Maternal wounds & attachment

Hakuna Matata Is Not Healing

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  8 min read

A meerkat and a warthog find a child face-down in a desert. Scavengers had already begun their approach on foot, which tells you how far past rescue everyone assumed he was. They pour water on his head, which is the medical intervention available to a warthog, and it works.

Then the meerkat asks where he’s from.

Who cares. It doesn’t matter anymore.

The responsible answer to a child who says that is it does matter, tell me what happened. In an actual desert it might kill him. He’s dehydrated, he watched his father die this week, and the only adult he’s spoken to since told him he caused it.

So the meerkat says: fine, don’t tell me. You’re an outcast? So are we. Then they sing him a song and feed him bugs. And the kid lives.

I want that on the record, because I’m about to be critical of advice that saved a life.

The two sentences

Peace says: the past happened, and it no longer controls me.

Avoidance says: I’m fine as long as nothing makes me remember.

On an ordinary Tuesday those sentences produce the same person. The woman who has metabolized her childhood and the one who has built an excellent containment structure around hers both make the joke, both say oh, that was a long time ago in the same untroubled voice. From the outside they’re indistinguishable. From the inside they often are too.

The difference appears only on contact. Peace can be touched: say her mother’s name and she’ll feel something, and it will be proportionate, and it will end. Avoidance can’t. The subject comes up, the temperature drops fifteen degrees, something gets joked away, and three minutes later you’re talking about parking.

In defence of the song

It’s tempting to sneer at hakuna matata. Listen to what the song actually instructs. Put your past behind you. Not your past didn’t happen. It’s a sequencing instruction: that goes back there, you go forward, now, because there’s no version of this where you process it here.

For a starving, orphaned, terrified four-year-old with no adults and no shelter, that is excellent advice. Nobody competent opens the trauma of a preschooler in acute crisis. You stabilize first.

The problem isn’t the instruction. It’s that nobody revises it. No one sits the adolescent down and says, about that thing we told you when you were four and dying. The emergency protocol becomes the operating system, and then it becomes a personality — and nobody examines their personality. It’s just what you’re like.

What it’s called, and what the ruler can’t do

The formal name arrived in 1996, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, from Steven Hayes and his colleagues: experiential avoidance, attempts to avoid or alter unwanted internal experiences even when doing so causes behavioural harm.

The first half is universal: you did it this morning, picking up your phone instead of feeling something. The second half is the argument. Hayes proposed avoidance as one process running underneath many diagnoses rather than a symptom of any one of them. Working ninety hours a week is avoidance with a retirement plan.

Now the part most articles skip: the idea is well founded, and the ruler is not. The standard measure, the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire–II, was challenged in 2019 by Tyndall and colleagues on discriminant validity: it may substantially proxy general negative affect rather than a distinct process. If so, much of the evidence that avoidance predicts distress is one instrument agreeing with itself.

The distinction the whole thing turns on

In 1999, Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut published the Dual Process Model of coping with bereavement in Death Studies, revisiting it in OMEGA a decade later.

Loss-oriented coping is engagement with the loss: the crying, the remembering, the going through the closet. Restoration-oriented coping is managing what the loss changed: the paperwork, the new routines, going back to work, the distraction.

Then the finding. Healthy coping isn’t one or the other. It’s oscillation — back and forth, on no fixed schedule, several times in an afternoon. Periodic avoidance of grief is normal and adaptive. The widow who spends Saturday sorting her husband’s shirts and Sunday watching eleven hours of a cooking competition is oscillating, and that is the health.

Here’s the whole idea in one line. Healthy oscillation comes back. Hakuna matata doesn’t.

The pendulum swings out and back, and each pass takes a little of it. Avoidance with a return trip booked. What happens to Simba, and to a lot of you, is that it swings out and the return trip is quietly cancelled. The life built on the other half runs beautifully, for years. He isn’t limping. He’s singing.

So the question isn’t whether you avoid. It’s whether you come back.

Why the defence holds until it doesn’t

Everyone brings up the white bear here. In 1987 Daniel Wegner and his colleagues asked people not to think about a white bear, and afterward they thought about it more than people who’d been allowed to. Thought suppression backfires: the most quotable finding in the history of self-help.

