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Chapter 1
On gentleness
From as long as he remembered himself, Ron had known a sense of fragility. His feelings, he sensed, were always close to the surface â a tender tissue that would crack at the merest touch. It wasnât a great asset in his childhood neighborhood: a Tel Aviv quarter largely populated by former army personnel. It might not have been much better elsewhere.
He spent long stretches alone in his room, listening to music and drawing. An odd bird; that was how his father thought of him, sometimes trying to swallow expressions of contempt and puzzlement, and at other times not even trying. His mother was full of good intentions but couldnât quite figure him out, either. She didnât know what to do with his emotions, or rather, what to do with herself around them.
Ron was not socially isolated. He was quite good at fitting in and made sure he did everything as expected. He joined the Boy Scouts, went to summer camp and to parties, and hung out with friends, pretty much doing what they were doing. But deep inside he felt split: He didnât want to seclude himself, but he also didnât really want to be out there, and occasions they handled with ease, almost lightheartedly, he experienced as a struggle.
He was extremely self-conscious â initially, in the way it sometimes happens with children; next, as adolescents can be, and eventually in the manner of young adults. He looked at himself and felt both different and vulnerable. He decided to take action, to adjust himself and toughen up. Going against his natural grain, he forced himself to listen to loud music and watch violent action movies. He started using the local slang, though inside himself, he flinched.
An unconscious part developed in him that tried to take control of the current of stimuli-experience, from the inside out and from the outside in: to put a brake on any sadness or yearning wherever they arose, and to push away â at least a little â whatever threatened to trigger these feelings. He adopted a swallowing movement that appeared at the first signs of excitement, that he repeated so much it almost seemed a tic, and an involuntary tensing of his jaws and stomach, which in time turned into headaches and stomachaches. Although he felt stronger and better able to meet the world, there was also a price to pay. Something in him was outraged at this imposed discord, and it tried to find its own course.
Not a few people move in the world feeling like a delicate being that somehow strayed into a coarse reality. This experience â more or less conscious, more or less overt â is an ongoing undercurrent of their lives. It amounts to an existential condition in whose light, and on whose basis, all the rest is built: their sense of self, their sense of others, and the relations between them. A woman describes her mother as being made out of materials so unlike her own that there wasnât a chance, from the very outset, to be either seen or understood by her. A man who, due to his need for softness and aesthetics, was under more or less constant assault from the physical harshness of his family home. Another whose fatherâs invasiveness and vulgarity, set off against his own sensitivity and gentleness, caused him to move in and out of states of non-existence in order, paradoxically, to be able to be himself.
Some people are born with certain physical and mental characteristics which make them into what I would call gentle people. What exactly it is that turns them into what they are â inborn traits (genes? intra-uterine experience or experiences during birth? circumstances whose roots lie even further back?); the nature of their relations with early significant figures, or other physical and cultural conditions â none of this is what I would want to try to probe and determine. It is clear, however, that a combination of these factors, interweaving, constantly emerging one from another and creating one another, could easily turn into a complex, inextricable knot.
For some years it looked as though following the beaten track worked well for Ron. After graduating from high school, he joined a prestigious intelligence unit in the army. Though headaches and stomachaches persisted, rising and falling, they never called for more attention than some simple allergy tests followed by largely unsuccessful attempts to cut out lactose or gluten. Somehow he managed the first weeks of his military service. He passed through them as if through a fog, aware, but not quite, of his new reality, withdrawing at every opportunity as he hooked up to his music through headphones. Eventually, however, there was no escape and the environment invaded â grey, ugly, coarse. An immature romantic relationship exposed him to intense feelings, and these in turn touched on painful primitive mental layers and reactivated them. The adaptive-hardening envelope was torn.
âI moved through the [military] base and it hurt, every moment. Everything I passed was something that was about to pass away. Every moment a moment of parting. In the mere passage of time there loomed separation. Separation filled each and every moment, insufferable painâ.
It wasnât long before this intolerable pain was joined by frequent panic attacks. Stomachaches and headaches moved into the background in the face of these panic attacks, grew insignificant by comparison. It seemed as if Ron had given up his muscular holding, dropped the pretense of toughness. Once or twice a day all of the worldâs walls would close in on him, the air growing dense. It could overtake him almost anytime, anywhere. Neon lights could trigger an attack, or the way the room looked. Or, completely arbitrarily, so it seemed, with no good reason at all, he would suddenly feel his brain chemistry changing: some substance would start flowing through his body and mind, causing the entire universe to collapse. There was nowhere safe to be. Only when he was on the road was he safe from the nightmare: being in motion kept it at bay. Sometimes, when he passed by a flowering plant, heâd pick a blossom and inhale the smell. Heâd close his eyes and for a few brief moments take his fill of the goodness he yearned for so badly. He needed tenderness and beauty. Coarseness and ugliness grated on him.
