'You're Not Good Enough!': the challenge of non-compliance

Published on 12.4.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

Not everyone thinks of Winnicott’s portrayal of human emotional development as dangerous. But it is. Few also are alive to its subversiveness: its stated emphasis on non-compliance and ruthlessness. - Alexander Newman

The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby, and to hate so much without paying the child out… -D.W. Winnicott

It’s hard to be hated. It’s hard to feel we’re disappointing to others. It’s hard to be on the receiving end of negativity from those we care for, whether it be a child, a partner, an employee, a student, or a patient. Yet it’s an inescapable part of our alliances. The only serious question is how we deal with it. Which brings me to this week’s note.

In the last three notes, we’ve seen what Donald Winnicott’s influential idea of the “good-enough” caregiver can teach us about how to help. Now we’re looking into the shadows, at when we fail to be “good enough”. Unfortunately, it’s a big topic! In this note I look at one common failing: intolerance of non-compliance.

We could be a university dean dealing with a troublesome faculty member, a teacher dealing with a disruptive student, or a therapist dealing with a patient’s attacks. Here we’ll imagine we’re a parent dealing with bedtime drama. The deans, teachers, and therapists out there will no doubt recognize how it fits your situation.

Let’s say the child is at an age where there can be conflict and even an “I hate you!” if we hold the bedtime boundary. In the face of their non-compliant push-back, there are several ways we can fail to be good-enough. For the sake of avoiding the conflict and hate, we might avoid setting a bedtime altogether. Or, having set a bedtime, we might fail to hold it—either re-negotiating the boundary, or giving up altogether and letting them feel our disappointment and resentment of them for being so, well, childish! Finally, we might fail them by meeting their non-compliance with open hostility or hatred, not just insisting on the boundary but punishing them for daring to test it.

Each of these responses fails to tolerate the challenge non-compliance presents, and thus fails to help the child feel both strongly held and loved. In this vein, Winnicott writes

What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate....he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength (with consequent tolerance) if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and of his imaginings to make progress in his emotional development.

How often we fail makes all the difference, which is where the more familiar idea of “good enough” comes in. We don't need to be perfect. We all have the occasional bad day, where we fail to do good enough. As noted elsewhere, mistakes and failures are a necessary part of learning and growth. But if these become the rule, we fail to be good enough.

What Winnicott calls the “false self” develops when the child is forced to adapt to the caregiver’s projections, rather than be held with gentle firmness and mirrored in a way that allows the child to go on being himself. Winnicott describes the consequences of this failure for a baby, but his point applies more broadly.

The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother's face and finds himself therein... provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother's face, but rather the mother's own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain. [my emphasis]

When we hold someone well, we are not projecting our expectations, fears, needs, and plans onto them, but are acting in their interest. By contrast, to avoid holding a boundary because we want to be loved (and don’t want to be hated) is to project onto them our need to be loved. Likewise, to punish non-compliance with resentment and hate is to project onto them our expectation that they “just eat and grow and smile sweetly”—which is not what normal children (or faculty or employees or students or patients) do.

When we can tolerate the hate, our own and theirs, we can help others work through negative feelings and learn to make good use of them in their relationships. (There’s a reason we have so many books on feedback and difficult conversations.) This is some of the hardest and deepest work good-enough parents and therapists do. The work is easier when we remember that exasperating behavior is not necessarily a sign anything is wrong. To the contrary, as Winnicott (and teenage rebellion) reminds us, non-compliance plays a central role in development and individuation.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me that part of what patients pay therapists for is not to retaliate when they’re being difficult. Good-enough parents also manage (mostly) to be tolerant in this way, which is the more impressive, given that parenting is an unpaid and sometimes thankless job—at least in the short term! Once we’re adults, it can be hard to find people willing to tolerate us if we’re habitually difficult and uncooperative. This is why working skillfully with non-compliance is such a valuable gift to those in our care, and why failing them can be so devastating….I’m reminded of that playfully serious definition of insanity: when there’s no one who can stand us.

