The Church of 10,000 Yeses

Chapter One

The Simple Yes of Love

 

    “Underneath all his [her] preoccupations with sex, society, religion, etc. (all the staple abstractions which allow the forebrain to chatter) there is, quite simply, a person tortured beyond endurance by the lack of                     tenderness in the world.”

Lawrence Durrell

 

 

It is now 34 years after that monumental conversation with Joko Beck. That singular dialogue and her simple word “tenderness” has continued to reverberate, transform and offer coherence in my lifer. My work as both a psychotherapist and developmental researcher has centered upon our shared underlying need for tenderness - as infants, as children, and as adults. Everything in my psychotherapy with adults and my clinical interventions with infants and young children underscores the essential need of tenderness within the human experience.

 

I'll telegraph where I'm going (which may offer you an early opportunity to opt out of reading further). Joko was absolutely accurate. Human suffering is, in so many circumstances, a byproduct of our inability to be tender with the orphan of inevitable pain each of us experience. We appear to have two choices: avoid the pain that simply refuses to go away or slow down enough to recognize it and allow it to actually be comforted (by ourselves, others, and the Mystery of grace) with tenderness. I simply haven't found a workable third option.

 

I want to be clear, there  is certainly suffering that isn't primarily interpersonal. The inevitability of illness, old age, and death - are all part of our lives. And yet, I've been alive enough years (and worked on cancer wards, with hospice patients, and grief groups) to know that how we face such events of suffering is ultimately an internal experience. What we may not know is that how we approach inevitable suffering. is learned in our earliest relationships. Hurt people hurt people, we know this. Something very similar turns out to be true for people who were inadequately met with tenderness early in their lives. Definitely not understood by most of us, is that these limitation around tenderness (for ourselves and others) is stunningly common. (When was the last time you offered yourself the comfort and kindness that supported listening more deeply to your pain?) Knowing little of the contours of tenderness, those of us who felt unmet struggle with meeting pain (especially for the orphan in ourselves) in a deeply tender way..

 

Reality, as the cliche goes, is always personal. Cliche or not, that statement, in terms of infant and child development research is very accurate. We all start out as children. Within the field of infant research it is now a proven scientific fact that our earliest experiences form a template that becomes the lens through which we observe life for the remainder of our lives. (Along with two colleagues I've written two books on this topic which can be easily googled.) As it turns out, this has so much to do with how we interface with the inevitable pain in our lives. This template is formed in a preconscious state of mind prior to having access to language. It is often referred to as "the unthought known" because it our experience of "how reality works" (how relationships function, how pain is responded to, how inevitable difficulty resolves or fails to resolve, etc.). It is known, but not consciously thought, it's simply for us, "the way life is." It's obviously subjective and experience-based. We all respond to life in a vast array of ways, each of which is (at least to a significant degree) a response to the filter or lens through which we have come to know life.

A colleague, Dr. Daniel Siegel, makes clear the personal nature of our introduction to life on this planet when he says, "We all come into this world looking for someone looking for us."  We're hardwired to be loved. We all want to "experience being experienced," that is a given. We simply can't not seek out being seen and known and cared for. That much is no longer up for debate. How successful we are at having this underlying longing met, as it turns out, has so much to do with how we make sense of the pain in our lives. To return to Joko's insight, "Do we learn, early, that pain is both inevitable and deeply workable? Do we experience a depth of comforting presence that makes clear that both joy and pain can be shared? Do we learn that who we actually are can be met by another or others or do we learn that either all or us or parts of us must go unrecognized and experienced alone. It is this alone which becomes "all alone" that is at the source of what we are now calling the orphan in our lives. 

 

 

"From our earliest moments on planet earth there’s one

question that all brains want answered, and they want it

answered, “Yes.” And they don’t want a lukewarm “Yes,” or a

“Maybe Yes,” or a “Getting-to-Yes, Yes.” They want a

substantial, resounding, unequivocal, “YES! Yes.” When the

answer is something other than “Yes,” if the answer is

“Maybe,” or “I’m not sure,” a confusion and uncertainty

begins to take shape in our brains. The question our brains

ask is: 'Are you there for me? Do I matter enough that you’ll

put me first when I need you to? Can I count on you to attend

                                                           to me in the ways I need you to? Do I truly and deeply                                                                                                                             matter to you.?"

