WantYness

Seeking an understanding of existential WANT

WantYness by eMMe

Balance, especially Tree Pose, can be tricky. I’m famous for my wobble (an elephant journal essay I wrote on Tree Pose in 2016 is HERE), in yoga, as well as with a Great WantYness. Another noticeable trait is that I have a tendency to use dramatic extra-extra words, both in verbal interactions and on a page—a habit I’m intensely (lol) confronting. In this post, the addition of “Great” in front of WantYness isn’t overplayed, it might even be GREATER than advertised.

Awareness of my version of wantYness came about on yet another morning walk through the frigid tundra a few weeks ago. 

Before announcing what brought me to this awareness, I must precede with a disclaimer that I am not paid to promote the We Can Do Hard Things Podcast. That said, Glennon Doyle, Amanda Doyle, and Abby Waumbach and I seem to be having a universal-to-me-several-months-in-a-row moment. During this time period, nearly every podcast episode has resonated into the tendrils of my experience. There have been days I have outright flinched as a phrase wandered into my auditory canal as a “Hello, Childhood Critters, how are things?” Therefore, I will likely be referencing WCDHT until the “tag, you’re it” leprechaun finds a new method or I’m sent a Cease-and-Desist Order from the podcast hosts.

WantYness vaulted in with a Glennon share about a disordered relationship with food and how it seemed to be activating a similar experience with consumerism, describing it as “needing to the point of longing.” When those words swerved into the backseat in my brain, an image arrived of a child in a crib hanging onto side slats for support. The child appeared to be, perhaps, a year-old, and barely able to stand. In the image, the child’s face seems agonized—terrified to the point of extinction—as though their mind is frenzied and fractured into tiny bits. When I review the image of this child, it flits between an I know “them” recognition, a harsh-internalized “maybe that’s me,” and a confused strangeness; a hummingbird unable to settle on one understanding, all of them oddly and simultaneously accurate.

Wobble-wobble.

The “Cry it Out” method was proposed in 1897 by Emmett Holt in their book The Care and Feeding of Children (the title comes to me as a zoo handler tossing raw meat to lions). While researching childhood sleep approaches in the 60s for this paragraph, I found an adaption of Holt’s initial approach, called “The Extinction Method,” developed by Marc Weissbluth. I’m both shocked, and not, that I had sought a synonym for “annihilation” to describe the child face in my mind and decided on “extinction” prior to an introduction to these controversial authors. To clarify, Dr. Weissbluth utilizes the word “extinction,” as the end of an unwanted behavior and not the extinction of an emotion or human need, though I suggest that both could be possible short and long-term outcomes.

When I consider “needing to the point of longing” and wantYness through the lens of teaching children, as the description of The Extinction Method states: “to self-soothe,” by annihilating a primal instinct to cry for care, I am confronted by the barbarism of the practice and overrun with potential personal and societal side effects. A one-year-old has had 365 days to become accustomed to the practices within their family unit. Weissbuth mentions beginning the extinction method at 6 weeks. Let’s hypothesize that by three or six-months, children have already become conditioned to lose the notion that crying would be a valid or reliable way to receive care. What if this translates into being taught that the only way to be fed, changed, or given human contact is if children are mainly silent and emote only when it is “appropriate?” What might that mean to teens experiencing trauma or adults in a job with a tyrannical boss? Is it possible that denying human comfort as a baby makes it difficult or impossible for a child to learn to self-soothe? What if learning how to self-soothe comes from being given soothing care instead of isolated until the instinct to cry becomes extinct?

There are other aspects of the “Cry it Out” method, involving leaving children to cry for an increasing amount of time, over time. A similar behavioral conditioning technique championed by B.F. Skinner 1930-1948, culminated in an experiment on rats. Again, I’m thinking about zoo keepers training animals to be compliant in cages.

Revisiting how I parented twins nearly thirty years ago, has me wondering what it would’ve been like not to utilize methods designed to whittle children into compliant zoo animals. I wonder about myself, the kids I tried to do my best with, and a community of grown-up children that may be living with a conditioning that wasn’t considered with more care, rather than less.

The child I saw in my mind telegraphed wantYness—a yearning to see a familiar face open a door and make the emptiness of a white room go away. There has been a Kudzu tangling of wantYness within me. I believe it sprouted a long time ago and my next human feat will be to re-birth an ability to cry and then develop self-soothing into a way of be-ing.

I’m interested in other perspectives. If you’re inclined, please comment and let me know your thoughts on the concepts in this essay.

Attributions:

Holt, Emmett. 1897. The care and feeding of children. New York. D. Appleton and Company.

Nickerson, Charlotte. 2023. Skinner box: what is an operant conditioning chamber? Simplypsychology [dot] org.

Weissbluth, Marc. 2021. Marcweissbluth [dot] com.