““One of my earliest memories is from around age three or four—sitting in a dress by myself playing with a doll. I was fine playing, but the sense was that there was no connection. There was nobody around; I was completely isolated. This was safe, but there wasn’t a sense of happiness, only that I had figured out how to protect myself.” “By being alone.” “By being alone and yes … without feeling contact. “There are other fragments that come up. For a long time I’ve had this image of lying in what felt like clouds; I was on a bed of clouds with a grey and colourless sky above me and this one ray of sun hitting me, but it was cold. The sense of really being completely alone, that even this ray, which might be love, wasn’t. I saw that learning not to feel was what I had to do in order to survive.” Such experiences — or the conclusions Harriette drew from them—left her isolated in life, or in relationships that, she felt, depleted her more than they nurtured her. Her intensive therapy was aimed at developing emotional competence. Emotional competence is the capacity that enables us to stand in a responsible, non-victimized, and non-self-harming relationship with our environment.* It is the required internal ground for facing life’s inevitable stresses, for avoiding the creation of unnecessary ones and for furthering the healing process. Few of us reach adult age with anything close to full emotional competence. Recognizing our lack of it is not cause for self-judgment, only a call for further development and transformation.””
