by Mark Epstein
When I did manage to sleep, I dreamed recurrently that my teeth were clenching against themselves so hard they began to crumble. I would wake from these dreams in fright, afraid that I was actually hurting myself, and wary of dropping back into sleep. It is possible that meditation was helping me to be more conversant or, as John Cage had once indicated, more fluent with the information coming in through my senses and up through my dreams, but I did not know what to make of what was happening. The dreams persisted and began to evolve. I would be trying to get through to someone on the telephone—calling my wife, for example—but as I dialed the phone it, too, would start to crumble. Then my teeth would start in. The crushing feelings were intolerable and I would wake with another start. I brought all this to my therapist.
“Oral rage,” he said right away, spelling out for me something I had read about but never thought could actually apply to me.
Oral rage is the anger that children exhibit in the earliest years of life—when the mouth is the primary erogenous zone and the breast or bottle the most important source of connection. Nourishment and comfort are one and the same in this “oral” stage of psychosexual development, and an infant expects (if an infant can be said to “expect”) that their needs will be met immediately by whoever is taking care of them. Children in these years, around the time when their teeth first come in, exhibit intense fury when they are not immediately gratified. They attack their parents with the full force of both love and hate when they are in need. Young children do not have words for these feelings. There is not enough of what is called “secondary process” in the mind—the ability to think symbolically or abstractly about something—for the child to understand what is going on inside of them in these moments and there is certainly no ability to postpone the immediacy of their demands. In many cases, parents are able to respond in a timely manner, with enough sympathy and care, so that the anger gets pacified or diffused. The child is reassured and his or her rage becomes manageable. But sometimes, for myriads of reasons, the response does not come, or does not come in time. In such situations, rage becomes unmanageable. Situations in later life that evoke a longed-for intimacy can make it erupt once again.
As my therapist and I talked, my dreams coalesced into an actual memory. I was four or five years old and my parents had left me to babysit for my younger sister, two years my junior, while they went next door to play bridge with their friends. I was a responsible child, even at that age, and my parents had entrusted me to watch over my sister while she napped. There was an intercom connecting the two houses—I still remember it—and they gave me instructions on how to call if I needed them. My sister had cried and I had been anxious after they left. The memory of the intercom came as I was describing one of those dreams in which the telephone disintegrated.
I was able to give meaning to my perplexing sleeplessness through all of this. The happiness of my marriage had made separation challenging. I was hungry for the connection and deeply uncomfortable when it was absent. It echoed that earlier time of my life when my wish to be the responsible child had created conflict with my need for contact. Perhaps it even reached back further, into infancy and early childhood, when the first inevitable separations and frustrations take place. There was no way of knowing for sure, but there was enough of an explanation in all of this to settle me down. I was turning separation into abandonment and acting as if there were no tomorrow. On one level, I was having insomnia. On another, I was experiencing separation anxiety. But my dreams were showing me something even deeper. There was a primitive anger underneath my anxiety that I was not in touch with but that was driving my behavior. Therapy helped me to acknowledge this anger, to make a place for it, and to give it understanding. The dreams went away, and while my insomnia still rears its head on occasion, I am now able to use meditation for what it is good for. It does help contain those primitive feelings when they rise in the night, even if it could not help me understand where they came from or make them go away.
—
My breakthrough in therapy aided me immensely in my marriage but did not free me as much as I might have wished. I was still vulnerable to my early conditioning even if I had a better understanding of its roots. In fact, one of my first attempts to bring Buddhism directly into my work was compromised for just this reason. Driven by an unacknowledged fear, I acted in a way that undercut the message I was endeavoring to communicate. In retrospect, my behavior seems related to the issues I was facing in my marriage, although at the time these connections were not at all clear to me.
I was teaching in the mid-1980s at the New York Open Center, a clearinghouse in downtown New York City for all things New Age, with two old friends, Daniel Goleman and his wife, Tara Bennett-Goleman. In those days, the Open Center was on Spring Street in Soho; I believe it had opened just a short time before. I had recently completed my residency in psychiatry and begun to see private patients, and Danny and Tara invited me to join them in leading the class. I had done very little of this kind of thing yet. Goleman had been a teacher of mine when I was an undergraduate in college (he was one of the first to steer me in a Buddhist direction), and although I was grateful for the opportunity to teach with him and his wife, and was conscious of the affirmation connoted by the invitation, I was still young and finding my way. This was not long after Joseph’s pivotal conversation with Arlene, and I was hopeful, empowered by my old friends, that I, too, would be able to help people better understand the dharma. We called our workshop “Clinical Relaxation,” and we planned to offer meditation to people who were looking for new ways of dealing with stress. But I was anxious in my new role. I have a vivid memory of trying to calm myself in the upstairs bathroom of the Open Center that morning, my intestines churning and unresponsive to my internal pleas. I could have used a conversation with Munindra myself on that day to help me deal with such things.
The morning session went well enough—we talked about stress and gave preliminary instructions in concentration and mindfulness—but at lunch Danny told me they had to catch a train at four forty-five that afternoon. Something important had come up, and even though the workshop was scheduled to run until five p.m., they would have to leave early to make it to the station in time. I would have to run the last hour by myself.
