The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace (18 page)

The Splinter of Rock Discourse helped me with my own anxious feelings. I thought of them as like his splinter. Children who in one way or another lose their connection with their mothers or fathers seem to internalize their loss in some way, not as a thought, or even as a memory, but as a feeling. These “self-feelings,” described by Winnicott in his list that included “falling forever, going to pieces, and losing all vestige of hope in the renewal of contacts,”
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become the anxious and unstable foundations of the emerging self, the insecurities upon which identity is constructed. “It is a joy to be hidden,” wrote Winnicott of the struggles of such children, “but disaster not to be found.”
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Meditation often becomes a vehicle for being found, for bringing the splinters of rock, the internalized remnants of childhood traumas, into conscious awareness. As day-to-day thoughts and preoccupations become less dominant, the lurking feelings that tint the personality begin to emerge. These more primitive and emotionally tinged identifications, the ones Winnicott hailed as primitive agonies, lie beneath the surface of the mind and find ways of expressing themselves when given the chance. Therapists know this and are trained to let their encounters with patients expose the traces of these early experiences. The Buddha’s Splinter of Rock Discourse suggests that something similar can happen in meditation.

When the Buddha spoke of making unworldly or nonsensual feelings an essential part of the foundation of mindfulness, he was making room for what psychotherapists like Winnicott would describe twenty-five hundred years later. There are feelings we carry in our minds, ones that are not dependent on our immediate sensory surroundings but ones that define who we think we are, that entangle themselves with our sense of personal continuity. Often such feelings come from an early place, so early that they were there before we were, before our selves were formed enough to hold or understand them. These feelings demand attention, even when we are at rest. Meditation, the Buddha discovered, can work with these feeling tones productively.

I had a chance to speak with Joseph Goldstein about all of this once. We were teaching together in a daylong workshop. I had spoken in the morning, outlining my ideas about the Buddha’s loss of his mother, and he came in the afternoon. Given my questions to him, he spoke about his own experience of the mindfulness of unpleasant feeling. In his years of intensive practice, Joseph said, he had to deal with a lot of fear. Even as he trained himself to be mindful of it, he became aware that he was actually waiting for it to go away. His fear did not seem related to anything he was actually going through in his meditation—yet it filled his mind while he was sitting. It seemed to fit the definition of a nonsensual, unpleasant feeling, and Joseph did not like it, despite his attempts to be with it mindfully. He had a slight prejudice against it because of how unpleasant it was, and he was always hoping, in the back of his mind, even though he knew better, that he could manage to get rid of it. His fear was a recurrent presence, and it was not until he resolved, after years of doing otherwise, to treat it as if it would
never
go away—even if it were to kill him—that it began to actually inform his practice. Rather than pulling away from it just a bit, in a subtle form of dissociation, he learned to rest his awareness in its unpleasantness, making it into an actual object of meditation rather than treating it as an enemy. He used as an example a conversation he once had with his Burmese teacher about meditating while he had a headache. After Joseph complained to his teacher about how the pain was keeping him from meditating properly, the teacher rebuked him. “You’re missing a great opportunity,” he said. “That kind of pain can be a wonderful object of concentration. It can really settle the mind.”

“Your mother must have put you down to sleep before you were ready,” I joked to him when I heard him describe the ongoing nature of his fear. His description of it had put me in mind of Winnicott’s primitive agonies, of the ways in which babies who are not adequately held have the fear of falling forever. I was thinking that Joseph’s fear in meditation must have been his version of something left over from infancy that had happened too early for his mind to make sense out of. Unworldly unpleasant feelings, in the Buddha’s language, seemed to be another way of talking about the remnants of childhood trauma we carry in our unconscious. These feelings are not based exclusively on what is experienced through the five senses—there is a mental component that overrides and preserves the experience.

Joseph looked at me kind of funny. “My mother used to say that for the first three years of my life I just cried and cried,” he said. “She felt like there was nothing she could do.”