The Virtues of the Good-Enough Mother

Published on 11.20.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

I think you will agree that there is nothing new about the central idea. Poets, philosophers and seers have always concerned themselves with these ideas. -Winnicott

As for me, I can already see what a big part has been played in my work by the urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother. - Winnicott

My first job in this second career as a psychotherapist was at Dragonfly, a residential-treatment program for young adults. My job involved working with my clients and their parents, who were usually paying for treatment. I remember an awkward conversation with a mother who heatedly demanded to know whether I’d ever been a parent. When I said no, she replied, “Then what do you know about parenting, much less being a mother? Why should I trust your advice?” She said this during a family session that included her husband and her son. She was reacting to my suggestion that she reflect back what she heard her son saying, before she responded to it. This advice is standard practice when communication is breaking down—much less completely broken, as it was between this mother and her son. Even so, she was right that there’s a lot I will never know about being a parent, and even more that I’m constitutionally incapable of knowing about being a mother.

Yet I humbly suggest that the basics of good parenting are not so hard to know, though they are hard to practice. Part of the therapy for her son—and for her, if she was willing—included learning about how his early experience and the way he was parented had affected him. The point was not to blame anyone, but to understand how they got here, including why it was so heartbreakingly hard for her to hear what her son was trying to tell her.

This is a long windup to the famed pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s ideas about mothering. But it’s good to remember that we all have an interest in what it means to be a good-enough parent. We were all shaped by parenting, so exploring it deepens our knowledge of ourselves. Even if we don’t become parents ourselves, there are moments in all our lives when we’re called on to play a parental role.

Fortunately, as Winnicott noted, the central ideas are clear enough. Indeed, he coined the term “good enough” to emphasize that his ideas about parenting were drawn from observing what good-enough parents typically know and do. The language of “good enough” indicates that parenting comes naturally, that there is no special knowledge or technique required, that the “ordinary, devoted mother” possesses everything needed to raise a healthy child.

Winnicott thought this needed emphasizing because he saw how “expert” opinions threatened to override the sound instincts of mothers. In 1969 he wrote a letter to the editor of Child Care News, in which he criticized “Behaviour Therapy”. In the letter he explains why he capitalized it: “I give it capitals to make it into a Thing that can be killed.” In his time, and and even more so in ours, parents are inundated with “expert” opinions about how to raise a child. He saw that an educated mother following the latest advice may do more harm than an “ordinary mother” who follows her heart’s sound instincts. In Winnicott’s view, fortunate are the mothers who haven’t read the latest news: that they shouldn’t pick up their babies when they’re crying; or that they should punish them if they’re not potty trained by two; or that they should guard their child against experiencing failure, etc. Like so much else in our culture, the ever-changing advice of the expert class militates against honoring the good-enough parent’s sound instincts. This will become obvious as we dig deeper into what good mothering involves.

Winnicott noted the importance of what he called “primary maternal preoccupation”, which occurs during the fetus and infant’s early phase of absolute dependence. He saw the role of the father or other caregiver as to protect the mother’s ability to be fully preoccupied with the child, “which she does simply through being devoted to her infant.” Contrast this devoted attention with a mother who doesn’t have a partner who can protect her precious preoccupation; or who struggles with mental illness; or whose attention is drawn away to other concerns during this critical period. Now add a culture that resists supporting extended maternity leave. Winnicott’s point is that, however it may happen, the failure to be fully preoccupied in this early phase exposes the infant to discomfort, fears, and anxieties they aren’t yet able to metabolize. The resulting insecurity can become a lifelong source of anxiety and distrust, as attachment science is showing.

As the child develops beyond these early weeks and months, the mother naturally becomes less preoccupied. Winnicott takes the mother’s primary virtue throughout to be holding. This begins with actual holding, but he intends the word expansively, to include things like encouraging a child to try out for the school play, or enforcing a regular bedtime, or prohibiting them from having an iPhone (and tolerating the ensuing hate). Because the mother is attuning to the changing needs of her child, her holding is “an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for her failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration.” To leave an infant alone to cry herself to sleep is not good holding; whereas to let a 12-year-old express anger and cry tears of frustration that they can’t have an iPhone is good holding. (I use the example of devices because the damaging effects on children’s mental health are obvious, yet here again our culture makes it hard for parents to hold their children in this way.) As the child matures, holding them well means letting them go. It means encouraging independence and autonomy, and enduring the lonely ache of coming home to an empty nest; or that comes from respecting an adult child’s request not to call or text so often. That was one of the things my client was trying to tell his mom that she didn’t want to hear. She couldn’t hold it.