— Mark Brady, Ph.D.

 

The language of the heart is Yes. This is what 13th Century mystic Meister Eckhart called "the simple Yes of love." With Yes we thrive, without Yes we begin to wither and then defensively take control. Who among us hasn't experienced precisely the kind of insecurity that Mark Brady names above?: Intimacy struggles, family strife, workplace interpersonal difficulties often step from the uncertainty stemming from interactions that remind us of "Maybe Yes"  or "I'm not sure Yes."  Lacking trust in a full Yes, we ask the exact same questions in the here and now: "Are you there for me? Do I matter enough that you’ll put me first when I need you to? Can I count on you to attend to me in the ways I need you to? Do I truly and deeply matter. to you?'" This isn't pathology, it's the precious vulnerability that makes us most human. .The number one internal (yet unconscious) mantra of almost every client I have worked with and as well as friends and colleagues is "It's up to me, on my own." From this fundamental pre-conscious decision (often  occurring in our first few months of life and certainly by the age of two) our internal insecurity goes underground and is lost from conscious awareness. It gets covered over by an amnesia that blocks out our original pain. We then craft strategies (clinging, performance, perfectionism, withdrawal, etc.) designed to keep our focus on anything but this forgotten (but not really) pain. This is the pain that Joko calls "the orphan,"

 

You live with a child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this child
. . . [This child] is uninformed with six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now [this child is] repeating them to you.

- Robert Bly

 

This child is doing everything possible to avoid repeating dreaded moments of non-Yes..  Moments like: "When I

get sad, she gets upbeat," "When I'm upset, he gets more upset," "When I'm focused on her she stops listening and changes the subject.". This child is too young to have a clue about how to actually help herself.. Her (or his) "big ideas" were formed in a void, a place of loneliness and despair. This is the opposite of an environment that might support wise and compassionate options..   

 

 

 

 

“Hurt is not what hurts us, what hurts us is not following hurt to its source. Hurt always continues to hurt, and in a greater way, when we do not follow it back through our minds, through our bodies, through our memories and through all its endless sources to the place where it begins.”
- David Whyte 

 

 It's also the grief of an unacknowledged hurt that David Whyte so powerfully names as the very pain (orphan) we typically keep at a distance. It is here that go to work doing all we can to deny the hurt as either significant or real and double down on our chosen strategy to stay away from the scene of the original crime. 

 

 

Ideally, the first year of life is primarily supportive of an infant being surrounded with soothing and a palpable experience of caregivers who are For and With whatever the child is experiencing. It is no coincidence that the first moments after a child’s birth are followed by a great cry and then the great soothing needed as the infant is settles into the mother’s tender care. This is the first lesson within our first moments outside the womb:: soothing comes first. From that time forward, the underlying tenderness of caregivers who are For us and With us (in our delight and in our pain) continues to be required.

 

Side Bar: Throughout this writing I will be speaking of tenderness as our central psychological need. This can be confusing because, of course, our needs are more complex than the need for tenderness. 

 

Yes. And no. 

 

When I use the word tenderness, I mean tenderness-at-the-core of every interaction. Developmental research is now clear that infants and children require caregivers who offer an underlying coherence to their children by providing three key traits: strength, kindness, and commitment. When these are consistently present, children’s lives make sense and they are secure. When one or more of these traits is missing, children feel confused and lost and are insecure. But strength (“i’m in charge as you learn to make sense of your life”) must be offered with tenderness at its core. Commitment (“You can count on me to be here with you and for you in every circumstance”) requires tenderness at its core. And kindness is, by its nature, tender at its core. Thus, while children have needs that expand beyond tenderness, I am saying that they require tenderness at the core of how each need is being met. 

Without tenderness as the bottom line, what’s the point of it all? We’re here, ultimately, to share our hearts and to experience the sweetness of love. 

