Speech Becomes Bearable

“When we don’t speak … we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.”

Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums, p. 1

From his early work in the 1950s through his later writings in the 1980s, John Bowlby expressed the hope that attachment theory would become strong enough to guide the direct practice of helping others. He hoped attachment theory would not remain only an explanatory theory. It would move into practice. And it did.

In attachment-based clinical work, we consider a person’s childhood experiences with attachment figures, the way people learn to seek protection and avoid danger, the representations they form of themselves and others, and if and how the world around them feels safe.

This essay expands the use of attachment theory by considering the world and language as having some of the functions of a secure base. In Bowlby’s sense, attachment is a bond formed toward particular people. The world itself, the society and culture in which attachment occurs, can ensure the conditions necessary for belonging and the freedom to explore, or deprive a person of both. Dictatorship and institutional privation are extreme conditions that impede exploration.

A Falsified World

Herta Müller is a Romanian-born German writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009 for depicting “the landscape of the dispossessed” (The Nobel Prize, 2009). Müller was born in 1953 in the Banat region of Romania, in a German-speaking village, under a totalitarian regime. Her work belongs to the broader literature of trauma and historical memory. Müller writes through one concentrated, solitary voice. I find Müller’s distinctly feminine voice powerful and inspiring. Her voice remains precise and uncompromising in the face of extreme adversity.

Müller’s childhood was shaped by violence at home and by a country under dictatorship. The traumatic histories experienced by one generation affected the next. Layers of trauma, nested within one another. The more one opened, the more one found. In her Nobel lecture, she describes the loneliness of the persecuted adult as resembling that of the child. The child’s loneliness is more than the absence of others. It is the discovery of a falsified world.

“I was as lonely as I had been as a child tending the cows in the river valley. I ate leaves and flowers so I would belong to them, because they knew how to live life and I didn’t. I spoke to them by name: milk thistle was supposed to mean the prickly plant with milk in its stalk. But the plant didn’t listen to the name milk thistle. So I tried inventing names with neither milk nor thistle: THORNRIB, NEEDLENECK. These made-up names uncovered a gap between the plant and me, and the gap opened up into an abyss: the disgrace of talking to myself and not to the plant. But the disgrace was good for me. I looked after the cows and the sound of the words looked after me” (Müller, 2009, pp. 7–8).

The dilemma described by Müller in the epigraph is not solely between silence and speech. It is a dilemma between two forms of unbearable experience: remaining alone with what cannot be said or speaking while fearing that one will be misunderstood. An inner experience, protected until then, can be misinterpreted. Shame can appear when the speaker hears her experience distorted in the mind of the other.

In her memoir, published in English in 2026, The Village on the Edge of the World, Müller’s reflections raise the question of whether healing the individual would be enough to address other forms of trauma, including those of the community and the external world. They also raise the possibility that psychological interpretation alone may never bridge the distance between internal experience and the external world in which it was formed; that experience may be interpreted before it is acknowledged; that something already falsified could be falsified again, and that what happened, before the right words for it could be found, could be betrayed again.

In Müller’s work, trauma is revealed through myriad forms of shame. There is the shame of speaking, of intimacy, of the body, of poverty, and of compromise. Shame is also imposed through public humiliation, through a false identity created by the state, and by a community that feels exposed by the person who tells the truth. There is inherited historical shame, the shame of belonging to a community involved both in persecution and in its own persecution, and the shame of what one had to do in order to survive.

The picture of trauma and shame shifts like a kaleidoscope. The Banat Swabian community was persecuted after some of its members had participated in the persecution of others (Müller, 2026). People and communities occupy the positions of victim and perpetrator at different moments in history. Sometimes these positions coexist. A similar contradiction can be reproduced within the family. One of the most disorganizing conditions occurs when the person expected to provide care and protection is also the source of fear. The child must seek safety from the same person who frightens them, a dilemma that Main and Hesse (1990) described as fright without solution.

A representation is not the same as the reality it represents. Under totalitarianism, one must continue living in a society while participating in the pretense that it is not designed to suppress freedom. The distance between words and reality becomes politically dangerous. Official language presents itself as a faithful description of the world while demanding that people deny what they perceive. Words become detached from truth. People learn that a statement may mean something other than what it says. They learn to recognize concealment and enforced agreement. Public language becomes opaque because speech must protect the speaker from the listener. A mode of language evolves that conceals rather than reveals.

