I have always been curious about whether my earliest experience of being separated from my mother at birth and subsequently adopted might bear any relation to the insecurity and self-doubt I often experience in life and particularly in my work as a counsellor. In 2018 as part of an MSc Counselling and Psychotherapy I undertook a piece of research to try and explore this further. I used a methodology called “heuristic research” which essentially involves feeling into your own experience to get insight and implicit knowledge.  It was a very emotionally challenging and probably inadvisable process. This is an extract from some of my reflections at the time:

A cold morning in March and I’m trying to keep warm in bed. I don’t want to face the day. I’m thinking about an art exhibition I went to recently where I was drawn to an exhibit of some little white porcelain vases. There were several, beautiful fragile delicate ornate, like eggshell, easily fractured, broken. You were allowed to touch them. I held one in my hands and tiny bits of porcelain broke off like lace. “It’s okay…” the artist said “that’s meant to happen”. I loved these beautiful fragmenting vessels so light and delicate, at the same time containers, small, strong and rounded. This tiny vessel cupped in my hands, felt almost as if I was holding my self.

Thinking this soothes my miserable soul and a vaguely remembered poem drifts into my mind. It’s by my friend and poet Elizabeth Burns and it’s called “Held”. I haul myself out of bed to see if I can find her book and when I take it down from the shelf I see, ah yes I remember now, there’s a picture on the front cover of a beautiful round porcelain vase.  “Held” is the name of the title poem and it begins with a small child.

 “One year old and he’s discovering the river,

dropping stones in at the edge, retrieving them

 

He loves containers says his mother,

Then wonders, is a river a container?

 

The riverbed is: it curves its way….

down through these woods of wild garlic and bluebells,

 

letting the winding stony vessel of itself be filled

with springwater, meltwater, rainwater,  

 

[   ………   ]

 

and if the river’s a container, so’s a song,

holding words and tune; an eggshell

 

holds a bird, the atmosphere

enfolds the planet; everything is like a basket

 

says the basket maker, the earth contains us

we contain bones, blood air, our hearts

 

we are baskets and makers of baskets

and fresh from the hold of the womb

 

the boy child’s discovering how things

are held by other things: milk in a cup

 

food in a bowl, a ball in his hands

a stone in water, water in a nest of stones.”

 

Elizabeth Burns (2010)

 

The images in the poem are beautiful and simple. And they express a sense of what feels to be an emerging theme in my research. A theme around holding and containment. My research is essentially exploring what it means to be held and what happens to us when we are not held and the container of the mother is absent.

Could my being a fragile person who easily falls apart be a consequence of not being held? Not being held when I was born, at least not by my mother. By an incubator I guess (tiny, premature) or perhaps in the arms of strangers? Fresh from the hold of the womb, placed in the wrong container, or barely contained at all. Can something that happened so long ago still be felt all these years later?

Elizabeth’s poem is set in a valley called Roburndale, close to where I live, and where the river bends sharply as it meets a large rock face, it forms deep pools for swimming, the Fairie Pools. This is a place I know well and have taken myself to (dragged myself) in times of difficulty and despair knowing that immersing myself, swimming in these river waters brings life, invigorates. It does. It brings me into the world. It connects me and I become part of the world and I feel to come alive.

I am wondering then: is the river is holding me? The water, the riverbed? Or perhaps the earth, and the woods of wild garlic and bluebells. Some spiritual traditions consider the earth to be a mother, who holds and nourishes us. The poet Ted Hughes saw rivers as primal conduits to the core of our inner nature. Swimming in the river at Roburndale feels primal somehow. Perhaps I am experiencing a return to the waters of the womb and an emergence into life. Is that too fanciful? Would jumping into a cold bath have the same invigourating effect? Possibly yes. But at the same time there is no doubt that the river flowing through this lush hidden valley soothes me, almost as a mother to an infant. It calms me and I feel reconnected somehow. I feel as though my estranged psyche comes to dwell more fully in my body. I feel soothed and held.

I have always liked the work of the paediatrician and psychoanalyst Winnicott who developed a concept which he called “indwelling”. A capacity to dwell/exist/be present in your body. Winnicott carefully studied mothers and babies and came to the conclusion that “It is the provision of a safe holding environment that allows the infant to indwell”, traditionally the “safe holding environment” being the mother. Winnicott considers this capacity to indwell to be the bedrock of emotional health (Winnicott 1956).

This would suggest then that babies who don’t experience a safe holding environment would struggle to indwell. Perhaps in that case there can only be a sense of exile from the self, a feeling of not being at home, an existence that is outside of oneself. And a sense of forever trying to find a way back.

 

 Ref   Burns.E.(2010) Held. Edinburgh: Polygon

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