 

In the 1960’s , while I was still in high school, a group of scientists decided to test the sensitivity of an amoeba. Why they did chose to do this I have no clue. Their methodology was to place an amoeba under a microscope and then poke it with a sharp object to gage its reaction. Each time they did this the amoeba would contract for about 30 seconds and then gradually expand outward to its normal size. But, after about 8 pokes the amoeba would contract and then refuse to once again expand. Their conclusion was that this single celled organism, without an apparent brain, was “exquisitely sensitive” to the impact of trauma and that its eventual choice to remain in a state of contraction was testimony to how lifeforms are inherently self-protective. It also implies that even an amoeba is somehow aware that it has innate worth, something worthy of protection.

 

If this is true for an amoeba, what does this say about the “exquisite sensitivity” of an infant or young child (and its experience into adulthood) when it is experiencing moments (and years) of insensitivity and even trauma? How does this explain the patterns of self-protection (often called defenses of the ego or false self) that begin in childhood and often follow us to our death bed? In what way does this awaken our empathy for the intricate patterns of self-protection that most of us employ in defending the exquisite sensitivity and innate worth at the core of who we are?

 

In 1970, I began my first year in graduate school and my first clinical professor was Frank Kimper who on October 3 of that year  said 9 words that revolutionized my life. I was quite literally one person before I heard his words and I was a different person a few seconds later. His words were these: “Every person you will ever meet has infinite worth.” He then added an additional sentence: “Every person is infinitely precious.” He said that worth and preciousness cannot be measured, but they can be recognized and known. Once recognized they cannot be forgotten. As he said these words I experienced a kind of transmission from his awareness to mine and I knew in an instant that he was sharing what I most needed to know.  There has not been a human interaction since that time when his words have not influenced how I experience the person in front of me. I have, since that time, begun any class I. have taught with his 9 words. At the end of each class students, almost unanimously, say that is. the single learning they will carry with them.. It was, without a doubt, the most important learning in my graduate education.

 

We are, each of us, exquisitely sensitive, beings of infinite worth on a planet that is stunningly limited in its capacity to honor either this level of sensitivity or recognize the infinity of our worth. This becomes my definition of a "fallen world," a setting where it is not. our badness that is the problem, but the inevitable wounding to our innate goodness gives rise to the defenses that create additional wounding and ongoing pain.

 

Through the decades that would follow, my work with adults in psychotherapy and my research with infants and young children, has confirmed what Frank Kimper taught me in a few brief sentences. We are each sensitive beyond measure and our sensitivity is consistently focused on the quality of tenderness (or lack thereof) being offered by those with whom we share our lives. Every infant pays exquisite attention, moment to moment, to the loving environment offered. When this is present, infants and young children blossom into an ongoing sense of trust. When it is not present the infant and young child learn to defend against the pain of not having their infinite worth honored and deep sensitivity attended to with tenderness.

Very few people I know (very, very few) are capable of offering tenderness to the orphan of their personal pain. We (at least in this westernized, capitalistic culture) are remarkably adept at sidestepping our pain, either shaming and chastising ourselves for struggling or focusing outside ourselves on either others or achievement as a way to avoid simply meeting our suffering head on. 

 

We all know the term "hurt people hurt people." Yes, and this is always the case when anyone in control of others forces pain on those under that control. But hurt people also hurt themselves. The underlying compassion that we all most crave and are hardwired to know is simply unavailable to most of us most of the time. Said simply, we transmit to others and the divided part within ourselves the very pain we have yet to transform within tenderness. It is this ongoing "lack of tenderness in the world" that keeps the wheel of suffering endlessly. turning.

 

Our culture is primarily busyness in the service of amnesia - forgetting what was painful and also forgetting our longing for a deeper dimension, one for which we were created. 

Chapter Two

 

“Whether we are rich or poor, we all share the fear of being left alone and abandoned, a fear that remains hidden under the surface. Its deepest root lies in the possibility of not being loved at all, of not belonging to anything that lasts, or being swallowed up by a dark nothingness.” 

 ⁃ Henri Nouwen

 

Until we have access to Tenderness at the heart of the Holy, we’re screwed (lost, alone, and left screaming into the void

 

Infant development researchert, Dr. Daniel Siegel, has a summary statement about the human condition: "We each come into this life looking for someone looking for us." Nice work if you can get it. What he's pointing us toward is the simple fact that unmet people don't meet others well and they don't meet themselves well. 

