Disillusionment, Surrender, and Authenticity – Reflections on Fatherhood

I still remember the nights well.  Likely because there were so many of them, otherwise they might have been lost to some dreamy no-place of the mind, covered over only to be later recovered when the next child rolled around with their own version of the same demands.  The calls a menacing invitation or beckoning more so than a wailing or plaintive call.  “Daaaaaada…DAAAAA-da…”.  Eventually I would stumble in and, along with my wife, negotiate stretches where my daughter resisted sleep, giggled, grabbed at lips and tugged hair, tip-toed around our own bed, and (worst of all) would lay in my arms staring at the ceiling, eyes agape, moving only to claw at my neck and collar if I dared try to place her back in her crib before she’d gotten the amount of contact she insisted she was due.  The irony of all this being that it seemed to both my wife and I that I was the one she was most likely to fall asleep for.

This was a nearly every night occurrence in our home for the better part of age four-months to about two-years, before we finally worked out some dietary deficiencies that seemed to be contributing significantly to a year and a half long “sleep regression” that was resistant to any and all sleep training protocols we came across.  I think about these nights often in the work I do.  Not merely because I was often actively trying to navigate work on 3- or 4-hour nights of sleep at various points over the last couple of years while negotiating these nightly disturbances.  Nor is it even because of the number of fathers who come through my practice remarking on the same or similar concerns about the impact of parenthood on various aspects of their lives.  I think about it most often, because—more than any other experience in my life—it has seemed the arena in which I have weathered the most concentrated acts of surrender I have ever had to comport myself towards in trying to reconcile who I wanted to be with who I found myself being.  Which is not to say that these moments were the bleakest I had ever endured.  But I learned over the course of those months that every untamed instance of my being overmatched and outstripped in my desire for simple, uncomplicated slumber was some recapitulation of some set of phenomena I had been suffering through for the better part of my life.

Though, in clear dialectical terms, before surrender comes the resistance.  My wife took the brunt of it, though she was right to have also called me out on the breathless frustrations I would bark at my daughter in the darkness of her room, pleading that she close her eyes, just go to sleep, and insisting that she “stop” though at times even I was unsure of what it was she should have been “stopping”.  Though my wife certainly had her own challenges with parenting she also had to work through, she could see much better than I in those instances that there was clearly “something” contributing to my daughter’s sleeplessness.  Of course, I too thought there was “something” contributing to that sleeplessness, though the something I saw bore the contours of my own demands related to control and insistence that my daughter reinforce my own competencies as a father.  Therapy was helpful.  I returned just before my daughter’s first birthday.  And it certainly wasn’t just the sleep that needed sorting through.  There were frustrations in communication at home, many environmental factors not worth rehashing at this point related to housing (which also partly related to the sleeplessness), and needing the kind of support in doing this work that most clinicians find helpful to have available while going through all of this.  But time and again we returned to the sleep, and the anxiety, the worry, the sadness, and the bubbling anger that would take over in the quest for controlling some situation to which I was missing the real invitation.

I’ve spoken previously in this space about surrender in the context of Emmanuel Ghent’s work, and I’m bound to say more before this post is complete.  But before we do that, I want to spend more time thinking through the thing that comes prior and the dynamic relationship in the resistance-surrender cycle that we encounter phenomenally in many of our practices.  Ghent was an adherent of Winnicott’s, and it shows in the paper on surrender.  He primarily cites Winnicott’s own paper on object usage, which is in the same collection as his papers on transitional phenomena, and treads much of the same philosophical ground.

Winnicott was fascinated in his work with his belief that early states of omnipotence were a fundamental concern in the development of the infant.  He saw the illusion of omnipotence as a necessary state of healthy development.  Infants ought to feel omnipotent in the early going, as that was a natural internalized response to the mother’s ability to ideally and effectively meet their needs.  For the infant, in feeding, if they cry and the breast appears, then it must be their cry which manifests the breast.  Same with being swaddled, or rocked, or changed, or any of the other basic needs requiring tending to by the parent.  Early omnipotence (or primary narcissism) is the logical response for the sufficiently cared for infant.

Over time, something new happens in the relationship.  Eventually a dynamic emerges based on the intuition of the mother (and partly—these days—based on overly technicalizing manuals and guidance on child rearing)  that says the baby is ready to tolerate some frustration in not getting their needs immediately met (this is also the point at which something like hate enters the relationship between mother and child—a good thing in Winnicott’s eyes).  This initiates a chain of events for the infant that involve recognizing and growing a capacity for frustration tolerance, ability to self-sooth, and is even the phenomena responsible for the emergence of the mind in Winnicott’s eyes, as it forces the infant to begin to mentalize things about the world out there, which to that point had not truly existed.  This is the beginning of the infants needing to learn how to encounter disillusionment of his own omnipotence, and the trajectory of these unfolding changes, to my mind, is the beginning of some kind of blossoming into a recognition of their own processes of being and becoming.

