As a devout listener to BBC, I got an earful of the recent coronation event. Monarchy is something I so rarely think about, apart from the recent death of Queen Elizabeth, which similarly took over a day of BBC coverage. From the endless memorial feed, my mind somehow floated back to junior high school European history. Admittedly I don’t remember much. Junior high school was a truly terrible time in my life. A half-starved anorexic, I foggily remember that I stared absently out the window a lot and did not hear much. So perhaps, thankfully, I have little memory at all. Curiously, however, what floated to mind that day, was the term “benevolent despot.” I don’t remember which royal figure it referenced, but I remember thinking, “What?!!” I did not understand how absolute power and the quality of well-meaning kindness could go together. I guess it made about as much sense as “Let them eat cake!”
The world of neglect is fraught with many ironies and contradictions. That is part of what makes recognizing, understanding and working with it so complicated and fraught. Recently, in a conversation about my work with a highly esteemed colleague, she made a comment about “benign neglect.” Somehow that struck the confused and admittedly sensitive nerve about “benevolent despot.” There is something to me oxymoronic about the idea that neglect is “benign” I think of benign as meaning harmless. A tumor, for example, that is malignant is cause for alarm. It may be serious or even fatal. One that is benign may be aberrant or even unsightly. But not to worry. No neglect, if it is, in fact, what I refer to, what Frank Corrigan has so exquisitely named “attachment shock:” rupture, loss of connection, abandonment, withdrawal of the other, is benign. Certainly not for an infant. It is not only devastating but potentially lethal as well. I think my colleague meant not intentionally malicious, which is often the case, but harmless. Not! If intentionality is the question, that is a different conversation.
A lover of words and also admittedly quite fussy about them, I started thinking about the word “neglect.” If I am on a mission to make “neglect informed” a concern for the psychotherapy field, and the world for that matter, I had better come up with precise definitions. Perhaps the noun “neglect” works, but as a verb is floppy and ambiguous. In my mind, neglect, by its very nature, is a failure of awareness, a blip of intentionality, an absence of agency. Whether it be a preoccupation with the urgency of some sort, a limitation of circumstance, emergency or trauma, disability, loss of means, or long or short-term loss of capacity: whatever the cause, the agency goes offline. Something does not get done. In general, my paradigm is one of “no blame.” This means ascribing fault and villainizing the negligent does not serve the sufferer/ victim, or anyone really.
However, the child, or anyone who is abandoned or neglected, is grossly mistreated and pays dearly for it. The losses in terms of opportunity, relationship, choice, capacities, freedom, time, joy, quality of life… I could go on and on… they are too numerous and too costly to begin to try and name. So the grief, rage, agony, bitterness, contempt and judgment are understandable. This is another of the great challenges of neglect, another of the dilemmas the survivor must struggle to navigate. The old saw, “they did the best they could,” with the backwash of every kind of emotion.
Long before I was aware of it, I knew that my mother was overwhelmed and taking care of us was simply too much. I remember being haunted by the newsreels of concentration camps I saw at Hebrew school when I was barely six years old. If I was haunted by movies, what would the impact of lived experience be? My mother was anxious, brittle and sad. I remember hustling to clean up and eradicate clutter before it would make her more jumpy and irritable, being as helpful, inconspicuous and as little of a “bother” as possible. Partly to try and make her “happy,” or happier? And partly for my own benefit, in the hope that she might have more presence and more to offer us if she was calmer. Was she intentionally neglectful? No, of course not! Was it benign, absolutely not! Only after the onslaught of symptoms and problems that plagued me for decades and the years and thousands of dollars of therapy could I figure it out. It was not only what I was previously aware of as my various forms of overt trauma, but the attachment trauma, the missing experiences, and the neglect had scarred me deeply. It was not benign, and I went through at least a decade of terrible conflict and emotion. Of course, she/they “could not help it.” And I was enraged about the price that I was left with. Another Rubik’s cube of neglect. How to hold both?
The child of neglect is caught in the headlights of the “dilemma without solution,” which I talk about endlessly. The object of longing and the source of agony are in the same person. How to manage that. And similarly, the tangle about responsibility. They could not help it? Well, maybe not. And the damage? It is not like the simple calculous of car insurance. The responsible party pays, and the victim is somehow compensated.
For those of us challenged by the work with neglect, whether our own, loved ones’ or clients, we are faced with the flopping dissonance of ambiguities that may blur and alternate, expand, contract, compel, embarrass, frustrate and flummox us for years. They can be paralyzing, or we can think we are crazy or “stuck.” Many of us look so good, accomplished, or are so good at numbing that no one would even know there was someone inside who desperately needed help. I remember how surprised I was when I read Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography and learned that the “Boss” had sometimes spent up to two years in bed with depression, unable, in his words, to “turn off the faucet.” And this was well after he had been long busting charts and filling stadiums. The healing of attachment shock is a complex journey of cycling and often frozen opposites, where both are painfully true and real and yet seem crazily incompatible. That is why great compassion, patience, and the ability to tolerate and hold wild ambiguities and stay the course are all essential.
There is also no substitute for information, about the brain, attachment and healing. And the recovery stories of those ahead of us on the path who can attest to coming out the other side, that a joyful life is, in fact, possible. It is a very hard sell! And certainly, no substitute for the emotional and somatic work that really affects trauma. In those moments when the pre-frontal cortex is firing, they may serve to bolster hope.
I often say, sometimes my main task is to be the harbinger of hope. The one person in the room who is not activated, so I can keep the perspective that it is not happening now, something different is possible, and progress, however glacial is in fact happening. You may not believe me. But I won’t stop holding that. And someday, all of a sudden, maybe for only a minute, you will.
Making our peace and coming to peace takes however long it takes. If it seems to take “forever,” it is not that you are doing something wrong. It is like correcting a terrible environmental insult: nature has been rudely interrupted and the organic processes of restoring it are underway, and not to be rushed. I remember as a child, pulling open the petals of a flower that was not quite ready to bloom. It really only spoiled it. My intentions were not bad. But the result was a small disaster. And we must continue to look upstream to address the social, political, and economic forces that perpetuate these many contradictions, so ultimately peace has some kind of a chance.
Today’s song:
Throughout this year’s Refugee Week (June 19 – 25) we commemorate the strength, courage and perseverance of millions of refugees. In honor of this week and of Refugee Day (June 20) I have written the following blog.