 

As an infant development researcher myself, I consistently observed the many ways very young children experience  "ships passing in the night" events as they are forming their view of who they are, who important others in their life are, and how life works.

 

”You are the Light that shines in the dark that is my life, the Yes that sings in my no, and the song of everywhere that was, is and will be.”

 ⁃ Meister Eckhart 

 

If we are wounded in the ways of intimacy and closeness early on, why wouldn't we struggle with  opening to a  deeper intimacy and closeness when it is being offered from the ultimate nature of the universe? What Yes are we even talking about if it isn't known when we are forming our sense of the world? The eyes with which I have learned to recognize tender presence or its lack are the same eyes with which I will be expecting to see whoever "God" might be.

 

We each carry an exquisite coherence (a map if you will) hidden at the heart of our wounds. Our innate and early  vulnerability is often confronted with the wounding that comes with not being seen or known, with never being found; not being met at the core of who we are.. Beneath our deepest longing to be found (an occurrence that we begin to believe to be impossible) something tender is yet (and always) waiting. As the Sufis say, "Thirst is proof of water." So too, our core longing for tenderness is the map toward finding love waiting to find us. This is at the heart of mystical awakening, the growing awareness that the universe is constructed for an ultimate intimacy, the sharing of the love we most need by a Love that needs us. Theologican Henri Nouwen says that the hidden nature of God is to be discovered in the most personal intimacies of our own lives. The problem within the human condition is that this capacity to trust in intimacy is wounded in so many of us from early on. This blunts our ability to recognize and respond with ease to the tenderness at the heart of things. (If you pay close attention to the mystical spiritual writing in all traditions you will always find tenderness at the core of what each moment offers.)

 

Fully outside of religious dogma, this quotation honors the absolute necessity of accessing a “holy” reality within a life that is continually offering “unbearable” options. And it is clear in its assessment that the only way to unflinchingly face that which is unbearable is through a discipline that is “severe.” No easy outs here. But also no embarrassment about recognizing that without the holy there is no resolution to the agony we all know all too well. 

 

What I’m about to explore with you is based on my forty plus year practice as a psychotherapist focusing on abandonment despair in the clients I served. It is also centered upon what I discovered in my five year journey into the heart of my own darkness. It will be based on the commonality of a shared certainty on the part of every person I work with that “I am in pain and I am alone in my pain and it’s up to me, alone, to strategize a way through it.” I will also be incorporating my almost three decades as a developmental researcher into the way infants come to make sense of relationships and how their early conclusions influence the remainder of their lives. 

 

It all comes down to moments of meeting, whether they happen or whether they don’t. And sadly at the core of how many of us are our moments of absence rather than moments of presence. This forms us and becomes the negative certainty that permits our belief about ourselves, about others, and about the universe. This is the fractal agony that a culture of desperation and distraction is consistently living out.

 

For this equation to activate within us, we need to have access to an experience of the sacred that we can trust. The sad and painful experience of many is that the options offered for direct connection with the holy are tribal, insular, self-serving, and narcissistic. They are commonly shame-based and require a kind of self-negation that is destructive or promote outcomes that are little more than promises of ego satisfaction that do little to impact our experience of “the unbearable.”

 

We need to address “the unbearable” and what gives rise to “the unbearable.” This will take some digging.  We also need to address “the holy” and ways this can be made available that don’t require dogma and acquiescence to belief systems that get in the way of building a deeper intimacy with the divine, an intimacy that is always available and doesn’t require institutional or traditional buy-in. 

 

All the many micro-ways we try to remain self-sufficient, certain that we are always alone.

 

All the ways we are being offered a personal intimacy we’re hardwired to know but are sure isn’t possible. Too good to be true. Wishful thinking. And yet it’s such a fractal, so much so that it is almost absurd how obvious it is. So many micro-moments of resonance through the day that mirror a larger Resonance from which it all emerges.

 

Who is really good at any of this? Who do you know who is capable and  willing to bring the very worst together with the most sacred? What is this sacred? How can it be real and not prescribed for us? Authentic and learned within the realness of our own lives.

