percolating

We exist in the time of the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humans are the major geological force shaping the earth at a global scale (Macfarlane, 2019). Given this, recognition is mounting for research that disrupts and makes taken-for-granted constructs visible (Green, 2022). My research sits in this intersection, asking what it is to be a professional, an ecological being, and a human during the time in which we live. What entangles our identities?

This writing draws on new materialist thinking. New materialism is a turn from post-modernism to consider materiality, its agentic effects, and how ontology and epistemology are intimately entangled (Barad, 2003). New materialism is a philosophy that is ‘part of the world’ (Braidotti, 2013), embracing interdisciplinary work enquiring into how culture and nature can no longer be seen as separate (Haraway, 2016a), how identity is material and discursive (Barad, 2007), and how concepts and meaning are material too (Akomolafe, 2017).

My writing intends to sit in these intersections and consider the material world and the intra-active way we move through it as phenomenological, living beings (Merleau-Ponty, 1945). This idea of ‘being’ a phenomenal being puts language to the idea that our bodies think and know in ways that precede cognition. We feel the material, intra-active world, and through this feeling, we come to know something about it. We are temporally entangled with these knowings, whether or not we are cognitively aware of them.

Intra-action, instead of inter-action, argues for the intra-dependence of things rather than a linear ‘cause and effect’ of independent objects (Barad, 2014). Intra-action denotes how relationships precede the objects and how objects only come to gain their ‘thingness’ in the context of a relationship through entanglement, rupture, and congealment (Brown et al., 2020).

I consider how new materialist thinking conceptualises ‘events’ rather than structures, systems, or mechanisms enacted upon our lives (Barad, 2014). This writing details four ‘events’ through stories to illustrate intra-action and how I am being formed, as an ecological and professional being, through them.

The orientation of new materialism honours the place of obstacles, not as things to overcome but as curious spaces of being stuck. My stories illustrate stuckness, and I am comforted by Akomolafe’s (2017, p.102) noticing that obstacles are the richest, thickest, densest places in the universe, bursting with activity, generativity, experiments into dis/continuity, and alchemical shifts.

Philosophies and theories weaving with CAT practice | Embodying

Haraway (2016b) challenges us to consider that it matters what thoughts think thoughts. What this means, in practice, is interrogating and troubling the assumptions, deeply held beliefs and internalised philosophies that form our worldviews and, thus, vocabularies in the world. How our thoughts are formed extrapolates into considering the intra-actions of our behaviours, communication, and decision making with the world. This matters when considering how we embody our professional and ecological identities (Næss, 1989) and how individual stories connect to a web of other stories. This is important for CATs who work at intersecting spaces of caring for deep wounds, inviting and considering new ways of living, and bringing creativity into our clients’ worlds.

Challenging our thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and practices of being in the world is an iterative and ongoing process that therapists are invited into. In many ways, it is required in order to practice ethically. Staying grounded in lived experience and being available to practise compassion, acceptance, and open-heartedness to the people we work with in vulnerable spaces requires this.

In this work as CATs, we encounter daily the intra-active-ness of being human. We cannot ignore that we are beings entangled in the material environments in which we live and practice. We work intimately with the materiality of the arts and entangle with them in relational, surprising, compelling, paradigm-shifting ways. We know what it is to feel, engage, and be moved by this practice. This is intra-action.

When I write about and consider the word ‘ecological’ in this piece, I do so in a way that moves beyond the static, binary idea of ‘beings’ interacting with their ‘environment’. I use the term in a layered way, considering the ethical and axiological quality of what it is to be ecological. I sit with curiosity about the flux and continual becoming-with that Haraway (2016b) speaks about. I am considering what it means to challenge anthro-centric notions and begin learning to live and die well with/on this earth. How might we think with different thoughts? How might we think ourselves out of particular anthro-centric shapes and into other more ecological shapes? Moreover, how does this entangle our work and who we are in professional therapeutic spaces as CATs?

This matters because research repeatedly acknowledges that for all the different therapeutic modalities, training, and therapeutic labels out there, what it comes down to, at the most basic level, is the human-to-human connection we foster in therapy (Yalom, 2003). The quality and nature of the therapeutic relationship generate trust, vulnerability, and transformation for clients, and the therapeutic learning we practise always comes secondary to that (Rappaport, 2014).