A few early mornings ago, I heard an interview with a scientist, expert in soil. The interviewer asked her, how on earth (No pun intended of course!) did she end up making her life’s work a study in well, dirt? She replied with a story. As a young person, she was on a camping trip, and her little dog fell into the outdoor latrine. It was a laborious and messy excavation rescuing the little guy, that involved a fair amount of hacking at the hard dirt walls of the hole. In the process of this protracted relief mission, our protagonist could not help but be distracted by the spectrum of brilliant and vivid colors of the well enriched soil. She was mesmerized, not to the point of being interrupted from her task, but enough that when the pup was safe and clean, she was inspired to see more. Perhaps under more deliberate and certainly more savory circumstances. So not only, as is often the case, was there a silver lining to a stinky traumatic event, but it paved the way for a rewarding career. Of course, as a lover of colors, I loved the story, and the many metaphors about how a rainbow of microbial diversity provides the field for a universe of life and growth. It also reminded me of how bizarre and nonsensical it is that we humans can be separated, even go to war about color. Go figure…
I always fancied myself something of a nature girl, with resistance, if not at times outright contempt for electronic modes of connection. Until the Pandemic changed everything in so many ways including that one. Not suddenly but soon and powerfully, I discovered the wide world of Zoom and “webinars,” where my lifelong introversion and solitude, my crazy insomniac hours and my cheese-vat stirring marathons morphed into a veritable social life. I was delighted. First there was “Grateful Ed’s Gospel Hour,” where neurofeedback expert extraordinaire, who happened to have a sense of humor to match, rhapsodized about all sorts of philosophical questions through the lens of brain science and rock and roll. What a wondrous combination for my brain! Then there was world class neuroscience rockstar Ruth Lanius, presenting all manner of brain research wonders in accessible language and adorned with vividly colorful and alive neuroimaging photos, that I could stop and stare at for as long as I had time, not to mention the bingeing replays of recordings that helped me learn the slippery stuff. And sometime later, a new-to-me character, a beautiful young Viet Namese somatic practitioner, Linda Thai, who generously shared her own story as she taught trauma concepts in a style quite different from mine. She even sang a bit. Linda talked especially about refugee and immigrant trauma. In some way she seemed kindred to me. Different personal stories, different sides of the world, different colors, even different historical epochs, but the themes and brains of trauma and neglect resonated deeply, certainly for me.
What a surprise when at a recent conference, in a packed elevator, I found myself face to face with Linda! Well not only face to face, we met in a spontaneous and delighted mutual hug. Suddenly all the people around us vanished, and we were like a couple of long, lost cousins. Only we had never before met. Well only through the ether. And of course, as a bona fide child of neglect, I was amazed that she knew I existed, and had a similar feeling of kindredness to me. Imagine that. And having recently been thinking a lot about Viet Nam, and from different angles than I really ever had before, I was again amazed by the many wonders of serendipity. How do these things happen?
My husband had a lousy childhood, but one thing I have always envied was that he had a wealth of cousins. He had five cousins, all boys around his same age. Their summers, (or my image of their summers) were a Mark Twain wonderland of boys being boys running around together as long as the long summer daylight lasted. My husband having a summer birthday, close to 4th of July, had celebrated with this crowd of boys.
I grew up in a boy-less family, so boy fun and abandon, is probably at least somewhat idealized. And we really had no cousins, to speak of. Yes, all my cousins were boys. The two that were “domestic,” living in the US, were both a good decade older than us. The third lived (and lives) in Switzerland and to this day I have never met him. Our grandmother was one of those types who grandly hyperbolized about the brilliance and perfection of our cousins, as if by comparison we were pond scum (my interpretation.) The Swiss was a child genius; the older domestic cousin being movie star handsome and a tennis star too. The younger domestic cousin was a protégé and then a champion at chess, although somehow he disappeared from the face of the earth. Anyway, I always wished for cousins like my husband had, or better yet, like on the Patty Duke Show. And it was of course never far from mind that, most of our kin had been traumatically wiped out, and as ever we were lucky for all we had. A true but tiring message for a child.
I was always well aware of our status as refugees, less so as immigrants. Until recently in my work with a couple, where one partner is a Caribbean immigrant, and talks about that, feeling like an outsider, or having to abdicate his authenticity or voice, to “fit in.,” and whose ways are dismissed at best, if not outright rejected. I remembered the confusion of messages we got growing up, a strange dissonance of gratitude that we had a relatively safe place to live, but profound mistrust that we could be viciously turned on, on a dime. And appreciation for this country, with more than a spoonful of contempt for the materialism, superficiality and “shallow-ness” of the culture, compared to “our proud intellectual and humanitarian” heritage. Even the messages about earning well were very confused. On one hand we are not supposed to care about those things, and on the other Dad’s abiding, undeniable bitterness about how much higher the rabbi is than the step child cantor on the hierarchical pecking order of both salary and status. My child brain was addled. Not to mention the ever-present pressure to both be accepted, but not “assimilate” too much. Even American Jews were not “like us,” certainly didn’t “get it.” But if we dated or god forbid ever were to marry a non-Jew, there was much more than hell to pay.
Dad’s family fled to Shanghai and for 7 years suffered and survived in the Shanghai ghetto. His mother died there for lack of medical care. All of our stories and images of Asian people were scary and evil. A very far cry from Linda! I had a Chinese boyfriend for oddly, also 7 years. In all that time, Dad never ever referred to him by his name. He was always “that man.” Already at sea in the world of relationship, this did not make a difficult relationship with my father or my boyfriend, any easier. And was a kind of annihilation of both my boyfriend and me, already a teetery young couple.
I suppose I have neglected immigration and refugee status as yet additional forms of developmental and even attachment trauma, that disrupts the formation of identity and sense of self. Feeling unseen, not known, not understood, unwelcome, lees than and unworthy, are all endemic to the trauma of neglect. I am grateful to my client and to Linda, for sharpening my lens on this. Especially now when the tides of climate change, fickle and tragic economies, crazy political conflict and war are fierce. People are emigrating or fleeing from place to place including many to foreign countries, and the US for one is becoming more and more multicolored.
Perhaps my most treasured inheritance from my mom was Pete Seeger. She loved him and he was a soundtrack, always playing and brightening the environment of our bleak little apartment in Manhattan. Pete said on that worn old album “We are all cousins!” Then he would sing the beloved old song All Mixed Up.
Hey, the name of the SF restaurant where I lucked out and met Bobby McFerrin is Third Cousin! Hmmm…
Refugee Week 2023 is 19–25 June. This year’s theme is Compassion.
Today’s song:
As we all know far too well, trauma activation is redundant, miserable, and exhausting. I avoid the word “triggering,” because it summons the imagery of gun violence, (although activations certainly can feel that violently jarring and even lethal,) but also because the word is used is too loosely in popular discourse. It can lose its real meaning. What I am referring to is the invasion of traumatic history into the present moment as if the horrific event is happening again right now. It is the insidious way that trauma rather than being remembered, is re-lived.
Actually however, these activations are a brilliant adaptation of nature in service of preservation of the organism, and the species. In its infinite wisdom, the brain is hell bent on preventing the traumatic event from ever recurring, so it reacts to any stimulus reminiscent of the trauma, as if it were the trauma, the real thing all over again. The explosive flip into survival mode is immediate and fierce: fight/flight/freeze, whatever is most available and most likely to facilitate safety. It is nature’s unsavory way of teaching us to learn from experience. Unfortunately, all too often, especially in the mine field studded realm of interpersonal relationship, we get lost in the confusion of time, and only after much repetition and effortful work, can we learn to tell past from present. I might be convinced that my partner really is attacking, terrorizing or abandoning me. And I certainly don’t want to let them off the hook by owning that I am being visited by ghosts from my past. Oy vey.
Learning from experience, in all its myriad iterations throughout our lives, is a worthy endeavor. And economical too, it would save so much time, heartbreak, waste and destruction. But it is no fun at all, and certainly rarely quick, probably the hardest thing we ever have to do. At least that is what I tell my couples, and I know to be true for myself.
“I’ve got my shortcomings and my flaws and I ain’t no better than nobody else. But man, the shootings that’s going on. I don’t care what ‘hood’ you’re from, where you’re at, man. I love you and God loves you. Put them guns down.”- George Floyd in a selfie video he shot several years before his death in 2020.
