Eleanor Roosevelt & Marie Souvestre: The Search for Safe Harbor
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
EMILY DICKINSON
Ah, the wonders of secure attachment. The possibilities of “safely held and soothed.” The joy of protected psychic space—of Grandma’s blue eyes and thin arms. Rowing in Eden! But alas, as we are all aware, there is a darker side to the realities of early bonding.
I need hardly say it: there are many things that can go wrong here—right out of the gate. The child bonds to the parent he gets in the lottery of life. He must make do with whatever forms of contact his caretaker can provide—be it a volleyball or a good-enough mother. Of course, very few of us actually get a volleyball. But remarkably few of us these days, either, get anything like the perfect container.
It was some kind of great karma that I had Armeda VanDemark Crothers in my life from such a young age. But apart from this sliver of paradise, my early attachment history was not ideal. And herein lies an important part of the story: early bonding, when not optimal, leads to various forms of emotional and mental suffering. I will wager that almost all of us reading this book will identify with some aspect of this territory. This suffering occurs when the parent is only intermittently available, or flat-out unavailable—or when the parent is simply unable to nurture at all. In many cases, too—somewhat less obviously—this happens when, in spite of her best intentions, the parent’s own emotional conflicts and wounds significantly impinge upon the child.
Many of us spend a lifetime simply trying to recover from the damage of insecure attachment—searching everywhere for repair. We search for what we never had: safe harbor and the experience of being safely and securely held and soothed. There is inevitably an anxious, and at times even desperate, quality to this search, as Emily Dickinson’s poem of longing vividly conveys.
Might I but moor tonight in Thee!!
Can you feel it? Her sense of her longing? Rowing in Eden?
2
How shall we approach this darker territory? I think it would be useful to begin with an exemplar of early attachment gone awry.
There is probably no more stunning—or instructive—example in American history of early attachment gone awry than the universally admired Eleanor Roosevelt—wife of our thirty-second president. And it turns out that Roosevelt is a particularly good example for our purposes here because she spent her adult life in a remarkably successful pursuit to recover from early attachment deficits. Indeed, she was a brilliant example of what some attachment researchers would come to call “earned secure attachment.”
Eleanor Roosevelt, I need hardly say, was from a prominent American family. Her Uncle Teddy—Theodore Roosevelt—was the President of the United States. Her Cousin Franklin—who became her husband—also became President of the United States. And Eleanor herself, of course, is widely considered one of the most emotionally intelligent, competent, and influential First Ladies in American history. And yet she suffered a shockingly deprived childhood. How did her later success make any sense at all, given her early severe deprivation? It’s a fascinating tale (and, I think you’ll be glad to hear, a hopeful one).
Eleanor’s mother was the beautiful, wealthy, and socially prominent Anna Hall Roosevelt—widely admired as one of the most elegant women of her day. Anna’s life, however, was not even remotely what the society pages made it out to be. She was emotionally overwhelmed throughout most of her adult life—just barely holding it together. Her alcoholic husband, Elliott (Teddy Roosevelt’s brother), experienced a dramatic plunge into severe alcoholism, and eventually completely abandoned the family and died in ignominy when Eleanor was just ten years old. Anna, depressed throughout the whole of her marriage to Elliott, simply did not have the emotional resources to cope with her many disasters. She did her best, I think, but, for the most part, her actions were in the service of keeping up appearances. She tried to wall off her feelings, and maintain her composure at all costs. Anna Hall Roosevelt was a product of her social tribe: She valued looks and manners and social status above pretty much everything else.
Little Eleanor, Anna Hall Roosevelt’s first child, was a great disappointment to Anna, especially in the all-important looks and manners department. Eleanor was simply not the brilliant, beautiful little darling that Anna craved. In fact, Eleanor was a strange and rather homely child. Shockingly, her mother nicknamed her “Granny,” because she was so serious—even at the age of two.
“You have no looks,” Anna said repeatedly to little Eleanor, “so see to it that you have manners.” Needless to say, Eleanor felt homely and unloved. She was always outside the closed circle that appeared to embrace her two younger brothers, Elliott, Jr. and Hall, Anna’s true “darlings.” To make matters worse, Anna mocked her daughter’s appearance and chided her manners in public, and declared right out loud that Eleanor was doomed to social failure.
