The Trauma of Everyday Life: A Guide to Inner Peace by Mark Epstein Page B
Authors: Mark Epstein
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Buddha’s parents’ delight, in its first chapter, when describing their reactions to his birth. Both parents can be seen trying to contain a mix of hope and dread, as if anticipating Maya’s capitulation a week later.
When he saw the wondrous birth of his son,
the king, although steadfast, was much perturbed;
and from his love two streams of tears surged forth,
rising from apprehension and delight.
The queen was overcome with fear and joy,
like a mixed stream of water, hot and cold;
both because her son’s power was other than human,
and because of a mother’s natural weakness. 13
The idea of the Buddha’s parents having a hard time with the feelings evoked by their baby moved me because it hinted at a truth I never could have articulated but that fit with my experience. Love enlivens but also frightens, not only when it falters or when it is unrequited but also when it is unleashed, dissolving us in the heat of its expression. It takes stamina and faith to maintain oneself in the midst of such passion. Maya was not the first, nor the last, to retreat from it, to question her ability to survive its intensity.
Within the psychoanalytic tradition, it was Winnicott who first paid attention to this dimension of the mother-infant relationship. He looked at it through the lens of breast-feeding, which at the time was under assault by the medicalization and mechanization of childrearing. It took Winnicott to remind therapists—and parents—how meaningful nursing can be for a mother. With care to avoid presuming that it was right for everyone or every situation, and with barely concealed horror at those who would “make” mothers breast-feed, Winnicott nevertheless took care to repeatedly affirm its primal power at a time (in the early 1960s) when the medical establishment was counseling just the opposite.
Alongside the observation of the baby’s experiences which are richer when the breast is being used than with a bottle, one has to put all that the mother herself feels and experiences. I prefer to leave it to your imagination, but it is important to draw attention to the fact that although the feeding of a baby can be very satisfactory, however it is done, the satisfaction is of a different order altogether for the woman who is able to use part of her own body in this way. The satisfaction links up with her own experiences when she was a baby, and the whole thing goes back to the beginning of time when human beings had scarcely moved from the position of mammalian animal life. 14
There is something in the nursing experience that connects a woman not only to her infant but to her selfless self. The Sanskrit verse says much the same thing. Maya felt the vast luster of her connection with her child but did not think she could sustain the thrill of bliss it brought her. The feelings evoked, although positive, were unbearable, and her only solution was to dissociate herself from them. She left her physical body behind and retreated to the only place that felt safe enough to sustain the thrill of bliss she could not otherwise process: a heaven realm where, according to Buddhist cosmology, beings have bodies of bliss rather than flesh and blood. Her son, meanwhile, was left to work things out for himself.
From a trauma perspective, Queen Maya’s death had to impact her child, even if the care he received from her surrogates turned out to be loving and tender. There could be no way to entirely paper over the cut. At the beginning of life, as Winnicott once put it, it “seems impossible to talk about the individual without talking about the mother.” 15 While an infant already has the potential for separateness, he is in a state of absolute dependency such that the mother’s relating cannot be discriminated from the baby’s own self. “How the mother behaves is really part of the infant,” Winnicott surmised. “I think the difficulty is that there’s a paradox. The paradox is that the environment is part of
When he saw the wondrous birth of his son,
the king, although steadfast, was much perturbed;
and from his love two streams of tears surged forth,
rising from apprehension and delight.
The queen was overcome with fear and joy,
like a mixed stream of water, hot and cold;
both because her son’s power was other than human,
and because of a mother’s natural weakness. 13
The idea of the Buddha’s parents having a hard time with the feelings evoked by their baby moved me because it hinted at a truth I never could have articulated but that fit with my experience. Love enlivens but also frightens, not only when it falters or when it is unrequited but also when it is unleashed, dissolving us in the heat of its expression. It takes stamina and faith to maintain oneself in the midst of such passion. Maya was not the first, nor the last, to retreat from it, to question her ability to survive its intensity.
Within the psychoanalytic tradition, it was Winnicott who first paid attention to this dimension of the mother-infant relationship. He looked at it through the lens of breast-feeding, which at the time was under assault by the medicalization and mechanization of childrearing. It took Winnicott to remind therapists—and parents—how meaningful nursing can be for a mother. With care to avoid presuming that it was right for everyone or every situation, and with barely concealed horror at those who would “make” mothers breast-feed, Winnicott nevertheless took care to repeatedly affirm its primal power at a time (in the early 1960s) when the medical establishment was counseling just the opposite.
Alongside the observation of the baby’s experiences which are richer when the breast is being used than with a bottle, one has to put all that the mother herself feels and experiences. I prefer to leave it to your imagination, but it is important to draw attention to the fact that although the feeding of a baby can be very satisfactory, however it is done, the satisfaction is of a different order altogether for the woman who is able to use part of her own body in this way. The satisfaction links up with her own experiences when she was a baby, and the whole thing goes back to the beginning of time when human beings had scarcely moved from the position of mammalian animal life. 14
There is something in the nursing experience that connects a woman not only to her infant but to her selfless self. The Sanskrit verse says much the same thing. Maya felt the vast luster of her connection with her child but did not think she could sustain the thrill of bliss it brought her. The feelings evoked, although positive, were unbearable, and her only solution was to dissociate herself from them. She left her physical body behind and retreated to the only place that felt safe enough to sustain the thrill of bliss she could not otherwise process: a heaven realm where, according to Buddhist cosmology, beings have bodies of bliss rather than flesh and blood. Her son, meanwhile, was left to work things out for himself.
From a trauma perspective, Queen Maya’s death had to impact her child, even if the care he received from her surrogates turned out to be loving and tender. There could be no way to entirely paper over the cut. At the beginning of life, as Winnicott once put it, it “seems impossible to talk about the individual without talking about the mother.” 15 While an infant already has the potential for separateness, he is in a state of absolute dependency such that the mother’s relating cannot be discriminated from the baby’s own self. “How the mother behaves is really part of the infant,” Winnicott surmised. “I think the difficulty is that there’s a paradox. The paradox is that the environment is part of
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