For Winnicott, this is all foundational for understanding certain developmental factors of the infant, but if we carry the concepts of the transitional object and disillusionment into adulthood, don’t these become the basis for understanding any sort of change?  As adults, we often experience disruptions in some founded ways of understanding the world.  These disruptions then elicit either resistance or new activities of being, allowing us to respond accordingly to the new phenomena.  And this adaptation is usually facilitated by increased awareness or relatedness to some kind of transitional phenomena which, in its suggestion of a resolution, demands we hold open some paradoxical or ironic position to truly facilitate that change.

What is this paradoxical or ironic position?  At its core, one way of understanding it is through the hermeneutic nature of Heidegger’s Dasein, which (among other things) is the kind of being unique to human being, which bears the unique quality of being capable of taking up its own being in concernful deliberation.  Though still mostly a present-at-hand structure, in discussing the anxiety of disillusionment, Winnicott is skirting awfully close to the kind of existential anxiety that Heidegger illuminates in Being and Time.  In becoming disillusioned, we are inviting a coming into an ungroundedness, an ungroundedness which is shot through with the kind of potential for being that can accompany authentic being-in-the-world and attunement to the “thrown possibility” that can be so disruptive to the inauthentic fallen mode of average everydayness.  Winnicott even talks in some places about a potential space, that space which opens up between the experiencer and the experience, mirroring the Heideggerian idea of a clearing the emerges in the disclosiveness of the call towards anticipatory resoluteness.  In our move towards authenticity, we hold open the temporal nature of our being, or perhaps even more accurately we become the openness of that temporal nature, we are our thrown possibility.

There is an anxiety and unsettledness to all of this.  It is an invitation into something ungrounded in the familiar goings on of the way we always do things.  It is the resistance to the structural defenses we have come to rely on that make the world around us feel comfortable, safe, secure, predictable.  This is what I mean when I talk about surrender.  Surrender in this sense is not a giving up, but a giving over.  That is, it is a giving our being over to the being-in-the-world which we have become in our emergence into disillusionment.  In those late-night moments, I was so sure of what was supposed to happen.  I suspected I knew something about infants, about expectations related to the processes of getting to sleep, what my role and what my wife’s role were meant to be (and who was getting in whose way when it wasn’t going well), and the fact that in resisting all of that my daughter was doing something wrong, something hurtful, potentially even something cruel.

Though it in fact took a tremendous amount of time, I remember myself on some sudden night coming into a great deal of sadness about all of this.  Of my misconceptions.  Of the ways in which I was insisting on something that was never going to be.  Of the realization that I was giving up all of my control in a quest to demand the situation go a certain kind of way.  Of the fact that I was missing out on the possibility of what these moments could be because I was so concerned about what they were supposed to be.  That in my determination to have the authority of the father, I was missing out on the possibility of being her dad.  It was on one of these nights where I without thinking grabbed a pillow and a blanket, took up a spot on our couch, and laid with her on my chest.  Fifteen minutes later she was asleep and I was able to drift of on the couch with her.  This became our new routine.  Sometimes I would stir a couple hours later, when she was in a deep enough sleep to be returned to her crib undisturbed.  On some spring and summer mornings we would both awaken to the birds chirping outside our window.

I won’t sit here and necessarily pretend like I miss these moments.  I like being able to sleep through the night.  Not to mention we have by no means “mastered” sleep in our household.  But our practices are a bit sounder.  And it allowed for something special that, despite its fraughtness, will always be ours.  I remember those nights still in the little mini-battles that get waged: which shirt will be worn today, who has what responsibilities in potty training, resistances to cleaning the wake of destruction that becomes of play time.  And, of course, in all of this I recognize that the battles materialize in part because of her own needing to wrestle with the disillusionment of shirts with uncomfortable tags, the mechanics of what her body can and can’t yet do, the responsibility that accompanies pleasurable activities, and (perhaps more than any of that) the fact that she “got” her father’s stubbornness.  Which will serve her well as she fights to become who she wants to be in this world.  And when the moment is right, she too will learn the power of surrender, the joy in disillusionment, and the beauty in the richness of true authenticity.