I’m relieved I’m not a mother. It’s incredibly hard work to raise a human soul, even in the best circumstances, and ours are far from the best circumstances. It’s a relief to hear in the expression “good enough” that we needn’t be perfect. It’s good enough to love the child for who they are, and to enjoy supporting them becoming their true self. The good-enough parent is free (mostly!) of the need for the child to meet their needs, or those of society. So at least Winnicott hoped.

At our best, psychotherapists and other allies bear a kindred love for those we help. This love helps us get out of our own way and attune to what the other needs in order to grow. The philosophical love of wisdom has a similar character—of being more in love with getting to know the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, or think it should be.

In Winnicott's Words

Published on 11.27.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

A note to my readers

Last week was Thanksgiving here in the United States. I’m feeling thankful to you for giving some of your precious attention to these weekly notes. One of their main themes is that it’s vital to have good company in the work and play of one’s life. So, thank you for the company. I hope in its own way How We Help offers you some good company.

You can help these notes reach more people by sharing them with likeminded friends or colleagues. If there are notes you especially like, I hope you’ll “like” them, using the heart icon. (I’m told The AI feeds on likes.)

Image from Non-Compliance in Winnicott’s Words, by Alexander Newman

This week I offer a few longer quotations from Winnicott’s writings about parenting—that is, about how to raise a free, autonomous, creative human being. There’s no special principle of selection. These happened to catch my eye as I was reading; I hope they catch yours too.

Don’t let Winnicott’s simple direct prose fool you (as it once fooled me): He’s a deep thinker about parenting, and about the human condition. Winnicott writes with great humanity about the “immense contribution” that good-enough parents make to the world. His thinking influenced Alice Miller’s classic, Drama of the Gifted Child, a book that was important to me years ago, when I was first considering therapy. A main theme of that book is the importance of children being seen and taken seriously for who they are. This is precisely what good-enough parents do.

If you’re not familiar with Winnicott’s work, his book Home Is Where We Start From offers a good collection of essays and lectures on a range of themes. If you want to jump straight into the deep end, read Playing and Reality.

For an amusing preface, here’s Winnicott relating a definition of insanity that aligns with his relational perspective: “As a friend of mine (the late John Rickman) said, ‘insanity is not being able to find anyone to stand you.’” (Home Is Where We Start From)

More of Winnicott’s Words…

The life of a healthy individual is characterized by fears, conflicting feelings, doubts, frustrations, as much as by the positive features. The main thing is that the man or woman feels he or she is living his or her own life, taking responsibility for action or inactions, and able to take credit for successes and blame for failure. (Home Is Where We Start From)

I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.” (Winnicott On the Child)

In a complex way, development, especially at the beginning, depends on a good-enough environmental provision. A good-enough environment can be said to be that which facilitates the various individual inherited tendencies so that development takes place according to these inherited tendencies….a good-enough environment starts with a high degree of adaptation to individual infant needs. Usually the mother is able to provide this because of the special state she is in, which I have called primary maternal preoccupation….Adaptation decreases according to the baby’s growing need to experience reactions to frustration. In health the mother is able to delay her function of failing to adapt, till the baby has become able to react with anger rather than be traumatized by her failures. (Home Is Where We Start From)

Holding….gradually widens in scope to mean the whole of the adaptive care of the infant….Holding can be done well by someone who has no intellectual knowledge of what is going on in the individual; what is needed is a capacity to identify, to know what the baby is feeling like. In an environment that holds the baby well enough, the baby is able to make personal development according to the inherited tendencies.The result is a continuity of existence that becomes a sense of existing, a sense of self, and eventually results in autonomy. (Home Is Where We Start From)

If we take the situation in which she is a child playing while her mother is occupied with some activity such as sewing, then this is the good patterning in which growth is taking place. At any moment the child may make a gesture and the mother will transfer her interest from her sewing to the child. If the mother is preoccupied and does not at first notice the child’s need, the child has only to begin to cry and the mother is available. In the bad pattern, which is at the root of this patient’s illness, the child cried and the mother did not appear. In other words, the scream that she is looking for is the last scream just before hope was abandoned. Since then screaming has been of no use because it fails in its purpose. (Psychoanalytic Explorations)

