The Trauma of Everyday Life

with some reflection, grasp what might have been going on. My wife’s play with the wiggle worm, in the context of breast-feeding my daughter in the first weeks of her life, was making me uncomfortable. It was hitting me in a place I could not tolerate and making me act out aggressively. Why? Winnicott, with his exquisitely sensitive descriptions of the dynamics of the mother-infant relationship, had an idea. Reading him, I could sense how much my wife’s play with the wiggle worm embodied something I ostensibly valued but was also made anxious by. She was manifesting just that quality of mind that helps a baby navigate emotional experience without becoming traumatized. In witnessing her demonstration of it, my own trauma resurfaced and I enacted it once again.
    “The mother (or part of mother) is in a ‘to and fro’ between being that which the baby has a capacity to find and (alternatively) being herself waiting to be found,” 7 Winnicott wrote, in a description of how a parent stops her child’s feelings from becoming stuck in implicit memory. She is both a separate self (waiting to be found) and a potential space in which her self is suspended, making room for the baby to find her. In letting herself be that which the baby has a capacity to find, she puts herself into relief. The baby then has the admittedly illusory experience (although not illusory to the baby) of discovering her, an experience that is inherently creative. “In the state of confidence that grows up when a mother can do this difficult thing well (not if she is unable to do it), the baby begins to enjoy experiences. . . . Confidence in the mother makes an intermediate playground here, where the idea of magic originates, since the baby does to some extent
experience
omnipotence.” 8 This is what my wife was facilitating for my daughter. She was showing how the wiggle worm could become a transitional object and she was beginning to endow it with the qualities of the breast. She was making a playground in which the wiggle worm, and by extension herself, was both already there and waiting to be found. In sensing her intentions, something in me must have rebelled. My reactive behavior manifested exactly the opposite approach, one that Winnicott warned against. As is often the case with trauma, I began to act out what I must have, in some way, experienced. My implicit memories were going straight to my actions. Only this time I was engendering more trauma, passing it along to those I loved most in the world in an endless cycle the Buddha called samsara.
    Winnicott used the language of gender to illustrate two possible approaches a parent can take with a child. “The male element
does
while the female element (in males and females)
is
,” 9 wrote Winnicott. Two mothers, both breast-feeding, can look identical, but the experience of their infants can be radically different. In one, the baby can find the breast for herself and have the feeling of creating it; in the other, the breast finds the baby and the infant has to comply. In the first scenario, the good-enough one, the baby, while feeding or being held, actually becomes the breast for a time. In the other scenario, the breast is given at the behest of the mother and the baby has to adapt. Instead of space being created in which the baby can find the breast, the baby is given no agency and no choice. When it is time to eat, it is time to eat. “Either the mother has a breast that
is
, so that the baby can also
be
when the baby and mother are not yet separated out in the infant’s rudimentary mind; or else the mother is incapable of making this contribution, in which case the baby has to develop without the capacity to be, or with a crippled capacity to be.” 10
    For Winnicott, if early experience goes well, it provides the foundation of a stable sense of confidence. “We find either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living,” 11 he wrote. “Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and that life is not worth living.” 12 The trust engendered by the “breast that
is
” carries over and makes emotional development possible. Even after the rise of the ego and the emergence of the self, this “capacity to be” is crucial. If it is there, it makes for a fluid ego, one that can dissolve into