OT - the piece

[Guest guest]

Hunches on childhood

(or everything I want to say about world peace)

1. I am a psychotherapist. That is to say, I am an archaelogist

and midwife to the human soul. ( " The unique role of the analyst,

moving to the minutest detail of a person's history, gives a

perspective and clarity to the direct cause and effect – the reactive

nature – of childhood experience on later adult behavior. " – Alice

) I believe, after fifteen years of doing this work, that what

happens in our earliest years has a radical – root – effect upon all

that we experience thereafter.

2. We love because we were first loved.

3. We fail to love because we ourselves were failed very early

on.

4. The way we were treated as small children is the way we will

treat ourselves and others the rest of our lives: with tenderness and

support, with neglect and cruelty, or with something in between.

5. Few of us have a batting average of even three hits out of

ten when it comes to treating ourselves with tenderness and support.

6. We do have the possibility of choice over our behavior. We

are, indeed, larger than our history. We do not have choice over our

feelings. Unless we bring deep intention and committed awareness to

our lives, feelings will continue to control behavior. (Freud was

right: the unconscious calls more shoots than it doesn't.)

7. Each person is infinitely precious, of infinite worth – that

is, worthy of infinite tenderness and support. Nowhere is this more

obvious and apparent than in the life of a young child.

8. To have grown up in this industrialized society means that we

are – each of us – wounded in ways that we do not yet comprehend.

Unless we grieve – and thus release – these wounds, we will pass them

on to the next generation.

9. The central wound of early childhood is abandonment.

10. Children are exceptionally sensitive – that is, fragile.

Children (we) are also very resilient. Therein lies the problem: we

do bounce back, early on, from woundings. To the naked eye, we appear

to have gone on... beyond the wound. And we have. We have also stayed

right there, at the scene of the crime. Depending upon how deep the

wound, we will make certain that we return again and again.

11. In spite of our wounds, there is at our core a truth that

cannot be extinguished. It has wisdom and tenacity. It can be lost

and forgotten, but never destroyed.

12. Our degree of openness to relationship – to intimacy and

negotiation – is established in the first four years of life. Indeed,

the context of life for the earliest years is the world of

relationship, or the lack thereof. This is the world of the self as

it comes into focus _in relationship_ to mother.

13. Mothering is not supported in this culture. Mothering

(nurturance, community, relationship) is dangerous because it reminds

us of our dependence and the limitations of the ones upon whom we

were dependent. The result is an active rejection of nurturing and of

women. ( " Traced to its root in the history of each individual, this

fear of woman turns out to be a fear of recognizing the fact of our

dependence. " – D.W. Winnicott)

14. It is difficult to give what we didn't get. ( " Unfortunately,

all too many modern women have not been nurtured by the mother in the

first place. Instead, they have grown up in the difficult home of

abstract, collective authority – `cut off at the ankles from the

earth,' as one woman put it – full of superego shoulds and oughts. Or

they have identified with the father and their patriarchal culture,

thus alienating themselves from their own feminine ground and the

personal mother, whom they have often seen as weak or irrelevant.

Adrienne Rich speaks for many of us when she writes, 'The woman I

needed to call my mother was silenced before I was born.' " – Sylvia

Brinton Perera)

15. The man I needed to call my father was silenced before I was

born. ( " There is a lot of grief around our missing fathers. We're in

a bad spot. I can't fix that. If you needed love at a crucial moment

in childhood and didn't get it, you can't go back and get it now. But

I can tell you that the further a man goes into his grief, the more

male he becomes. Every time you touch your pain, in grief or in rage,

you'll get stronger. " – Bly) It is _this_ strength that

children need from their fathers.

16. Women have every right to express themselves in ways other

than mothering. An aversion to mothering is, however, both common and

significant. This isn't so much a comment on mothering as it is upon

the isolation women feel from themselves – their deep struggle to

know what it is to be uniquely woman. ( " Basically, as women, we have

no sense of what it means to be a woman. We know what we have been

_told_ women are, yet we have a sense that we can't possibly be that,

that there is more to us. We don't know at all. We cannot even begin

to imagine what this woman would be like, because first we are

presently stripping down the negatives that have always been said

about women and, second, we must undo the effort we make to imitate

men in order to have a self or social power. These two are such

enormously preoccupying labors that we haven't had the opportunity

yet to dream up, create, or even fantasize this future woman. " – Kim

Chernin)

17. Mothering is a verb. It is thus a task for both men and women.

18. The ultimate goal of " good enough mothering " is to call forth

in the child _confidence-at-the-core_. That is: " You are inherently

good and lovable in your natural expression of who you are. "

19. For children, the medium is the message. And the medium of

confidence-at-the-core is time: availability, countless repetitions

of presence, time and time again. " Quality time " in the place

of " quantity time " does not easily translate as nurturance in the

childhood unconscious.

20. Hovering, on the other hand, can translate as engulfment.

21. The fundamental need of the developing child is to be fully

held and fully dependent. ( " At first we were absolutely dependent,

and that _absolutely_ means absolutely. " – D.W. Winnicott) And then

the child needs to initiate his or her own gradual independence, in

his or her own time. The vehicle for this task, on the part of the

parents, is _attentive presence_: to be actively available when

needed, and passively available when not.

22. All parents fail.

23. To the degree that we neglect our anger and grief about our

early childhood wounds, we do by default choose to induce others to

help us re-create our wounds and to find others upon whom we can re-

enact our wounds.

24. I repeat: the past haunts us in ways that we don't want to

believe.

25. The future of the planet is, in part, dependent upon

establishing the raising of healthy children as _the_ central

priority.

26. Less violent cultures (Hopi, Senoi, Eskimo, Kalahari) do

appear to prioritize early childhood practices that encourage

confidence-at-the-core.

27. Life is bigger than we think. ( " There is more to the human

condition than psycho-enchantment. " – Larsen)

28. It is difficult to support children in a context that doesn't

support us: industrialized economy, financial anxieties, sexism,

racism, meritocracy, dysfunctional family patterns ... not to mention

genetics or acts of nature. All of these, as well as the painfully

slow process of parents' freeing themselves from the wounds of their

own past, interact – thus complicating the process of historical

change.

29. Nevertheless, it is essential to establish priorities. There

can be no more fundamental priority than the raising of healthy

children.

30. Even given a concerted effort to support children in an ever-

widening frame, we cannot hope to see any significant change on the

world scene for ten generations, maybe fifty – then again, it could

be four, it could be ninety-four. ( " The most important lesson of the

new peace: that peace must be allowed to grow from natural

foundations, not imposed by force... A peace that can grow as a shade

tree, not to be balanced by force as a pyramid stood on its peak. " –

Horowitz)

31. It may be too late for all of this. Our only hope is to live

as if it were not.

32. The way we hold our children is the way we hold our future.

Kent T. Hoffman

(The Sun Magazine, Issue # 150, May 1988)

[Guest guest]

José-,

<Hunches on childhood

<(or everything I want to say about world peace)

<Kent T. Hoffman

<(The Sun Magazine, Issue # 150, May 1988)

Abosolutely beautiful, thank you. Reminds me I need to renew my membership

to The Sun... it's such a great magazine. Have a wonderful trip. Even us

lurkers will miss your prose.

Kim