The Trauma of Everyday Life

stand there and listen.” 11
    The koan of the tree withering and its leaves falling also unwittingly ties into the work of Winnicott on developmental trauma. When he was sixty-seven years old, Winnicott, uncharacteristically, wrote a very personal poem about his own mother. The poem, which is called “The Tree,” seemed to have emerged rather unexpectedly. It conjured up the favorite tree in his family’s garden that Winnicott climbed to do his homework in when he was a boy. Winnicott sent the poem to his brother-in-law with the following note: “Do you mind seeing this that hurt coming out of me. I think it had some thorns sticking out somehow. It’s not happened to me before & I hope it doesn’t again.”
    The key lines of the poem are the following:
Mother below is weeping
weeping
weeping
Thus I knew her
Once, stretched out on her lap
as now on dead tree
I learned to make her smile
to stem her tears
to undo her guilt
to cure her inward death
To enliven her was my living. 12

    Knowing Winnicott’s work, one can read all kinds of things into the poem, including the fact that his mother’s maiden name was Woods. But even without knowing much about his work, the basic theme is evident. His mother’s smiling face did not make itself spontaneously available to him—young Donald had to work for it. To Winnicott’s way of thinking, this was a form of trauma. A child whose mother was either intrusive or abandoning has to prematurely mobilize a self in order to manage the less than adequate parental environment. This prematurely mobilized self is a life-saving adaptation that eventually squeezes out life. It comes at the expense of the kind of play a more secure child can engage in and results in a self whose rigidity and inflexibility ultimately creates fear or deadness. As a vehicle for connecting with the much beloved parent, such a “caretaker self” has extra staying power, extra value, and extra investment. It is etched deeply into the brain; wired, through a combination of love and necessity, into the fabric of one’s personality. But as a vehicle for connecting more deeply with life, the caretaker self is flawed. Based on an insecure attachment, its stance is inherently mistrustful.
    “To enliven her was my living,” Winnicott wrote, with a play on the word “living.” It was his job, and it was also his life: All that he could focus on. This was the classic scenario for Winnicott, the one he described over and over again, in which something critical in the child is sacrificed in order to cope with a less than adequate emotional environment. Winnicott was writing his own version of the koan here. He was describing the trauma that happens when the tree (or mother) withers and her leaves fall. But Winnicott was also demonstrating, in a very personal way, what the Buddha found. The way out of trauma is by going through it. In acknowledging, without rancor, the deadness of his maternal environment, Winnicott was able to turn himself into the relational home he had lacked. He did this for countless patients and he did it for himself.
    The golden wind refers back to the implicit relational knowing of the mother, latent in all of us. When our traumas are exposed, when the efforts to resist, deny, overcome or even indulge them are dropped, something unexpected happens. Connection analogous to that of the infant-mother couple naturally arises. A golden wind appears. While it frightened the Buddha when he first remembered it blowing through him under the rose-apple tree, he was curious enough to explore it unabashedly from that moment on. Eventually he found it to be a breeze.

Acknowledgments

    To Robert Thurman for showing me the meaning of words; to Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield for giving me the opportunity to teach with them; to Dan Harris for meaningful conversation; to Ann Epstein for implicit relational knowing and Bernard Edelstein and Michael Vincent Miller for Bromberg; to Mike Eigen for feeling mattering; Nancy Black for Stolorow and Lisa Gornick for the baby’s first steps. To Amy Gross, Robby Stein, Axel Hoffer, and Lindsay Whalen for their careful readings of the text. To Henk Barendregt for Rilke and the “courage de luxe.” To Ann Godoff for guiding me and Anne Edelstein for caring for the book. To Sonia for help with the brain, Will for his support, and Arlene for her understanding.

Notes

    Chapter One: The Way Out Is Through

1 . Robert Stolorow,
Trauma and