May brings with it another anniversary and painful memory of George Floyd’s traumatic murder in 2020. I think of him, perhaps as if haunted, often throughout the year, but being something of a walking day-runner of orbiting anniversaries and milestones, dates stick in my mind like super glue. I remember birthdays of boyfriends, friends, even clients that I have not seen in decades. My own flagged dates often serve as reference points for reflecting on my past cycles. I reflect, “where was I last year on this day?” and these dates help me track change. It is hard for me to believe that it is so many years already since Floyd gasped his infamous dying words. What have we learned? What have I learned?
Looking at the larger world, I might say, “not much.” Mass shootings are daily fare. Girls and women barred from opportunities for education, work, even reproductive justice. Wild and erratic, unfamiliar and often lethal cataclysms of nature, from drought to storms, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, destroyed harvests, devastated herds make it hard to deny the human perpetrated trauma to the climate. I, for one found it easier to minimize a year ago, being more compelled by the pillage of humans than of land. Now admittedly I am forced to “get it.” They are of course indistinguishable. Dysregulation on every scale.
Each day’s news is another bombshell of war, incomprehensible conflicts resulting in yet another intergenerational chain of attachment shock and trauma, not to mention PTSD; physical disabilities; widowed; orphaned; wrenched away loved ones and liked ones; traumatic grief and loss. All to trickle stubbornly through blood lines for years to come; “new” aberrations of attachment; and wrecked land rural and urban, forced to re-invent itself or persist as rubble. Again, dysregulation on every scale.
Each day’s news is another bombshell of war, incomprehensible conflicts resulting in yet another intergenerational chain of attachment shock and trauma.
Perhaps what I feel I have learned this year is a new discovery or deepening of a profound lesson, not really new to me, but that has bookended my life for as long as I can remember. I am anguished, flummoxed, and kept awake by what has often seemed to me to be competing demands of macro and micro. Compelled and driven by a life committed to activism, justice, and peace on the mass scale, I felt there was no other reason or excuse to live. Crashing and burning from my own dysregulation, and the unanswerable questions of the micro: interpersonal world, I have devoted my last four decades to the mysteries and miseries of that: the more micro, interpersonal world. But I never quite made my peace or reconciled the choice.
I remember when I first started studying and practicing somatics in the early 1980’s, something about sitting and breathing seemed so utterly self-indulgent, and “individualistic” to use the contemptuous language of my activist comrades. I didn’t have a clue back then how essential breath was to regulation. We activists “did not have time.” There was too much to do. Our relationships with each other were largely a disaster, children were born and often ignored, or their importance minimized in comparison with our ideological and tactical priorities. Our health was not on the table. What sort of breathless world will we create?
Breath is nourishment and metronome of regulation, which is the basis for any sort of order. When I work with couples who can’t speak because they are so desperately running from an imagined tiger (their partner!) I teach them to stop action and practice 6:9 breathing. “Breathe in on 6 counts, out on 9 counts. Your inhale is stimulating: sympathetic. Your exhale is calming: parasympathetic. The long exhale will calm you down, bring you back into present time, regulate you anew. Try it for 10 breaths.” It is a very hard sell. But it is true, when we are calm we can think. When we are activated, we are like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, flailing wildly to its sorry end. Breath. Precisely what George Floyd was robbed of. But the lesson of breath is not what is new to me. What have I begun to comprehend differently this year?
It is this no-brainer seared into my awareness in a different way: addressing trauma and not social justice is like trying to slay the hydra. We succeed in felling one head, and then sprout nine more, or 100 more. We must find a way to do both, regulate our own brains and relationships, and attend to a larger wildly dysregulated world. Trauma and social justice are two wings of the same bird. We “simply” must learn to find our way in relationships so we can work together to stem the deadly tides. Regulation, regulation, regulation.
Reading this over, I fear I may have ignored neglect today. When I say “trauma and social justice” of course I include neglect in the category of trauma, but I am afraid if I don’t name it, it will disappear. I was the quiet middle of three sisters. I remember Aunt Gertrud and Aunt Lottie, my quirky old great aunts. Both would say of us through their thick German accents “one is prettier than the next.” Must be an old German expression. Anyway, being the one in the middle I came up short either way you started the count, or at least in my mind. I fell out of the picture. So let me explicitly say it so neglect does not fade out as the forgotten middle child. Trauma-and-neglect, and social justice are two wings of the same bird. Regulating one without the other is a lost cause.
Have a few delicious, deep regulating breaths in memory of George Floyd (and Eric Garner too, the “forgotten” prior utterer of the same famous words “I can’t breathe!”) And may all the countless martyrs of injustice throughout the world and across time, rest in peace.
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
In my morning workout, I was swept out of my usual reverie by a vocal. Most of the time my Pandora musical feed keeps me happy and in rhythm with instrumental music. My station is a mix of contemporary/jazz/Spanish guitar which for me is just right. At first, I was annoyed, it was a slowish cut and Santana does not exactly belong on my Pandora station. When I began to tune in a bit, I realized it was Santana’s “I Ain’t Got Nobody, That I Can Depend On.” Then I realized that Pandora was suggesting that I write about the core dilemma of neglect, and the terrible dilemma that results from that early experience.
I always loved Santana. The band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was the first to effectively and successfully, broker the intermarriage between two of my favorite musical styles: rock and Latin. It was a pretty gutsy of him, and an innovative undertaking for a young kid from Jalisco, Mexico. But in San Francisco in the late 1960’s, much was possible. Certainly in the music world. In my typical way, I read a biography of Carlos almost a decade ago. I don’t remember much. He grew up in a musical family; he was sexually abused between the ages of 10 and 12, by an American man who brought him across the border. He subsequently lived and went to school in the San Francisco Mission District which was then a Spanish speaking ghetto, of immigrants from many Central and South American countries. (Now it is a wildly gentrified neighborhood and foodie hot spot, where finding a parking space is like winning a Las Vegas jackpot.) I remember walking through the streets of the Mission when I had my first alcohol treatment job, teaching drunk driving school in Spanish. I loved passing the many Latin music record stores, and often stopped on my way home to buy vinyl “discos.”
I remember that many of Carlos’s relationships were stormy, with the band changing members and managers multiple times. But I suppose that is not so unusual in the complex and often drug laced musical world, certainly in those days. He divorced after more than three decades, in 2007 and not long thereafter married his drummer with whom he is still married. I do remember that I reflected when I read about him: his appeared to be a challenging, like many an immigrant, life of neglect. That song came from somewhere!
I always loved Santana. The band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was the first to effectively and successfully, broker the intermarriage between two of my favorite musical styles: rock and Latin. It was a pretty gutsy of him, and an innovative undertaking for a young kid from Jalisco, Mexico.
The core dilemma of neglect, and in my experience, the most common and most insidious, is very early in life, precisely that: no one to depend on. Often it starts in the crib. A safe infancy, involves a primary caretaker, most often the mother, who learns to recognize and respond to the infant’s signals. Not being a mother myself, I have always been in awe of how a mammal mother, (not only our species,) learns to distinguish the various infant cries, for food, a clean diaper, the fussiness of being too tired, cold, fear, and simple company or loving arms. How does she do that? And not perfectly of course! The attachment researchers tell us that the best case scenario, the best of the best, succeed 30% of the time! The remaining two thirds of the time, is the ceaseless dance of rupture and repair. But both the prompt response to the particular cry, with the sought supplies; and the reliable quest for repair and reconnection, make for a securely attached, regulated infant.
The child of neglect for whatever reason, misses out on that. It may be because a mother is depressed, ill, drug addicted, traumatized, desperate to make a living, fighting with the other parent, too young, or simply selfish or careless.
