Housing a Soul, Part IV: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

The Role of Environment & Timing

The age-old question about child development is: if 2 children are raised under the same roof, by the same people, following the same rules, how do the 2 children come out so different?

Answer: variables, variables, variables. 

And though I’m sure there are many more, here, I’d like to highlight just three.  These include: differences in the environment, differences in the cues of each child, and differences in the caregiver.

To illustrate how differences in the environment impact the construction of ego, I’d like to share a story about my childhood pets.  Three cats to be exact: Fluffernutter, Morris and Maxine.

When I was a child I had a cat named Fluffernutter.  She was a gorgeous long-haired calico who loved to snuggle and love on both people and other cats.  She looked a little like this cat:

Fluffernutter had two litters of kittens. 

The first litter was born in our family room in a lovely nest of blankets in a medium size cardboard box where the new little family could spend their first weeks together undisturbed.  From this litter of kittens, Fluffernutter had her son Morris. 

Morris was skinny and orange, and was actually the runt of the litter. He had all kinds of difficulty learning to nurse from his mother and trouble successfully competing with his siblings for his mom’s attention.  So my older sister ended up having to bottle feed Morris to keep him well-nourished.

Not long later, Fluffernutter was pregnant again before we were able to get her spade. So, though not planned, we again set up another nest for the second-time mom in our family room to create a supportive and safe environment for the soon-to-arrive kittens. 

Unfortunately though, Fluffernutter had her second litter of kittens outside in our chicken coop, and we did not know the new litter was out there for a whole week.

Maxine was one of the kittens who was born in the chicken coop.  She was not the runt of the litter.  She was healthy with long pitch-black hair, and in fact quite resourceful and energetic.

Of Fluffernutter’s kittens, Morris and Maxine were the 2 we kept from each litter, and these 2 siblings couldn’t have ended up being any more different in character.  Though both cats had the same mom (who was a very doting mama to all her kittens), who grew up in the same house with the same family, by all the same rules.

Morris became very similar to his mother in personality. He was quite snuggly, fat, slow-moving, kind of lazy with frequent naps throughout the day often on someone’s lap, bed or pillow.

Maxine on the other hand, developed into a very nervous scaredy-cat.  We never quite knew where she was in the house because she was always hiding under a bed somewhere and she never liked to be held by anyone.

I use this very light example of my pets to demonstrate the potential role early environment can play in that critical time of ego development which could lead one child to be very different from her sibling. 

In the human world, this might look like a caregiver who is doing her very best to protect and nourish a new soul, but the external circumstances of being poor in a ramshackle house might make it very difficult. 

A few year later though, after a new brother or sister has come along, the family might have moved into a working class neighborhood because the caregiver got a higher paying job, though already these 2 very different environments might have been just enough to impact the construction of ego development around each sibling’s soul. 

I am sure it played a role for my maternal grandmother and her sister.

My grandmother, who’s name I borrowed as pseudonym for this blog, graduated high school just one year before the financial United States Stock Market Crash of 1929.  Her younger sister graduated exactly one year after. 

Need I say more?

At a critical time of ego development, late adolescence, my great aunt’s environment was financially devastated from an event that could not have been prevented by her caregivers.

How could such an environmental variable not impact my great-aunt’s sense of safety and security in her own home? How could she not feel robbed? 

But my grandmother, on the other hand, seemed remarkably untouched by it developmentally. 

As the oldest of 4 children, in a family that valued higher education for all of their children but after The Crash of ’29 could now only afford it for one, my grandmother was sent to college at one of the great mid-west schools that had only recently integrated women.  My great-aunt was kept at home until she married.

Two souls, only two years apart, who grew up in the very same house, with the very same caregivers, but who went on to lead quite different lives.

Another factor that can affect the differences among siblings in the creation of a solidified house of ego is the actual cues each child soul offers to his or her caregiver.  For this illustration I’ll use my sister and I. 

