The Trauma of Everyday Life

meditation gave me was the choice to be with the feelings
or not
,” she told me recently. “When they get to be too much, I can come back to the breath and feel safe.”
    Eva’s experience matched my own. She found that meditation, by providing auxiliary ego-support and a more neutral observing stance, opened up her memories and allowed conscious access to feelings she could only have previously enacted. But the ability to have a choice in the matter was critical. When those difficult feelings arose, which they would do sporadically and unpredictably both in and outside meditation, she could move back and forth between them and her breath as she saw fit. Over time, she could get to know her feelings bit by bit, but she had enough control to not be totally overwhelmed by them. This made her less vulnerable when her traumatized emotions were set off in daily life. They were not such a surprise, and her fear around them became more tolerable.
    The Buddha, in his embrace of mindfulness, found a middle path between indulgence and dissociation. Spurred on by his childhood memory, he took himself out of an eternal present in which he was endlessly acting out feelings of self-denigration and reestablished a link with his personal history. He made remembering the centerpiece of his therapeutic method. In his careful elucidation of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, he established the means by which implicit memories can be converted to narrative ones. The process is analogous to that which occurs between mother and infant. The memories of feelings are sensed in the body and known by the mind. A second-order symbolization is made possible. A narrative, although not necessarily a verbal one, is created. A picture is made, a representation established, a felt sense known. Feelings are brought out of the body and into real time and space. The boundaries and fortifications around them are pulled down as the ego surrenders its supremacy to the auxiliary function of mindfulness.
    Winnicott did not know of meditation; he knew of psychoanalysis. He felt that the therapeutic situation in many cases reproduced and mimicked the early child-parent relationship, providing a second chance for unexplored trauma to resurface in an environment in which it could be experienced as if for the first time.
There are moments, according to my experience, when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life,
has already been
. It is a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious. . . . In this special context the unconscious means that the ego integration is not able to encompass something. The ego is too immature to gather all the phenomena into the area of personal omnipotence.
It must be asked here: why does the patient go on being worried by this that belongs to the past? The answer must be that the original experience of primitive agony cannot get into the past tense unless the ego can first gather it into its own present time experience. . . .
In other words the patient must go on looking for the past detail which is
not yet experienced
. This search takes the form of a looking for this detail in the future. 15

    The key to Winnicott’s thesis is his understanding that
experience
is healing and that certain pivotal events have, nevertheless, not yet been experienced or remembered. In the scenario that he outlined, the infant at first needs the mother to provide protective ego coverage so that difficult emotions or difficult experiences become tolerable. If the mother’s absence or preoccupation precludes this protective coverage, the infant has nowhere to go. The very help that he needs to deal with the lack he faces is unobtainable. Instead of learning about tolerable frustration, there is only intolerable, and unthinkable, anxiety. But the child cannot process this situation alone. It never gets dealt with. Often it is filed away but resurfaces later: a kind of prototypical posttraumatic stress disorder. The person becomes fearful or anxious or aggressive but does not know why. Winnicott believed these ghosts were actually ancestors and that
awareness
was the key to unlocking their influence. “The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the possibility that the breakdown has already happened, near the beginning of the individual’s life. The patient needs to ‘remember’ this but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet happened, and this thing of the past