> **🌱 Planted:** Mon 24 February 2025 --- No one expects perfect parents or caregivers, or rather no one should expect this. Firstly because it is impossible, and secondly it's actually detrimental to our development. [[人 Donald Winnicott]], an [[✦ Object Relations]] psychoanalyst, didn't expect parents to be perfect either. Instead he said what actually helps us to develop in a healthy way is the "good enough mother"[^1], meaning our mothering is not too hot—overbearing, controlling, devouring—and not too cold—distant, rejecting, neglecting. When our mothering figure is good enough, they create what Winnicott called a "holding environment"—a reliable emotional space where our [[We all have normal developmental needs|normal developmental needs]] are adequately met, yet also balanced with manageable moments of natural [[Our normal developmental needs are met through empathic attunement and mutual recognition|misattunement]] which creates the right conditions for us as children to access our internal resources while developing our own authentic way of being. When caregiving falls significantly below the "good enough" line—whether that be due to illness, depression or overwhelming circumstances—our caregivers are unable to respond to and meet our spontaneous desires and needs. This places us as children into an impossibly suffocating situation where our needs aren't getting met, but we also still need to secure whatever love, care and safety we can receive from our caregivers, and so in order to do that, we respond to this suffocation by [[Repression is the unconscious act of blocking feelings and emotions|repressing]] our spontaneous and natural expression. This adaptive compliance becomes what Winnicott calls the "false self"—a protective strategy which keeps us safe but disconnects us from the core of our being. On the other hand, when we do receive this "good enough" mothering, our caregivers are able to provide us with [[Our normal developmental needs are met through empathic attunement and mutual recognition|Empathic Attunement]] most of the time while allowing for natural rupture and repair, and when this happens, our "True Self" (what we fundamentally are in our [[✦ Presence|❍ True Nature]]) emerges as we develop the capacity to be authentically ourselves while openly expressing our needs and maintaining healthy connection to others[^2]. Even though parenting is extremely difficult, at least we know we don't need to be perfect. Sometimes good enough is actually perfect enough, and that's what Winnicott showed us through his work. --- **➡️ Next:** - [[Our eyes don't just see the world, they reveal how we learned to be in it]] - [[How we care for ourselves now speaks to the way we were cared for as babies]] **⬅️ Back:** [[Little T Trauma isn't about bad things happening, it's about good things not happening]] --- **🈁 See Also:** - [[When our normal developmental needs go unmet, we are left deeply wounded]]. - [[✦ Object Relations]] explains how [[Our sense of self unfolds intersubjectively, not separately]], showing us how important our early relationships truly are. [^1]: The mother doesn't necessarily mean a child's biological mother. Rather it refers to mothering as a role, which could be fulfilled by another woman (who isn't the child's mother) or even the father or another male figure. [^2]: [[The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment by Donald Winnicott 1]]