Absence sucks, but learning to deal with some absence in our lives is actually essential. It is only useful, however, when a caregiver's inevitable absence is recognized by the caregiver and repaired. As we just saw in the

above video, "the [inevitable] bad" is allowed to return to "the [essential] good."

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Known as "rupture and repair," when a child experiences a rupture and also experiences a caregiver willing to repair that rupture, the research shows that such a child builds a deepening sense of trust.

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"Bad things happen to me, but they are followed by good things. My caregiver cares enough to recognize her (or his) mistake and work it out with me."

 

So ultimately, absence, in and of itself, isn't the issue.

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The issue is absence that is repeated in ways that fit a pattern, a consistent kind of absence that goes unrecognized by the caregiver. ("When I reach for you, you look away and start talking fast. Why don't you like my reaching? Is there something wrong with me?)

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The issue is ruptures that go without repair on a regular basis; ruptures where the caregiver is blind to a specific pattern of rupture and thus does not repair the relationship back toward shared presence.

 

After working with parents for so long - upper class, middle class, and street dependent - I’ve learned that all parents bring some degree of patterned, consistently un-repaired absence to their children. Unconscious, unintentional, never on purpose, the fact remains that almost all parents block being-with their children concerning certain emotions. For some, it’s that we cannot be-with our child’s fear. For others it’s that we can’t tolerate our child’s anger or sadness or joy or curiosity. We can allow some of these emotional states, but it’s very rare to find a parent who can genuinely support all of them.

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For example, when a child is crying a parent may subtly attempt to cheer him up, thinking that making him happy will "solve the problem" of his sadness. What this parent doesn't currently know is that some version of “Don’t cry” (from “be a happy baby!” to “big boys don’t cry”) leaves the residue of being-without, an absence that lingers. To the child, this is subtle evidence that “No one can join me here in my sadness.” In some way this translates into "Don't have this feeling" and "Don't be you in this particular way."

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Over time, the experience for the child is, "I require connection but I'm un-meetable here… Whenever I get sad, absence

trumps presence."

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Winnicott said that this point of unconscious realization is precisely where our innate "true self" begins to build the facade of a "false self" or protective self: "Be cute, be charming, stay hidden, etc., because they don't want to see how you really feel."

 

Ordinary Heartbreak

 

She climbs easily on the box

That seats her above the swivel chair

At adult height, crosses her legs, left ankle over right,

Smooths the plastic apron over her lap

While the beautician lifts her ponytail and laughs,

"This is coarse as a horse's tail."

And then as if that's all there is to say,

The woman at once whacks off and tosses

its foot and a half into the trash.

And the little girl who didn't want her hair cut,

But long ago learned successfully how not to say

What it is she wants,

Who, even at this minute cannot quite grasp her shock and grief,

Is getting her hair cut. "For convenience," her mother put it.

The long waves gone that had been evidence at night,

When loosened from their clasp,

She might secretly be a princess.

Rather than cry out, she grips her own wrist

And looks to her mother in the mirror.

But her mother is too polite, or too reserved,

So the girl herself takes up indifference,

While pain follows a hidden channel to a deep place

Almost unknown in her,

Convinced as she is, that her own emotions are

not the ones

her life depends on,

She shifts her gaze from her mother's face

Back to the haircut now,

So steadily as if this short-haired child were someone else.

- David Levine

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From this point forward – the point captured in Levine’s poem and the ones we all experience – people carry, in a place deeper than conscious awareness, underlying assumptions and an eventual certainty about "life" which includes an ever-present, albeit unconscious experience of "forever empty."

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Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas calls this learned experience, especially when it happens at a phase of life before we have language, our unthought known: that which we always know but may never actually think. "We learn the grammar of our lives before we have the words." This early programming continues to convince us that the way we see ourselves and others from this point forward is unquestionably the way things are.

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Ruptures without repair become the ongoing risk of falling forever.

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