To be in the world unheld
Life naturally involves suffering. From its very start until the end, we must take our leave from who and what are dear to us and must encounter what we donât wish for. Birth is attended by pain, to be followed, ineluctably, by sickness, old age, and death, physical and mental agonies, grief and distress. That life is given to constant change; that we are given to constant change, and that whoever and whatever we hold dear is given to constant change â this means separation and misery. The process of becoming and decaying is naturally painful (the first noble truth, according to the Buddha). There is a way out of this process, and this way is fully articulated (the third and fourth noble truths); and those who take it watch as release occurs and feel the consequent happiness and relief. But until one has covered the whole length of this path, life will involve some degree of mental pain. In the case of the infant or child, the question is how this pain is treated, how it is held (Winnicott) or contained and digested (Bion). How the minds of the childâs first caregivers hold the pain and digest it, and to what extent the infantâs young, tender psyche is ready to absorb this holding and digestion, to allow them to alleviate lifeâs impingements, and to gradually offer themselves to the child and become functions of his or her own.
When a baby comes into the world, she needs a holding environment. Her head weighs heavily and her muscles are weak in extra-uterine gravity. While there are some few things she is already competent enough to do for herself, she is pretty much helpless. I assume that even while still in the womb, she experienced suffering of various kinds, but there, at least, her body was always held. Now this has ended, and it is only natural that this bodily âdropâ, in the babyâs immature psyche, will connect with a general sense of being dropped â a terrifying non-integration and lostness. Physical slippage has an emotional parallel. Much like the parents may fail to collect and hold the infantâs limbs in such a way as to instill a sense of security, they may also not succeed in properly holding the parts of her psyche, the raw affects and experiences, the anxieties and distress, as well as the rest of the babyâs gropings and signals. In a similar manner, the infant, whose digestive system â mental as much as physical â is not fully developed, depends on others to process the emotional reality on her behalf. Like a young bird whose mother pre-chews and partly pre-digests his food, the infant must rely on the minds of her parents to function as containers capable of taking in the difficult mental components which she projects, then to process them and return them to her in a usable form, one that she can handle and metabolize, one that is life-giving and allows for growth.
If the infant is not appropriately held and contained (something which depends on its caregivers but also on the infantâs own traits), there is a threat of disintegration, and a primitive terror of annihilation and obliteration â lurking in the background anyway â is likely to take root (Klein, 1946). This primitive anxiety, though fundamentally unthinkable, can nevertheless be described through images of an endless fall (Winnicott, 1974) or a seepage or scattering through space where an envelope is missing (Bick, 1968). Against this dread the psyche employs survival behaviors producing a âsensory floorâ (Ogden, 2004), or a holding âsecond skinâ (Bick, 1968), or again a sensory âwrappingâ (Anzieu, 2016). These are the infantâs ways of holding itself in the absence of sufficient external holding. Infants may fix their attention on some sensory object (a lamp on the ceiling, say), get immersed, and thus feel that they are being held. They may tighten their muscles to prevent the personality from pouring out, in fantasy, through physical holes. They can also be engaging in constant movement, which produces a sense of continuity experienced as a holding skin (Symington, 1985). We adults, too, do such things: We stare at the TV by way of a holding sensory object; we tense certain muscles continuously and involuntarily to hold ourselves tight; we make sure thereâs always music in the background so as to avoid frightening gaps; we take the car and drive for hours, just to be in motion, or we engage in repetitive body movements so as to sense ongoing being (Ogden, 2004). There are mental parallels to all of these modes of holding, all of which reflect the systemâs resourcefulness, and each carrying its own particular burden. The mind can create them by stubborn adherence to a certain mental object (an emotion, memory, image, idea or thought), or by means of an incessant parade of images and thoughts, or by a mental movement that has a tightening quality and that leaves no gaps in the inner space, clustering mental materials into one solid mass (Barnea-Astrog, 2015).
No infant is wholly inured against lifeâs injuries, no matter how good the holding and containing they received, and even if its inborn features allow for their optimal use. Since the quality of holding and containment is measured in relation to the specific needs of the specific child, certain babies are less likely to experience conditions of sufficient ongoing holding and containment. Their sensitivity makes them liable to absorb their surroundings at a higher resolution, and they find themselves frequently hurt. Their parents might find it hard to gauge the nuances of their experiences, to process them and adjust themselves to a possibly demanding and intensive rhythm; the babies, from their side, are more likely to feel overwhelmed and emotionally dropped. This is why, it seems to me, gentle people tend â though not inevitably â to be carrying a sense of terror. Ron, clearly, was such a person. At this time many tender regions, previously covered by a provisional layer of adjustment, were exposed. Here it was that anxiety broke through, acute and irrepressible.
He was helpless in the face of this anxiety. He wrapped himself in sound, inhaled any beauty that came his way, and rested on the continuity of motion. These, however, were no more than feeble arms, a fragile, fleeting sensory floor, fragments of a home, the merest twigs carried along in a stream, offering themselves limply by way of momentary and unconvincing support.
Cigarette smoke trickling from mouth to throat to lungs. A glass of wine. More music. A slice of cake. Minute, insufficient breaths of air which neither heal nor accumulate.
This moment hurts, intolerably. It is unbearable by itself, but the fact that here-it-is-passing-away is unbearable, too. A sharp pinch at the depths of existence.