In Müller’s writing, concealment and revelation coexist. Her work does not easily open itself to interpretation. It feels like an ongoing, detailed labor of naming the truth. In an opaque world, where silence is the result of trauma and speech conceals the truth, she tries to name who the perpetrators and victims were, and what happened to a person who refused to participate in the persecution of others. Müller’s work reads like poetry, through symbolism and surreal transformations. Historical reality itself is not denied. Through writing, experience is transformed into a language capable of conveying truths that ordinary speech might not be able to express.

The Freedom to Explore

Attachment theory developed in the context of the catastrophe of World War II and its aftermath. The separation of children from adults, their institutionalization, and the organization of society around their care had become urgent problems. While working with children with emotional and behavioral difficulties, Bowlby wanted to understand the ways in which separation from or loss of attachment figures could lead to later psychopathology. In Maternal Care and Mental Health (1952), he formulated these questions within a broader framework of social responsibility.

Bowlby moved away from the orthodox psychoanalytic view according to which the child’s tie to the mother was secondary to the satisfaction of primary drives, such as hunger. He understood that the need for proximity and protection has its own biological and psychological importance. The attachment system is activated in order to restore proximity and safety.

The child continuously evaluates danger and the availability of the person caring for them to provide protection. When a sufficient level of safety is restored, attachment behavior diminishes and exploration begins. Through repeated experiences, the child forms expectations about the world as safe or dangerous, about the attachment figure’s availability in times of need, and about their own worthiness of receiving protection.

A secure attachment figure provides a secure base. Mary Ainsworth’s observations and research gave empirical form to the secure-base phenomenon and to individual differences in the ways children use an attachment figure when they are distressed and when they explore (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970). A securely attached child can tolerate distance from the attachment figure. Security does not exclude separation. It makes separation tolerable enough for curiosity and learning, and for contact and communication with the unfamiliar world. Attachment, therefore, is not dependency, as the opposite of freedom. It is one of the conditions of freedom.

Bowlby did not abandon the internal world or the idea that external relationships become internally represented. He conceptualized these representations dynamically as internal working models: expectations about the attachment figure’s availability to provide protection and about one’s own worthiness of receiving it. They organize the person’s developing understanding of the self, of others, and of the surrounding environment (Bowlby, 1969, 1973).

The relationship with the attachment figure not only provides protection from danger but also facilitates the child’s understanding of the world. Before a child can independently describe an object in the external world, they participate in another person’s understanding of the object. The child observes the object, then the caregiver’s gaze, expression, and attitude toward it. The process of understanding and naming the world is triangular. There is a child, another person, and something in the world toward which the two direct their attention together.

In the same way, language is relational. It develops in interaction with another person, who observes the object, gives it meaning, and names it. Later, the developing capacity to understand another mind introduces a further relational condition: trust in the other person as a source of knowledge. Fonagy and Allison use the term epistemic trust to describe a person’s willingness to consider knowledge communicated by another person as trustworthy, personally relevant, and generalizable (Fonagy & Allison, 2014). The child does not encounter the world as a neutral reality and then communicate it to others. It becomes meaningful through relationships. As a secure base, the attachment figure helps make the world intelligible as the child begins to explore it. The child looks outward while remaining in relation to another mind. Through attachment and social communication, the world gradually becomes explorable, meaningful, and nameable.

In a paper aptly titled “On Knowing What You Are Not Supposed to Know and Feeling What You Are Not Supposed to Feel,” Bowlby examines what happens when external experiences, events the child experiences or hears about, are denied or distorted by an adult. When adults deny what happened or require the child to deny it, two versions of reality start to coexist: what the child experiences and what the child is allowed to know. The conflict becomes internal. Adverse experiences involving parents can produce cognitive distortions. Later, the child can develop chronic distrust of others, inhibition of learning, distrust of their own senses, and a tendency to perceive everything as unreal (Bowlby, 1979).

Ferenczi’s (1949) “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and the Child” offers another way of understanding what happens when the adult who helps organize the child’s reality imposes a meaning that does not belong to the child’s experience. The child is left not only with the traumatic event but with a conflict between what was experienced and what the adult allows it to mean. Winnicott’s (1965) distinction between the true and false self helps explain how a person adapts to an environment that does not support authentic self-expression. The false self develops through compliance and serves a protective function by concealing and preserving the true self.

In extreme conditions, such as dictatorship, this conflict between the external and the internal extends beyond family life. Adults themselves are required to deny what they know. A family can protect the child from the external world while reproducing within itself the same mechanisms of denial and silencing. A secure attachment figure who prepares a child to explore the world cannot guarantee that the world will allow that exploration. The freedom to explore begins in the relationship with the attachment figure. It does not end there.