For me, this conversation with Joseph helped things fall into place. While he had never particularly tied his meditation fear to his childhood experience—working it through meditatively did not demand that he make this connection—it helped me give language to the stirrings of my own unconscious, language that calmed my mind enough to let me apply the foundations of mindfulness to my anxious feelings. It helped me treat my anxiety without shame, letting it come and go as part of the flow of feeling of which I was a part, while recognizing that I was, perhaps, being given a window into my earliest emotional experiences, not all of them pleasant ones. If my anxiety was like the Buddha’s splinter of rock, then I might be able to learn to be with it as he had been, “not complaining at all, enduring it with mindfulness and comprehension.” This is something I have taken directly into my work as a psychotherapist. People often come with fear or frustration or anger or pain that seems to have been there from the beginning. By recognizing that these feelings may well be remnants of infantile experience, I can help them attend dispassionately but with real interest. Rather than feeling besieged by or ashamed of such feelings, people can take ownership while at the same time not judge themselves so much for their discomfort. This attitude has proven very helpful. Many patients, troubled by these leftover feelings, criticize themselves for them. “Other people have it much worse,” they say. “I should feel lucky that this is all I have to worry about.” But the self-judgments only compound the problem. They perpetuate the malattunement that was the likely source of the discomfort. Once someone can treat his or her feelings like a splinter of rock some movement becomes possible.

Something similar applies in cases of big trauma, too. Those who have encountered incredible hardship or loss often feel that their experiences are singular. They believe that they, alone, have been hurt, and they judge themselves, or worry that other people will judge them, if they reveal what they are going through or have been through. They expect themselves to “get over it,” or, at the very least, to protect other people from their distress. Attending to their feelings mindfully, with attunement and responsiveness but without judgment, often feels too threatening. The Splinter of Rock Discourse has something for these individuals, too.

When the Buddha taught the Middle Path, his vision was one of balance. Having reconnected with his own capacity for joy, with his spirit of vitality, he now had the poise and stamina, the ease of mind and the fortitude, to hold the unpleasant aspects of his psyche in his awareness. In Winnicott’s way of thinking, this equilibrium is what unfolds in the therapy office, with the therapist re-creating the holding environment of the good-enough mother and the patient left with no other option than to slowly let in, or out, the un-worked-through unpleasantness of the past. In Winnicott’s language, the therapist creates a holding environment, a field of awareness, that mimics that of the early parent-infant bond. It does not duplicate it, but it is close enough that a sense of safety is reestablished and one’s defenses are allowed to relax. In the Buddha’s experience, the relational aspects of Winnicott’s therapy were collapsed into meditation. In his case, the capacity to make the mind into an object of mindfulness, to know the mind knowing, created a holding environment for the entire range of his emotional experience. To return to the metaphor of the sky so favored in the Buddhist tradition, the Buddha’s recognition of the background presence of the luminous emptiness of awareness allowed him to hold the splinters of his emotional life in a new way. While the splinters did not disappear, they lost their special status. They could coexist with his knowing mind just as the clouds coexist with the sky. In discovering his knowing mind, the Buddha demonstrated that there is an ongoing rapport that continues, within the individual, long after he or she emerges from the infantile parent-child matrix. The relational capacity that begins in infancy when we are totally dependent on our caretakers endures. We have the ability to be both subject and object to ourselves, and this capacity of reflective self-awareness has the potential to enlighten us, to ease the burdens we all carry.

In the Buddha’s self-analysis, and in his later teachings on mindfulness, we can see his relational self in action. It is as if he were reproducing the parent-infant dynamic internally but taking it to a higher level. Listen to one of today’s foremost researchers on mother-infant rapport, Peter Fonagy, to have a sense of how close the parallels are. He uses the word “affective” in his writing in the place of “emotional,” but he is talking about the same thing, about how babies are helpless in the face of the onslaught of their own feelings.