For me, a good-enough mother and good-enough parents and a good-enough home do in fact give most babies and small children the experience of not having ever been significantly let down. In this way average children have the chance to build up a capacity to believe in themselves and the world—they build a structure on the accumulating of introjected reliability. They are blissfully unaware of their good fortune, and find it difficult to understand those of their companions who carry around with them for life experiences of unthinkable anxiety, and a deficit in the department of introjected reliability. (Psychoanalytic Explorations)

I am trying to draw attention to the immense contribution to the individual and to society that the ordinary good mother with her husband in support makes at the beginning, and which she does simply through being devoted to her infant. (Home Is Where We Start From)

Being Great Vs. Good Enough

Published on 11.13.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

The good-enough mother is one who makes active adaptation to the infant’s needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant’s growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration. – Winnicott

Everyone has a mother. Being a mother is simultaneously a most ordinary and extraordinary role. So, what’s involved in being a good mother, and a good parent generally? The question is important, for how we were parented has an outsize impact on who we become. In addition, as allies there’s a lot we can learn about being helpful from learning what goes into good parenting. Psychodynamic therapy, for example, often includes a “reparenting” process of one sort or other.

One of our best guides to the question is the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896-1971), and his powerful and influential idea of the “good enough mother”. Even if you’ve never heard of Winnicott, you probably recognize this phrase. Often he’s thought to be saying something like, ‘Look, bearing and raising children comes naturally to us as a species. There’s a lot of resilience in the process. Parents don’t need to be perfect because children are adaptable. It’s good enough to love them and keep them safe.’ To which the collective response is, ‘What a relief! We can be imperfect parents, and our kids will still turn out fine.’ This is true enough, as far as it goes, but if we stop here we misunderstand Winnicott’s view.

A brief diversion to a story about physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman will help show the misunderstanding. Feynman was teaching at Caltech and the students were a little in awe of him. One day at the board Feynman made a mistake in his calculations. A student pointed it out to him. If Feynman was embarrassed, he was also quick to laugh and thank the student for catching it. Then he noticed something: his mistake had broken the ice, so that the students were less awed, more relaxed and engaged. From then on, the story goes, when needed, Feynman might deliberately make a mistake early on in a course to help bring everyone together.

The moral of the story seems to be that Feynman—so clearly an example of a “great” physicist—sometimes needed to fake being merely “good enough” for the sake of bridging the gap between himself and his students. It reminds me of Aristotle’s humorous observation about friendship, that we wish good things for our friends—but only up to a point: We wouldn’t wish our friend to become a god, since then the gap between ourselves and them would be too great, and so there would be no common ground for the friendship. Similarly, by making a mistake Feynman humanizes himself, crosses the gap, and enters the “good enough” middle realm where most of us live.

Winnicott’s idea of “good-enough” is often taken to mean something similar, that the “good enough” parent stands in the middle range on a continuum ranging from bad to great parent, thus acting as a kind of metric. Bad parents need to aim higher, while great parents can relax a little, comforting themselves that, even when they’re less than perfect, their “failure of adaptation” ultimately serve the child’s best interest. The child learns a valuable life skill, “to tolerate the results of frustration.” Again, true enough, as far as it goes. But at its heart Winnicott’s “good enough” does not refer to a middle range between great and bad. So what does it mean?

Broadly speaking, “good enough” names a growth mindset. You can sees this in the quote at the top of this note (which is consistent with how Winnicott describes the good enough parent at other places in his writing). A growth mindset is, by definition, tolerant of mistakes and failures—they are “correct practice” for learning and growing, as we hope both children and parents are doing. As Winnicott describes it, good enough parents recognize this instinctively; they know how to respond helpfully to mistakes and failures. For this reason, it’s not a surprise that we tend to use “good enough” language at those times when we feel like we’re messing up, “Well, that was not my best effort, but still it was good enough.” We don’t think this way when we’re being an exemplary parent or therapist or…teacher.

Which brings us back to Feynman. Sure, his mistakes humanize him in the eyes of awestruck students, but what really brings them together—their true common ground—is being serious students of physics. Mistakes are part of the bargain whenever we’re learning—whether how to parent, or how to do physics. The fact that Feynman made mistakes doesn’t make him any less great a physicist. Likewise the fact that great parents sometimes screw things up and feel no better than “good enough” doesn’t make them any less great.