I remember how startled I was when he told me.
“What?” I exclaimed to myself. “You’re leaving early? What? What about me?”
Maybe it would have been easier if he had asked me nicely, I thought, if he had not just laid it on me as if it were a fait accompli. But this is the kind of thing I often find myself thinking when I am angry or hurt. If only so-and-so hadn’t said it that way, if only they had asked me in a different manner. . . . The fact was, I was pissed. But I was not prepared to deal with it with him. He was my friend and my former teacher. He was now the psychology writer for the New York Times. I respected him enormously. It was a privilege to collaborate with him and Tara. What was I going to do?
My mind worked very fast. “Okay. If they are leaving, I’m going to leave, too,” I thought. “No way I’m going to be left holding the bag.”
Looking back at this many years later, I find it hard to fathom why their early departure was so threatening. What was the big deal about running the class for an hour by myself? In subsequent years I have come to be comfortable in these kinds of situations, but in those days it felt like a challenge I was not necessarily up to. In thinking about it, I can see that my reaction was as much about being abandoned by my friends as it was about the unexpected opportunity of leading the class by myself. Rather than dealing with it in any sort of straightforward way, however, I tried to turn it into a teaching for the participants. I remember thinking what an elegant solution I had come up with.
My idea was the following. Our day was structured with periods of silent meditation alternating with lectures and discussions. At the end of the afternoon, just before Danny and Tara were to catch their tr
ain, we would begin a period of extended meditation. People would be sitting quietly with their eyes closed, watching their breath, practicing Right Mindfulness. While everyone was sitting, we would just slip out the door. Sooner or later people would grow restless, open their eyes, see that we were gone, and know that the day was finished. There was the possibility of a huge spiritual lesson. What did they need teachers for? Wasn’t Buddha-nature inside them already? They were looking to us as some kind of authority, but their wisdom was already within. Just as Munindra had refused to buy into Jack Engler’s need for meditation instruction, so could we challenge our students’ expectations about us. They wanted us to make them feel better, but they had to do it for themselves. The best advice we could give them was no advice at all!
Danny and Tara did not object to my plan. It is quite likely that it did not exactly register with them. They had to make their train, they had another engagement, and they had decided to hand responsibility over to me. That I was not really taking responsibility eluded them, as it eluded me. I was pleased with myself, and while I was not unaware of my lingering anger at my friends, I did not yet recognize how I was acting out my insecurities by inflicting the same kind of abandonment on our students that I was myself trying to avoid. My plan did not include any warning to the people in the class that I would be leaving early. Danny and Tara let them know about their train but I did not say anything about my agenda. I was just going to disappear. A rather creative demonstration of the Buddhist notion of no-self, I thought.
All went smoothly with my scheme. I introduced the final meditation, Danny and Tara left for their train, the group sat there in silence together with their eyes closed, and I quietly got up and tiptoed out of the room. I did not think about it much thereafter—the workshop was over for me and I was on to the next thing. A week went by before the Open Center forwarded me a stream of vituperative letters from participants who were hurt by my abandonment of them. There was no e-mail in those days, so it took some time for the consequences of my decision to catch up to me.
“Where was the compassion in your action?” they wanted to know. “What were you thinking?”
In teaching the Eightfold Path, Buddhism often stresses the balance necessary between wisdom and compassion. Compassion without wisdom is sometimes called “idiot compassion” and manifests as someone giving too much and destroying himself or herself along with whomever they are trying to save. It is common in abusive relationships where the afflicted partner keeps on forgiving the abusive spouse, or in situations where a person is addicted to something and another person—a parent, spouse, or child—enables their loved one’s addiction by being overly forgiving. But there can also be wisdom without compassion. I am not sure that my little teaching exercise qualified as wisdom, but it was certainly lacking in compassion. My motivation was not Right Motivation. It was motivation based in fear and insecurity, not in regard for the other. As befits the connectivity of the Eightfold Path, the untoward consequences of this failure of motivation had a ripple effect. Saying nothing of my plan was not Right Speech. Leaving my students to fend for themselves was not Right Action. The effort to avoid my anxiety was not Right Effort. Tiptoeing out of the Open Center was not Right Livelihood. Forcing my students to be attentive while being abandoned was not Right Mindfulness. And disappearing was not Right Concentration.
My failure at the Open Center helped me in an unforeseen way, however. It made me aware that my personal life was not as disconnected from my spiritual life as I might have expected, and that issues that were bedeviling me on the home front could unexpectedly show up elsewhere. This led to a change in my understanding of Buddhism and reinforced for me how important it was going to be to integrate what I was learning in my personal life and from my own therapy with my Buddhist leanings. If Right Motivation means living the life fully, then therapy has an important role to play.