 

All of your battles will shape who you are

And know that your scars are my favorite part

I want you to know this. 

 

Needing “another” seems just too dangerous.

 

Vulnerability is the exposed presence of raw need.  The key question for those of us working on this point of pain is “How did our caregivers honor our deepest needs?”  To the degree that they did not, our vulnerable self will want to remain hidden, mistrusting and cynical concerning the risk involved in the further sharing of need.  Once again, this will have a major impact upon how we approach God.  

 

In her own way, this is what my friend is asking when she says: “If God already cares, why do I need to ask?”  Not unlike most of us, she is saying that it is painful to expose her need, to cry out, to beg, to experience true desperation.  Thus, like her, many of us find ourselves saying: “If God really cares I shouldn’t have to make it known.”  If crying out in our earliest relationships was not a particularly successful endeavor, why do it now?  The wish hidden in many of our hearts is the desire to be in a relationship where we don’t have to risk exposing need, a setting in which we can have our needs met immediately as they emerge.  This is the dream and hope and expectation that are often brought to God.  “Be the all knowing, all powerful, and all supportive caregiver that I have never known but always longed for. And, while you’re at it, please keep me away from any future pain.” (i.e., “Be the one who will guarantee me that I won’t have to face the hurt and disappointment of previously denied needs.”)  In this request we seldom realize what we are really doing.  Because, rather than asking for a healthy holding environment that would contain us and allow us the full differentiation of a unique self – alive in a world of inevitable difficulty – we are seeking a God who would keep us within an perpetually infantile state.  And yet, because the pain of suffering alone is so unbearable and because we cannot imagine a presence that would be with us as we come to terms with this pain, the wish understandably persists.

 

Chapter Three

 

Behind my [memories]. . . coursed three icy streams of thought: the howling cry for my mother’s love; the rage at my entrapment in grief; and my resolve, as hard as nails, not to be caught in that place again.                                                                 - Mark Matousek

 

KTH - journal piece

 

These days, when I observe a homeless mother with a history of severe abuse and neglect who is clearly able to manifest simple, genuine being-with her baby, I feel that I am observing what D.H. Lawrence called "the living, incarnate universe" and the "Mama matrix most mysterious."

 

The cure for pain is in the pain.  

Good and bad are mixed.

If you don’t have both, you don’t belong with us.

       

                                                                                   -Rumi

 

Sadly, our overarching worldview and view of the cosmos defines the personal view we hold of ourselves and others. Modernity implies a conclusion that we each exist alone in a universe that is, itself, alone and ultimately lonely. It is no coincidence that the psychological malady of our time, one shared by many, has been termed “abandonment depression.”  Having been a clinician for more than 40 years, I have watched the trickle down effect of our perceived cosmic abandonment on the internal experience of abandonment in the lives of my clients. Many of us believe that we are but random strangers in a strange land, separate individuals alone (and abandoned) within an ultimately meaningless cosmos.

 

 A term used often used to define our times is “the Great Separation.” This is apt, because we go through our days separated, each person expected to find an individualized meaning as best they can. Many of us struggle to be personally connected. And any sense of cosmic connection is either thought to be illusory, built on fantasy or is told to us in a way that distrusts our innate goodness, requiring shame and self-negation as an entry point. Yet another popular option is mindfulness, but outside a community setting this often becomes another individualized, self-improvement (ego oriented) endeavor. 

 

[A daily practice] is a slow and sometimes painful process of becoming as little children again, in which we make friends with mystery and finally fall in love with it. And in that love we find an ever-increasing freedom to be who we really are, in an identity that is continually emerging and never defined. We are free to join the dance of life in fullness without having a clue about what the steps are. —- Gerald May, The Dark Night of the Soul

 

“Solitude is a courageous encounter with our naked, most raw and real self, in the presence of pure love.” - Richard Rohr

 

My practice is bringing the vulnerability of the unbearable within me into communion with the Tenderness that passes all understanding. It is giving up any sense that what needs to happen is up to me. It is my surrender into unknowing (and no longer needing to know) that I am learning to trust and rely on. This is the “nothingness” where I can finally be met as I have always needed. (It is here that I’m beginning to give thanks for the failures and disasters in my upbringing because it is through them that I have been led here, into an original dependence that I have spent my life trying to avoid.)