So Winnicott’s point is not that it’s okay to aim for the average or middle range; we’re not off the hook from striving to be great parents or allies generally! Of course there will be difficulties along the way. Winnicott reassures us of what the evidence shows, that occasional failures won’t ruin our children or our alliances. On the contrary, unfortunate as our failures may be, everyone will learn from them (one way or the other!). Again, this way of framing it helps cultivate a growth mindset toward our own difficulties, and those of others.

Having said this, we have yet to come to the heart of what Winnicott means with his idea of “good enough” parent. That’s for the next note. Stay tuned! And thanks for reading.

On Helping Others Metabolize Mistakes

Published on 11.6.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

[The beautiful soul] lives in dread of besmirching the splendor of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world…. - G.W.F Hegel

In the last couple notes I’ve reflected on how to think, and feel, about mistakes. In this note I consider how valuable the help of others can be. Specifically, I point out a few basic things we can do to help others metabolize mistakes and failures.

But first, let me observe a fact about helping relationships that is relevant here: much of the help we offer others we can also offer ourselves. This sounds promising for individualists prizing our independence. Yet, by now you generous readers who have been following these notes will recognize a familiar refrain: Some of what we need we can only get from others. Severely abused or neglected children are unlikely to flourish as adults, precisely because they didn’t get what they needed from othersduring critical neurobiologically mediated stages of development.

Something similar may be said of the higher reaches of philosophical and spiritual development. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel describes a “struggle for recognition” through which we become more fully ourselves by engaging with others—by putting ourselves at risk in the world. In the last note I described a patient whose fear of making mistakes had led her to avoid risky situations generally. In this she was like Hegel’s “beautiful soul”, who “flees from contact with the actual world” (and the struggle such contact inevitably brings) so as to avoid “besmirching their splendor”. The consequence is that, like abused children, they suffer from arrested development. To get an idea of the beautiful-soul type, think of the artistic genius who never realizes their potential because they won’t sully themselves with practical affairs; or think of the person whose moral conscience is too pure to bear the besmirching compromises required to be actually effective in the world.

My point is that it’s often valuable, and sometimes essential, to have help working through mistakes and failures—those besmirching experiences that the beautiful soul fears, but which are “correct practice” for learning and growing. Hegel's point is that engaging with others is the way out of our inner being into a fully actualized experience of our selves in the world. It is the way to wisdom. It is also the way to healing and learning from mistakes and failures.

Let’s move now from theory back to practice. If I had only one word to describe what we’re doing when we help others, I’d choose ‘attunement’. This includes the key skill we need here: deep whole-bodied listening. Nothing else we try to do—not all the brilliant methods and advice in the world—will help if we’re not able first, and last, to listen and take in where someone is coming from. On the contrary, if we don’t listen carefully, we’re likely to do more harm than good.

Attunement includes awareness, not only of what’s happening in the moment, but of the wider interpersonal field in which it’s happening: How are we relating to the person? How much trust is present? What have we learned over time helps them feel seen and heard? What triggers their defensiveness? And so on. For now, let’s assume we’re so fortunate as to possess this field awareness. What comes next?

Well, in order to listen, the other must speak. Unfortunately, when it comes to mistakes and failures, many of us prefer to avoid talking about them, especially in the open vulnerable way therapy encourages. Actually, we’d prefer never to have our shortcomings seen at all! Part of what drives the beautiful soul’s retreat from the actual world is precisely this wish to escape being seen as an actual, imperfect human being who needs the help (damnit!) of imperfect others.

With this in mind, the basic practice is to hold space in an empathetic non-judgmental way; this enables the person to lower their defenses and speak more freely. We do this by attuning and adapting to where the other person is coming from, emotionally and cognitively. If someone is too upset or flooded with feeling, we use our body language, breathing, and speech to encourage a calming co-regulation that helps them think and speak feelingly. Contrariwise, if a person reacts to mistakes by feeling numb or empty, we help excite curiosity and engagement so that they can speak more vitally and feelingly of their experience.

A spirit of curiosity helps counter resistance at the cognitive level. In the last note, I showed how my curiosity invited the patient to explore a painful experience. She had started the session by saying that her “final judgement” about herself was that she’s “just stupid”. This summary judgment sparked my curiosity. I told her we could circle back and reality-test just how (not) true that was. But first I was curious what she felt as she shared that judgment. She replied, “I’m ashamed and angry with myself”. She told me all this, yet she hadn’t told me what terrible thing she’d done to invite this heap of scorn. What she’d done was ruin a favorite pair of jeans because she forgot to check the pockets before washing them. I looked at her expressively, as if to say, ‘Uh, so that’s it?’