The meta-analyses don’t support the version you’ve heard. Abramowitz, Tolin and Street pooled the controlled studies in 2001; Wang, Hagger and Chatzisarantis ran the analysis again in 2020. Both found the rebound real but small-to-moderate and inconsistent, varying by thought content and measurement, and clinical samples didn’t rebound harder than anyone else. Not a geyser. A leak.

Suppression mostly works, for years, which is why nobody stops. But it has a load limit. In 1997, Fraley and Shaver reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that avoidant people suppress attachment-related thoughts efficiently under ordinary conditions, and that the suppression breaks down under cognitive load. In 2004, Mikulincer, Dolev and Shaver went further: under suppression plus load, the defences give way and negative self-representations become more accessible.

That’s the mechanism behind I was fine for fifteen years and then I fell apart over something small.

Four hundred performances, one Tuesday

The people from my practice appear here as composites.

Tobi is thirty-one, tends bar in Brooklyn, and has a fifteen-minute stand-up bit about his mother that has never once made him cry. She emigrated from Lagos alone at twenty-two and has never said she loves him. The bit turns on the difference between being loved and being monitored: she knows his blood type, his shoe size and his GPA from 2009, and doesn’t know one thing he’s afraid of.

“Safest fifteen minutes of my life,” he told me. “Nothing in there can get me.”

A protective identity doesn’t bury the material — burying is amateur hour. It converts the material into a form that can’t reach you. Four hundred passes at the central wound of his life, not one of them loss-oriented. He goes to the exact address every night and the house isn’t there.

Then, on a Tuesday, in front of seventeen people, it stopped working. That morning his mother had sent a photo of a pot of stew on her stove, no caption, slightly blurry, the way people over sixty photograph food. He got four words into the closer and nothing came out.

A picture of stew is not nothing. It’s the whole relationship in one image: wordless, unaskable-about love from a woman who has never said the thing, to a son who built a career on the fact that she never said it. Tired, bad month, a girlfriend who’d asked to meet his mother. Load. Not a breakdown — the first loss-oriented moment he’d had about her in his adult life.

Regina is fifty-eight and widowed, and about every hard thing that has happened to her she says the same sentence: God was preparing me. She means it, and it is not my business to tell her she’s wrong about God. What I said, after four months, is that a thing can be true and also be a place to hide. The afternoon I let six seconds of silence sit after that sentence, she looked out the window a while. “That’s the only sentence I have.”

Where this breaks

Some people really are fine. In 2017, Stroebe, Schut and Boerner reported that resilience is the modal response to bereavement — roughly forty-six percent of bereaved people show stable low distress throughout. Decide from this article that your untroubled friend is secretly shattered and you’ll be very annoying at dinner.

I’ve also described something hard to falsify. You seem fine, which proves you’re avoiding is not an argument, it’s a trap. And plenty of families treated not dwelling on things as competence rather than avoidance, because there was no time for this. Nor is any of this an argument against faith. The most avoidant people I’ve met weren’t in churches; some were in therapy, fluent in every term in this article.

If reading this has put you somewhere raw, it goes better with a person in the room than alone at midnight with a search engine.

Something to do: find the topic that ends conversations

Nobody can answer “what are you avoiding.” If you could, you wouldn’t be. So ask something narrower.

For one week, keep a note on your phone. Every time a conversation changes direction — the subject turns, someone makes a joke, the energy drops — write down what it was about ten seconds earlier. Four words is plenty. Her surgery. Dad’s house. Money. My sister.

Don’t analyse. Don’t write why. At the end of the week, read the list once. Once. The topic that recurs is the one.

Be clear about what this is: my own construction, not a tested intervention. The Dual Process Model is well supported; extending it into a weekly exercise is not, and I’d rather you knew which one you were holding. A topic that turns up four times proves nothing either. It’s an address, and you can drive past it a few times before you stop the car.

Because you were four. Somebody gave you a song, the song saved your life, and then nobody came back to tell you the emergency was over.

Nobody is going to. There’s no scene where a meerkat sits you down and says, okay, about that advice.

You have to be the one who revises it.