'You're Not Good Enough!'

The Challenge of Non-Compliance

Not everyone thinks of Winnicott’s portrayal of human emotional development as dangerous. But it is. Few also are alive to its subversiveness: its stated emphasis on non-compliance and ruthlessness. - Alexander Newman

The most remarkable thing about a mother is her ability to be hurt so much by her baby, and to hate so much without paying the child out… -D.W. Winnicott

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It’s hard to be hated. It’s hard to feel we’re disappointing to others. It’s hard to be on the receiving end of negativity from those we care for, whether it be a child, a partner, an employee, a student, or a patient. Yet it’s an inescapable part of our alliances. The only serious question is how we deal with it. Which brings me to this week’s note.

In the last three notes, we’ve seen what Donald Winnicott’s influential idea of the “good-enough” caregiver can teach us about how to help. Now we’re looking into the shadows, at when we fail to be “good enough”. Unfortunately, it’s a big topic! In this note I look at one common failing: intolerance of non-compliance.

We could be a university dean dealing with a troublesome faculty member, a teacher dealing with a disruptive student, or a therapist dealing with a patient’s attacks. Here we’ll imagine we’re a parent dealing with bedtime drama. The deans, teachers, and therapists out there will no doubt recognize how it fits your situation.

Let’s say the child is at an age where there can be conflict and even an “I hate you!” if we hold the bedtime boundary. In the face of their non-compliant push-back, there are several ways we can fail to be good-enough. For the sake of avoiding the conflict and hate, we might avoid setting a bedtime altogether. Or, having set a bedtime, we might fail to hold it—either re-negotiating the boundary, or giving up altogether and letting them feel our disappointment and resentment of them for being so, well, childish! Finally, we might fail them by meeting their non-compliance with open hostility or hatred, not just insisting on the boundary but punishing them for daring to test it.

Each of these responses fails to tolerate the challenge non-compliance presents, and thus fails to help the child feel both strongly held and loved. In this vein, Winnicott writes

What is a normal child like? Does he just eat and grow and smile sweetly? No, that is not what he is like. The normal child, if he has confidence in mother and father, pulls out all the stops. In the course of time, he tries out his power to disrupt, to destroy, to frighten, to wear down, to waste, to wangle, and to appropriate....he absolutely needs to live in a circle of love and strength (with consequent tolerance) if he is not to be too fearful of his own thoughts and of his imaginings to make progress in his emotional development.

How often we fail makes all the difference, which is where the more familiar idea of “good enough” comes in. We don't need to be perfect. We all have the occasional bad day, where we fail to do good enough. As noted elsewhere, mistakes and failures are a necessary part of learning and growth. But if these become the rule, we fail to be good enough.

What Winnicott calls the “false self” develops when the child is forced to adapt to the caregiver’s projections, rather than be held with gentle firmness and mirrored in a way that allows the child to go on being himself. Winnicott describes the consequences of this failure for a baby, but his point applies more broadly.

The mother gazes at the baby in her arms, and the baby gazes at his mother's face and finds himself therein... provided that the mother is really looking at the unique, small, helpless being and not projecting her own expectations, fears, and plans for the child. In that case, the child would find not himself in his mother's face, but rather the mother's own projections. This child would remain without a mirror, and for the rest of his life would be seeking this mirror in vain. [my emphasis]

When we hold someone well, we are not projecting our expectations, fears, needs, and plans onto them, but are acting in their interest. By contrast, to avoid holding a boundary because we want to be loved (and don’t want to be hated) is to project onto them our need to be loved. Likewise, to punish non-compliance with resentment and hate is to project onto them our expectation that they “just eat and grow and smile sweetly”—which is not what normal children (or faculty or employees or students or patients) do.

When we can tolerate the hate, our own and theirs, we can help others work through negative feelings and learn to make good use of them in their relationships. (There’s a reason we have so many books on feedback and difficult conversations.) This is some of the hardest and deepest work good-enough parents and therapists do. The work is easier when we remember that exasperating behavior is not necessarily a sign anything is wrong. To the contrary, as Winnicott (and teenage rebellion) reminds us, non-compliance plays a central role in development and individuation.

A wise psychoanalyst once told me that part of what patients pay therapists for is not to retaliate when they’re being difficult. Good-enough parents also manage (mostly) to be tolerant in this way, which is the more impressive, given that parenting is an unpaid and sometimes thankless job—at least in the short term! Once we’re adults, it can be hard to find people willing to tolerate us if we’re habitually difficult and uncooperative. This is why working skillfully with non-compliance is such a valuable gift to those in our care, and why failing them can be so devastating….I’m reminded of that playfully serious definition of insanity: when there’s no one who can stand us.