The World as Privation

Michael Rutter, the British child psychiatrist, belongs to Bowlby’s intellectual lineage. He continued to work on the problems Bowlby raised around separation, loss, disrupted care, and the conditions children need for healthy development. He tested Bowlby’s ideas, revised them, and further widened the framework in which these questions could be asked.

His work led to a more nuanced, less deterministic understanding of how separation, loss, and disrupted care affect child development. A single event does not lead to one inevitable outcome. A single relationship does not explain an entire life. In Maternal Deprivation Reassessed, Rutter distinguished separation from deprivation and argued that developmental risk depends on the quality and continuity of care rather than on the absence of the mother alone (Rutter, 1981).

Rutter placed external experience at the center of developmental research and asked increasingly specific questions. Which aspects of a child’s experience increase the risk of psychopathology? At what point in development? For all children, or only some, and if only some, which children? Human development follows multiple pathways rather than a single predetermined course (Rutter et al., 2001). Rutter’s work on resilience further examined the processes that reduce the effects of adversity and open new opportunities for development (Rutter, 1987).

Individuals can be born into privation. The later history of totalitarian Romania, which Müller describes, provides an extreme example of a society abandoning its responsibility to protect its own children. Beginning with Decree 770 in 1966, the regime sharply restricted abortion and access to contraception, bringing family planning under direct state control and contributing to the placement of large numbers of children in state institutions (Kligman, 1998). After the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, Rutter led the English and Romanian Adoptees Study. The study followed children who had spent their early years in institutional care in Romania before being adopted by families in Britain. It described their early condition as severe global privation (Rutter & the English and Romanian Adoptees Study Team, 1998). The problem was not only the absence of one stable attachment figure. The children were also deprived of many of the ordinary human experiences that support development, including consistent care, touch, play, stimulation, shared attention, and language directed toward them.

Many of the children made remarkable progress after adoption. Their development had not ended. New relationships, care, stimulation, and opportunities changed the course of their lives for the better. Abilities that had not developed in one environment developed in another. The children’s progress showed that early privation did not determine their futures. Yet the severe and enduring difficulties many continued to experience ruled out any easy optimism (Rutter et al., 2007). The study showed both the severity of early privation and the continuing possibility of development. Rutter’s work helped form the foundation of my clinical thinking and my belief, as a psychotherapist, that change and healing remain possible even in the face of the most atrocious forms of adversity.

A person is a world. A world of relationships, memory, language, history, and social reality. Attachment protects a child from certain forms of adversity. It does not abolish the world in which attachment takes place. When the world has been organized as privation or deprivation, a later relationship may provide conditions in which development and healing become possible.

Psychotherapy as a Secure Base

A secure base implies a disciplined relationship to truth. It allows movement toward what has been unbearable and movement back from that place. It allows exploration of what happened and how it was experienced, without premature naming.

In psychotherapy, several questions must remain distinct. What occurred is a factual question; how it was experienced is a phenomenological question; what it came to mean is an interpretive question; and whether it was wrong, harmful, unjust, or permissible is a moral question.

Judith Jarvis Thomson’s moral philosophy of goodness-in-a-way helps me analyze therapeutic dilemmas involving the relationship between subjective experience and factual reality, as well as judgments about what is good or bad. In Goodness and Advice (2001), Thomson argues that there is no goodness simpliciter (Latin simply), or goodness without qualification, but only different ways in which something can be good. Something can be good for someone, good as a particular kind of thing, or good in some other respect. A qualified judgment can still be objective. Something may be good for one person and bad for another, therapeutically useful and morally questionable, or protective in one respect and harmful in another. These distinctions are especially important in psychotherapy, where different kinds of goodness often coexist and conflict.

Thomson’s distinction raises an inverse question for psychotherapy. Must badness also always be qualified as badness-in-a-way, or as bad for someone?

The fact that an experience can be understood from several perspectives does not mean that every judgment about it becomes relative. Severe abuse, neglect, torture, or extermination can be judged morally wrong without that judgment depending only on the perspectives of the victims. This recognition does not determine what the experience means to the person. It establishes something prior to interpretation. The badness did not originate in the person who suffered it.

The fear of being misunderstood is also the fear of moving away from the truth, of interpreting before acknowledging, and of finding the wrong names for a world already falsified by family secrets, collective denial, or repressive political language.

In ordinary English, to speak your mind means to speak openly and honestly about what you think. Putting thoughts into words can clarify feelings. Finding the right words requires matching words to thoughts. In psychotherapy, the search is relational. The therapist can gradually come to function as a secure base, and the search is no longer solitary.

The therapeutic process moves back and forth between childhood and the present, between patient and therapist, and between words and thoughts. Two people return to an experience as understanding develops.

Selected bibliography