by Mark Epstein
My favorite passage from the paper comes toward the end:
A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it. She cannot express it to him. . . . The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby and to hate so much without paying the child out, and her ability to wait for rewards that may or may not come at a later date. Perhaps she is helped by some of the nursery rhymes she sings, which her baby enjoys but fortunately does not understand?
Rockabye Baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
Down will come baby, cradle and all.
I think of a mother (or father) playing with a small infant: the infant enjoying the play and not knowing that the parent is expressing hate in the words, perhaps in terms of birth symbolism. This is not a sentimental rhyme. Sentimentality is useless for parents, as it contains a denial of hate, and sentimentality in a mother is no good at all from the infant’s point of view.
It seems to me doubtful whether a human child as he develops is capable of tolerating the full extent of his own hate in a sentimental environment. He needs hate to hate.
This image of a mother or father singing to their baby about their own ambivalence has always moved me. It speaks to the real experience of the parent, to the endless demands a new baby puts on one, and to the satisfaction that emerges when one’s own selfish motivations are both acknowledged and restrained. The most remarkable thing about a mother, to paraphrase Winnicott, is her capacity to take it all personally without taking it personally. His description of the parental state of mind is true for the meditative one as well. It does not need to be a blank slate or an empty void. There can be tenderness but also humor, self-pity mixed with self-deprecation, anger swaddled in love, a teasing quality that is nevertheless subservient to the rocking, singing, and cradling of the lullaby. And behind it all, there is the echo of the inevitability of separation and change as described by Right View: Down will come baby, cradle and all.
Talking about such things to a Buddhist audience always gives me a certain thrill. It is not what they are expecting. In recruiting Winnicott to embellish Buddhism, I am not only extolling the power of meditation to mimic the mind of a good enough mother, I am also emphasizing how psychotherapy has something important to teach us about how to evoke this essential mind-set. While I have made much use of this in my teaching over the years, I have also found it immensely helpful in my clinical work.
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One of my most spiritually accomplished patients, for example, a gifted woman named Claire who had practiced meditation for more than twenty years, consistently came up against the feeling that she was not real to me, that I cared about her because it was my job but not because she actually meant something to me. This is not an unusual feeling in therapy but it was very persistent with Claire. For a long time I could not figure out how to work with this feeling. If I were to be too reassuring, I might miss the deeper meaning of her insecurity, but if I were to ignore it, I would be missing something essential.
As I got to know Claire, I found that she often seemed more comfortable with her meditative attainments than she did with her own history. She tended to use meditation as a doorway to an empty and infinite expanse into which she could dissolve. She liked to go to this place in her imagination and hang out there. It gave her a sense of peace but also a feeling of sadness. There was a desolate quality to it that I could feel whenever she spoke of it. For Claire, meditation was an alternative to everyday reality; it was a place she could go to get away from things that bothered her. Once a day, or more often if she was angry or upset, Claire liked to smoke a cigarette. The way she talked about the cigarette and the way she spoke of meditation were similar. Both offered respite from the daily grind, a retreat from all that aggravated her. In my therapy with her, I often thought back to Munindra’s comment about living the life fully. Claire’s persistent feeling of not mattering to me was an important clue about what was holding her back, but I did not quite understand the connection.
A breakthrough came one day when our conversation circled around to Claire’s father. We were able to tie together several significant events in her life while making sense of the feelings therapy was bringing up. Claire’s father had left the family when she was two years old. He had remarried and had another child and come to visit when she was thirteen. She remembered seeing him playing on the living room carpet with her two-year-old half brother and feeling that the scene was too “obscene” to look at. “Obscene” was her word; it startled me when she said it and I asked her to explain. It was too rich, she said; it seemed like the perfect father-child moment, the kind of thing she had always longed for in life, and she had to look away. While there was more sadness than rage in Claire’s voice as she relayed the scene, it was clear to both of us that a deep anger underlay her experience. Claire’s own needs for her father’s attention must have also seemed obscene to her at that time. How could she not have felt there was something lacking in her? Was she still harboring this feeling within?
Several years after this vision of her father, Claire became anorexic. She would spend her evenings looking at pictures of food in magazines, salivating over the images, after having surreptitiously thrown her own dinner in the garbage. Sometimes she played a game. She would look at herself in the mirror to check whether she was real. The longer she looked, the more dissociated she would become. After a while, she did not recognize the stranger’s face in the mirror and she would pinch her skin, touching her face again and again to check whether she still held any physical reality. When I suggested that she must have wondered whether she mattered to anyone, she rejected that idea. The question was not, “Did she matter?,” she told me; it was, “Was she still matter?” What Claire felt lacking was the right to have needs at all.
