The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (20 page)

“The mother (or part of mother) is in a ‘to and fro’ between being that which the baby has a capacity to find and (alternatively) being herself waiting to be found,”
⁷
Winnicott wrote, in a description of how a parent stops her child’s feelings from becoming stuck in implicit memory. She is both a separate self (waiting to be found) and a potential space in which her self is suspended, making room for the baby to find her. In letting herself be that which the baby has a capacity to find, she puts herself into relief. The baby then has the admittedly illusory experience (although not illusory to the baby) of discovering her, an experience that is inherently creative. “In the state of confidence that grows up when a mother can do this difficult thing well (not if she is unable to do it), the baby begins to enjoy experiences. . . . Confidence in the mother makes an intermediate playground here, where the idea of magic originates, since the baby does to some extent
experience
omnipotence.”
⁸
This is what my wife was facilitating for my daughter. She was showing how the wiggle worm could become a transitional object and she was beginning to endow it with the qualities of the breast. She was making a playground in which the wiggle worm, and by extension herself, was both already there and waiting to be found. In sensing her intentions, something in me must have rebelled. My reactive behavior manifested exactly the opposite approach, one that Winnicott warned against. As is often the case with trauma, I began to act out what I must have, in some way, experienced. My implicit memories were going straight to my actions. Only this time I was engendering more trauma, passing it along to those I loved most in the world in an endless cycle the Buddha called samsara.

Winnicott used the language of gender to illustrate two possible approaches a parent can take with a child. “The male element
does
while the female element (in males and females)
is
,”
⁹
wrote Winnicott. Two mothers, both breast-feeding, can look identical, but the experience of their infants can be radically different. In one, the baby can find the breast for herself and have the feeling of creating it; in the other, the breast finds the baby and the infant has to comply. In the first scenario, the good-enough one, the baby, while feeding or being held, actually becomes the breast for a time. In the other scenario, the breast is given at the behest of the mother and the baby has to adapt. Instead of space being created in which the baby can find the breast, the baby is given no agency and no choice. When it is time to eat, it is time to eat. “Either the mother has a breast that
is
, so that the baby can also
be
when the baby and mother are not yet separated out in the infant’s rudimentary mind; or else the mother is incapable of making this contribution, in which case the baby has to develop without the capacity to be, or with a crippled capacity to be.”
¹⁰

For Winnicott, if early experience goes well, it provides the foundation of a stable sense of confidence. “We find either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living,”
¹¹
he wrote. “Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living.”
¹²
The trust engendered by the “breast that
is
” carries over and makes emotional development possible. Even after the rise of the ego and the emergence of the self, this “capacity to be” is crucial. If it is there, it makes for a fluid ego, one that can dissolve into nourishing experiences, give way to the creative impulse, and spontaneously erupt in joy. If it is not there, the ego becomes more “male” in nature: There is a reliance on “doing,” a more rigid approach to everyday life, and a more uncomfortable relationship to the self. “The study of the pure distilled uncontaminated female element leads us to BEING, and this forms the only basis for self-discovery and a sense of existing (and then on to the capacity to develop an inside, to be a container, . . . ). At risk of being repetitious I wish to restate: when the girl element in the boy or girl baby or patient finds the breast it is the self that has been found.”
¹³

When the Buddha taught mindfulness, he seemed to grasp much of what psychotherapists like Winnicott spelled out for us. In particular, in his treatment of unworldly or nonsensual feelings, the Buddha described how the traumas encoded in implicit memory could become objects of meditation, how they tend to surface when the female element of “being” is given preeminence in the mind. Mindfulness creates another version of the container Winnicott identified as the mother’s most important gift to her child. By moving the ego to a neutral place of observation, giving the “male element” something to
do
, and then focusing on raw experience, an internal environment is created that mimics the early infant-mother relationship. Under the spell of this kind of attention, implicit memories are given opportunities to reveal themselves. Like the videocassette I discovered in the back of my bookshelf, meditation asks us to reexperience aspects of ourselves we would rather forget. The re-membering aspect of mindfulness, like the writing process I engaged in after watching myself on the video, creates a bridge between implicit and narrative memory. One begins to give name and form to one’s inchoate feelings, to gather one’s dissociative elements back into the self. This can be a humbling experience, but it can also be a relief. The troubling aspects of the self are a lot less troubling when held in the forgiving arms of one’s own awareness.

I sensed a version of this happening through my own reflections on the wiggle worm. Meditating on my strange behavior while writing about it helped me see a distressed aspect of myself with less shame and more understanding. It also helped me take responsibility for similar actions in later family situations. In the events captured on the videocassette, I was acting out a traumatic residue. Confronted with my wife’s unself-conscious display of her own female element, I manifested a caricature of the male archetype, revealing something about my mind that I, and the people close to me, have had to deal with. In vivid display, I manifested what today’s researchers have also concluded. “The organization of mind comes to mirror, in part, the organization of earlier communicative processes.”
¹⁴
The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.

