The Trauma of Everyday Life

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.
    The Buddha, in recovering his capacity for nonsensual joy, learned that this joy was limitless. He found that if he got himself out of the way, his joy completely suffused his mindful awareness. This gave him the confidence, the stability, the trust, and the means to see clearly whatever presented itself to his mind. In the curious bifurcation of consciousness that meditation develops, where we can be both observer and that which is being observed, the quality of joy that he recovered did not remain an internal object. It was not only a memory or merely a feeling to be observed; it was also a quality of mind that could accompany every moment of mindfulness. The more he accepted the presence of this feeling and the more it toggled between being object and subject, the closer the Buddha came to understanding his true nature. Splinter of rock or no splinter of rock, the Buddha was figuring out how to relate.

9
    Implicit Memory

    N ot long ago, while cleaning out my bookshelves, I came upon a videotape, a VHS cassette, that had slipped behind a layer of novels on an upper shelf. I wondered about it as soon as I found it; I had recently transferred all my home movies from minicassettes to DVDs, but this discovery was of a different size and make from the others. I ran quickly to watch the tape on my television, congratulating myself on not having thrown away my cassette player yet, and found myself face to face with a forgotten episode from my past. The scene was from 1986; it was recorded when my daughter was five weeks old by a friend of a friend whose house we were visiting in upstate New York. I had not given the tape a single thought since it was recorded—I’m