This is often how it goes, isn’t it! Many of us judge and find ourselves guilty and shameful before we have sorted out the merits of the case. Indeed, we may never get around to sorting things out precisely because we’re trying to avoid any additional “besmirching’. Thus our first habitual reactions, and unexamined stories, often carry the day. But if we calm down and get curious, we can learn and grow by understanding and metabolizing what happened—including, in my patient’s case, why she had such a disproportionate reaction to a low-stakes mistake.

All of this is easier when we have a good, warm, trustworthy companion to accompany us as we make contact with the actual world, and our imperfect selves. Indeed, being with others in our difficulties is making contact with the world. A good ally can help us be more gentle (and firm) with ourselves; help us know our feelings and feel our thoughts; help us unpack and reality-test our stories; and, not least, their tender recognition helps us feel more connected and less alone.

How to Feel (about) Mistakes

Published on 10.30.23 at garyborjesson.substack.com

A patient told me that as far back as she could remember, her mom had a “strong reaction” to her mistakes.1 If she dropped something, her mom would say, derisively, “What a klutz!” If she forgot or overlooked something, her mom would say, “What were you thinking? Were you even thinking?” As she grew up, this woman made a virtue of avoiding mistakes because she hated how they made her feel.

In this note I offer a way of thinking feelingly about mistakes. My approach starts from the fact, explored in the last note, that mistakes play an essential part in learning and thus in becoming our best selves. So trying to avoid them at all costs is just too costly. My patient’s story offers a way to work through the difficult feelings, and underscores why it’s work worth doing.

The first thing to do when things go wrong is feel our feelings. In the case of mistakes it’s likely the feeling will be negative, and likely we’ll want to avoid feeling it fully! Thus it’s not uncommon to go straight from the feeling to a story and a judgment. In my patient’s case, she started the session telling me about a “stupid” and “unnecessary” mistake she’d made over the weekend. I said we could get to the judgments, but first I was curious to hear what she was feeling. She said she felt ashamed and angry with herself. I asked her to tell me where in her body she felt it. She said her chest was tight, her stomach was upset, and she felt a burning sensation behind her eyes.

The next step, as we’re feeling our feelings, is to follow them. Staying with feelings—rather than defending against them—can help us find their true source. While shame, anger, fear, sadness and guilt are all negative feelings, they lead in very different directions. So I asked her to stay tuned to how she felt as she told me more about why she was so angry and ashamed. She said she had left a pen in the pocket of her jeans, thrown them into the wash, and now they were ruined.

When we follow our feelings, we’re sometimes surprised to notice they change—often in the direction of becoming more true and just. (This is not to say they always become more positive!) My patient noticed feeling better as she told me about what happened, and in particular as she saw how disproportionate her reaction had been. The half-conscious shameful story she’d been telling herself sounded less convincing when she said it aloud and heard me reflect it back.

I wondered aloud if she knew why she’d made such a big deal of something so relatively small. Whence the reflexive self-hatred and shame? The question made her curious. “I don’t know, maybe I’m just wired to overreact.” A great value of therapy is to get help challenging our default stories. In this spirit, I asked if that internal voice accusing her of being stupid and shameful was familiar. Did anyone in her life talk this way? She winced, ‘My mom. She still talks to me this way, still makes me feel like shit about the smallest mistakes.’ I smiled and said, “It sounds like these aren’t your true feelings at all; it sounds like you’re hearing your mother’s voice and mistaking it for your own. Fortunately, as a competent 42-year-old woman you have the right to thank your mom for her (unsolicited) help, remind her you’ve got your own voice to guide you, and show her the door.” (I know, if only it were as easy to do as to say.)

In sum, she started by feeling her feelings, her self-anger and shame, and the bodily sensations associated with them. Because they felt so substantial, she identified with them, feeling she was a shameful person. But as she followed them, her feelings started changing. She felt them “down-sizing”, as she put it, from catastrophic shame to a much more rational (and manageable) regret. Her feelings changed again as she recognized the connection with her mom, from being angry with herself to being angry with her mom. This more justly directed anger motivated her (as healthy anger often does) to set some boundaries with her mom, internally and externally. To experience in this way how feelings change helps us stop identifying with them, and treat them as the signals they are.