Not surprisingly, Eleanor—as she told it later in life—felt “lost, unseen, empty, and depressed.” When she was seven years old, Eleanor’s aunts made the shocking discovery that little Eleanor could not read a word. She—daughter of one of the greatest families of America—had been deprived even of education.
The stories are heartbreaking. Eleanor was often left behind while her parents toured Europe. Her aunts—her only real sources of nourishment and attachment—observed on one of these trips (a trip that followed immediately on the heels of a near-death experience for Eleanor on a previous sea voyage), “Eleanor was ‘so little and gentle and had [recently] made such a narrow escape out of the great ocean, that it made her seem doubly helpless and pathetic to us.’ She asked several times where ‘her dear Mamma was and where her Papa was and where is Aunt Tissie?’” When told that her parents had left for Europe, the bereft little girl was heard to ask, “Where is baby’s home now?”
Remember: babies, and children, are object seeking. So Eleanor was constantly seeking her mother’s love. Against all odds. Eleanor, writing later in life about this, said, “[I can] still remember standing in the door, very often with my finger in my mouth—which was, of course, forbidden—and I can see the look in her eyes and hear the tone of her voice as she said, ‘Come in, Granny.’”
Yet little Eleanor pressed on in her attempt to win the love of Mamma.
To be fair to the unfortunate Anna, she did make occasional efforts to try to parent Eleanor. For example, she set aside time every afternoon, as part of her regular schedule, to spend with all three children. Eleanor craved attention during these family afternoons, and did indeed receive some. (Honestly, I think that had she not received these crumbs, she would simply not have survived emotionally.)
In retrospect, it’s clear that Anna Roosevelt was the hapless victim of what we might call today “a fast-disintegrating alcoholic family system.” Anna was simply consumed with grief—with the loss of her own young life, her own happiness. Her emotional distance from young Eleanor was a classic result of what we will call, later in this chapter, “impingement”—the impingement of the parent’s own emotional conflicts upon the child. Says Blanche Wiesen Cook, one of Eleanor’s most astute biographers: “Anna’s disapproval of her daughter’s solemnity reflected her own unwillingness to give in to the grave emotions that devastated her heart. Anna turned aside and rejected the feelings Eleanor’s eyes revealed. Every time Eleanor thought back to her mother, she remembered [Anna’s] glib dismissal: ‘She is such a funny child, so old fashioned . . .’ Eleanor ‘wanted to sink through the floor in shame.’”
Little Eleanor had been emotionally exiled. Not seen. Not felt. Ergo: not real. Virtually all of Eleanor’s relatives remember this air of unreality and lack of solidity in the child.
Anna Hall Roosevelt contracted diphtheria in 1892—when Eleanor was only eight years old. Just before her final illness, under the influence of ether following a surgery, Anna Roosevelt spoke the truth: she wanted to die. Soon after, she did just that. She lapsed into semiconsciousness and was gone. Eleanor had now been completely abandoned. She had never won her mother’s approval, and now had forever lost the chance to prove herself worthy.
Eleanor’s father would die not long after, shamefully exiled from the family’s good graces by an enraged Uncle Teddy and with no explanation to Eleanor or her brothers for their father’s disappearance.
3
How do we understand the damage done by the devastating deficits in “holding and soothing” that young Eleanor would have borne? Or that any of us may have borne? Who can help us to get a handle on these? Or at least to name them?
As it turns out, our friend Dr. John Bowlby has mapped out this territory with a precision that has never been bettered.
Bowlby closely examined what he would come to call “the forms of insecure attachment.” He describes three prominent forms: Ambivalent. Avoidant. And disorganized. And he goes on to describe them in vivid clinical detail.
4
Bowlby first observed a phenomenon he called ambivalent attachment, or anxious attachment. This is, in fact, my very own form of early attachment—and little Eleanor’s. And as I read about it now in textbooks, I am so familiar with its landscape that I anticipate every sentence, and occasionally cringe.
I’m sure you can imagine what creates anxious attachment. Here we find parents who are inconsistently available. These parents are sometimes attuned to the needs and the mental state of the child and they are sometimes not attuned at all. They are only intermittently responsive to the mental and emotional state of their children.