If we consider the identities we embody, our presence and positionality, and how this influences the meeting place and alchemical space of a therapeutic encounter, then it deeply matters what thoughts are thinking our thoughts. It profoundly matters how we understand intra-actions (Dernikos et al., 2020). What we believe about our ecological place on this earth when offering ourselves in therapeutic encounters matters because we are constantly entangling with what thoughts our clients think, too, and how they experience us in our being-ness (Kopytin, 2021).

My positionality | Temporal

My positionality in this inquiry comes from nine years of living and being in Aotearoa New Zealand’s CAT world with clients, colleagues, and students, and a lifetime of wondering about belonging to and being on this earth. From this position, I resonate with Macfarlane’s reminder that the first law of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else (2015, p.69). I want to acknowledge my positionality, in time as space, as a being who grew up disconnected from my ancestral land in Scotland but also the lands I inhabited in towns and cities in Aotearoa. I want to acknowledge how Indigenous Māori grow up in relation with and connected to this land. I am a first-generation immigrant who was invited to know the natural world through invitations from the natural world itself.

In my master’s research, I considered how art-making in CAT might be gentler for the planet by collecting and creating environmentally sensitive art materials. Reflecting on this project now, I notice that perhaps there was a deeper question underneath my master’s research question. That question is not so much about the ‘practice’ of environmental sustainability in our field but something about the being-ness and intra-connectedness of ecology and our professional-ness as therapists.

An expanded notion of professional identity | Entangling

I am curious about the notion that CATs consciously and unconsciously think about identity as they go about their day-to-day (Borowsky Junge, 2014). ‘Professionalism’ as a construct is very Euro-/Western-centric. As well as this, professional identity, as a human-centric concept, seems to be understood predominantly in the present tense, by whom and how you are now. It seems to be shaped by categorisation, by who is in and who is out. It seems to be conceptualised in hierarchical, comparative, and binary ways, and is entangled with ideas about being an expert who is educated in a certain way to perform a certain type of task (Cruess et al., 2019). The ontological position of these dimensions fundamentally differs from the epistemologically driven positions informing intra-action. There is an entire raft of literature about professional identity in CAT and adjunct fields, yet, in light of the Anthropocene, I challenge this to consider how we extend this identity to include the ecological identity of being a human intra-connected with the living world.

If we consider the ways we are entangled with the world around us, then the sense-making we engage with around professional identity needs to move beyond a human-centric definition to consider a post-human (Braidotti, 2013) lens that imagines our identities as ecological, in the sense of being spatially, geographically, and temporarily formed too. I consider this ecological entanglement literally, as I think with the landscape of Aotearoa; philosophically, as I notice the entanglement (Barad, 2003) of human life with other agential forms on this earth; and metaphorically, as I tell narratives in the next section that are rich and layered and earthy. What we know and how we know it is intra-active, relational, and grounded in our lived experience of being in the world and engaging with the things of the world.

In preparation for my doctoral enquiry, I have come to wonder about, encounter, and notice how many CATs in Aotearoa New Zealand appear to already have a woven-ness to their professional and ecological identities, at least in material ways. I notice how many CATs use nature and aspects of the living world as metaphors, stories, art material, and symbols in their work with clients. Furthermore, nature-connected CAT is taught and woven into the Master of Arts in creative arts therapy at Whitecliffe College. Many students every year research therapeutic nature connections, as I did.

Therapists embracing and students researching nature-connected CAT suggest a core quest by many to live socially and ecologically well in place (Kasper, 2009). Therefore, my inquiry sits in this space, and I intend to dig into this phenomenon and consider the intra-active nature of these identity formations in our CAT worlding.

Methodologies | Enacting

In the following sections of this writing, I capture, through critical autoethnography and arts-based methods, four stories, or ‘events’, of how these complex ideas, questions, and philosophies intra-act in my lived reality.

Ellis (2016) notes that autoethnography is not simply a way of knowing about the world. It has become a way of being in the world that requires living consciously, emotionally, and reflexively. Autoethnography, as a methodology, asks that we examine our lives and consider how and why we think, act, and feel as we do. It means starting with lived experience and investigating the ‘culture of self’ and the multiplicity of identities to examine and critique broader cultural beliefs and experiences (Gray, 2011; Levine, 2019; Ricci, 2003). To help facilitate understanding of their experiences, autoethnographers use personal stories to create nuanced and detailed thick descriptions of their cultural experience (Leavy, 2016). Autoethnography privileges subjectivity, personal voice, and emotional experience, challenging traditional norms of scholarship that silence the complexity and fragility of life (Ellis, 2016).