Thinking feelingly about mistakes and other failures usually leads us to be more gentle and understanding with ourselves. This in turn makes us more able to learn and grow from them. Indeed, the final part of her story beautifully underscores the connection between mistakes and growth. Our conversation in that session and several that followed had exposed a deep frustration in her life. Because she was so self-critical in the face of mistakes, she’d become overly risk-averse. (Who wants to be flooded with self-hatred and shame every time they make a mistake?) As a result, her world had become small and lonely as she carefully avoided situations—in particular dating—where she feared “making a huge mistake”.

But now she was uncovering the reasons why she was so habitually fearful, and—just as importantly—she was discovering by direct experience that she could live through her difficult feelings, learn from them, and metabolize them. She could tolerate making riskier choices along the way, since she both knew and felt their connection to a more expansive, less lonely life.

Thanks for reading How We Help ! Subscribe at garyborjesson.substack.com for free to receive new posts each week.

1. Here, as in all these notes, I have changed details so that individuals cannot be identified from the descriptions.

How to Think About Mistakes

Published on 10.16.2023 at garyborjesson.substack.com

Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it’s a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from. — Al Franken

When I first joined the faculty at St. John’s College, a senior colleague asked me what classes I was teaching. After I told him, he gave me a sly smile and some great advice: “It’s best if you avoid teaching those classes for the first time.” “So true, Sam!” I laughed. “Any idea how I do that?”

I hate making mistakes, especially when it involves others. Either I’m embarrassed to have others see me messing up, or I’m upset because the mistake means I’ve failed them—whether as a teacher, a therapist, a friend, or writer. In this note I walk through a way of thinking about mistakes that makes them easier to bear. Many patients (including the patient in me) find this perspective helpful, not least because it’s true.

What made Sam’s joke so funny is that it points to our impossible situation. On the one hand, mistakes can be irritating, painful, humiliating, costly, dangerous, harmful, even fatal to us. (In which case, as Franken sagely observed, at least others can learn from it!) No wonder we’re wired to fear mistakes, and to feel bad when we make them. On the other hand, mistakes are inevitable. To avoid them we must also avoid self-awareness, learning, and growth; and few of us are willing to make that trade. So, putting these two hands together, we grasp a fact of life: We’re going to teach that class for the first time, we’re going to make mistakes, and it’s going to pain us.

The question then is, how best to think about mistakes. To get a perspective that helps minimize their negative impact, let me start with an example of a mistake from…earlier today. (I don’t know about you, but I never have to look far.) Here’s the scene: I’m learning a new song on the guitar, and I keep screwing up a chord change. After the third or fourth miss, my gut starts to churn, and I notice a familiar story popping up. It’s inspired by my limbic system, with Shame in a leading role. Here’s an excerpt from the script: ‘This is not hard. What is wrong with you? Anyone else would have it down by now. I don’t know why you even try. What a loser.’

It’s understandable, and even helpful, that making a mistake should irritate me a little. (It’s well-established that pain teaches us faster than pleasure.) But notice my story got existential fast: from messing up a chord change to being a loser in less than a minute. Like many such stories, the strong negative charge to mine comes from a suppressed, often unconscious premise: that all mistakes are avoidable. Consciously, of course, most of us recognize that the cliché is true: mistakes are part of life. Nevertheless we often react to mistakes (our own and those of others) as if they were always somehow avoidable. This is because we generalize from the fact (and it usually is a fact) that this mistake here was avoidable to the conclusion that all such mistakes are avoidable. Like many logical fallacies, this one owes to our automatic instinctual thinking, which often defaults to all-or-nothing claims.1

By making a conscious effort to engage our rational minds, we can correct the facts and the story, and reduce our suffering. We can start by noticing that since mistakes inevitably will be made, they must be made somewhere, and here is as likely a place as anywhere else. (The conscious mind knows better than to imagine that because we avoided a mistake that time, we can avoid making it every time.) Thus when I’m practicing with awareness, the script goes more like ‘Ah, damn! Missed it. Hate that! But this is the first song where I’ve come across this chord change. It’ll take some practice but I’ll get it down.’

Thus we can use our good minds to think and feel differently about mistakes. They’re more than a necessary evil, they’re teachers. We can learn to value them as “correct action” when we see the essential part they play in all learning. As Moshe Feldenkraisexplains in The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion:

making mistakes is essential to satisfactory learning. During an apprenticeship, mistakes are correct action; they are part of the business. One cannot become a master of any field of human endeavor without the most important item of learning how to do, which is the personal experience of what not to do.

So long as we are learning and growing—and helping others do the same—mistakes are correct action and part of the business. In this light, calling our efforts “good enough” acknowledges our true situation.

1. See Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow for more on the cognitive biases associated with automatic “system 1” thinking.

Allies and Alliances

Published on 10.9.2023 at garyborjesson.substack.com

Meno: Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue is taught? Or is it not taught but acquired by practice? Or is it neither acquired by practice nor learnt, but present in humans by nature?

Socrates: …. So far am I from knowing whether it’s taught, I don’t even know what it is at all.

— Plato’s Meno

One of the things I have always loved about philosophy is how it makes familiar things strange again. Take virtue, the definition of which is apparently so obvious that Meno doesn’t think to ask about it. Well, count on Socrates to make it strange and curious again. I hope this note begins to do the same for our thinking about allies and alliances. Let’s start philosophically, by locating our subject in the big picture.

In the first of these notes about How We Help, I wrote that “for philosophical and psychological reasons” I wanted to start not with who we are when our aim is to be helpful, but with where we are. Where we are is in the interpersonal field. Moreover, we’ve all have been unceremoniously thrown there—thrown without our consent into a solar system and ecological system, a genotype and phenotype, a culture and time, a community and family.

To recognize these circumstances feelingly is to know a lot about who we are. Not least, we know we need others to survive and flourish. Given our ontological interdependence, it’s to our benefit (and to the benefit of all beings, as Buddhism reminds us) to make good connections. This brings us to our subject, the ally—or who we are when we’re being helpful.

The name ally is used in many different ways. That’s why I want to follow Socrates’s lead and begin our exploration by making sure we know what we’re talking about, before we start talking about it! Here I offer a broad definition of the ally. In notes to come we will refine and deepen our thinking about what’s involved in being an ally.

Carl Jung identifies the ally or caregiver as a central human archetype whose unifying principle is the mindset of service. This resonates with our word “therapy”, from the Greek therapeia, which means to care for, tend to, minister to, counsel—to be of service.

So an ally is a person whose mindset is one of helping, and an alliance is the relationship through which this help is offered. This help may take many forms. You may be a veterinarian consulting with a long-term client deciding the fate of their beloved dog; a lawyer helping your client make the best case for herself in the face of an awful divorce; a mentor or teacher helping someone learn to the best of their ability; a physician or nurse caring for your patient. The list goes on.

To be an ally, it’s not enough to be in these roles, since many can play these parts while conspicuously lacking the mindset of service. For example, a surgeon who does technically competent work in the service of their status or wealth is not an ally to their patient, except (as we say in philosophy) by accident. For the ally, being of service is no accident, but belongs to our essence. (To help make this distinction clear, consider how being “black” or “white” or “tall” or “short” are accidents, not of the essence of being human.)

The ally is also neither saint nor slave, which is to say that having a mindset of service does not mean we are selfless. This needs saying because the helping professions attract many people who imagine that service means putting others first. I’ll have more to say about why this is fundamentally mistaken. Here it’s enough to note that being helpful is a collaborative achievement, since in an interdependent world you cannot neglect yourself without neglecting others.

A big takeaway here is that we become better allies by becoming better friends to ourselves, and we become better friends to ourselves by becoming better allies to others. Among others, the German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) described this as a dialectical to-and-fro, out to others and back to self again. Through this dance of connection we live and flourish.

There is a further quality that’s of the essence of the alliances we’re exploring in these notes: The relationship itself is integral to the help offered. This is obvious in the case of psychotherapy, where research shows that the quality of the relationship is the best predictor of how effective treatment is. But the same is true, more or less, for many professions. In the examples above, the quality of a veterinarian or nurse or lawyer or mentor’s way of relating plays an essential part in how effective they are. You can be knowledgeable and technically competent, but if you don’t know how to connect you won’t be much of an ally.

Not that the quality of the relationship always matters much. My plumber excels at his work, and I’m the grateful beneficiary. But his art serves the plumbing, not me, so he is only accidentally an ally. But the more central human interaction becomes to our work, the more the relationship matters.