 

I'm going to share with you a piece of writing I did about 10 years ago that will, in a relatively brief time, clarify what I see happening for so many of us. It involves a video-based parent/infant psychotherapy that my colleagues and I pioneered and that has been quite helpful, ultimately, to many other clinicians. It involves videotaping a parent and a 4 month old and then reviewing the tape with the parent,  helping her or him make sense of how they are interacting (the nuances of presence and absence). What you are about to read is daunting information and yet I have come to recognize that the emptiness, aloneness, the sense of not being known, and the experience of being met, not met, or met with too much intensity (which is another way of not being known) starts very early. I'm also quite convinced that psychotherapy is not how these core issues can be adequately addressed. As you will soon see, I believe the only way to actually touch in and make a needed difference is at a spiritual level. This, of course, is where I believe ICN comes in. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Chapter Four

 

“In this life the heart is going to be injured.”  

- Robert Haas

 

 

Watching Lindsey

 

As attachment researchers. we spend a great deal of time watching babies with their caregivers in millisecond by millisecond interactions. We notice how infants are always paying very close attention to the willingness of their caregiver to follow their lead.

 

As an attachment oriented therapist it is my job to pay exquisite attention to how infants pay exquisite attention to the quality of connection between their caregivers and themselves. In the following observation of video freeze-frame you will witness baby Lindsey experience the tentativeness of being connected as a question: "Are you here with me now? And now? And now? Will you stay with me as I change moment to moment? Can you say YES to all of me or are there places in me where you start saying 'Maybe yes.' Or 'I'm not sure' or 'No Way'?" 

 

It is in the "not so yes" and the "tantalizing but pretend yes" and the "yes, but really no" that we learn to question ourselves and, catastrophically, experience the onset of shame. As it turns out, anything other than "Yes, yes" eventually gets translated into shame: "It's me. It's got to be me who's the reason I'm not getting "Yes."

 

I’m sitting next to a mother as she perches on her chair’ s edge, looking toward a video monitor placed in front of us. Monica is a highly successful youngprofessional seeking help because her four-month-old daughter Lindsey, “just cries and cries, unable to calm herself down.” After a brief pause she adds, “Maybe I spoil her, because she seems so ungrateful.” I’m about to show a recently recorded videotape of this mother and daughter in a standard laboratory interactive session. The screen displays Monica as she sits on a folding chair directly facing Lindsey, who is leaning back in a car seat looking in the direction of her mom. As Monica and I watch the monitor, we see how she is smiling broadly, eyes dilated, intensely focusing upon her daughter. This mother, utilizing her signature upbeat intonation, calls out to Lindsey in a high-pitched voice. “Hey Linds! Watcha doin’n?” Her daughter, head at the back of her chair, returns her mother’ s smile for several seconds and then looks out beyond her mom, then down and to the right. Monica immediately shifts her weight, bringing her head into alignment with her daughter’s new position. With a cheerful, bubbly voice mom chants “Lindsey, Lindsey! Hey, Linds!” Her daughter’s shoulders shrug briefly as she momentarily meets her mother’ s gaze. They both grin, each smiling, but this time Lindsey’ s smile seems slightly odd, almost forced. The baby’s eyes quickly move up past her mother o the lights on the ceiling. The mother’s smile falters for a few tenths of a second, then seems to ratchet up a notch. Monica raises her right hand and commences to gently, but insistently poke her child’ s tummy. “You like to be tickled don’t you? Yes, you do. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.” As she finishes the third repetition of “gotcha,”Lindsey winces briefly, then begins to whimper. Not yet crying, it is clear that she soon will. Mother momentarily shifts her gaze out and away from Lindsey, frownsslightly, and with a barely discernible irritation turns to face her daughter. This mother’s tone is suddenly flat, the cheer fully vanished. “I think you’re just sleepy. You just get so cranky when you need a nap.” Now turning away, she begins rummaging through her purse. With a voice slightly aloof, almost curt, she intones: “Let me find your Binky.”

