Safe and protective early relationships are critical to protect children from long term problems.
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
And you make me talk
And you make me feel
And you make me show
What I’m trying to conceal
If I trust in you, would you let me down?
Would you laugh at me if I said I care for you?
Could you feel the same way too?
I wanna know
Oh yes, I wanna know…
ABBA, The Name of the Game
A miracle is the shift from fear to love.
Marianne Williamson
After a recent gathering of members of several generations of my extended family, my thoughts have turned to the effects of turmoil and emotional impoverishment on young children while growing up, and how these effects can best be overcome.
Emotional impoverishment, in this context, refers to a combination of three factors; a fixed mindset, adherence to the scarcity model, and the incapacity of adult carers to provide young children with sufficient essential emotional nurturing, – summarized by David Richo as acceptance, affection, appreciation, approval, and attention.
A fixed mindset could be described as a cause-and-effect zero sum game. While a growth mindset embraces the possibility of growth and change, a fixed mindset believes that abilities are set and immutable. A person or group with a fixed mindset views setbacks and mistakes as failures, rather than opportunities for learning. They are often attributed to an inherent lack of talent of the group member(s). The unfortunate perpetrators of such `mistakes´ may be regularly scorned, ridiculed, or even punished.
The scarcity model posits that there is a limit to what is available, in total, and that there is never enough to go around. Sufficient resources (or in this case, emotional nurturing), therefore, can only be gained at the expense of others in the group. Constant manipulation, rivalry, and competition are the hallmarks of any group stuck in the scarcity model.
The root cause of the incapacity, on the part of the parents, to provide a safe, nurturing emotional environment may be different in each family, or indeed for each parent. Many adult carers may, themselves, have grown up in families bereft of emotional nurturing and without anyone to model the necessary skills of developing, utilizing, and teaching constructive conflict management, gentle boundary setting, and healthy assertiveness, using the language of the heart.
Emotional dyslexia or dysfunction takes many forms, from little or no nourishing physical contact (for example, no hugging), and attitudes from `boys don’t cry´ to `everything is drama´, and lots in between.
Parents who are themselves emotionally overwhelmed, whose emotional cups are empty, will have extreme difficulty in providing adequately for their young children. They may have simply experienced emotional impoverishment in childhood or have been exposed to trauma, for example as victims of domestic abuse or as soldiers in active combat.
Degrees of abandonment and neglect may result for the children of such parents, with real consequences for young family members later in life.
When it comes to healing and growing beyond emotional impoverishment, the exact identification of its causes is not, in and of itself, sufficient for healing. No amount of explanation can heal the wounds or help process the pain originally incurred. Being aware of and understanding the context is, however, important in preparing the ground for healing by facilitating compassion for self, others, and circumstances.
After many decades of inner work, I can confidently state that, while the mind can take us to the portal of healing, the healing itself takes place beyond this point, in our souls and at the cellular level in our bodies. It is there that the pain manifests and can be stored for a lifetime.
Crossing the threshold beyond intellectual processing will always involve backdraught, i.e. the re-experiencing of some of the initial pain, the pain we spend much of our adult life attempting to dodge.
It is only when we set aside our avoidance strategies and allow this pain to rise to the surface where owning, befriending, and grieving can take place, that the emotional wounds can truly begin to heal, and the emotional dis-ease begins to dissipate. It is at this point that we become willing to reach out for help.
In this context, the allegory of the cauldron and the long spoons comes to mind.
The story goes as follows: In a darkened room, a group of ten or twelve people are sitting around a steaming cauldron of delightful, nourishing, aromatic food. It smells so delicious such that it would make your mouth water, but the people sitting around this cauldron are famished, skinny, and sickly. They simply sit there in despair and dejection as they have for a very long time.
They each have in their possession a spoon with a very long handle, far longer than their arms. Due to the mis-dimensioned cutlery, they have each found it impossible to reach into the pot of stew and feed themselves. Even if they could clumsily get some food onto their spoon, they could not possibly get the spoons back into their mouths without first spilling the contents. After many vain attempts, they have all given up.