—
Right around this time, I published a piece about Buddhism in a classical and widely read British journal of psychoanalysis and I received letters from three respected New York analysts after the paper was published. Each of the analysts independently suggested that I read the work of a British child analyst named Donald Winnicott, whose work centered on the notion of the “good enough mother” and on the transitional objects of childhood—the blankets or stuffed animals that help children navigate separation. Something in my depiction of Buddhism had evoked Winnicott for each of them. I was only vaguely familiar with his work at the time but I was intrigued and began to read him. He was especially attuned to the kinds of things I was discovering in myself: the primitive emotional experiences of children before the onset of language. Among many brilliant and provocative insights was one that my own issues had alerted me to. Because children are filled with emotions they cannot understand, they are completely dependent on the people around them to “hold” their emotions for them and make those feelings bearable and, later, intelligible. Parents do this instinctively by comforting their children when they are upset and letting them know that things will be okay. Winnicott wrote of how inevitable failures in this “holding” leave scars. When there is a “good enough” environment, children develop a faith that emotional experience is manageable. When there is not, there is a sense of being “infinitely dropped.”
In my article, written without knowledge of Winnicott’s work, I had taken issue with Freud’s well-known depiction of mystical experience as a return to the “oceanic feeling” of the infant at the breast. But I had said that Freud was nevertheless onto something. While I did not use the phrase “holding environment,” I tried to describe how meditation creates a container in which otherwise uncomfortable feelings can be known and investigated. The meditator does not have to regress to infantile narcissism, as Freud had imagined, for the unprocessed emotions of childhood to be revealed; they come up naturally—sometimes when meditating, sometimes in dreams, and sometimes, as in my case, in love. What I found so helpful in Winnicott’s work was that he had explanations for where these feelings originate. His explanations supported what I had discovered in my own therapy; his approach dovetailed with my therapist’s and reinforced the insights my teeth-crushing dreams had given me. Rather than treating my uncomfortable feelings solely as annoying obstacles, I was able to investigate them, think about them, and use them to come to a more compassionate understanding of myself.
My efforts to integrate Buddhism with therapy shifted during the subsequent few years. I saw how relevant Winnicott’s way of thinking was for my patients, as well as for myself, and I strove to make my office a place where people felt safe enough, over time, to reveal the feelings that frightened them, the ones they did not understand and that threatened their grown-up equilibriums. My focus became increasingly centered on therapy; I felt it was important to offer people the opportunity to work with their primitive emotions from a psychodynamic perspective.
It was not until two other friends from my Buddhist circles moved to New York City and invited me to teach with them that I made another attempt to bring the two worlds together. Robert Thurman is a professor of Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University and one of the first Westerners to ordain as a Buddhist monk in the school of Tibetan Buddhism headed by the Dalai Lama. And Sharon Salzberg is a meditation teacher in the vipassana tradition of Theravada Buddhism, the Buddhism prevalent in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Thailand. She is one of the founders of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, where I have done the majority of my silent retreats. The three of us have now taught together for almost twenty years. As our teaching has evolved, I have found myself elaborating many of the themes of this book. Rather than presenting meditation as a technique of stress reduction, as I had done with Danny and Tara, with Bob and Sharon I always began by discussing the troubling feelings I had discovered in myself. I had spent enough time as a therapist by then to realize that I was not alone in grappling with such issues and that many people who were coming t
o learn about Buddhism were also struggling to understand their deeper and more frightening impulses. Buddhism by itself does not easily address the kinds of things that psychotherapy takes as its bread and butter, and that Winnicott wrote about so evocatively. In order to make Buddhism relevant in today’s world, where our psychological selves are part and parcel of what we bring to meditation, I found it very useful to explain Winnicott’s perspective and to talk about the value of psychotherapy. Buddhism has a lot to offer, but it needs help with the kinds of psychological issues that we often face: issues of relationships, of childhood, and of emotional reactivity rooted in an unresolved past.
When teaching with Bob and Sharon, I almost always began with a famous paper of Winnicott’s, called “Hate in the Counter-Transference,” which compares a therapist’s frustration with his or her patients to that of a mother who cannot help but sometimes hate her beloved infant. I love presenting the paper to people interested in meditation because it helps to make anger a worthwhile subject of inquiry rather than simply a disturbing element they are trying to get rid of. Winnicott’s paper has a sinister undertone, a realistic appraisal of the human condition, combined with an uplifting, almost spiritual message, unusual in a professional discourse.
In his paper, Winnicott invokes eighteen reasons why mothers hate their infants. He does not do this with any kind of malice, judgment, or condescension, but with an empathy and humor born of experience and understanding. To my mind, his main point is that rage, of the kind I experienced in my dreams, does not magically disappear (even when there has been a “good enough” childhood) but manifests in adult life whenever frustrations are encountered, even in situations, like parenthood, where we might rather pretend it does not exist. His thesis is that therapists, in order to help patients with their issues around anger, must be comfortable with their own deepest feelings, just as a mother, in order to help her child navigate his or her own destructive urges, must be comfortable with her own. “However much he loves his patients he cannot avoid hating them and fearing them,” he writes, “and the better he knows this the less will hate and fear be the motives determining what he does to his patients.” In reflecting on my behavior at the Open Center, I could see how relevant this warning could be!