There are innumerable root causes for the neglect, but that notwithstanding, the child who misses out on the well timed, accurately registered response, winds up with a dysregulated nervous system, as what quiets hyperarousal, and the fear that comes with need, is gratification. The accurately gratified child can settle, calm down, and rest in the knowledge that someone is there who gets it, who gets me, who will take care of me. My feelings matter and will be attended to. What an ideal scenario. And of course this happens, or does not, way before we have the brain development to remember it in a narrative, story-like way. This start inhabits the infant’s little body with a calm that adds up to safety, value and trust that someone is there. I matter and I am OK. It lodges in body, emotional and sensory experience that someone is there. This is why I never had the guts to have children. By age five, I was sure I couldn’t do it, and I never wanted anyone to feel like I did.
Missing those experiences, or enough of them, results in a child with many varieties of dysregulation. I sometimes wonder if my disordered eating started that long ago, if signals of hunger and satiety were mis-read, ignored or over-ridden. Who knows? I do know that neglect is the vast and vacuous desert of missing experiences, where the child ultimately has nowhere to turn but inward. These are the roots of the primary default to self-reliance. What else is a little person supposed to do? Pacify or insulate against the “careless” caregiver, and soldier on. You might ask, “how would I know that? It happened so long ago.” Or “my hapless parents did the best they could.” Or “I had a perfectly happy childhood.” Or the most often resounding disclaimer: “Nothing happened to me!” Precisely, too much nothing!
It takes time and hard work to unearth an unremembered story. Often we can only piece it together from body, emotional and sensory cues, and reflecting on what was going on around the mother or parents, when the child was tiny. And an often seemingly ferocious self-reliance. Self- reliance is a lifeline, the survival mainstay, hard to ever want or dare to relinquish. It is also a dead give-away.
Local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher extraordinaire, Mary Main coined the term “Dilemma without solution” which is the core conflict surrounding neglect. The concept gave rise to what was initially a new attachment style: the disorganized, disoriented. The dilemma is that the source of terror and the source of comfort are the same person. So the infant is an endless ambivalent and confused frenzy seeking both safety and comfort, and succeeding at neither. The dissociation world seized on the concept in a hot minute, because a freeze or numbing response might be the infant’s only recourse, until self-reliance kicks in. Yes, it is a long road to healing. And this is why the wide world of relationship can be a bleak battlefield, littered with the mangled corpses of a parade of misguided or failed relationships of all kinds. At least mine was. That is what brings most survivors of neglect to therapy. Loneliness and confusion about “nothing.”
Local treasure, Berkeley attachment researcher extraordinaire, Mary Main coined the term “Dilemma without solution” which is the core conflict surrounding neglect. The concept gave rise to what was initially a new attachment style: the disorganized, disoriented. The dilemma is that the source of terror and the source of comfort are the same person.
Anyone who reads the acknowledgement of most any book, and I always do, knows that it takes a village to write a book. Of course, I didn’t really get that while writing my first two books. The result was what my husband refers to as the two (respectively) worst years of his life. As I approached my next book, to be a “lay-person’s” book about neglect, which promises to be my most important book yet, my husband adamantly refused to go through anything like the experience of the previous two. He proclaims that each time in effect, “he didn’t see me for a year,” except exhausted, stressed out and with little to offer him. In my advancing years, I finally had enough recovery to get a clue: duh! I hired a helper, who turned out to be an angel.
What an experience! I did not have to know what to do. Amazing! And what did the brilliant angel do? She brought in two more! Imagine that! A team of angels, who know what to do, and know how to do the things that I have no idea how to do, and never would have thought of. And who care about me! Always a solo endurance athlete, suddenly I was playing on a team. Three beautiful, smart, knowledgeable, kind and hardworking helpmates, all there for me! And all working to mid-wife the slowly gestating book. Unbelievable!
So this week, I had a truly astonishing experience. My primary angel got very sick. And like the infant who is torn between taking care of the mother, and worrying about its own urgent needs, I was in a quandary. I love my person so much, I only want healing for her. And I was also starting to stress about the things I don’t know how to do, that I am under deadline about. I did not want to interfere with her healing, and knew she was upset enough about work, while also in pain and fear about pretty much everything. And what happened was the unimaginable. The other two, who love her also, simply stepped in, took up the helm, and basically said, like the old Stevie Wonder song says “don’t you worry ‘bout a thing.” Amazing. Even at this advanced age and after 100 years of “solitude,” more and wonderful healing discovery is possible. I feel a new wave transformation, and awe about what it is like to emerge from self-reliance. I’d like to say, “Try it!” But that would be ridiculous. So I will simply say, stay the course! It is worth it!
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
Way back in the middle 1970s, I cooked in a restaurant. I was a pretty good cook, having had the dubious distinction of being the only one who could be in the kitchen when Dad was doing his cyclone-like chef act. Dad had learned to cook by “stealing with his eyes”, as he said, watching the experts and doing what they did, as he worked in restaurants around the world in his diasporic flight from Hitler.
When I was born, he and Mom had a little restaurant in Carmel, and my sister and I spent our early years in the sink. This job, however, was a “movement job” at La Pena de Berkeley, a wonderful restaurant and community center supporting the Latin American solidarity movement. It is still there. It was there I really learned to cook. I was in my early 20’s and had a friend named Erica, who was tall and blond and looked like a model. I never imagined having a friend who looked like that. Erica was an amazing cook and taught me to make soup. Every day I made a 10-gallon pot of the soup du jour. I got pretty good at the soup thing, in fact, once one of my great idols at the time, Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown, praised our food from the stage.
My mom always loved my mushroom soup. Erica taught me how to make cream soups, and I loved the smell of the “roux,” the heady blend of butter and flour slowly roasting in the pot. Mom always started talking about Mother’s Day about three or four weeks ahead of time so we would not forget, so she could tell us what she wanted, and we had plenty of time to make or get whatever that was. She often asked for mushroom soup for her Mother’s Day dinner. It took about half the day to make, and I was so glad there was something worthwhile that I had to offer.
I am not a mother, and my mother and grandmother are long gone. So Mother’s Day is a non-event for my husband and me. Except for the fact that roses are double in price for a week or two. So it is unfettered and free for reflection.
Every day I made a 10-gallon pot of the soup du jour. I got pretty good at the soup thing, in fact, once one of my great idols at the time, Puerto Rican singer Roy Brown, praised our food from the stage.
When my mother died, I simply felt empty. When people expressed heartfelt condolences, I felt embarrassed and guilty. I was not sad at all, only relieved. I had felt so hated for so long, it was like having a vice removed from my throat. My loss came so very long ago. I suffered a protracted grief over the loss of my first real love relationship with a man. Only much later did I realize that the seemingly bottomless intractable grief was really about Mom. By the time my mother actually died, I had mourned for over a decade and had no tears left.
My mother had a trauma-ridden life. First, an upbringing of upper-class northern German coldness and nannies, then the Nazi Holocaust, then finding her way in a new and alien culture, and a long and challenging marriage to a difficult man. By the time my mom was the age I was when I was slinging hash and drinking at La Pena, my mom had three little kids and lived in a bleak apartment in New York while my dad went to school and worked and was barely around. That Manhattan building was like a refugee camp, almost everyone who lived there had numbers on their arms.
It is always hard to navigate the balance between sympathy and compassion for the pretty disabled other, with the bitterness and grief about one’s own deprivation, trauma and neglect. For many of us, the struggle is unbearable, even impossible, for a long time. It points to the great challenge of relationship in general. How in the world do we make space for the pain and subjectivity of two people who are both in agonizing needs, and they are different, and maybe gratifying one costs the other? I don’t use the word “incompatible.” Our work is to find our empathic way.