Each breath. Every moment. Blunt knives. Loneliness without a name, a gaping abyss.
The mind, Ron noticed, crashes on the past and fantasizes the future, but the present moment it cannot abide. Each moment grates. The distance between this moment and the past, the distance between now and the future, drowns the moment in separation. It makes it agonizing, insufferable. He invented a method, trying to catch his mind and force it to live in the present: Now I eat, he told himself again and again as he was eating. Now I lay down my pen. Now I walk. I walk. (Years later, he will smile at himself, realizing that a similar meditation technique was already invented many centuries ago.) It didnât work for him, hardly scratched the surface, and he gave up on it very soon. (Years later, he will learn why.) He couldnât help himself, and life was urging him to do something to somehow extricate himself. On friendsâ advice, he sought psychological help.
In a sense, the primitive dread of being dropped and unintegrated is universal. But it doesnât stay with all of us to the same extent. Those who do carry the terror of their original breakdown simultaneously fear and are attracted to it. It is the very essence of essenceless horror, the worst of undreamable nightmares. Yet, in order to be truly close to themselves, in order to be themselves, in order to truly be, they need to make contact with it. There is no way, says Winnicott, to fully experience the original breakdown: it is too horrific, and because there was no one there to experience it when it occurred (in Winnicottâs view, the subject was yet to emerge) â one could say it was never really experienced. Still, it can be approached, its very margin; it can be touched and its presence sensed. Indeed, for the sake of recovery, this is exactly what needs to happen (Winnicott, 1974; Kolker, 2009). Ron touched the edges of his original breakdown at that time. He was moving against them, and their sharp ends cut into him. If this painful contact with terror was going to transform into a gate to truth and healing, Ron would have to study it inside himself, to study himself in the light of it, through experience and non-violent awareness, in a setting offering the right inner and outer attention.
His first encounter with such an environment was the room of his psychologist, full of spaces and moments of silence. Her personality, her quiet affection, this peculiar, non-mutual relationship â somehow they did the job. How and why it happened, he didnât understand, but he began to feel lighter. Initially, the therapy gave him a break from his panic attacks, and then it directed itself to subterranean layers â those relatively closer to the surface â of Ronâs relational patterns. This was the beginning of a more flexible, less fragile way of being. The process developed further when, some years later, he began practicing Vipassana meditation. In time, his ability to look into himself in a less violent manner, and to better digest whatever he found there, grew. He wound his way among the geological tissues, the rocks and pebbles of his mind â casting about between them, crumbling them, from the coarsest to the subtler. First, he faced the panic attacks, which his meditation practice brought to the fore yet again. When these vanished â and even before that, in the breaks between them â he had the space to work through his more general anxiety, which would rise to the surface of his body-mind, subjecting him to its ebb and flow. Then he addressed the dregs of terror, the remaining components, physical and mental, which by this point had become almost entirely divested of personal identity: nightmarish contents, a hyper-aroused state of the nervous system, and the raw matter, the primary pain of primary separation, the open abyss, the tear around the stomach branched throughout his being.
The gap
A gentle person is born. What happens to his gentleness as it encounters the world? To what extent does reality suit it, and to what extent do they clash? Does it meet with a resonant sensitivity tending towards it, engaging, flexing, stretching, and solidifying as the need arises? To what extent does this gentleness get to live, to serve the person as a soft ground from which contact with both the inside and the outside can be formed?
I have been fortunate enough to come across quite a few gentle people in my everyday life. They may be different from one another â light years away. They may feel lonely or isolated, but gentleness connects them. I spot them easily: in a sense, theyâre my people. I know their pain and their beauty, and I love them straightaway. One might think of their pain as related to the clash between their gentleness and the nature of their physical and emotional surroundings â human or not human. This collision may be almost constant, an undercurrent right beneath the flow of experience; in other cases it may enter the field of experience and leave it again, conveniently forgotten only to burst in once more. It might be thought of as a type of developmental trauma, the kind that occurs when an emotional pain finds no (human, emotional) place to be held (Epstein, 2013). And the various physical and mental formations produced in these people in response to the collision might be conceived as constructions that allow them to live with it, to survive it, to hold onto their slight-rich psyche. Some people are more gentle, some are less; still, rather than offering a characterization of a certain type, I would prefer to examine gentleness as a way of being, a certain mode of being in this life.
The gap that often attends the experience of gentleness is a gap between different levels of perceptual-sensory-conscious resolution. âWhat I feelâ, the gentle girl realizes when facing her mother, âyou donât feel. What strikes me so intensely, you canât even seeâ. The gap is painful. Any distance and disparity hurt the tender, immature soul. In this case, the gap between the motherâs and childâs levels of resolution may lead the former to miss out on important parts of the latterâs experiential universe, leaving them neglected, cast in the shade. Occurring at a much more benign point on the line, yet nevertheless a little like neglected orphans who, having learned that the hoped-for response will not come, stop crying â the internal and interpersonal links of one who experiences such a gap are bound to ...
