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I’m sitting next to a mother as she perches on her chair’s edge, looking toward a video monitor placed in front of us. Monica is a highly successful young professional seeking help because her four-month-old daughter Lindsey, “just cries and cries, unable to calm herself down.” After a brief pause she adds, “Maybe I spoil her, because she seems so ungrateful.” I’m about to show a recently recorded videotape of this mother and daughter in a standard laboratory interactive session. The screen displays Monica as she sits on a folding chair directly facing Lindsey, who is leaning back in a car seat looking in the direction of her mom.

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As Monica and I watch the monitor, we see how she is smiling broadly, eyes dilated, intensely focusing upon her daughter. This mother, utilizing her signature upbeat intonation, calls out to Lindsey in a high-pitched voice. “Hey Linds! Watcha doin’n?” Her daughter, head at the back of her chair, returns her mother’s smile for several seconds and then looks out beyond her mom, then down and to the right. Monica immediately shifts her weight, bringing her head into alignment with her daughter’s new position. With a cheerful, bubbly voice mom chants “Lindsey, Lindsey! Hey, Linds!” Her daughter’s shoulders shrug briefly as she momentarily meets her mother’s gaze. They both grin, each smiling, but this time Lindsey’s smile seems slightly odd, almost forced. The baby’s eyes quickly move up past her mother to the lights on the ceiling. The mother’s smile falters for a few tenths of a second, then seems to ratchet up a notch. Monica raises her right hand and commences to gently, but insistently poke her child’s tummy. “You like to be tickled don’t you? Yes, you do. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.” As she finishes the third repetition of “gotcha,” Lindsey winces briefly, then begins to whimper. Not yet crying, it is clear that she soon will. Mother momentarily shifts her gaze out and away from Lindsey, frowns slightly, and with a barely discernible irritation turns to face her daughter. This mother’s tone is suddenly flat, the cheer fully vanished. “I think you’re just sleepy. You just get so cranky when you need a nap.” Now turning away, she begins rummaging through her purse. With a voice slightly aloof, almost curt, she intones: “Let me find your Binky.”

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From a clinical perspective, what we’ve just seen is a mother whose hope for shared happiness makes it hard to read her daughter’s bids for personal space and a slower, less frantic rhythm. Because of this mother’s inability to dial-down her own need, her child eventually winces and whimpers, cuing ever more directly that mom’s intense agenda is simply too much. Unfortunately, when Monica notices her daughter’s distance, she misses an opportunity to experience the relationship from her child’s perspective. Instead, because she is feeling momentarily rejected this mother withdraws her warmth. She’ll back off, but with a sense of confusion and growing resentment. Sadly, they are moving into a relationship where neither mother nor daughter will feel they can get things right.

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Moments of not meeting. Moments of void.

 

To paraphrase Winnicott: It is easier to remember difficult, even traumatic events, than it is to remember moments of absence, where presence was needed. How do you remember nothing happening when an attuned response was needed? How do you remember the specifics of emptiness?

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What we’ve seen here certainly wouldn’t be defined as neglect or abandonment, at least not in the way we might typically understand these terms. Even so, four-month-old Lindsey has begun to experience something of what it’s like to feel unknown. Naturally, instinctively seeking an experience of AND from a mother who is well-intentioned but unable to read some of her cues, Lindsey already has a dawning sense of being a stranger in a strange land.

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How is Lindsey to make sense of the fact that the central figure in her life, the one teaching her the structure and nuance of relationship, is unable to read her requests for less pressure and more personal space? How, at four months old, is she to understand the sense of absence she is already beginning to know?

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Years later, unable to decipher persistent feelings of isolation and a tendency for self-attack, Lindsey might find herself speaking to a therapist. “It makes absolutely no sense. I had an almost perfect childhood. My mom was utterly devoted to me. But, inside I feel lost, like no one actually ‘Gets it. Gets me.’ I’m never really happy, or even satisfied. There’s something really wrong with me. I’m such an ungrateful bitch.”

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There she’ll still be sitting, feeling terrible and bad. There she'll sit blaming herself for an emptiness that makes no sense.

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She will sit in absence, yet she won't feel completely alone. Lindsey will have something bad about herself and her life to focus on, and she'll have a persistent, harsh, yet ever-present Voice keeping her company. Unfortunately, I see this in therapy patients like a grown-up Lindsey all the time.

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It is important to know that research is now making clear that when a parent recognizes the rupture to the relationship in inevitable moments of misattunment and chooses to repair the miscue on her/his part, the bond actually deepens. Mistakes in our connection (moments of disinterest, being overly happy, trying to push the child out of hurt or anger or joy, being invasive, etc.) aren't the problem. Not noticing these ruptures and consistently miscuing the child in the same emotional events without acknowledging them and finding another way is where deeper problems begin.

 

Rupture is inevitable. We simply can't be attuned all the time. Thinking we have to be becomes an even bigger problem. Repair (recognizing ruptures and returning to AND, whenever possible) is key.

 

Good enough is good enough.