My mom had three little kids and lived in a bleak apartment in New York while my dad went to school and worked and was barely around. That Manhattan building was like a refugee camp, almost everyone who lived there had numbers on their arms.
I just learned moments ago that our beloved Harry Belafonte passed last night at 96. So sad. Mom loved Harry, and he is one of the great bequests that I cherish from her. Our bleak little apartment was brightened by him, as one of her three record albums was his. I remember waltzing Matilda with my sisters around the linoleum floors, laughing. Those memories are sweet. And when a few years ago, on a trip to Cuba I learned how bananas grow, I could not help remembering Harry singing “Dayo!” the banana boat song. Thanks Mom! My grief about Harry is unadulterated, perhaps it contains some compassion for you.
I am not one for regrets. In fact, I only have one. I failed to make my peace with my mother before she passed. Meaning I failed to reach a point where I no longer felt bitterness and recrimination and a simmer about her negligence or seeming self-centeredness. I never achieved equanimity before it was too late. She died precipitously. We did not see it coming. She seemed so healthy. At 75, she was going to aerobics, riding her bicycle around town, and seemed a picture of health. It was only when she kept dropping things that she got a check-up, and through a routine chest x-ray, it was discovered she was over-run by metastasized cancer: breast cancer, brain cancer, lung cancer. It was seemingly everywhere, and she had seemed just fine. It had always been our Dad who had all the serious medical issues. Five weeks later, she was gone. My sister wisely hypothesized that maybe she simply got too tired of taking care of Dad.
I am certainly not one for advice. I hate getting it unless I ask for it. And I strive not to give it unless I am asked. But there are a couple of things I do freely offer unbidden that you can take or leave. When faced with questions about how to proceed with a parent or any significant other who has hurt us, the question to ask is this: How will I feel about myself after they are gone if I do “X”? How will I feel about myself when they are gone if I do “Y?” And there is the answer. The one I have to live with is me. Who do I want to live with? Who do I want to be? I am sorry I was still angry when she died, that I could not or would not see her off with an open heart. My Mother’s Day is perhaps my day of atonement. Forgiveness is so important to me. I was a decade or two late in learning how.
Thanks Mom, for the soundtrack of Harry and Pete Seeger, for teaching me to sew. For the tiny sewing machine you gave me for my 16th birthday, the little Elna Lotus. I still have it. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to please you at least once a year with that soup.
I sometimes envy the Buddhists or others who have a way of thinking about where people go after they leave their corporeal existence on this earth. I think about my Dad sometimes and wonder where he is, much less often about my mom. Except maybe on Mother’s Day. This year, however, it comforts me to think that maybe she and Harry are in the same realm somewhere. That she can sing with him about Matilda taking his money and running off to Venezuela and laughing together.
Happy Mother’s Day one and all, mothers, grandmothers, sons and daughters, orphans, and everything in between. Have a gentle day. I think I am going to go and look for some mushrooms.
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
May is American Cheese Month. No, I don’t mean American Cheese (Kraft Singlets, that hideous impostor masquerading as or feigning to be cheese.) Granted, those singlets were the” perfect melt,” producing an immediate bright orange gooey ooze that dripped dramatically off the burger, providing a mouth-watering visual. It melted as quickly as its single-serving polyethylene wrapper probably would have and didn’t taste much better. The singlets additionally produced an ample supply of landfill, also sadly “American.” But we didn’t think much about those things then. No, this month honors American cheese, or to be precise, and certainly more politically correct, cheeses originating and produced in the US.
So why a month? Probably a commercial initiative to remind and encourage people that the step-child of domestic cheeses actually has an honorable and noteworthy tradition, history and even some products. The fans of a Wisconsin football team call themselves “cheeseheads,” as Wisconsin is one of the most venerated US origins of cheese. But I also remember from years ago, long before I cared much, billboards with beautiful scenes of California landscapes, touting “Come for the Views, Stay for the Cheese!” I often feel that way at our home.
Europe: France, Switzerland, Denmark, Italy, Greece are all the icons of great cheese. Like neglect, “American” cheeses dim and fade from view and allegedly at least can’t compete. I will differ with that (much as I do about neglect!) as some of the creations coming out of Marin, in the Bay Area, are pretty darn good, and even some of mine are getting there, although I would not dream of selling it. So, a month suggesting that we buy some, try it, well, how could that be bad? And for the home cheesemakers like me, a reminder to – as Gavin, my beloved Australian cheesemaking teacher, always counsels, “Keep calm and make cheese!” I hardly need reminding.
And cheese, besides being a passion of mine and an inspiration in countless ways, provides an infinite supply of ready and exquisite metaphors. Like peeling the plastic singlet wrap and setting the stuff to melt, I miraculously get a quick spill of words and ideas. The ups and downs of cheese making, replete with dramatic disasters of failure and the occasional wildly delicious success, replicate the non-linear trauma/neglect healing process. It also reminds us that some things are, in fact, intended to stink, and if we learn or develop the taste, we may even come to like that.
Many know that during my first year or so of cheesemaking, my failure rate was a dismal 60%. Many feel that way about their first year, or even maybe ten, of trauma therapy. What would make one hang in there? People ask the same question when I tell them that my husband and I fired five couple’s therapists back in the early days (blessedly three decades ago now!) before we found one who could help us. We thought we were the couple from hell and probably were. Ultimately after about two years and thousands of dollars wasted, we found someone who could, in fact, help us and who even inspired me to become a couple’s therapist. So, what would make one stay the course, or as Gavin would say, “soldier on?” After all, my husband is the one who, after 30 pages, if the story hasn’t “begun,” gives up on a book. I still can’t do that, always having to keep going and finish the thing, endlessly hoping that “it might get better…” (He did, ultimately, teach me that it is OK to walk out of a movie, although admittedly, it took a while.) Trauma/neglect therapy is not linear, and that is for sure. However, I do believe it will get better. For those who stay with it, in my experience, it invariably does.
We thought we were the couple from hell and probably were. Ultimately after about two years and thousands of dollars wasted, we found someone who could, in fact, help us and who even inspired me to become a couple’s therapist.
I have also learned, and admittedly a form of American cheese has been a great teacher, that like the couple from hell that we were, even the most godforsaken disaster can be salvaged and even transformed into something quite wonderful. A life or a relationship that looks like an abandoned corpse-strewn battlefield can be transformed into a paradisiacal tropical resort destination like Viet Nam has become. Younger people, I have discovered, are surprisingly free of haunting prejudices, ghosts and guilt about the war there, even unfamiliar with the history. It may be something rather like a clean slate, or one might hope.
Gavin and a buddy of his, Larry from Deep South Texas, in a global-partnering attitude-changing effort, collaborated to teach the world “curd nerd” community to “make lemonade,” if you will. It was Larry’s initiative, wanting to improve the world’s view of both American Cheese and American cheese. And for me, it was a lesson or a reminder about new beginnings. Admittedly my husband, in all his politeness and undying patience, was getting tired of joining me in eating my mistakes. Thankfully, looking back, I (fortunately) did not have the 8-gallon pot then and was working more in four-gallon batches. But it was still a lot to ask, a lot of what I have come to call “Cottage Chevre.” Fancy recipes with European titles that somehow come out looking more like cottage cheese or edamame maybe.