If we think of cues as those things we say and do to signal what we need from another, my older sister was a bold, direct communicator. She was verbal, outgoing and expressive. In fact, I would say it would have been damn near impossible for even the most self-focused of caregivers to have missed my sister’s cues for what her needs were to develop a supportive ego to house her soul. 

Me on the other hand…I was harder to read for sure. 

As a child I was mostly quiet and reserved, preferring to fly under the radar or behind the scenes. While my sister might have put herself center stage, I was probably not even in the auditorium, or if I was, I was acting as usher to help people find comfortable seats. 

It most definitely would have required an astutely observant and inquisitive caregiver to have picked up my cues. 

For this reason, it makes total sense that a seemingly small difference such as the intensity and frequency of direct and indirect communication from child to caregiver would leave 2 siblings living in the same house, with the same caregivers, with a potential sharp contrast in how their houses were constructed, or not, to the expressed needs of each soul.

The last variable to consider in the context of ego development in siblings is changes in the life stage of the caregiver. 

I have a great friend who was born to a teenage mom- she only 15 years-old in fact. My friend’s mom later went on to have another child, my friend’s younger brother, when she was well into her 20’s.  As one would expect, my friend and her brother had a very different experience in their ego development.

And it makes absolute sense.  For most of us, the amount of inner resources we would have to construct a nourishing and protective house of ego in our teens would naturally be far less than in our twenties.  Or thirties…

I myself had my son when I was 31 years-old and my daughter when I was 36.  I like to think in those 5 years I changed in a lot of ways, hopefully positive, that inherently would make me a different caregiver to my daughter than I was to my son. 

It’s not that I was a “bad” caregiver to my son in any way, I wasn’t. 

I think of it more like the difference between a 2009 car make and model and a 2013.  If you can afford it, you want the 2013 model. 

In the 2013 model presumably the little tweaks and adjustments and recalls have already happened, so you can feel more confident in the newer and improved version of the same car that was already  pretty good to begin with.

But what if that is not the case? What happens when the ideal and the good enough do not take place?  For the individual child or the siblings?

More on the way…

Housing a Soul, Part III: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Renovating My Own House

So when I became a parent 7 years ago no one told me about the de facto self-examination that would emerge in the unfolding process of motherhood.  (Somebody really should have!)

On the other hand, one could also argue that the process of self-examination has helped me gain greater awareness as a parent to be more mindful of its various tasks (and minefields) including the spiritual development of each of my children.

When I think about the role of ego in the nourishment and protection of the soul, I’m reminded, to be candid, that 20^th century psychiatrist D.W. Winnicott’s famous phrase “good enough” is what I had.

This is not said with disdain or lack of gratitude.  I actually feel enormous relief (as an adult child, as a parent, and as a psychotherapist) that good enough in most cases will be sufficient.  It helps remind me of miraculous human capacities like resilience, neuroplasticity and one of my personal favorites: catching a second wind.  And because in my early life a solid foundation was constructed for a healthy ego development, I am extraordinarily grateful, because it kept my child soul safe and protected.

But later, as it became apparent my own caregivers, or construction workers, had to shift their attention to their own unfinished houses to attend to their own transitions to mid-life, my house was left incomplete, leaving me exposed and at times, vulnerable.  

In my case, the construction workers left the job site half done.  

What’s more, I was not aware of this for some time, and rather than picking up my own hammer to work on my own house of ego, instead, I began to work on the fragmented areas of my caregivers’ houses.  Not realizing at the time that the roles had flipped, I began to work on shoring up the very foundation of one parent’s house and became the home décor, Nate Berkus expert for the other parent’s house to build up their real estate value of ego, while unknowingly neglecting my own.

There did come a point though in my early 30’s when I decided it was imperative that I turn my attention back toward myself to work on my own house of ego again.  This decision was born of my new role as a parent.