When her mother belatedly realized what was happening, she plied Claire with candy and desserts until her appetite returned. While this would never be sanctioned in the therapy world as an effective treatment for anorexia, it worked for Claire. She could not resist the lure of the sweets, or the reality of her mother offering them to her, and she began to eat again. I am sure her mother was operating purely on instinct but she managed to turn her daughter around. She accomplished something therapists have a notoriously difficult time doing in the treatment of anorexia: she restored a normal appetite to her. But her unconscious wish to dematerialize did not go away.
When Claire began to practice meditation in her late twenties, she had an intense but frightening experience. Unlike many people who begin to meditate, she found it very easy to do. Her thoughts did not preoccupy her and she settled into a tranquil and peaceful state. Feelings of joy and bliss arose, and she went with them easily. But all of a sudden she became afraid. She felt separate from her body and did not know how to get back to it. Her heart began to beat furiously, but she was locked into a disembodied state. It quickly lost its blissful character and became a kind of dissociated panic from which she could not leave. It was not until one of her teachers sat with her, eyes open, breathing in and out while staring into her eyes, that she was able to come back to her day-to-day mind and body.
The richness of the interpersonal world remained something Claire felt unworthy of despite the best efforts of her mother and her meditation teacher. Her basic premise, disguised in her veneration of meditation, was that she was not real. She felt it in her relationship with me, and it is fair to say it had become an unconscious pillar of her identity. Claire’s ego was convinced of its own insignificance. It was a big deal when she could find the right words to express this and a bigger deal when she saw where her convictions were coming from and began to take my regard for her seriously. Claire often said, as she got better, that instead of “cornering” her with my understanding, I “welcomed” her in our sessions. I made room for her uncomfort
able feelings in a way that allowed her to make room for them too. Until then, her feelings of unreality—and the needs and emotions hidden beneath them—were outside of her awareness but conditioning a good deal of her behavior. Claire’s therapy allowed her to take possession of her history, painful though much of it had been. In turning away from the sight of her father, she had also turned away from herself. There were important feelings she was trying to avoid at the time, feelings that then seemed as obscene as the love on display in front of her. Those feelings—of longing, envy, anger, and self-doubt—could now start to be integrated. Right Motivation, in my view, led in this direction.
Emotions still have a bad name in many Buddhist circles. When I was learning meditation, the emotions I was taught about most often were the obstacles, or hindrances, to meditative stability that are known to all those who try to quiet their minds. These hindrances are usually listed as anger, lust, worry, doubt, and fatigue, although “fatigue” is given the more arcane name of “sloth and torpor.” Who is it that is angry? Who is it that lusts? the Buddhist teacher wants to know. Behind each of these feelings is a sense of an all-important “me”—a person, striving to exert control, at the center of a mostly uncooperative universe. This way of working with the emotions, while incredibly useful at certain points, tends to leapfrog over the important and meaningful personal content bound up with such discomfort. Claire’s therapy is a good example of this. She wanted to avoid her uncomfortable feelings by whatever means possible, but this left her feeling unreal. Emotional content needs a welcoming attitude; otherwise it will remain undigested, waiting to jump out at inopportune times.
There is a tendency among Buddhist practitioners, and even among many Buddhist teachers, to lump all feelings together and to see the spiritual path as one in which “toxic” aspects of the self, like the emotions, are “cleansed” through practice. Through the eradication of such “defilements,” it is assumed, a state of quiescence can be reached, a state of calm defined by the absence of emotional disturbances. Claire’s view was very close to this one. It is reminiscent, in the language used to describe it, of the dynamics of toilet training associated with the Freudian anal stage, where the cleansing of one’s waste in the service of order and control is also emphasized. This way of practicing leads to a kind of paralysis, however. Rather than opening up the underlying flow of feelings that marks our connection to this world and makes us human, there is only retreat and routine. In the guise of openness, emotions are shut down. Feelings are pushed away. A kind of joylessness masquerades as equanimity.
This is not to suggest that it is not important to learn to detach from difficult feelings in meditation. They are not called hindrances for no reason. But the idea that they must be eradicated is dangerous. In bringing Winnicott into a dialogue with Buddhism, I have endeavored to show an alternative. Right Motivation is the motivation of the ordinary devoted mother. She is not put off by hate but realizes that she has the wisdom and compassion to hold even the most difficult emotional experiences. This capacity is inherent in the good enough parent. Winnicott made it clear that this is the best model for psychotherapy. It seems to me that it is also needed in Buddhism. Let us treat the primitive emotions of childhood as motivation for growth rather than as obstructions to be eliminated. Treating emotional life as an obstacle is an obstacle in itself. One’s personal history cannot be erased, after all.