The criticality of autoethnography comes when we observe ourselves observing, interrogating what we think and believe, challenging our assumptions, and asking if we have penetrated as many layers of our defences, fears, and insecurities (Ellis, 2016). Autoethnography is vulnerability with a purpose (Holman Jones et al., 2016), which, unlike more traditional research methods, invites secrets, disclosures, and histories to be made known with the purpose of identifying the systems that constrict, disrupt, and inform both the story and the storyteller. A lens of criticality engages the researcher to consider and more fully articulate the complex decision-making processes involved in conducting their work.

Autoethnography aims to write prose readable by general audiences, to challenge the elitism of most scholarship, and contribute to the flow of discussion around their topic. Holman Jones et al. (2016) note that autoethnographic writing is most successful when evocative and emotionally compelling. There is little point to autoethnographic writing that does not break your heart (Anderson & Glass-Coffin, 2016).

This writing utilises arts-based methods woven throughout the critical autoethnography. Arts-based methods are simultaneously a practice, a process, and a product of research, and are not simply used to discover or uncover what is already there, but are performative and generative by both creating and transforming the research and the researcher (Adams St. Pierre, 2014; Greenwood, 2012; Haseman, 2006).

At their best, the arts can move people to see things in new ways. The arts connect with people through their senses and, in research, can promote dialogue, cultivate understanding, and problematise dominant ideologies (Leavy, 2016). Images can make us pay attention to things in new ways, capture hard-to-put-into-words ideas, communicate layered and holistic nuances, evoke strong questions, and carry theory elegantly and eloquently through metaphor (Levine, 2005; Weber, 2008).

An essential purpose of engaging in arts-based methods in this inquiry is to ‘surround’ the questions rather than ‘solve’ them (O’Sullivan, 2006). This aligns with new materialist thinking about complexity and entanglement. It is a shift towards staying with the troubles and moving towards ideas and images that enhance, challenge, and diffract each other’s meanings (Allen, 1995; Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016b; Undurraga, 2021; Yardley, 2008).

The heart of arts-based research and critical autoethnography is that knowledge of the world cannot and should not be reduced to words and numbers alone, which ties in with a fundamental tenet of CAT, that there is a myriad of ways to communicate stories (Levine, 2019; O’Connor & Anderson, 2015).

Stories | Being

To ground these slippery ideas in something tangible, what follows are four stories, from the summer of 2023, that illustrate tangible, material moments about what I mean when I speak to all of this. These are personal stories. There is the story of a storm, a pine-needle basket, a waterfall, and a satellite dish. Each story attempts to demonstrate, through entangled lived experiences, how this inquiry can and does look in a critical autoethnographic, arts-based process.

Story one: The arrival of a storm, 27 January

The rain began two nights ago. In an eerie serendipitous premonition, as the rains began, I watched the movie about the 13 Thai boys trapped in a cave when the floodwaters rose. I remember the story’s mythic quality at the time, the world holding its breath as it unfolded, watching, waiting, wondering if they would all get out alive.

When I woke, the rain was still falling. It became torrential and stayed torrential all day, relentless in its power. In the afternoon, I watched through my kitchen window as the neighbour’s hill paddock began running with rivers. I watched as these rivers began to turn into waterfalls as they hit banks and cascaded off. I watched as the water gathered in the pond at the bottom of the gully. The pond burst its banks, and the water level rose rapidly. I put on a jacket and was instantly saturated as I moved around my property, trying to assess what was happening, the water sheet making it hard to see. I needed to know if I was going to be safe. The drainage trench that runs around two sides of my house, at the bottom of a bank (which slumped and slipped), had turned into a river. I was an island for a while. Yet the water in the moat kept moving and draining, and none reached my house.

That evening the news started pouring in, people checking up on each other, images of houses and cars submerged, families evacuating, animals separated from their owners, and casualties. Missing persons. Total destruction. The tears started flowing.

Our weather service recorded that, in 24 hours, the Auckland region had 249mm of rain. Shattering the records. We live on a restless earth (Macfarlane, 2019).

The rain eased overnight but still threatened. Today, I watch the horizon constantly, noticing how the clouds form and preparing myself. The airport is still closed, so I suspect I may be alone for a while longer if my husband, working away from home, cannot land. My mother-in-law checked in, sending me photos of my village underwater. My sister-in-law said it was like Atlantis.