 

From a clinical perspective, what we’ve just seen is a mother whose hope for shared happiness makes it hard to read her daughter’s bids for personal space and a slower, less frantic rhythm. Because of this mother’s inability to dial-down her own need, her child eventually winces and whimpers, cuing ever more directly that mom’s intenseagenda is simply too much. Unfortunately, when Monica notices her daughter’s distance, she misses an opportunity to experience the relationship from her child’s perspective. Instead, because she is feeling momentarily rejected, this mother withdraws her warmth. She’ll back off, but with a sense of confusion and

growing resentment. Sadly, they are moving into a relationship where neither mother or daughter will feel they can get things right. 

 

Moments of not meeting. Moments of void.

 

Moments of shame-in-the-making to fill that void.

 

Moments of unnameable despair about ever being safe enough to simply "be" without the fear of criticism or intrusion.

 

To paraphrase Donald Winnicott: It is easier to remember difficult, even traumatic events, than it is to remember moments of nothing happening, where presence was needed. How do you remember absence when attuned presence was needed? 

 

How does an infant remember the anatomy of emptiness and the texture of not enough . . . or too much?

 

What we’ve seen here certainly wouldn’t be defined as neglect or abandonment, at least not in the way we might typically understand these terms. Even so, four-month-old Lindsey has begun to experience something of what it’s like to feel unknown and potentially unknowable. Naturally, instinctively seeking an experience of presence from a mother who is well-intentioned but unable to read some of her central cues, Lindsey already has a dawning sense of being a stranger in a strange land.

 

How is Lindsey to make sense of the fact that the central figure in her life, the one teaching her the structure and nuance of relationship, is unable to read her requests for less pressure, more personal space and simple, unadorned delight? How, at four months old, is she to understand the absence and experience of being unmet she is already beginning to know?

 

Years later, unable to decipher persistent feelings of isolation, hopelessness, and a tendency for shame that morphs into self-attack, Lindsey might find herself speaking to a therapist. “It makes absolutely no sense. I had an almost perfect childhood. My mom was utterly devoted to me. But, inside I feel lost, like no one actually ‘Gets it. Getsme.’ I have such a hard time letting people close. Why? It makes no sense. And I’m never really happy, or even satisfied. There’s something really wrong with me. I’m such an ungrateful bitch.”

 

There she’ll still be sitting, feeling terrible and bad. There she'll sit blaming herself for an emptiness she lived but that doesn't compute.

 

She will sit in absence, yet she won't feel completely alone. Lindsey will have "some-thing bad" about herself to focus on, and she'll have a persistent, harsh, yet ever-present voice of negativity (about herself, about closeness with others, about her life, and possibly about access to "God") always keeping her company. 

 

Shame, hopelessness, and distancing will have become her primary companions, they are now "the presence" that "holds" her, filling in for those who couldn't meet her when she needed them most. .

 

Unfortunately, I see "Lindsey" in therapy patients, close friends, family members, and most definitely myself on a consistent basis. Welcome to the human condition as experienced by many of us. 

 

By the way, it is important to note that there are, in fact, deeply secure and comfortably nuanced parent/infant relationships on the planet. In this two minute video clip you'll see how an interaction can go really well. 

 

The sad news is that such attunement on the part of a parent is remarkably rare. I've worked with hundreds of parent/child dyads (many of which were not considered troubled) and have never seen an interaction that equals the one just mentioned. For me, this is part of  the wounding that many of us carry without having a clue where it began.

Chapter Five

 

 

In very simple language, my colleagues and I have spoken to clients (and friends) through the years about the shared and deeply human fear of falling into "the black hole." Our mentor, a psychoanalytic luminary by the name of James Masterson, described the singular terror that is behind all human defensive strategies as "abandonment depression." (We have added "emptiness despair.") Both are names for the black hole of not being met when we needed to be met and of then "falling forever." (Infants and very young children have no sense of time. When something painful happens it gets internally recorded as "forever.") Masterson was brilliant at teaching us (we studied with him for 10 years) how to recognize, moment to moment, our clients attempts to stay away from and not be reminded of the black hole that is (unconsciously) always center stage. Sadly, this capacity to observe this perpetual avoidance strategy has become something I can't turn off. I see it all the time In others and in myself. (It's a bit creepy to know this about me. The only good news is that in 93.7% of circumstances my affection and caring for people takes over and it isn't a problem. Unfortunately, some of the time - primarily where it brings up my own history - it creates a problem. This is definitely what's happening with me and Allen. More on that later.)