One woman who has come to a number of my lectures and workshops over the years, whom I will call Eva, confided in me recently how hearing me equate the work of Winnicott with the practice of mindfulness has helped her with her own trauma. She described how she would be “blindsided” over and over again by what she came to understand was primitive agony hiding in her implicit memory. Unexpectedly, and with no conscious control, events in her relational life—an unanticipated rejection, a minor disagreement or an unwanted demand from her husband—would provoke an outburst of fear or anxiety that would completely destabilize her. Drawn to the practice of meditation, Eva was able to describe how the progression of mindfulness—from the breath to the body to the feelings to the mind—helped her deal with her history. “It’s not like the trauma ever really goes away,” she told me. But by using the breath as a central, and neutral, object of mindfulness she was able to give herself enough room to sometimes face the “unendurable” feelings when they arose, instead of simply being at their mercy. For Eva, the word “sometimes” was crucial. “What meditation gave me was the choice to be with the feelings
or not
,” she told me recently. “When they get to be too much, I can come back to the breath and feel safe.”

Eva’s experience matched my own. She found that meditation, by providing auxiliary ego-support and a more neutral observing stance, opened up her memories and allowed conscious access to feelings she could only have previously enacted. But the ability to have a choice in the matter was critical. When those difficult feelings arose, which they would do sporadically and unpredictably both in and outside meditation, she could move back and forth between them and her breath as she saw fit. Over time, she could get to know her feelings bit by bit, but she had enough control to not be totally overwhelmed by them. This made her less vulnerable when her traumatized emotions were set off in daily life. They were not such a surprise, and her fear around them became more tolerable.

The Buddha, in his embrace of mindfulness, found a middle path between indulgence and dissociation. Spurred on by his childhood memory, he took himself out of an eternal present in which he was endlessly acting out feelings of self-denigration and reestablished a link with his personal history. He made remembering the centerpiece of his therapeutic method. In his careful elucidation of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, he established the means by which implicit memories can be converted to narrative ones. The process is analogous to that which occurs between mother and infant. The memories of feelings are sensed in the body and known by the mind. A second-order symbolization is made possible. A narrative, although not necessarily a verbal one, is created. A picture is made, a representation established, a felt sense known. Feelings are brought out of the body and into real time and space. The boundaries and fortifications around them are pulled down as the ego surrenders its supremacy to the auxiliary function of mindfulness.

Winnicott did not know of meditation; he knew of psychoanalysis. He felt that the therapeutic situation in many cases reproduced and mimicked the early child-parent relationship, providing a second chance for unexplored trauma to resurface in an environment in which it could be experienced as if for the first time.

There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life,
has already been
. It is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious. . . . In this special context the unconscious means that the ego integration is not able to encompass something. The ego is too immature to gather all the phenomena into the area of personal omnipotence.

It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience. . . .

In other words the patient must go on looking for the past detail which is
not yet experienced
. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future.
¹⁵

The key to Winnicott’s thesis is his understanding that
experience
is healing and that certain pivotal events have, nevertheless, not yet been experienced or remembered. In the scenario that he outlined, the infant at first needs the mother to provide protective ego coverage so that difficult emotions or difficult experiences become tolerable. If the mother’s absence or preoccupation precludes this protective coverage, the infant has nowhere to go. The very help that he needs to deal with the lack he faces is unobtainable. Instead of learning about tolerable frustration, there is only intolerable, and unthinkable, anxiety. But the child cannot process this situation alone. It never gets dealt with. Often it is filed away but resurfaces later: a kind of prototypical posttraumatic stress disorder. The person becomes fearful or anxious or aggressive but does not know why. Winnicott believed these ghosts were actually ancestors and that
awareness
was the key to unlocking their influence. “The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the possibility that the breakdown has already happened, near the beginning of the individual’s life. The patient needs to ‘remember’ this but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet happened, and this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to. The only way to ‘remember’ in this case is for the patient to experience this past thing for the first time in the present, that is to say, in the transference. This past and future thing then becomes a matter of the here and now, and becomes experienced by the patient for the first time. . . . This is the equivalent of remembering.”
¹⁶

A person in therapy uses the therapist in much the same way that an infant uses a parent, as a provider of protective ego coverage, so that feelings that would otherwise be too frightening can be slowly passed back and forth and made known. Meditation, as the story of the Buddha’s life makes clear, does something similar. It also creates a holding environment in which unknown and unexamined aspects of the past can be experienced for the first time in the here and now. My vision of myself on the videotape, like my dreams on retreat, gave me another opportunity to turn my implicit memories into narrative ones. Winnicott, who liked to frame things as “male” or “female,” would have seen my predicament as emblematic of too much “male” energy. For him, there needed to be a balance between doing—the male element—and being—the female element. In my fight against doing and being done to, I was locked into a dissociated aggressive response. In search of attunement and responsiveness, I was nevertheless vulnerable to my own aggression. In the face of my wife’s nursing of my daughter, I could not contain myself. Not only did I enact my own trauma, I created trouble for them.

The Buddha dramatized a version of this as he journeyed toward his enlightenment. The events that unfolded after the recovery of his childhood memory and the abandonment of his ascetic practices brought him face to face with the childhood trauma he had not yet fully experienced. In Winnicott’s formulation, it had not yet happened because he had not been there enough for it to happen to him. But with his mind rejuvenated by his childhood memory and his body replenished by the offering of the maiden
, Gotama was ready to make more room for himself. Emerging from between the rock and the hard place that had so constricted him, he was poised to remember that which he had no conscious recollection of. The first sign of this came in the form of five great dreams. While they are traditionally viewed as prophetic, these dreams seem as related to the past as they do to the future. They suggest that the Buddha, like the rest of us, needed to connect with his history. With no videotape to come to his aid, his implicit memory yielded up its treasures in the only way it could. His dreams, as Freud would later confirm, were the royal road to his unconscious.