For you parents out there, this is probably not surprisingly to you.  Sure, it meant finding a new team of carpenters to help me. But this time, I myself was head foreman, and it didn’t even feel like a choice honestly.  I knew I could no longer work on my caregivers’ houses anymore, which regrettably left them somewhat confused and exposed for a brief time. 

This process of my own home renovation ended up being far more comprehensive than initially thought (as most home projects are), and it included several spiritual milestones like: a pilgrimage, a ceremony officiated by a reverend, a radical decision to speak honestly rather than politely (even if it meant conflict with people I love).

This chapter in my spiritual life ended with me fully knowing and believing, for the first time in my life, that I am actually a child of god, not my parents.

Now, I love my house.  I still tweak this and adjust that, but I feel like the major renovations are complete.

This makes me feel more available for working on my children’s houses to help them develop an ego structure that will help them nourish and protect their own souls until the time may come, maybe in this lifetime, when they feel ready and able to let all of the scaffolding come down- to become real.

This blog entry is the 3^rd in a 6 Part Series.

To be continued…

Housing a Soul Part II: The Spiritual Task of Parenting

Building the House

Parenting has many tasks, but one primary spiritual task is to nourish and protect the soul of the child.

I think of this parenting task as analogous to carpenters on a construction site who are charged with building a house where the head architect is, of course, god, and the house is a metaphor for the child’s psychological ego that is to be built around the child’ soul.  The intention of this house is to protect the soul until it knows how to navigate the earth without a shell.

I think this process of constructing a strong and stable house or ego begins as early naming the child.  Ask a parent what process they went through to assign a name to their infant, and you will get a little window into how that caregiver is beginning to construct the house of ego.

But aside from the ritual process of naming, when the soul first arrives in the world as an infant, it predominantly lives within the house or ego of his or her caregivers.  Referring back to my earlier training in psychodynamic theory, from an Object Relations Theory perspective, this would be the symbiotic stage of Separation Individuation.

For some, this means a warm, clean, safe, and stable house.

For others though, it means moving into a house with a leaky roof, a broken window and half-finished renovations- after all, we are all acutely aware that this earthly world is by no means created equal.  

There are child souls who grow up in the holding environment, another favorite term of mine by the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, of caregivers with ego structures that never quite got solidified themselves. And there are some child souls who grow up virtually homeless because their caregiver had little to no sense of their own self, or ego, to possibly be able to loan it or share it with another. It's not that they didn't want to let the child soul move in to their house, they just had no house to move in to. There was nothing to share.

Those select souls can sometimes feel like feral cats. A soul born and raised out in the elements that creates a quite skittish or even aggressive ego structure. As a metaphoric home, I imagine this ego structure as a shantytown hut or shack, like in India or Brazil, where orphan kids may be raising themselves; where the door is a piece of metal stolen from a junkyard and a bed is a sack found in the market.

But what comes next? After the child soul has lived within the construct of their caregivers’ house or ego, they begin to move into their own house that is still on the caregivers’ property. Ideally, while the child soul was held in the safety and stability of his or her caregivers’ home, the caregivers we constructing a specially designed kid house that was completely unique to that emerging understanding of who this child soul appeared to be.

Each day the caregivers would swing that hammer and try to read the blueprints God the architect had sent for this totally original soul. The caregiver was listening for each time the child soul said “I prefer this color. I'd like to read this book.” And the caregiver was also teaching the child soul how to live in his or her own unique house for when the time came. For example, the caregiver modeled how to handle grief and heartache as well as how to get up and go to work or school when he or she didn’t want to.

I think of the ideal ego or house construction for this child soul as similar to a children's book I loved as a child and now read to my son. It is called Andrew Henry's Meadow.

In the book there is a boy named Andrew Henry who loves to build and invent things. But he doesn't feel he has the space to do it in his house with his parents and 4 other siblings. What's more, he also doesn't feel his family seems to appreciate or enjoy his talent for building or for the inventions that he dreams up. So the boy decides to leave home and build his own house in a meadow; a house that is the perfect space in terms of size, shape and design for a budding inventor. 