Larry created a recipe for making American cheese, minus the polyvinyl packaging, of course, really a quite respectable recovery for cheeses with pure raw ingredients that somehow went awry in their developmental process. But here is the point: not beyond repair! Larry created a method for processing rocky, mushy, stinky or some other variation on “arrested development” into something wholesome and aesthetically pleasing. And additionally, that replicated the perhaps one and only “redeeming quality” of American cheese, that being the perfect melt! Even the original intended cheese may never have achieved that! A skeptical (and big-hearted!) purist, Gavin had the grace and the humility to not only undertake the experiment but to take it live on his channel with its 307K subscribers.
Younger people, I have discovered, are surprisingly free of haunting prejudices, ghosts and guilt about the war there, even unfamiliar with the history. It may be something rather like a clean slate, or one might hope.
I learned and repeatedly re-learn the lesson that there is no failure if we stay the course. The bodybuilders say, “Failure is success!” If you keep pumping until you can’t anymore, that is when you get stronger. (And a lot of them nourish themselves with whey protein!) Neglect, trauma, I’m pouring it all into one pot today. Some of the cheese recipes call for a 60, 70, or 80-minute stir. That means I am standing on my little, short-person’s stepping stool, stirring the 8-gallon vat, usually watching some webinar or maybe a Bobby McFerrin Circlesong all that time. I like to think of it as “kayaking in Kona,” but I am not always able to think so positively, much as I would like to. Sometimes it is a drag, a slog, an eternity.
For any neglect survivor waiting is on the order of fatal, and admittedly at times, I clock-watch, think about cheating, and want it to be over already. Here is the point, the seemingly hopeless case rarely is. I would like to say “never,” but I know never to say that!
May is the start of spring in many places. So for those who don’t care about cheese, it could be that. My husband just informed me while reading the news that May is Older Americans Month as well, so if you are domestic, you might prefer that. They say, “age doesn’t matter unless you’re a cheese,” so that way, we combine the two.
My one major takeaway is for those who are fed up, bone tired of stirring, slogging, pumping, going to therapy, I do understand that. I have felt that way too a lot on this long road, and admittedly occasionally still do. Finding a way to make it bearable, to be able to stay the course, is a tall order. I know that too! But I’m glad I did. And I never would have dreamed I could make something pretty wonderful out of those accumulated bowls of slop that I would have liked to toss if I weren’t so averse to wasting food. I am grateful to Larry for having the gumption to push Gavin and to Gavin for using his platform to get the word out to all of us. I do hope in some small way to pass on a message not only of endurance, but of hope! My friend Bruce, who I met on our first trip to Cuba, gave me the nickname “Cheese Wiz.” I like that!
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
The Vietnam War was the big bang that hurled us into awareness of trauma and sparked the birth of what was to become the field of traumatic stress studies. I say both “the” and “Vietnam”, somewhat embarrassed by a new awareness of another expression of cultural chauvinism. Centuries of war bloodied that small country, colonized and embattled with China, Japan, France, Britain, Cambodia… so “the” war with the US was one of many. Similarly, I am newly aware that spelling “Vietnam” as one word instead of two is somewhat of a corruption of the indigenous “Viet Nam”, which ironically means “unity.”
American veterans returning from that war with glaring, seemingly intractable symptoms, commanded long-needed attention to what in 1980 became the diagnostic category of overwhelming experience: PTSD. Nightmares, flashbacks, irregularities of memory, exaggerated startle response, depression, and anxiety all became the growing and perhaps similarly overwhelming list of boxes to check. When I worked at the VA some 15 years after the real-time end of the war, I saw how many of the aging men, (and most of our patients were men,) were still living it. Florid drug addiction blanketed many of their unbearable symptoms. Sadly, living close to Haight Ashbury and Golden Gate Park, I believe some of our homeless are those same guys, now 48 years older.
I recently woke to another population that at least I had completely ignored. Once again, I was awakened by an interview in the wee hours on public radio with Viet Namese author Que Mai Phan Nguyen about her new novel Dust Child. Besides the population of US veterans I am familiar with, and (by now I have had more than a few clients who were their sons and daughters,) I became aware of vast groups, generations, of attachment-traumatized American veterans, Viet Namese women, and Amerasian or mixed-race offspring of the two.
The novel artfully weaves together threads of three different stories representing a new view of the intergenerational transmission of attachment trauma and neglect. We meet a white male war veteran, like most GIs, barely more than a child when he finds himself embroiled in a bloody war far from home. Like most of his cohort, he does not choose to be there and does not really understand what it is all about. Like many of his buddies, lonely, bored, and desperately needing to block out painful reality, he whiles away his evenings in the seedy bars of Sai Gon (also two words in the native language,) drinking and being “entertained” by attractive young local women.
Secondly are the sad stories of painfully young Viet Namese women attempting to stave off starvation and save their families from homelessness by working in bars, serving drinks and providing company, and “more.” And finally, a generation of “Amerasians,” the often abandoned and orphaned offspring of desperate and lonely bar liaisons. These children are of any and all mixed-race colors, with apparently African American fathers (these being the most painfully outcast,) some mixed Asian and Latinx, and every imaginable variation. Our character in the story is dark-skinned, curly-haired, and unspeakably lonely, longing for family, hopelessly wishing his father would come looking for him and transport him to the dreamed-of better life in the US, and in search of a loving mother who would want him.
One protagonist is the now middle-aged white veteran, visiting Viet Nam and searching for the beautiful barmaid whom he had truly loved, now ashamed that he had both cheated on his faithful wife waiting at home and had left his young girlfriend pregnant. He did not know if the girlfriend or the child of unknown gender had survived the war.
We get the backstory of the then-young “girlfriend,” fleeing the extreme poverty of the countryside, seeking to earn enough to keep her family from losing the small plot of land that sustained and housed them, only to discover she had unwittingly signed on for sex work. I won’t spoil the rest of the story. Suffice it to say, the battlefields of Viet Nam are haunted by the gruesomely dead, the walking wounded, and the multitudes of ghost-like orphaned and abandoned whose invisible scars of attachment trauma, deprivation, and neglect leave many with huge questions about identity.
American veterans returning from that war with glaring, seemingly intractable symptoms, commanded long-needed attention to what in 1980 became the diagnostic category of overwhelming experience: PTSD.
In an interview, the author Que Mai Phan Nguyen, says the Viet Namese people have a particularly acute denial of PTSD. It is stigmatized, and people with symptoms are shunned as “possessed by ghosts,” which is not far from the truth – although surely not a reason to stigmatize or shun. Or they say, “How could we be traumatized? We won the war!” as if it were impossible to be the winner and claim trauma. Nguyen describes another expression of her own war trauma. As a child, she fished in the pond close to her family’s home. Agent Orange contaminated the pond, as so many other aspects of nature and people, too. “We were so poor we still had to eat those fish. In effect, we ‘ate the war.’”
She also makes the interesting point that, certainly in the US media and many movies about the war, the Viet Namese people are, for the most part, “props” in the background of a story about Americans. It is important to her to make space for them, to create dimension, so that we actually grant them the dignity of human existence in our awareness and history.
April 30, 2023, marks 48 years since the “fall of Sai Gon” or the “Reunification of Viet Nam,” depending on one’s point of view: that war ended. As other wars rage in the present, I find myself pondering the legacy of fracture or never formed family bonds. Somehow, even with the inescapable familiarity of my own family’s Holocaust history, this cast of characters brought home the tragedy in a whole new way.