We suggest that the infant only gradually realizes that he has feelings and thoughts, and slowly becomes able to distinguish these. This happens mainly through learning that his internal experiences are meaningfully related to by the parent, through her expressions and other responses. These habitual reactions to his emotional expressions focus the infant’s attention on his internal experiences, giving them a shape so that they become meaningful and increasingly manageable. . . . The parent who cannot think about the child’s mental experience deprives him of the basis for a viable sense of himself. . . .

Within a secure or containing relationship, the baby’s affective signals are interpreted by the parent, who is able to reflect on the mental states underlying the baby’s distress. For this reflection to help the baby, it needs to consist of a subtle combination of mirroring and the communication of a contrasting affect. The nature of the object’s mirroring may be most easily understood in the context of our description of the parent’s pretend play with the child: thus, to contain the child’s anxiety, the mother’s mirroring expression will display a complex affect, which combines fear with an emotion incompatible with it, such as irony. . . . We believe that the infant is soothed (or contained) through much the same process.
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Fonagy is describing the way a parent helps a child make feelings tolerable. He is evoking the means by which an attentive parent creates a field in which feelings can be known. In his view, this is an ongoing process, in which the parent attends to what is going on in the child, reflects upon it, and interprets it for him. Young children or infants have no idea what their feelings are. They are moved by them and possessed by them, but their minds do not yet have the capacity to hold or symbolize or name or understand what is going on. For this they are totally dependent on the adults who care for them. Fonagy describes what he has found in his laboratory, where he and his colleagues have observed infants with their parents. The good-enough parent senses what is going on in her child and mirrors it back with a slight twist. She lets the child know that she knows what is happening and she lightens it a bit with her combination of ironic detachment and sensitive attunement. The parent knows that whatever is happening is not the end of the world. If the child is hungry, she will be fed. If she is wet, she will be changed. If she is tired, she will go to sleep. If she is anxious, she will be held. And in the meantime, when the child is still caught up in the feelings of distress, the parent soothes her with her words and gestures. When Winnicott wrote of the parental “holding environment,” he was writing of this very phenomenon. In relating meaningfully to the child’s distress, the parent, over time, develops the capacity of the child’s mind to understand what feelings are and to deal with them. Fonagy’s word for this is “mentalization.”

The Buddha’s therapy, as described in his Four Foundations of Mindfulness, involves much the same process. What the Buddha counsels, in a moment-to-moment way, is just the kind of attitude that Fonagy described in an attuned mother: Seeing things clearly—the mirroring aspect—but not treating things as
too
real. Giving the information back with a slight twist, with a bit of paradox. “For me,” said the Thai teacher Ajahn Chah, pointing to the drinking glass he kept by his side, “this glass is already broken. Yet when I know this, every minute with it is precious.” When he called the glass already broken, Ajahn Chah was striking the ironic note of the Buddhist perspective. Undercutting our perceptions of what is real, he created a space in which the traumatic facts of impermanence and insubstantiality could be known. His words created a holding environment in which we could understand for ourselves how something could be both broken and whole, intensely alive and yet, in the words of the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, burning with the trauma of impermanence. And there was something ineluctably calming about seeing it this way. What he was saying was true, and we could tolerate it.

When the Buddha taught the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, he was charting the path to selflessness. When one sees that one’s experience is but a conglomeration of raw data, one’s conviction about one’s identity is shaken. When one sees that awareness has a life of its own—that we can be aware of it, or it can be aware of us, or that it simply
is
—our notions of who or what we are begin to collapse. The possibility of no-self makes us look at ourselves differently. Nothing changes, but there is a twist. What we had formerly assumed was so solid and real now comes into question. Ajahn Chah might say the glass is already broken—another Buddhist teacher might just call it empty. Whatever words they use, they are replicating the emotional stance of the good-enough parent who soothes her child by both mirroring and slightly undermining his all-consuming distress. “You take yourself so seriously,” she gently teases, holding the difficult feeling with her smile.