But Andrew Henry has barely finished his own house before another child shows up in the meadow. This child, a girl named Alice, asks Andrew Henry to build her a house too, but requests that her’s be the perfect size, shape and design for all of her birds and birdhouses which are her unique passion. And so he does.

Andrew Henry builds his friend Alice a house that is in fact the literal shape of a birdhouse, up in a tree, where Alice can be completely “at home” with herself.

Before long, the meadow is filled with children who are now living in little homes that are completely unique and special to their individual personalities. Each child soul now has an ego structure in place that is validating and reflective of the soul that resides within. 

I have to tell you, I love this story... 

In particular because the story implies that each child has an ability to intuit what their soul is drawn to, even before it is fully fleshed out and articulated in adulthood. 

Because we know, for some, this intuition of true self will eventually make it necessary for some adult souls go on to change aspects of themselves like their names, or in some cases, their genders.  These souls have determined and accepted that their houses are in need of radical renovations.  Their caregiver had constructed a condominium, but their soul needed a yurt.  Sometimes it is because the caregivers were not paying close enough attention to the cues from the child soul as to what kind of enclosure would be most fitting for that unique soul.

In interviews, Paulo Coelho, author of the now classic The Alchemist, tells the story of his parents trying to cram him in to the house of lawyer when he clearly showed no signs that his house was built of the law. This might be similar to a parent who keeps insisting that her daughter wear dresses and Mary Janes when the daughter is clearly more at home in shorts and sneakers.

In those cases, the caregiver is not actually building a new house for this one precious jewel that Fr. Rohr wrote about in Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self. No, they are either: A. Building additions on their own houses.  Or B. Building houses for themselves for the first time or finalizing the unfinished parts of their own houses meanwhile saying, and maybe even believing, it was for the child. 

Arguably, another good example of this invalidating construction of ego could come from the world of literature in the form of Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

You remember Mrs. Bennett, right? She is the novel’s memorable nineteenth century English mother who has taken on the task of finding suitable husbands for all of her 5 daughters.  But, rather than considering the needs, wants and cues for each of her very different and unique daughters, including the main character Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennett tries to just squeeze each daughter into whatever marriage works best for the mother in terms of her own financial security and reputation.

And of course, though it is beyond the scope of this piece, the external shaping of ego goes far beyond the caregivers.

Our ego houses do not live in vacuums, and therefore environmental influences like neighborhood, culture and religion, and the societal isms like racism, sexism, heterosexism, anti-Semitisms, able-ism, among others also influence the nourishment and protection of the child’s soul.

Whereby, for example, a young African American girl might put a bath towel on her head to pretend she has long hair because she has absorbed and internalized the racism of the larger society that values long, straight hair; thereby possibly skewing the foundation of her very own house.

Other times though, we as caregivers were watching for those cues but just, for whatever reason, missed them. 

Then, it is not until the child soul turns teenage, and then young adult, that they let us know all the mistakes we made in the construction of their house of ego. “You put the door here, it really should have gone there. You made my bedroom a square, how could you not know I'm a circle?” 

Yes, mistakes will be made. Renovations will be necessary. Repairs in the form of apologies or maybe family therapy might be called for. But all of that is okay. All of that is, as D.W. Winnicott famously said, good enough.  And in most cases, good enough is good enough.

This blog entry is the 2^nd in a 6 Part Series.

Stayed tuned for more...

Housing a Soul: The Spiritual Task of Parenting, Part I

Protecting the Jewel

Lately, I’ve been thinking about my role as a parent, or caregiver, to my 6 year-old son and 2 year-old daughter in a more meaningful way.  But when I stop to actually think about the task of parenting, I am both awestruck and scared to death at what’s at stake.  I think most parents feel the same way.

Tara Brach, Psychologist, author and Buddhist teacher, speaks in her book True Refuge about the importance of early parenting. 