I remember reading in a college biology course that so-called “intermittent reinforcement” drives rats in the lab crazy. Intermittent reinforcement. This means simply that the rat sometimes gets the food pellet when he presses the little stainless steel bar in his cage, and sometimes he does not. It’s quite random. As you might imagine, this creates rats who are anxious. Rats who are chronically upset. What have they done to get the pellet one day and not the next? What could they do to assure they get the pellet? They anxiously hit the little bar over and over again, and become more and more desperate and internally disorganized. Have I not been a good rat? What in the name of God can I do to get the damned pellet?
And what do you suppose happens to “ambivalently attached” children? Do they go crazy like the rats? Bowlby tells us that in the best possible case, they engage a “maximizing strategy.” This results in an over-activation of the attachment system. Read: these kids, like the rats, are anxious. They feel insecure about getting the pellet, so they constantly hit the bar. They are not easily soothed. They cannot rely on getting soothed, so even when they do occasionally get the pellet, they simply can’t get enough. In other words, contact itself does not turn off the desperate need for proximity, for reassurance, for “resources.” We read over and over again in the literature that ambivalently attached children have a predisposition for social anxiety. To say the very least.
And, alas, there is more bad news for these children: the parents of these ambivalently attached kids also tend to intrude their own anxious states of mind into their child’s mind. Interviews with parents who create these insecure children, show us that these parents are “preoccupied.” Preoccupied with what? They are deeply caught up with their own difficult past. They are profoundly distracted by their own suffering—suffering that they have trouble bearing, and that spills over everywhere.
I have said that many things can go wrong in early attachment. We each have our stories, don’t we? And in the final analysis, it’s actually quite important that we understand our own stories.
As I read Bowlby during my graduate-school days, I realized right away that I had endured many of the features of ambivalent attachment. This means, as you read earlier, that I had a mom who was, alas, only intermittently available. There had been some breakdown in “primary maternal preoccupation.” There was only intermittent attunement, intermittent alignment, and occasional resonance.
Mom was the daughter of Armeda VanDemark Crothers and Oliver Crothers. In adulthood, she was from time to time (and for good reasons) overwhelmed by her life, and, as I have hinted, by her own very real suffering. She had had five children in six years. This included no fewer than two sets of twins—of which, of course, my sister Sandy and I were one. I have two younger sisters, who are also twins. And an older brother.
So: our mother was only intermittently responsive. “Of course your mother was intermittently available,” you might respond quite rightly in her defense—especially if you are yourself a mother or a father. “She was dealing with five infants or toddlers all at the same time!” Well, yes, okay, there was that.
But there was more. (And many of my generation in particular will identify with this.) My father—a star in just about every way in college, where Mom had met him, and a lovely, handsome, and courageous guy—returned home from World War II (where he served in one of the most vicious of the campaigns of the war, the Italian campaign) a different person. He was suffering from the hidden, crazy-making illness for which we then had no name whatsoever: post-traumatic stress disorder. He struggled against this with heroic persistence. He self-medicated with alcohol (of course, because that’s what people—particularly men—did then). And finally, perhaps like Eleanor’s unfortunate father, he fell into the grip of alcoholism at depth for a number of years.
So, there was that as well. Mom, like Anna Roosevelt, was overwhelmed.
But for Mom, there was something else, something perhaps more deeply buried in the story—something that it has taken my sibs and me decades to sniff out. In certain ways, strangely, I have to say that being a mother to babies and infants was not my mother’s strongest suit. She was, I believe, in a bind that is much more common than we like to think: she liked the idea of the baby; but she liked the idea of the baby more than she liked the baby itself. Just read her poetry and you will see it instantly: In her poetry, a baby is a romantic thing. But in fact, of course, a baby is a messy, demanding thing.
Likewise, Mom was besotted with the idea of the family. She wrote poetry about that, as well. But again, she was more interested in the idea of the family than in the actual family—the family in all its chaos and rambunctiousness. Like her father, she had a natural reserve. She worked hard to live on the moral and artistic high ground toward which she was naturally—and beautifully—inclined, but at some point along the way, this slipped quietly into such reserve as we might call emotional aloofness—like Anna Hall Roosevelt, perhaps, protecting herself and her own suffering. Indeed, I remember as a child seeing it in her eyes: her suffering. It terrified me. There was nothing I could do to help.
By the way, a thought here that has bothered me for years, and is pertinent to our discussion: Why do we think that all women must be geniuses at motherhood, when this is so obviously not the case? Do we imagine that just anyone can be a great mother—or even a mother at all? Do we imagine that just anyone can do brain surgery? Do we imagine that just anyone can be a NASA scientist? Each of us has a calling, yes. But many of us have no calling to be parents. Why should there be shame in this?
In recent years, musing on this question, I’ve realized what my mother’s true, more authentic calling might have been. Our mother was truly fit to be a queen. (I’m not being the slightest bit facetious here, and I’ve polled my siblings and we all agree on this point. Indeed, anyone who knew Mom cannot look at pictures of Queen Elizabeth II of England in old age without thinking of my mother. They look remarkably alike.) Mom was naturally regal, with excellent manners and tastes. She was extremely intelligent. Well spoken. She could give a talk in front of many people without being nervous in the slightest—and when she was speaking, she commanded attention. She was a hard worker, and very detail oriented. She would have gobbled up those red boxes of state papers coming over daily from the prime minister’s office. (At her death, it took months to clean out her impeccably organized office and thousands of well-marked file folders. Forty years of tax returns were there. Plus an accounting of every penny she spent in the last years of her life.)
Yes, my mother would have been a terrific queen. Beloved by her subjects, I’m sure—as she was beloved by so many who knew her. Who could aspire to more than that? But why insist, then, that she also be a talented mother? (It took me decades of psychoanalysis to get to this degree of perspective, by the way. And still today it pains me greatly even to speak these truths. For I loved her very much. But the truth must be faced.)
My father? He was equally adored in his many communities—and rightly so. Smart as a whip. Darkly handsome. Assertive. With a killer sense of humor. And a joy in life—music, food, horse racing, jazz. Also, well, you probably can guess . . . not cut out . . . He was in love with his work. That’s where his true passion lay. And he did fine work. Important work. He was a college president, for heaven’s sake, and deeply respected. But he could not be my container. (Also, of course, there was the drinking. There was the PTSD.) He was intermittently available at the very best. But lovely when he was. Charming!
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My twin sister and I readily agree, chewing over these issues as we have for the past many decades, that, alas, we were destined to be anxiously and ambivalently attached little beings. We were products, after all was said and done, of intermittent reinforcement, like the rats. We had all the hallmarks: Insecure. Anxious. Hungry for more. Quickly seduced by the promise of love. Never quite sure we could count on it.
So, that has been a drag. But honestly, of the three insecure forms described by Dr. Bowlby, Sandy and I have decided that ambivalence is probably the best one to experience. It’s not the most comfortable one. The most comfortable form would doubtless be the so-called “stable, detached avoidant form”—which we’ll get to next. (A hint. It’s basically this: just drop the project of attachment altogether and live safely detached from feelings.) But as I have already said, Bowlby discovered that many insecurely attached adults can actually find another love object (not the parent) to whom they can become securely attached—and can thereby heal some of their deficits, wounds, and self-defeating patterns. They can, as we’ve said, discover the considerable satisfactions of “earned secure attachment.”
Now here’s a surprise: those of us who are ambivalently attached may have a leg up when it comes to “earning” attachment. Why is that? Well, if you ponder this, you can probably guess. Because of the fact that we’ve had a modest taste of attachment—of safety and soothing and alignment and resonance—we know what it feels like. Yes, we’re still the rat, pressing the bar obsessively in spite of ourselves. But at least we haven’t given up. We’ve had a taste of “rowing in Eden.”
I have heard stories of people (E. M. Forster is himself a great example) who have waited into their forties, fifties, or sixties to find a container, to find the “reparative attachment experience.” To find that one rare, needle-in-a-haystack soul that actually wants to align with their particular mind, attune to their idiosyncratic being. But here’s some especially good news: all we need is one. Just one. One solid experience of secure attachment—of non-abandoning love. And that one doesn’t have to be perfect by any means. (We really have to admire nature’s wonderfully plastic qualities here. Nature is so forgiving. Very little is perfect—even really, really good parenting is not perfect. To wit: My friends with babies—the aforementioned Carol and Brian—drop their babies on their heads, by accident of course, and yet these selfsame bouncing babies turn out to be just fine. We must marvel at the resilience of human beings. So, there is always hope that those of us who have been dropped on our emotional heads will also be just fine.)
I was as lucky as any insecurely attached kid gets. Armeda VanDemark Crothers was near at hand—and naturally talented as a mother. (Well, a genius, actually.) And, of course, Mom herself had many, many strengths—and over the years I’ve realized how very much I did, indeed, get from her.
You can probably see where I’m going with this: “Anxious and ambivalent attachment” describes Eleanor Roosevelt’s experience to a T. Isn’t she a good example? I mean, if she can recover, why can’t we? Do you identify at all with her story so far?
We have already seen that young Eleanor craved her mother’s approval and persistently sought comfort in her company—yes, even though Anna Hall Roosevelt was all too often no better than your average volleyball. Observe: anxiously attached children never give up, even on objects that yield only the most intermittent and occasionally inadequate reinforcement.
Eleanor was, in fact, the rat pressing the bar for the rest of her long life. Wrote Eleanor in her autobiography: “Attention and admiration were the things through all my childhood which I wanted, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing about me would attract attention or would bring me admiration.”
So Eleanor was left with the scar that she shares with all anxiously attached kids. Says Cook, “Her mother’s disapproval dominated Eleanor’s childhood, and permanently affected her self-image. With her mother’s death, she became an outsider, always expecting betrayal and abandonment. But even at eight, she was fiercely proud, determined to prove herself courageous, caring, and worthy of love. For the rest of her life, her actions were in part an answer to her mother. If she were really good, then perhaps nobody else would leave her, and people would see the love in her heart.”
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But now the astonishing part of the story: Eleanor Roosevelt matured into one of the most powerful and impressive women of her era. Indeed, during World War II, she became the virtual mother of the country—a container for the suffering and the high aspirations of an entire nation.
Where did her inner resources come from? Where, how, and from whom did she acquire her inner sense of security? In whose arms did she feel safely held and soothed, contained, and held together? In whose presence did she become unified?
Here’s the story: Help came in the form of one remarkably brief experience of non-abandoning love and secure attachment. It came in the form of a two-year relationship with a surrogate mother figure, who befriended Eleanor between her fifteenth and eighteenth birthdays—and who, after those intense two years, she never saw again.
This is the best part of the story. But before I tell it, let’s examine the rest of Bowlby’s description of the forms of insecure attachment. This will give us some helpful perspective from which to view Eleanor’s dilemma—and our own.
9
Bowlby next observed a more severe form of attachment suffering that he came to call avoidant attachment. This form of attachment is not a good outcome for any child. Here, the parents are emotionally unavailable, imperceptive, and unresponsive. They are distant, and we are told by students of attachment theory that they manifest neglecting or outright rejecting behaviors. Most crucially: they are insensitive to the child’s state of mind. They do not perceive the child’s needs—or seem, really, to care all that much.
Do you know any parents like this? What do you think happens to their children? Well, curiously, when, as adults, you ask these “avoidantly attached” individuals about their childhoods, they cannot remember much about childhood at all. They look into the middle distance. “Childhood?” they answer vaguely, or stiffly. It turns out that in order to avoid more suffering, these children have found ways of being in life that do not involve close emotional ties to others at all. They adopt what Bowlby calls a “minimizing strategy.” (Obviously: they minimize attachment.) Their lack of connectedness has consequences: They feel emotionally distant and flat to those of us who try to get close to them. They are “split off.” They lack a rich internal, subjective life. They very often display dissociative behaviors, we are told.
And who can blame these children—and, later, these adults—for being dissociated, split off? They’re just trying to survive as best they possibly can. I repeat: they are doing the only thing they can do to survive. And as it turns out, this minimizing strategy is actually quite adaptive for the child. The child learns to minimize proximity-seeking, and thereby to reduce expectation—which saves them from a tremendous amount of suffering. Yes, the sense of self is disconnected. Yes, they develop a belief in the unimportance of relationships in life. Yes, they often live emotionally dry lives. But they do survive. (Remember Bowlby’s evolutionary perspective: Job number one is always survival. Survival of both the individual and the species.)
We are told that avoidantly attached children “have been found to be controlling, aggressive, and disliked by their peers.” Yikes. We all know these people. Maybe they’re us. Of course, “they” often don’t even know they’re controlling, aggressive, and disliked by their peers. Their aversion to attachment has become encoded in their unconscious memory, and they are not really even aware of another choice. Avoidance, for these folk, can be a stable, automatic strategy—what Bowlby would call “an organized and stable adaptation.” But deep underneath it all, these avoidant human beings are heartbroken.
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Finally, Bowlby documented an additional and much more devastating outcome. This third form of insecure attachment is really quite alarming. He called it disorganized attachment. As you might imagine, it is the most severe form of insecure attachment. We find here parents who show frightened, frightening, or disoriented communications. The child cannot make any sense or order at all out of the parental responses. The hapless child cannot use the parent to become soothed or oriented. In fact, the child experiences a horrible bind: The fear and insecurity he experiences in the presence of his caretaker (say, the parent) cannot be modulated by the very source of that fear (yes, the selfsame parent). This child is eternally stuck between approach and avoidance—a kind of hell realm.
What do you suppose these kids look like? Well, we are told that they appear disorganized and disoriented. They have experienced very little apparent logic or consistency in their wee emotional lives. In the literature, we are told that these children “have been observed turning in circles, approaching and then avoiding the parent, or entering a trance-like state of ‘freezing’ or stillness.” The disorganized child, in the most severe cases, does not learn how to regulate his own state at all. There is really no effective or stable strategy here for achieving even a modicum of safety or soothing.
Disorganized attachments are associated with the most severe forms of dissociative symptoms, and later in life these kids are highly prone to developing full-blown PTSD in the slightest traumatic or challenging situation. We are told that these children have deficits in attention, and have extreme difficulty in regulating their feelings and behaviors. Do you know any of these children? I do. And honestly, it’s sometimes too heartbreaking—and infuriating in so many ways—to even be in their presence. Their profound disorganization—too often leading to bizarre social behaviors—sometimes drives us away.
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Do you identify with any of Bowlby’s list of insecure forms of attachment? Most likely you do.
When I was in graduate school, training to become a psychotherapist, I experienced a phenomenon that all therapists in training seem to face: I identified with every single form of pathology that we studied. Oh yes: For the week we studied manic depression, I was sure I was manic-depressive; during the week we studied narcissism, I was surely narcissistic. And so on. As we examine these forms of insecure attachment, you may identify with some of them. That’s okay, but try to keep all of this in perspective.
To raise our spirits, there is some very good news here. Even if we’ve been twisted by early insecure attachment, we can find new love objects along the path of life who can help us to untwist. We can even, over time, develop a modified form of secure attachment. Perhaps it will never be the heaven of secure attachment given to some of us so seamlessly early on. It is, nonetheless, a very serviceable form of attachment that we have “earned” over the course of a lifetime of effective relationship building. Even the very insecurely attached among us can engage friends, family, and love objects of all kinds to repair early damage and deficits, and to live most happily.
Here, by the way—just to help with the all-important perspective—I must tell you that I have only a handful of friends and acquaintances who have experienced the delights of unalloyed secure attachment as infants and toddlers. Rather, I find that most of my friends, like me, spend their life in search of a “reparative containment experience.” Simply put, most of us search for good-enough containers everywhere. We deeply need to feel safely held and soothed, aligned, attuned, and resonant with another non-abandoning being. We look for grandmothers into whose eyes we can gaze long and deep. Many of us spend our adult lives looking for safe harbors in which we can feel physically held, emotionally held, spiritually held—in which we can feel seen and felt. We want to anchor our boats in the quiet of these deep and protected harbors.
It is impossible to exaggerate how much we want this. Psychologists tell us that when they explore the fantasies of the suicidal among us, they find that suicide is sometimes driven not really so much by the wish to die, but, rather, by the wish to feel safely and securely held and soothed. To be held, even, perhaps—in these sad and desperate cases—by our own dear Mother Earth. To fall into the ground and finally to be held.
Emily Dickinson, who herself clearly experienced ambivalent and anxious attachment—just read her poetry if you doubt it—writes about this longing better than most. And so we are back where we began this chapter.
Wild nights – Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a Heart in port –
Done with the Compass –
Done with the Chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah – the Sea!
Might I but moor – tonight –
In thee!
There it is on the page: the raw longing to be held and soothed.
If you have a moment right now, read the poem over several times. Maybe read it aloud once or twice. Can you feel it?
But I ask you, who is “Thee” in the poem—the Thee in whom Emily wishes to moor? Is Emily talking about a parent, or a lover, or God, or Death, or all of the above? Where will she find the container? Where and with whom will she feel safely held and soothed? This was her lifelong struggle and longing.
But the longing Emily Dickinson felt—or that we feel—painful as it was and is, is, indeed, a “saving pain.” Why? Why does this pain save us? Because it drives us on. The wish for healing is, in this particular case, an indication that the possibility for healing and fulfillment still exists. There is something miraculous about our inner urge to heal. When we find a potential love object of repair, we automatically reignite our psychological development precisely where it left off. When the right love object comes into our zone, our radar goes off. We feel this fit deeply, hand in glove.
And more good news: The world, emotionally speaking, is just one big repair kit. There is the possibility of connection and repair everywhere. And luckily for us, the self is profoundly self-repairing. All it needs is the right environment. Like a seed, the self seeks the ground in which it can grow.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s story of repair is as dramatic as her story of early deprivation.
After her parents’ untimely deaths, young Eleanor was left in the care of her Grandmother Hall. Grandmother Hall was cool and remote—like her deceased daughter, Anna—but with at least a modicum of the young girl’s best interests at heart (certainly where proper education was concerned). And Mrs. Hall, God bless her, made at least one fantastic decision: her granddaughter should be schooled in England, at the famous Allenswood Academy, just outside London.
Eleanor left for England at the age of fifteen, in 1899. There, her life would be changed. There, she would discover the most astonishing “container” of her life: Allenswood’s headmistress and founder, Marie Souvestre. Through two remarkable years of Souvestre’s non-abandoning love, Eleanor Roosevelt would have an almost epic reparative maternal experience.
Marie Souvestre (1830–1905) was the daughter of the celebrated French novelist, Emile Souvestre. (Pictures of Souvestre in later life abound. She was a beautiful and magisterial woman with upswept white hair and piercing blue eyes.) Regal and self-possessed, Souvestre was an internationally acclaimed feminist educator who sought passionately to develop independent minds in young women. She founded two famous girls’ boarding schools, Les Ruches, near Fontainebleau, and Allenswood, just outside London. Over the course of a thirty-year career, she taught a host of famous students, including the daughters of many of the most elite European and American families. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook describes Souvestre: “A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all to think about a nobler, more decent future.”
By the end of her distinguished career, all agreed: Souvestre had had an impact on several generations of powerful women. But none more powerful than Eleanor Roosevelt.
As soon as Souvestre learned that young Eleanor would be coming to Allenswood, the great headmistress was determined to help the unfortunate girl—whose parents she had known, and with whose sad story she was already quite familiar. Before Eleanor arrived, Souvestre wrote to Grandmother Hall, saying, “Believe me, as long as Eleanor will stay with me, I shall bear her an almost maternal feeling. First because I am devoted to her Aunt and also because I have known both of the parents she was unfortunate to lose.”
An almost maternal feeling! This intention only deepened once Marie Souvestre really began to get to know Eleanor. She found young Eleanor awkward, and yet—undeveloped as she was—remarkably intelligent, soulful, humble, and hungry for knowledge and for deep human connection. Souvestre could not resist the possibilities.
From the first, Eleanor was special to the headmistress. She quickly became a member of Souvestre’s envied inner circle. Eleanor sat next to Souvestre at meals, attended special tutoring sessions in Souvestre’s library, and was invited to travel with her on vacations. At last, and certainly for the first time in her life, Eleanor felt safely and securely held and soothed. She felt seen, she felt known, she felt felt. Souvestre demonstrated what looks in retrospect like a certain amount of primary maternal preoccupation. (The mother is fascinated by the baby.) It was the first time young Eleanor would have experienced this kind of attention.
Eleanor responded powerfully. Remember: When we find a potential love object of repair, we automatically reignite our psychological development precisely where it left off. We are, then, especially attuned to objects of attachment who can give us precisely the kinds of attention we have not received. Well, Eleanor lit up in Souvestre’s presence, and she brought everything she had to the task of responding to Souvestre’s giving, and to her instinctive mothering.
Even in the first year of their relationship, Eleanor’s personality flourished. Says Cook, “A new maturity was reflected in her appearance. It was not just that she finally stood straighter. Now she claimed her full six-foot height, and walked tall with easy grace and pride. Mademoiselle Souvestre disliked Eleanor’s hand-me-down and unflattering clothes, and told her so. She encouraged Eleanor to use her allowance to have a long, really glamorous deep red dress made by a Paris couturier. [Eleanor] wore that dress with great pleasure every Sunday, and regularly for parties and school dances. No dress would ever satisfy her more.”
Like the best of mothers, the biggest gift Souvestre gave to her devoted student was the permission to be herself. Souvestre’s nurturing encouraged Eleanor to trust her own naturally arising thoughts and feelings, and to act on her own needs and wants. Souvestre gave Eleanor the luxurious space to engage in safe verbal and intellectual play, and to explore and express her feelings. Eleanor was even allowed, for the first time in her life, to cry in public.
Inevitably, Eleanor began to feel her own realness in her body. At Allenswood, she was not only emotionally, but also physically invigorated. Her chronic colds and coughs evaporated. She began to feel robust. “I never spent healthier years,” she wrote later, of her experience at Allenswood. “I cannot remember being ill for a day.”
The high points in this relationship—what Eleanor would later call her “red letter days”—occurred when Madam Souvestre invited Eleanor and others into her study in the evening to read and talk. The small group of special girls would read aloud to one another. They read great works of literature. They examined new novels. And they would reflect together on the meaning of what they were reading. Here, in the safety of a warm proximity to teacher and friend, was everything young Eleanor could want: Holding. Soothing. Resonance. Constancy. The alignment of minds.
As I have said, Souvestre also invited Eleanor to travel with her during selected holidays—and these adventures were a transforming experience for Eleanor. They traveled together to Paris, Marseille, Pisa, Florence, and Rome. It was not so much where they traveled, but how they traveled. Souvestre was an impulsive traveller. Travel was to her a fantastic form of play. She was famous for getting off a train spontaneously to see where it left her, and what adventures it led to. Eleanor was “thrilled by her spontaneity,” and later wrote that she considered her travels with her teacher to be “one of the most momentous things that happened in my education . . . Never again would I be the rigid little person I had been theretofore.”
All of that, of course, was wonderful. But there was even more—more that would shape Eleanor’s destiny. For Souvestre was not just a reparative maternal figure. She trained every aspect of her young charges: mind, body, and soul.
Marie Souvestre herself was possessed of an extraordinary mind—well trained, and deepened by a passionate, disciplined, and aspirational nature. All of her students commented on her brilliance—and never forgot it. Some of Souvestre’s students were in fact quite intimidated by her brilliance. But not Eleanor. Eleanor craved exposure to this agile and expansive mind. The mind of Marie Souvestre would imprint itself upon Eleanor’s. Remember: Soul Friends engage in an exchange of energy and information. (Our very brains and nervous systems grow and thrive in the context of this safe and soothing dyadic relationship.) The organizing processes of the mother are imprinted onto child’s brain. Marie Souvestre was imprinted on Eleanor Roosevelt’s brain for life.
One of the most wonderful things about this story is that Eleanor understood that she was being transformed—understood it as it was happening. And she found it thrilling: “I really marvel now at myself—confidence and independence,” she wrote later, “for I was totally without fear in this new phase of my life.”
When Eleanor was eighteen, Grandmother Hall insisted that her granddaughter return to New York, to “come out” into society. Eleanor was, of course, devastated. But the change had been wrought. The die was cast. In a mere two years of intensive and satisfying bonding, her deficits had been impressively repaired. The young Eleanor had found herself in the company of Souvestre. And it was this newly discovered self that would become the Eleanor Roosevelt whom we now know as one of the most transformative figures of the twentieth century. She carried Souvestre with her for the rest of her life. Indeed, her mentor’s picture accompanied Eleanor virtually everywhere.
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The moral of the story? Just this: The world is a vast repair kit.
Eleanor Hall Roosevelt’s story is, without question, remarkable. But what was true for her is in some way true for each of us. There are possibilities for connection all around. There are possibilities for the restoration of the self.
Our capacity to heal, and to restore and inhabit the self, is enormous at any age. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, I was very fortunate. I had Armeda and Oliver and others. And just as Marie Souvestre did for Eleanor, they filled in many of the gaps in my emotional foundations—and laid some new groundwork upon which I could build.
And looking back from my current position of late middle age, I see that much of the rest of my life has been precisely a filling in of these gaps. At each stage of life, there has been some new possibility for growth—growth through another human being, an interested, attuned human being. Each of us will patch together a life, looking for proximity, attunement, resonance, and the intense longing to feel felt. In many ways, the rest of this book is the story of some of the most important relationships that did this work for me.
And who does life bring us? For me, as you will see, it brought Seth, and Helen, and John, and Annie, and Susie—and so many others. These stand, in my story presented in the following pages, as the kinds of possibilities that you, too, must certainly have found.
things to ponder: containment