Three
RIGHT SPEECH
While Right Speech conventionally means abstaining from lying, gossip, vain talk, and hurtful rejoinders—all of which create turmoil in the mind—it has taken on an additional meaning for me. How we talk to ourselves is as important as how we speak to others. The way we think is as crucial as what we say out loud. Both Buddhism and psychotherapy ask us to pay careful attention to the stories we repeat under our breaths. We tend to take them for granted but they do not always accurately reflect the truth.
Right Speech is traditionally presented as the first of three ethical qualities to be cultivated on the Eightfold Path. Right Action and Right Livelihood are the subsequent two. Outer speech is emphasized because there is a choice involved in what we say and how we say it. It is rare, even when we are trying to free-associate, that we actually speak without thinking, without some kind of intentionality behind what we say. The classic approach to Right Speech asks us to pay attention to the space between thought and action and to intervene when the words we want to say have a toxic quality. It asks us to abstain from language that serves no good purpose, from words that are hurtful or distracting. But we do not ordinarily experience the same kind of choice in our inner lives. Our private thoughts seem to happen by themselves. Repetitive and destructive patterns of thinking drag us into circular eddies of criticism and blame, often with our self, or those close to us, as the target.
While the classical portrait focuses on refraining from harsh outer speech, in my view Right Speech can also be applied in our inner worlds. We can catch and question our loops of thought and rein them in, interrupting what appears to be an involuntary inner cascade. Many people are resigned to the way they speak to themselves. They do not like it yet they accept it as a given. “This is just who I am,” they say when pressed. But resignation is not the form of acceptance that Buddhism recommends. Right Speech asks us to take seriously the stories we tell ourselves, but not to take them for granted. Seeing them clearly gives us back some power over them. “Just because you think it,” I often say to my patients, “doesn’t make it true.”
Meditation is like looking at this under a microscope. An itch comes and we tell ourselves we have to scratch it or else. Our back hurts and we think we can’t take it anymore so we had better get up and move. We are stuck in traffic and get agitated about how late we are going to be and arrive in a frazzled state, having already imagined the worst. Something breaks and we rush to assign fault rather than dealing with the situation carefully or intelligently. Meditation suggests that we stay with the raw material of a given experience longer than we are used to—whether it is the itch, the pain, the delay, or the sudden loss—and to question our secondary add-ons. In emotional terms, my tendency to turn separation into abandonment is a good example of this. Separation is difficult for me, but when I give it the added meaning of abandonment, it starts to seem impossible.
When people who have never meditated are first introduced to it, they are often surprised by how easily their thinking hijacks them. Beginning meditation involves learning to stay in the body, following one’s physical sensations as they rise and fall over time. But Right Speech, in my interpretation, is a reminder not to remain stuck in the body. How we talk to ourselves continues to matter. This becomes very clear when it comes to observing one’s emotions. The raw feeling of the emotion is one thing and the mental component, in which we attach meaning to the feeling, is another. It is rare that we bother to separate the two.
For me to make sense of the feelings I encountered in the first years of my marriage, I needed to find someone I could talk to about them. The feelings had too deep a hold for me to make sense of them by myself and they were too entrenched for me to be able to simply let go of them meditatively. My dreams were talking to me in the night, but I needed to talk about them in the daytime in order to understand what might be going on. Talking about them allowed me to change the story I was telling myself. My knee-jerk reaction was to blame my wife for not being attentive enough in my distress. Once I began to explore this conclusion, however, instead of acting it out, my story began to change. I saw that there was something I had to do for myself that she could not do for me, some way I had to take responsibility for feelings that were beyond my comprehension. In a similar vein, in my work as a therapist, I cannot help people if they do not first tell me, to the best of their ability, what they are thinking and feeling, even if the content is shameful or embarrassing. Simply to dismiss one’s thoughts is to miss the boat. One’s story never changes if it is simply igno
red; it just lies in wait, ready to return with a vengeance.
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In my efforts to bridge the gap between psychotherapy and Buddhism by looking at how the emotions of childhood can haunt us in adult life, I found an unexpected and powerful ally in Sharon Salzberg. I met Sharon in 1974 at the Naropa Institute and knew her for more than twenty years before we began working together in earnest. She never intended to become a Buddhist instructor, but slowly and inexorably, with the encouragement of teachers she’d met in India while still in college, she has become one of the foremost proponents of Buddhism in the West. When she moved to New York City at the end of the 1990s, I used to send patients who asked me about meditation to her weekly classes. A number of people went back and forth between Sharon and me, allowing us to collaborate at a distance. As things evolved, when we started teaching together with Robert Thurman and I began to bring Winnicott into the mix of our public discussions, Sharon noticed how someone in our workshops would always ask me to elaborate on what being a “good enough” parent actually meant.