Review by Janet Keyes

All of us have experienced some sort of trauma, Epstein, psychiatrist and long time Buddhist practitioner, assures us; it is not a mistake, a failure or a weakness; it is an indivisible part of human existence, sparing no one.  It is the first Noble Truth: there is Dukkha, unsatisfactoriness, pain, suffering. Both Buddhism and psychology seem to offer escape from suffering, from trauma.  In psychology there is the belief that if we can find the cause of our trauma, we can move beyond our problems and have the happy life we deserve. In Buddhism, there is a promise to be able to quiet the mind, to rise above Dukkha into the bliss of nirvana. In fact, we can’t escape or rise above Dukkha; what we can do is learn from it and learn to relate to it differently.

Throughout the book, Epstein explores the life of the Buddha to illustrate our dilemma as humans.  Though Prince Siddhartha had rank, wealth, privilege, and love showered on him by his large family, he was also deliberately sheltered from all the pain and suffering of life.  As the story goes, finally at around age 30, he made his way out of the palace grounds and stumbled upon an old person, a sick person, a dead body, and a wandering monk.  Something was dreadfully wrong here.  His realization that there was a dark underbelly of existence that he’d been assiduously protected from, caused him to leave his wife and infant child and go in search of something more lasting and permanent than sense pleasures and a life of ease. 

Looking more deeply into the life of the Buddha, Epstein suggests that there was a hidden trauma at the heart of the Buddha’s own life: the death of his mother seven days after his birth.  The deep loss of his primary relational home stayed with the Buddha his whole life and was part of what inspired and informed his journey to enlightenment. 

This is a book about relational or developmental trauma, that is, “the emotional pain that cannot find a relational home in which it can be held.”*  A relational home is an attachment in the first crucial years of life with a “good-enough” parent, in which an infant is held with love and care, where its primitive and inchoate feelings can be mirrored and assuaged with kindness and intuitive nurturance. When such a relational home is absent, the trauma that ensues marks the person for life. 

Epstein holds that the path out of fear and dissociation into which trauma throws us, depends on our ability to use reflective awareness to study the nature of our everyday experience.  Dissociation is a state that arises from trauma; it is compartmentalization, a feeling of stuck-ness, the frozen response in the fight or flight syndrome. Dissociation seems to protect us. 

Rather than pathology, Epstein believes that dissociation is a lack of attunement and responsiveness within the original child/parent relationship, and later in the relationship to one’s self. 

Epstein believes that meditation, which the Buddha taught, resurrects the holding environment of a good-enough parent.  Mindfulness of mind—the ability of the mind to know itself knowing—brings fear, loss, and suffering into awareness. Such awareness is needed for any spiritual and psychological growth. Through meditation we can come into relation with our own receptivity, curiosity, and mental plasticity (the ability to see multiple perspectives), which then brings the entire range of thought, feelings and sensations into awareness. Meditation itself is the holding environment and allows us a different relationship to our trauma. Meditation creates a container, like a good-enough parent, giving form and name to our experience, and allows us to see our internal patterns.  The experience of reflective self-awareness gives us the choice and the means to be with difficult feelings.

Through meditation, Epstein argues that we are able to create what he calls Implicit Relational Knowing: training our mind toward the love, patience, sacrifice, awareness, engagement, care and tenderness of the good-enough parent.  Through meditation, we can create this relational home which can hold our suffering and ultimately, Epstein believes, can heal the relational trauma we all carry.  When we see we aren’t separate or different from others, we are then able to relate to ourselves and our experience differently. 

Though this view is inspiring, it feels to me that Epstein is setting up another ideal.  By assuring us that we can create an internal relational home, like a good-enough parent, where we can nurture ourselves is akin to the belief that we can escape Dukkha by transcendence. But isn’t it more like daily practice, where each day we sit down to be with ourselves?  Some days we see what this moment asks of us, and other days we are left stuck, holding the pain and dis-ease of our lives. Such an internal home seems to me to be much more than what a good-enough parent is capable of.  

Reflective meditation may be a means to create a different, more communal relational home. It does so, first, through emphasizing the development of our own self-awareness through actively reflecting on our meditative experience, and secondly, through the process of sharing our internal meditative experience with others. Through being held in our own reflection, and then being heard by a teacher and a group of meditators, an environment develops in which we are willing to tolerate and explore our difficult feelings. Even a good-enough parent may not be enough. Doesn’t it take a village?

*(Robert Stolorow, Trauma and Human Existence)

Reviewed by Janet Keyes, 11 May 2020