When I adopted my then five-year-old cat, I awoke in the night, enchanted to find her asleep on my chest.
Her choice of me, her presence on my heart, my consciousness of her with every breath of my own, eased my soul.
Recently my husband’s cat, with whom I have co-habitated one year and is technically not allowed on furniture, has sought my chest during afternoon naps. A heavier, wigglier cat than my own, she nonetheless creates in me that same awed sense of being comforted.
Over and over again, I have observed in troubled people the inability to self-soothe.
Harville Hendrix, author of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples
, posits that, in the womb, each of us receives what we need even before we’re aware of desire for it. We’re fed before we’re hungry, we sleep before we’re tired.
Once born, we must immediately address delayed gratification. Even if we’re blanketed in seconds, put to the breast in moments, we still feel some kind of terrifying awareness that what needs to be present is not.
Hendrix theorizes that separation from the womb might be the original trauma of human life from which we never fully recover, for which we seek reconnection our entire lives.
Other theorists argue (the universal phrase for “I don’t remember where I read it”) that this fundamental human truth begins to be addressed when infants learn in the arms of attentive mothers how to handle life’s hardships.
When an infant is hungry, tired, uncomfortable, in pain, or afraid, in the gap between those distressed feelings and relief, the mother soothes the baby. Whether through holding, rocking, speaking, singing, playing, or some combination thereof, the mother comforts the baby during its distress.
From the mother soothing the baby, the baby learns that it can be soothed, that it can tolerate the gap between distress and relief.
Just as we first have our shoes tied by others, then learn how to do it ourselves, from others we, too, learn the skill of self-soothing.
If there’s no mother, if there’s a neglectful, detached, emotionally unavailable, unskilled or impaired mother, if there’s an intrusive or abusive mother, if there’s repeated neglect or trauma in a young life, if there’s some cosmic mismatch between what the infant needs and what the mother can provide--if what should happen doesn’t, or what shouldn’t happen does--the infant is not soothed and does not learn to self-soothe.
In adulthood, when problems beyond hunger or fatigue arise--handling the expectations of others in school, at work, and in society, finding a job and paying bills, coping with illness and death, relationships at home and work--what’s a non-self-soother to do?
What does one do with an infant’s instinct that these feelings are so dire that, if not relieved, might truly lead to death?
Anything that blunts, extinguishes, dulls, or obliterates this sense of imminent demise.
Over-work, over-eat, under-eat, over-exercise, have sex, shop, drink, use drugs, gamble, have serial relationships, have dramatic relationships, anything that provokes high enough feelings to counter the heights of distress.
These paths are fraught with peril. Yet a non-self-soother’s choice of them makes perfect sense. They look like ways to survive.
Some thoughts, some feelings, some jagged mix of the two, seem beyond bearing.
At the times I can self-soothe, it feels like a cat on the chest, a presence on the heart.
by David Guterson: