Avraham Cohen’s Field Notes
April 1, 2025
Avraham Cohen, PhD, RCC-ACS, CCC
(604) 313 8423
ABSENCE
The lacunae are central and are what affects you most profoundly in your development and your innate propensity to move towards your potential for becoming a full human being…
The various levels of problems and issues are interwoven, so that solving any one of them without simultaneously addressing the others rarely works for long. —Arnold Mindell
The child is an inner possibility, the possibility of renewal.—Marie-Louise von Franz
If you want to get along with somebody else, go deeply into yourself. If you are deep in yourself, you will connect better with others. —Amy Mindell
What supports you when nothing supports you? — CG Jung
Audio version:
This Field Note highlights a subject that I have touched on previously, namely, lacunae, the missing, the empty space, in the service of highlighting the importance I believe this theme has for our growth and development. The lacunae are central and are what affects you most profoundly in your development and your innate propensity to move towards your potential for becoming a full human being, accessing fully your talents, having the relationships you most desire, and knowing where to begin and continue your search into who you most truly are.
The information about human troubles and misery is replete with narratives about traumatizing experiences. In the way the word, ‘trauma,’ is used—or rather, overused—currently, it seems that this word has been ‘tortured.’ While abuse of children or anyone in all its forms is beyond disturbing and horrible, often, such abuse by itself is not what causes the eventual problems you or anyone will have related to such events. You are hopefully still with me here and are curious.
For sure, the actual uninvited, unwanted, and horrible events that took place have reverberating shadows, and any shadowy appearance can be a reminder and trigger of all manner of bad experience over and over and over. The central issue is, however, what was missing: that is, what did not happen that the child or person needed that was not forthcoming or available early in life and as life went on. Even for adults, when something awful happens, it is fair to say that what they really need is not what is happening, and this of course is much different from the original experiences I am referencing and their potentially lifelong effects. These absences are invariably repeated over and over and may be so subtle as to be beneath one’s ability to notice them. One notices only the effects of the disconnection experiences.
Lacunae—gaps or omissions—do not exist as an all-or-nothing condition. If a child grows into adulthood, then there was clearly good enough input for this to occur at least physiologically. What we are talking about is the question as to where on the continuum of what was required does the incoming nourishment and lack of nourishment fall. It is also important to recognize that all attention and connection is influenced by how the messages and input were given and received. An important factor to consider is how, as a child grows, their filtering and interpreting and misinterpreting abilities grow. Feeling, energy, and attention are all important. Timing, sensitivity, and sensing in the moment all matter. And the overall ability of the attending adult to be present fully are features of the required care and support for growing infants and children. Likewise, to the extent these elements are not present and/or are in interconnected conflict with all factors, to that extent the growing being is affected by the rhythm and dimensions of absence and presence.
I am focused on absences not to be negative but to highlight what I believe is core to development or lack thereof in all ways for all growing beings. I believe that recognition of this core issue is most helpful in doing the healing and growth work that will move you towards wholeness. In short, behind every pattern of difficulty is a missing element in your development, lurking within your personal shadow.
Any prolonged and/or recurring absences and unreliability of a safe person that occurs when an infant is very young will produce extremes of discomfort, agitation, and fear; reliable fondness is lacking. As the time span expands and frequency of non-availability of a secure caregiver occurs over time, what we might call a ‘training’ takes place in the whole being of an infant. The infant becomes older and the memory of the non-responses from significant adults’ fades. The small human grows up with a wound related to these incomprehensible ‘empty’ spaces. The responses become part of the growing and eventually grown-up human. And the response to these non-responses is now an ingrained part of this human. This will invariably take a form as an egoic structure that is a reaction to the deficit and an effort to protect against the pain of the psychic wound. Whatever protection formation that is available is adopted and becomes a seamless part of the growing and grown person, and it is very likely seen as who you are, by yourself, and others. This history is burned into and buried in your unconscious. Your life is affected, and the source or even that there is a source is lost to your conscious awareness. The connection pathway to the source and the effects are powerful. This protection will become a part of your personality and will be triggered by any experience that is reminiscent of the original wounding that emerged from profound absences and omissions.
Take a moment now and reflect on what you did not receive as a child that was in the emotional, relational, and connection dimensions, and what you may not have witnessed between your parents in these zones of humanity. What I am referencing here is what is usually obscurely identified by the self-defeating behavioral patterns and personality structures that show up as unconscious compensation. These compensations can include such forms as addiction, what we might names as trauma and all manner of behavior, thinking, and feeling pattern reactions. These ways of being all obscure the lacunae that are the true result in the totality of your way of being of what was missing and the source of what has followed. As well I am suggesting that what shows up as “everyday trauma” (Epstein, 2014) is really a sign pointing to what is missing in your way of being and that leads to ongoing uneasiness, despair, and various and ongoing states of misery and ways of compensating for, and protecting against, feeling the associated hurt, pain, isolation, and loneliness. These ways are made of a host of behaviours that are run by sub-identities that are like sub-routines in a computer’s programming. These sub-identities ‘kick-in’ as needed when the proper signal is detected.
What Is Actually Missing and What are the Effects?
Deprivation is the effect. If a child is not fed an adequate diet, they will suffer physical deficiencies. If a child is not fed enough, they will forage to the best of their ability and eat whatever is available. The child will not know and will not be thinking about what a balanced and nutritious diet is. If a child is not given a sufficient diet of emotion, attention, and good modelling of these elements of life, they will grow up without the models and will almost certainly lack the abilities to give affection and attention in ways that are obvious and natural. Consequently, they will lack a strong and eventually mature ability to connect with others, particularly others who are intended to be their intimate partners. In reaction to these deficits a child will ‘adjust’ to the existing circumstances and develop, without thought and with no ability to evaluate, ways of being that support survival and certainly they are far removed from thriving.
Know that any omission for an infant or child is very threatening. The younger the child the bigger the threat, as dependency is near or at total, and consequently the more desperate the reaction. These ways of reacting are akin to practicing a skill, a survival skill in the service of meeting needs as best as is possible. Imagine that the adjustment initiates from earliest days and then is practiced and fine-tuned for years to the point where the practice leads to a rigid and mostly unconscious way of being and of protecting the vulnerable primal self. In other words, the child becomes very good at being in the way that has become a ‘best practice’: a way of being that is the only possibility. However, they do not think of this as a best practice. It becomes their personality.
The personality that shows up is seamlessly bonded to their sense of who they are and is now a prison. There is little or no recognition that they are indeed incarcerated. Those who feel the pain of the imprisonment are more likely to try and do something about it, at least when the pain reaches an intolerable level. The ‘something’ that is done is in the service of not feeling the accumulated pain of the early deficits and is then repeated endlessly over time, within the most important relationships. All this occurs unconsciously or with perhaps enough consciousness to remember the pain and the total lack of control. The good news is that with enough consciousness, we can study this absence and lack phenomenon in the self and find a way to liberate the self and experience an expanded self and world. I now ask: What is possible?
What Is Possible?
Let’s split this question into two distinct perspectives:
- Engagement in behaviors that mute the pain and become automatic:
- These ways of being may include
- Substance use
- Excessive us of alcohol
- Near continuous anger, belligerence, and rage
- Chronic anxiety
- Physical pain and/or illness
- Compliance
- Withdrawal
- Rationalization of behavior, blaming of others, criticizing major institutions, like ‘the government; essentially patterns of thinking and feeling that coagulate into a major personality structure that seamlessly includes, patterns of thinking, emotions, body states, expressive experiences, shutting down of life energy, withdrawal, near continual talking, and on and on.
- The list possibilities are endless…
- These ways of being may include
Or:
- Taking the pain as a signal and doorway to growth. You can develop an appreciation, even an eagerness for this pain along with an acute and refined ability to notice and investigate this pain. Know that this pain experience is a path to your own liberation and wholeness: what Jung termed individuation, Buddhism references as enlightenment, Daoism as the Way, certain forms of Christianity note this as an opportunity for union with God, and of course there are many more possibilities.
Engaging with the outcome of these lacks in your life and facilitating the opening of a vulnerability in you that frees your life energy and your connection to the deepest sources of life-giving energy and smooths your learned restrictive body-mind formations towards becoming fluid and flexible and enabling an ever-developing increasingly true expression of your being.
The summary point of this Field Note is that the identification of what was missing in your formative years and that had an extremely powerful effect on who you seem to have become, and that this is a constructed self that has in fact obscured who you really are, impeded your best expressions of yourself, and disrupted the advancement of your talents towards their optimal possibilities.
To end for now here is a short version of a story from the Sufi poet Rumi:
I am pounding on a door to get in for what seems like an eternity. Suddenly the door opens.
I realize I was on the inside trying to get out…
Once again, many thanks to Heesoon for her support with this Field Note.
Shalom to all of you,
Avraham