I love orchids, and my favorite places on earth are tropical lands, hot and lush, with beautiful birds, animals, and, most of all, flowers. Yet I have never been “able” to grow them myself, or keep them growing – well, until now.
Just when I thought I would stop discovering more and more passions/obsessions: things to make me still more “too busy,” I found myself again swept up, this time by the notion of being an “orchid whisperer.” I love orchids, and my favorite places on earth are tropical lands, hot and lush, with beautiful birds, animals, and, most of all, flowers. Yet I have never been “able” to grow them myself, or keep them growing – well, until now. Suddenly I discovered that when the blooms fall off and the branches start looking like dead sticks, they are not, in fact, dead. If I mindfully check the soil regularly and water them when they seem like they are getting dry, the seemingly dead brown stick begins to show shades of pinkish green, and then minuscule curlicues of growth begin to appear at their tips. If I check on them each day, and (admittedly with my nose in their “faces,”) I do talk softly and encourage them, they find their way back and bloom again! What a great metaphor for trauma healing! I remember the years of feeling like a dead stick, never to grow, let alone bloom, again. That parts of Viet Nam are blooming again is a good thought.
It has been hard for me to imagine how Viet Nam has become the vacation destination that it has. I have been unable to uncouple my associations of the place from all the horrific war images of my youth. As with all trauma, we must hold both: the processed memory and the wisdom it carries; and the faith, nurture, and care to bloom again. Happy spring!
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
After some crazy (for us) storms and the roughest winter drought-parched California has seen in a while, spring seems to be arriving. Sun! It is a source of great joy and energy for me. Piles of bunched daffodils on sale in the grocery store are almost free. I buy them by the fistfuls and put them all over the house. My husband calls them his “happy flowers.” I put a huge bouquet in his office, and it keeps him smiling all day. I love flowers and have always made sure to keep flowers in my office. As far as I am concerned, they are as essential in psychotherapy as the Kleenex and the ever-present clock. I am grateful that I can feel myself well up with joy in the face of beauty: that nature, music, color, and words make me happy. It has not always been easy for me to take pleasure in, to feel it.
I remember when I first started doing neurofeedback in 2009. Exclaiming, “I feel calmer and happier, calmer and happier, and things don’t bother me!” was my incredulous refrain as I did more and more of it. And I added, “A world without fear is a different place! The opposite of fear is joy.” Fear and hyper-arousal inhabiting the body act as a pulsing obstacle, a barrier to joy. Neurofeedback and all those years of dogged slogging therapy of all different kinds have opened the channel for joy to flow. My office is filled with light, and I have the good fortune of being able to see it now – not all the time, of course, but most of the time. Now, when beauty brings me to tears, they are more likely to be tears of awe than longing. What a blessing.
A flashbulb memory recently sprang up. It was 1988; I was in the little kitchen of my apartment in Santa Cruz, doing some chores and listening to the radio. A song came on that I had never heard before, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” was the bouncy refrain. The beat was calypso-like and lively. It was hard not to smile and bounce along with its wacky rhythmic wisdom. Those were some rocky times in my life. I thought, “Oh, were it so easy!” Don’t worry, be happy? How do you do that?”
Fast forward to 2023. The other night I was out to dinner with my best friend. I have the good fortune to have a best friend who dates back even further than the remembered song! We get together once a month, which is another blessing I appreciate even more now the pandemic has allowed us to resume the long-standing ritual. I was harried, coming off a rather brutal workday, then traffic and parking. It took me a while to settle down once I finally landed in the restaurant with her. This was a restaurant I had been to before, and I had made friends with the waiter. As I often do with new friends, I had given him some cheese. The waiter rhapsodized about my cheese, which I always love, and I was basking in that. I did not notice the people at the table beside us.
When the neighboring table got up to leave, the man in their group said to me, “You are the cheesemaker!” I said yes, surprised that he knew. Apparently, the waiter had told him I make cheese. He was an interesting-looking man. We chatted briefly, shook hands, and they left. When the group was outside, the waiter said to me, “Do you know who that is?” “No!” I replied. “Bobby McFerrin!” He said. I ran outside to shake his hand again, regretting that I had not recognized him. When I got home, I googled him and got a 1988 YouTube video of Bobby McFerrin singing the delightful song “Don’t Worry, Be Happy!” Both he and I are much older now. I listened to it about five times, thinking, what a different world it is since the last time I heard it.
I told my husband I had met Bobby McFerrin at the restaurant, and he said, “Oh, he sings a cappella, doesn’t he?” I didn’t know for sure, so I played a series of YouTube videos and saw his amazing diversity of sound and voice. In some cases, his sound was so diverse that it was indistinguishable as a cappella. He “played the snare drum on [his] chest” as the only accompaniment. In one piece, there was an instrument, another man playing the double bass. Bobby motioned to him to move to the keyboard. “I’ll sing the bass,” he said, and while his companion played the keyboard, Bobby, with his voice, replicated the precise deep rhythmic sounds of the double bass part. I wondered, what kind of person could write and sing like that? And could laughingly say, “Don’t worry, be happy…”? So, in my customary way, I watched a few interviews.
I am grateful that I can feel myself well up with joy in the face of beauty: that nature, music, color, and words make me happy. It has not always been easy for me to take pleasure in, to feel it.
Bobby’s childhood home was a bastion of music. In 1955, when he was five, Bobby’s father became the first African American singer to perform with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City and later in the New York City Opera. His mother was also a vocalist. Their home was perennially filled with music and song, and music was also a healer.
As Bobby said, “When I was sick, my mother would give me two things. She’d give me some medicine for the aches and pains, and music for my spirit… Music has the incredible power to rearrange your insides.” The gentle, reliable, and melodic presence of both parents created a platform, a nervous system tuned and able to not worry and be happy. Bobby always loved music and sound, but he also deeply loved quiet. As a teen and young adult, he was powerfully drawn to monastic life and nearly chose that. The music, however, won out. And I believe we are all the better for it.
The quiet, the music, the precedence over other things, the play, the love: Bobby’s kids, it appears, grew up in an ambiance and matrix, a field where one can experience joy, not sweat the small stuff, one can not worry and be happy, and not have to spend decades in therapy to get there.
I learned that one member of the party at the neighboring table was Bobby’s wife of 48 years. However, for me, the most striking and moving part of one interview was when Bobby talked about having their own three children. “You can’t have children without that affecting everything that happens to you!” He sang to them “in the belly,” and he and his wife went to concerts when she was pregnant. “They heard a lot of music before they even came out.” But what grabbed me most of all was when he said, “I wanted to be home all the time. I hated missing out on everything… they change so much in a week, in a day. I wanted to be home, all the time, read stories, be the ‘tickle monster…’ change my voice to be the different characters.” He wanted to be home, to be present with them, see them grow and change, become little people. So different from my dad and the parents of so many of my clients – absent in so many ways, for many kinds of reasons. The quiet, the music, the precedence over other things, the play, the love: Bobby’s kids, it appears, grew up in an ambiance and matrix, a field where one can experience joy, not sweat the small stuff, one can not worry and be happy, and not have to spend decades in therapy to get there. What an inspiration!
I am not a parent. To be honest, I was afraid that intergenerational transmission would seep into and haunt my next generation. I feared I could not do better. I now believe that the hard work of regulation, what the attachment researchers call “earned secure attachment,” the regulation one achieves through one’s persistent healing effort, can also be intergenerationally transmitted. We can, in fact, change the gene pool. Bobby’s music and his example are a gift to us all. Thanks Bobby! I am going to see if I can find him so I can give him some cheese!
