Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn

Author:Jon Kabat-Zinn [Kabat-Zinn, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-307-56757-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-07-21T16:00:00+00:00

In the last chapter we saw that a lack of closeness to one’s parents during childhood was associated with an increased risk of cancer in Dr. Caroline Bedell Thomas’s study of doctors. We might speculate that this has something to do with the extreme importance of early experiences of connectedness to later health as an adult. Perhaps it is in childhood that all the positive attitudes, beliefs, and emotional competencies that we looked at in the last chapter, and in particular basic human trust and the need for affiliation, take root. If we were denied such experiences in childhood, for whatever reasons, it is likely that special attention to the cultivation of those qualities will be particularly important if we are to experience ourselves as whole when we are adults.

The fact is that everybody’s original experiences of life were, literally, even biologically, experiences of connectedness and oneness. Each of us came into the world through the body of another being. We were once part of our mother, connected to her body, contained within it. We all bear the sign of that connectedness. Surgeons know not to excise the belly button if they have to make a midline incision; nobody wants to lose their belly button, “useless” though it is. It’s a sign of where we came from, our membership card in the human race.

After babies are born, they immediately seek another channel for connecting to their mother’s body. They find it through nursing if their mothers are aware of this channel and value it. Nursing is reconnecting, a merging again into oneness, this time in a different way. Now the baby is on the outside, her body separate yet drawing life from the mother’s body through the breast while touching her, being warmed by her body, enveloped in her gaze and sounds. These are early moments of connectedness, moments that cement and deepen the bond between mother and child even as the baby gradually learns about being separate.

Without parents or others to care for them, human babies are completely helpless. Yet protected and cared for within the web of connectedness that the family represents, they thrive and grow, complete and perfect in themselves yet completely dependent on others for their basic needs. Each one of us was at one time this complete and also this helpless.

As we grew older, we found out more and more about our separateness and individuality, about having a body, about “me,” “my,” and “mine,” about having feelings, about being able to manipulate objects. As children learn to separate and to feel themselves as separate selves with increasing age, they also need to continue to feel connected in order to feel secure and in order to be psychologically healthy. They need to feel that they belong. It is not a matter of being dependent or independent, but of being interdependent. They can no longer be one with their mothers in the old ways, but they do need to experience ongoing emotional connections with them and with their fathers and others in order ultimately to feel whole themselves.

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