 

 https://tenor.com/view/hole-black-hole-swallowing-sinking-drain-gif-21211016

I don't know if you can download the above GIF, but it tells the whole story in a single image. It's a graphic that portrays what is known as "the unthought known," that which we actually know deeply but didn't have language to think about when memories were being formed. As it turns out pretty much everyone we know is living inside this GIF. It's a bit dark to be saying this. It's may be a modern, psychological version of defining "the Fall," a story that has never held much interest for me. But we have all already "fallen" in real time within memories we formed before we had language. we then spend much of our lives doing everything we can to never fall again. (Our defensive strategies, all designed to avoid the vulnerability that brings us to the edge of the black hole, are likely what the church means by "sin." Yes, we all do it. Yes, it causes great suffering because the more frightened we are, the more we'll do what we can to protect ourselves from falling.) Sin in this way is about legitimate, deeply human needs that have yet to be met and the inevitable (and not to be blamed ways we use to avoid that pain). My favorite phrase as a therapist was "of course." For me, this is quite hopeful.

 

An adjunct to this avoidance strategy is the inevitable internal mantra: "It up to me." This seems to be universal. This is certainly understandable because each of us realize (again before we have language) that our environment and those we most need aren't meeting our deepest needs.  Hence the mantra:  "It's now up to me." (The actual phrase is more likely "It's up to me . . . alone.") This is the birth of the ego or defensive (false?) self. It's actually not false at all. It is legitimately defensive and terrified. It's working overtime to survey the landscape and make sure it gets what it thinks will help. ("What helps" tend to be patterns encouraged by parents, the church, and the culture that support the false hope that these needs can be met with a particular strategy (performance, compliance, intelligence, withdrawal, etc.) Those suggested game plans simply never pay the bills.) 

 

When what we require is simple resonance and a sense of being loved, no transactional strategy (and all strategies are transactional) will offer what is most needed.

 

What is essential to realize is that always (ALWAYS) deeper than any strategy or any defensive self is the true self that is ever present, always alive and waiting for (longing for) the safety and love (experience of being known and met) that has yet to happen. (With the cacophony of false options being shown to us while growing up and now as adults, it's hard to decipher what would truly meet the most healthy needs of our genuine self. Religion is often stunningly adept at piggybacking on our abandonment terror/emptiness despair in support of strategies that are defensive (using God-as-defense rather than doorway into the vulnerability that liberates the true self). Religion has, through history, been profoundly destructive to the true self. It's clear ICN is committed to not perpetuating this pattern.

 

What i learned in my experience with depth psychotherapy has been what I consider the legitimate recognition that the path to health travels through our facing the black hole (and eventually stepping into it).  There can actually be no health found living inside the protective strategies that continue to fuel the illusory world of the defensive self. I was taught, clinically, to walk with clients up to and then into their abandonment despair for brief periods of time each session, over a period of years. When done with the support of a compassionate and knowledgeable therapist (one who can empathize with the agony of what is being relived), essential learning about one's history, one's own personal defenses, and new ways of relating does happen. (This is some of what is meant by shadow work, even some of that work is self-directed, within the control of an ego that is hoping to transcend itself. Unfortunately the ego cannot be the author if its own demise. It can fool itself into thinking progress is being made, but in my experience, self-styled shadow work can often make the ego more sophisticated at being defended.)  

 

While I believe that we must find ways to authentically return to the scene of the crime (the black hole), after decades of working with people in this way (and many years of my own psychotherapy.) I have come to believe that the agony of the black hole is simply too overwhelming and intense to be traversed by an individual, even with the help of a therapist. Our Westernized fantasy of the "singular hero's journey" is just not up to the task. Transforming the black hole on our own, as an individual, is more wishful thinking than living reality.

 

The River beneath the river . . .