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 Bob Silverstein writes a newsletter about risk management, poker, and life.
His latest includes information on neuroscience, on soothing, and comforting. Always interesting subjects!
In the beginning
When my wife and I had our first child, our pediatrician gave us some very good advice. He said we should swaddle our son; that is, wrap him snuggly from head to toe in a blanket. The idea is that newborns are literally a bundle of nerves when they are born and that swaddling them soothes, comforts and holds them together as they develop. It helps a child to grow and withstand the internal and external stimuli they face until their nervous systems are better formed, and they can better process the exigencies of life.
And so it goes
As we age, although we are better able to withstand the barrage of life’s stimuli and no longer need to be swaddled, we continue to be affected by serious aspects of our life that overwhelm us — like abuse, trauma, intrusiveness and crisis — or less serious, but still impactful occurrences such as emotionally out-of-touch care giving and poor social integration. Either too much or too little stimulation challenges us to integrate and hold all the pieces or parts of our experience inside of us. Like loose or disenfranchised pieces of our whole selves, these parts, or “part objects”, take on personalities of their own, and reside within us like unwelcome family members whose voices run beneath and through our everyday existence, causing us anxiety, worry and self-doubt.
The unwelcome demand attention
These afraid, hurt, lonely and needy voices calling out to us are hard to acknowledge and deal with. Rather than move toward them and the pain their recognition provokes, we tend to turn away to preserve better feelings about who we are. The problem is that the more we try to move away or hide from these rejected parts, the more they gain influence over our functioning. In whatever we do, these rejected parts demand their due.
The risk of not seeing and feeling in poker
Poker players, just like most people, don’t like to think that these splinters of experience can affect them. But poker players are no tougher and no less affected by them then anyone else. Although she doesn’t refer to them in those terms, poker pro Annie Duke, winner of the 2004 $2 million World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions, talks about how part objects can interfere with the play of even an elite poker player in her story on The Moth radio show (Sept 2, 2014).
During the tournament, Annie struggled with self-doubt because many of her fellow pros complained that she was included in the elite field of 10, only because of her famous brother (top poker pro Howard Lederer). She also describes the pressure of being the only woman in this elite field and, “How I didn’t deserve to be there.” Moreover, because the hole, or hidden cards, were being revealed to a national TV audience as play was taking place, she was preoccupied with the fact that “everyone would see any mistakes that I made” and how she was afraid that the world would find out that she was a fraud.
Annie’s Moth story recounts how she tried to work with these difficult feelings and how, because she was able to do so, she was not overwhelmed by them; i.e., because Annie was able to identify her anxious feelings and the effect they were having on her, she was able to “swaddle” her anxious parts in self-awareness and self-acceptance and didn’t need to expend the effort to repress them and fight against their unpleasant reverberations.
If she had not identified and held her fears as tolerantly as she did, Annie likely would have been distracted by their unpleasantness and/or had to overcompensate and take inappropriately aggressive moves to prove that her fears were not in control of her. Her example is a testament to the fact that it is really better for us to identify and learn to feel everything that we feel in life and poker. When we do, it gives us our best chance to be whole and remain in the flow of managing the life events we are trying to be fully engaged in. In Annie’s case, it also allowed her to win a very big poker tournament.
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