The Trauma of Everyday Life

increasingly absurd (Did a very large hippo try to borrow your shoes?) until Little Pookie has completely forgotten why he was so upset in the first place. It is a humorous example of something parents do for their children all the time. They sense the emotional flavor of their child’s mind and endeavor to help the child make sense of it, lightening the child’s emotional load in the process.
    “Painful or frightening affect becomes traumatic when the attunement that the child needs to assist in its tolerance, containment, and integration is profoundly absent,” 8 writes Robert Stolorow, a philosopher, psychologist, and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, in his book about trauma. “One consequence of developmental trauma, relationally conceived, is that affect states take on enduring, crushing meanings. From recurring experiences of malattunement, the child acquires the unconscious conviction that unmet developmental yearnings and reactive painful feeling states are manifestations of a loathsome defect or of an inherent inner badness.”
    A recent patient of mine described a version of this perfectly. From as far back as she could remember, she had been convinced there was something wrong with her. This manifested in her preadolescent years as a conviction that her body was flawed. Her parents had their own problems, and she hid her feelings from them as best she could. But one consequence of this was that she not only felt that something was wrong with her but also blamed herself for feeling that way. She tried everything to get away from these uncomfortable feelings: ignoring them, rising above them, insulating herself from them, and pretending they were not there. None of these approaches worked too well—or, rather, they all worked a little. My patient grew to become an accomplished woman with a career and a family. But in private she was still troubled by self-negating feelings not entirely different from those she experienced as an adolescent. She could put up a good front now, but under the surface she was less than sanguine. Her body still bothered her. One day, when her college-aged children were home for the holidays, she was driving home feeling how quickly her life was passing her by. One moment her children were little and the next they were adults. Somehow, she let herself feel sad—an uncomfortable feeling she would not usually allow with such ease—and she sat in her driveway crying unabashedly before entering her home. When she told me about it some days later, she remarked upon how much worse the avoidance of the feelings was than the actual experience of them. She was touched in particular by how much love there was in her sadness.
    One of the unintended consequences of this kind of story, and of the recent focus on developmental trauma in general, has been to encourage the fantasy that relief can come through identifying where, or with whom, one’s trauma occurred. My patient and I both had the tendency to assign fault, if not to her then at least to her parents for having failed her. Although proponents of the relational perspective are quick to point out that “the possibility of emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence,” 9 it is still very tempting, when dealing with pain of this nature, to look for someone to blame. Disappointment is compounded when one discovers that tuning in to the lack of attunement does not, by itself, bring relief. The hope remains that by uncovering a single primal memory, or hearing a single insightful therapeutic interpretation, one will be healed.
    One reason why I think the Buddha’s loss of his mother makes sense as an organizing principle is that his loss occurred at such a young age. It would be impossible for him to remember it, and yet it is difficult to believe that it could have had no impact. While few of us suffer from this exact loss, many of us share the feelings of my patient, convinced that we are somehow flawed or defective. The psychotherapeutic model implies that it might have been possible for our families of origin to get it totally right: that if our parents had only been perfectly attuned to us we would feel okay. The quest for healing then takes off in a backward direction: toward the inevitable deprivations and deficiencies of the past. The Buddha did not imply that such deprivations did not matter—in fact his own experience suggests how central they can be—but he counseled a therapeutic