     "Even after we've left the refuge of the womb, our development depends on a profoundly intimate relationship with our earliest caregivers. We immediately enter a dance of attunement...This dance of attunement is our birthright. The degree to which our feelings of connectedness are damaged, sustained, or deepened is the most central predictor of our health and happiness throughout life."

The grandness of this task has led me to spend time contemplating the Spiritual aspects of this assignment god has set before me in which I am trusted to house these two souls until the time comes for them to become real, as said in The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams.

Becoming Real…What does that mean though?  In the spiritual development of a child, many could argue, it has to do with the soul or the True Self.

Franciscan priest and author Richard Rorh wrote a book called Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self.  In the book, Fr. Rorh defined true self as synonymous with soul and false self as all the definitions and labels we take on to describe ourselves. For example, for me it might be: white, female, social worker, mother, etc.

In Fr. Rorh’s description, it does not seem that one is right and the other wrong. Nor one good and the other bad. True self and false self do not seem to be defined in duality, they are, rather, merely different realities of what composes the developmental stages of the human soul.

Since hearing about this book, I've been going back in my mind again and again to this central idea of true self or soul as akin to a jewel inside of us. To me, this is a beautiful analogy that has the essence of faithfuls who have said for millennia that every human being has a divine spark inside. And when applied to parenting, the job assignment of “caregiver” seems to take on a whole new and powerful meaning for me.

The construction of Self (capital "S") has always been quite intriguing to me.  I have long been interested in how this process unfolds over the course of development, and particularly watchful for the juxtaposition of the psychological and the spiritual. I contemplate my own development, my children's development, my parents’ and grandparents’ development, and that of my patients in my work as a psychotherapist. I consider this construction of Self, and wonder how it reveals itself over the course of the lifespan from birth to death.

In my education as a clinical social worker, I was first educated in psychodynamic therapy.  During this training, I was introduced to the complex and diverse theories of development from a psychological perspective.  But since that time, I have moved in the direction of wanting to understand not only how the psychological development of an individual unfolds, but also his or her spiritual development, and where the two overlap.  This area of interest seems to be perfectly illustrated in the development of Self.

 Let me first, however, define some terms, and how I will be using them in this piece. 

C

In Fr. Rorh's interviews about his book Immortal Diamond he uses the term "false self" in the same way I have understood the term “ego” as stemmingv from my background in psychodynamic theory. Which to me, put very simply and succinctly, includes all the definitions, labels and roles of myself that I have determined, and other people have told me, make me, Me (capital “M.”). 

Please note here, this definition of “false self” by Fr. Rorh is quite different than how the famous psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s used the term “false self” as more like a façade or masking of the more authentic true self. 

Fr. Rorh also uses the term "true self." And his contextual use of “true self” is how I have begun to apply the word "soul." I don’t know that the use of “true self” by Fr. Rorh is as far away from D.W. Winnicott’s use of the term “true self” which he defined as a spontaneous sense of self derived from a sense of authentic being. 

To me, “soul” is quite, if not exactly, similar. It is that part of me that I begin to feel after long periods of meditative silence that has nothing to do with my body, my job, my roles, or even my human existence. It is an experience of myself and others that is outside birth and death. An entity that is a gorgeous, completely unique energy that is un-replicable; an energy that has always been and will always be.

Having said that, I will now use the terms “false self” and “ego” interchangeably and I will use the terms “true self” and “soul” interchangeably.

It seems to me, in development, if the true self or soul is a jewel which has come into this earthly world in the form of an infant, then it would be absolutely essential that, as caregivers and caretakers of this precious gem, we hit the ground running immediately after birth to build a house around this jewel to keep it safe and protected until it grows powerful enough and savvy enough in the earthly realm to exist with no protection. The soul must learn how to exist in this earthly body.

In this way, the construction of a house becomes a metaphor for the construction of an ego or false self. An enclosure to safely house the jewel, true self or soul.

This blog entry is the 1st in a 6 Part Series.

More to come…