The Trauma of Everyday Life

nourishing experiences, give way to the creative impulse, and spontaneously erupt in joy. If it is not there, the ego becomes more “male” in nature: There is a reliance on “doing,” a more rigid approach to everyday life, and a more uncomfortable relationship to the self. “The study of the pure distilled uncontaminated female element leads us to BEING, and this forms the only basis for self-discovery and a sense of existing (and then on to the capacity to develop an inside, to be a container, . . . ). At risk of being repetitious I wish to restate: when the girl element in the boy or girl baby or patient finds the breast it is the self that has been found.” 13
    When the Buddha taught mindfulness, he seemed to grasp much of what psychotherapists like Winnicott spelled out for us. In particular, in his treatment of unworldly or nonsensual feelings, the Buddha described how the traumas encoded in implicit memory could become objects of meditation, how they tend to surface when the female element of “being” is given preeminence in the mind. Mindfulness creates another version of the container Winnicott identified as the mother’s most important gift to her child. By moving the ego to a neutral place of observation, giving the “male element” something to
do
, and then focusing on raw experience, an internal environment is created that mimics the early infant-mother relationship. Under the spell of this kind of attention, implicit memories are given opportunities to reveal themselves. Like the videocassette I discovered in the back of my bookshelf, meditation asks us to reexperience aspects of ourselves we would rather forget. The re-membering aspect of mindfulness, like the writing process I engaged in after watching myself on the video, creates a bridge between implicit and narrative memory. One begins to give name and form to one’s inchoate feelings, to gather one’s dissociative elements back into the self. This can be a humbling experience, but it can also be a relief. The troubling aspects of the self are a lot less troubling when held in the forgiving arms of one’s own awareness.
    I sensed a version of this happening through my own reflections on the wiggle worm. Meditating on my strange behavior while writing about it helped me see a distressed aspect of myself with less shame and more understanding. It also helped me take responsibility for similar actions in later family situations. In the events captured on the videocassette, I was acting out a traumatic residue. Confronted with my wife’s unself-conscious display of her own female element, I manifested a caricature of the male archetype, revealing something about my mind that I, and the people close to me, have had to deal with. In vivid display, I manifested what today’s researchers have also concluded. “The organization of mind comes to mirror, in part, the organization of earlier communicative processes.” 14 The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into the domain of reflective self-awareness, there is a possibility of emerging from their constraints. Choice emerges where before there was only blind and conditioned behavior.
    One woman who has come to a number of my lectures and workshops over the years, whom I will call Eva, confided in me recently how hearing me equate the work of Winnicott with the practice of mindfulness has helped her with her own trauma. She described how she would be “blindsided” over and over again by what she came to understand was primitive agony hiding in her implicit memory. Unexpectedly, and with no conscious control, events in her relational life—an unanticipated rejection, a minor disagreement or an unwanted demand from her husband—would provoke an outburst of fear or anxiety that would completely destabilize her. Drawn to the practice of meditation, Eva was able to describe how the progression of mindfulness—from the breath to the body to the feelings to the mind—helped her deal with her history. “It’s not like the trauma ever really goes away,” she told me. But by using the breath as a central, and neutral, object of mindfulness she was able to give herself enough room to sometimes face the “unendurable” feelings when they arose, instead of simply being at their mercy. For Eva, the word “sometimes” was crucial. “What