So, within immediate proximity of the nourishment they both desire and need, these poor people continue to starve, doomed in an apparently hopeless situation, each person alienated in their own private misery.
At some point, stirred by compassion for the person sitting across from her, one of these misfortunates is intuitively moved to try something new. She manages to gather some broth on her spoon from the far side of the cauldron and now, departing from the old script, instead of a further attempt to convey this food into her own mouth, she stretches the spoon across the cauldron towards the mouth of the person opposite.
Shyly, their eyes meet in silent communion. The person addressed in this manner then slowly begins to suck the contents until the spoon is empty, a smile illuminating his face from ear to ear in recognition of the miracle which was now beginning to unfold.
He then returns the favour from his side, carefully fetching a spoonful of the steaming broth from the far side of the cauldron and steering the spoon gingerly towards the waiting lips of his new accomplice. She drinks shyly at first, feeling the warm nutritious food slowly make its passage down towards her stomach. As the food descends, a broad smile rises from her belly and spreads out over her entire visage.
All eyes in the room are now watching with interest, sensing that a new dawn has broken. Now another man gathers a spoonful of stew and moves the spoon to the mouth of the woman opposite. The gesture is returned and then repeated by the remaining pairs until, with care taken not to disrupt each other’s efforts, the entire group is feeding and being fed by the person sitting opposite. Smiles break out all around. Laughter and animated conversation begin to fill the hitherto sombre room.
In a matter of minutes, the entire group has begun feeding each other. The mood transforms from hopelessness and despair to joy and optimism, with the protagonists recognising that they are both the conduits and beneficiaries of a miracle. The room also begins to fill with light, emanating apparently from the auras of those present. Life would never be the same again.
I have had the grace of experiencing the blessings of healing communities. Whether in group therapy, Twelve Step communities, groups of family and friends, or other self-organised entities, I have always been impressed by the power of free-flowing, judgement-free sharing in the spirit of our shared human imperfection.
Original wounding never happens in solitude. It is in pairs or larger groups that wound are inflicted. We appear to need each other in the process of healing also. The `healing community´ is no theoretical concept. It is a living organism in which we all participate, more or less, and from which countless people benefit every day.
When the default family model is one of emotional impoverishment, however, the scene is set for sibling rivalry, bullying, contempt, discounting of the feelings of others, and the like. Any child exposed to such an environment will realise that it is very dangerous to show up authentically, i.e. as one really is, and will begin to cut the cloth of interaction based on guesstimates of how the others may react.
As soon as we get to this point, we have begun to abandon out true selves. In the case of neglect, we reason that any role is better than no role at all. Where we feel threatened, we try to show up in such a way that the threat is minimized or avoided, and our protection maximized. All of this occurs below the radar of our, thus far, unfledged consciousness.
Abandoning out true selves is akin to building our house in our neighbour’s garden. We build those homes, and we decorate them with the love, care, and respect that make us feel safe at the end of the day. We invest in other people, places, and things, evaluating our self-worth based on how much those homes welcome us.
But what many don’t realize is that when we build our homes on a foundation comprising other people, places, and things, we give them the power to make us homeless.
When those people walk away, when the places turn out to be less than satisfactory, and the things are lost, those homes fall apart, and suddenly, we feel empty because everything that we had within us, we had put into them.
We entrusted our souls to external entities and concepts. The emptiness we feel doesn’t mean we have nothing to give, or that we have nothing within us. It’s just that we built our home in the wrong place.
The circle around the cauldron then beckons as the place where we can reclaim our true selves. It takes courage to take our place at the cauldron, to begin trusting community again, and bring the willingness to try something new. There is no alternative, however, at least none that I have found.
We usually experience this process with new-found comrades we meet at apparently random intersections as we tread the path of life. Sometimes at this cauldron we meet people we have known since birth, old friends, or members of our extended family.
When this occurs, the miracle of healing seems to have an added dimension of grace. This extra blessing makes the experience indelible.