Todays song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
When I was young and deeply involved in Latin American anti-imperialist political work, the freedom fighters who organized and fought clandestinely against authoritarian dictatorships were called La Resistencia, the resistance. They boldly left their insignia, a capital R in a circle, as their quiet battle cry to show that they were not vanquished, ferociously not gone. I have always rather liked that it was also my initial, and I could sign off, if not in battle, certainly as a champion of the oppressed and unfree. However, the ways the word “resistance” has been used in the world of psychotherapy and, to some extent, in common parlance has irked me. I even occasionally hear disgruntled spouses hurl it crudely in an unruly couple’s session before I get a chance to nip it. It suggests intentionality, a willful thwarting of something. I rarely see psychological pushback that way. It invariably represents something else, certainly where trauma is concerned.
The core dilemma at the heart of neglect trauma is a profound internal conflict about attachment. Starting from the initial heartbreak, the child interprets the neglect scenario the only way they can, as rejection: “I am not good enough. I don’t matter. I am worthless. I am invisible. I don’t exist.” At first, if the neglect is early, which it often is, there are no words, only a quaking emptiness, hunger, agitation, a shapeless, rudderless flailing disorientation and confusion. After a while, there is collapse into the futility of waiting, and perhaps a freeze. Later, what most often emerges is a default to rock-solid self-reliance. What other choice do they have but to become strong, fierce, enduring, and to do it all themselves? It is the signature of the child of neglect, perhaps their/our version of the defiant “R.” But it is far more than a statement; it is survival, a way of life.
I began to learn about the ferocity of self-reliance in my work as a therapist. Often the child of neglect is reluctant to seek psychotherapy in the first place because they are not used to thinking of another person as a resource, or as being of any use. Often, these children of neglect are some of the most competent, accomplished, and outwardly successful people one might ever hope to find. The fact that there is a gaping interpersonal vacuum or “disability” might slip by unnoticed, even by themselves. They might know that they feel bad, or maybe they don’t even “have time” to notice that because they are too “busy” or too practiced at whatever their chosen medium of numbing out.
The core dilemma at the heart of neglect trauma is a profound internal conflict about attachment. Starting from the initial heartbreak, the child interprets the neglect scenario the only way they can, as rejection.
I had a humbling lesson about my own, perhaps avoidant, self-reliance only a few short years ago. My beloved therapist was undeniably getting old. I had been with her forever and had come a long way in letting myself know how important she was to me. I had always said to her, “I am going to keep coming here until you shut the door!” I was committed to that. By now, she was 89. In all our years together, she had never forgotten things. That stunned me when I first met her. She actually listened to me and tracked what I said! My parents had never even known my friends’ names, if I ever had any. Here was someone who was holding my whole life. Unbelievable. Now at 89, she was occasionally slipping, understandably, of course. I could not deny it.
I am a rather compulsively punctual person. All my years of therapy, I paid riveted attention to the clock, always cautious not to “overstay my welcome.” I liked to pay first, so I had “earned my keep.” I never wanted to impose in any way. And I scrupulously arrived on time. Until now. “Suddenly,” I began arriving at my sessions late. I would walk the mile or so from my office to hers. I had always enjoyed the walk, and window shopping on College Ave. It was a lively, colorful street, and now post-pandemic, it is coming back. I enjoyed being out in the world. And I made a point of managing my work days so there would be time to walk – until this point in time, when things started “running late.” I was unwilling to give up the walk and drive to be on time for my sessions. I stubbornly insisted on walking. We observed me arriving later and later to therapy. My therapist, always attentive to everything, especially where our relationship was concerned, would ask me, “What is up with this lateness?” I shrugged it off. My work… but it seemed I was starting to be sometimes almost 20 minutes late for a 50-minute session.
It took a long time to recognize that I was starting to fear not only her retirement but her death. Anything remotely related to losing her completely unnerved me. Except I did not even let myself know that. She worked to nudge and delicately steer me into that material for a long time before I “got it.” If she or anyone had dared to call it “resistance,” I am sure I would have had a righteous hissy fit.
The fear of loss is so profound it evokes the first “loss,” which was not really having anything in the first place, so far beyond conscious awareness. It took many months of wasted, lost time I could have had with her. She did retire before she turned 90. Now she is 93? I’m not sure. We are still in touch, and I still struggle sometimes to let myself call and see how she is doing. I know she will not live forever, and somehow that is unbearable. Need and loss are two sides of the same lousy coin. Neglect makes one desperately vulnerable to both, so we toggle back and forth, keeping them, as much as possible, outside of awareness. We deny, disavow, OK, resist. It can be a tragic waste.
Yes, our core dilemma is that the source of longed-for comfort and the source of perceived terror, loss, and/or rejection are the same person. What is a child to do?
Yes, our core dilemma is that the source of longed-for comfort and the source of perceived terror, loss, and/or rejection are the same person. What is a child to do? They push and pull, reach toward, recoil from, rock and roll, and ultimately culminate in collapse, freeze, or both. The same conflict can unfold in psychotherapy. On the one hand is a desperate longing, not only to connect, but to have the therapy “work” and actually be helped. On the other hand, is the seemingly lethal danger of interpersonal need, of letting the lifeline of self-reliance be punctured, and the puffed up, imagined, even experienced safety of isolation, whistling airily away. It is perhaps like a balloon with a hole, hissing and shrinking, spinning away from the risk of being abandoned, rejected forgotten again.
Some clients “resolve” or avoid it by having something like “serial monogamy” with therapists: going from one to the next as if they are interchangeable parts, not relationships, as if we therapists have a “shelf life.” It makes logical sense, but it is not what the heart craves. It is not “really” safe. It can most definitely be a challenge for therapist and client. Some view the method as the vehicle of change: the neurofeedback, EMDR, IFS, SE DBT, whichever of the alphabet soup, rather than a person. Those are all essential, don’t get me wrong. But the deepest healing comes in the relatedness.
It is a long-term challenge that I have been at for many years. I try not to think of it as “resistance,” even my own stubborn lateness, my preference to look at all the beautiful clothes in the shop windows. That makes it sound purposeful. Rather it was an urgent gasp to maintain autonomy, to save my life, and to protect my long-ago broken heart. I have come to think of the vacillation, the reciprocal reaching for, pulling back, perhaps as a kind of rocking? Perhaps it is a simulation of the loving somatic experience of being cradled, having a large and containing other’s body gently embrace, enfold us in gentle, rhythmic movement. It is often a grievously missing, even dreamlike experience, and people can try in vain to give it to themselves. What a terribly lonely, if logical, formulation.
We must go kindly with this. It takes its time to heal. Many of my comrades, the Resistance fighters I knew and did not know, I fear have died. Some I know about, some I never heard about again. They quietly slipped undercover, and who knows what happened? A different kind of cover than the craved cradle blanket. I still cherish the mighty R and the songs that honor them. And it is essential not to confuse different avenues of survival: both are heroic, each in their way in the service of freedom and life.
It is turning to spring in my hemisphere. Best wishes for whichever of the season’s holidays you observe.
R
Today’s song:
My book “Working with the Developmental Trauma of Childhood Neglect: Using Psychotherapy and Attachment Theory Techniques in Clinical Practice” was published on August 31st. It provides psychotherapists with a multidimensional view of childhood neglect and a practical roadmap for facilitating survivors’ healing.
My course with Quantum Way is now available for registration!