Why It Feels Like You're Always Reacting

In a study published in 2016, Jenny Molet, Tallie Baram and colleagues at the University of California, Irvine changed one thing about the cages a group of rat mothers were raising their litters in. For a week, from the second day after birth to the ninth, the bedding was cut to a sparse scatter and each mother was given half a paper towel to build her nest. Then the researchers filmed the mothers and counted what they did.

The mothers in the poor cages did not care for their pups less. Total nursing time, total licking and grooming and time in the arched-back posture rats use to nurse were no different from the mothers in ordinary cages. What differed was the pattern. Their licking came in bouts averaging 42 seconds instead of 105, nearly twice as many of them, and what each mother did next was measurably harder to predict. When the pups reached adolescence they showed less preference for sugar water than other rats, and they spent less of their time with other young rats playing. They were not more anxious. On two separate measures, they simply took less pleasure in things.

The amount of care was the same. Its continuity was not. Donald Winnicott, the paediatrician who became a psychoanalyst, built one of his central ideas on that distinction. He called what good early care protects going on being.

What Winnicott meant by going on being

Going on being is Winnicott’s phrase for an infant’s experience of simply continuing to exist, without interruption, before there is any sense of a self doing the existing. He also called it continuity of being. In his 1960 paper “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” he described the core of a person as an inherited potential “experiencing a continuity of being”, and he named the alternative without softening it: “The alternative to being is reacting, and reacting interrupts being and annihilates.”

The idea is easy to miss because it is so ordinary. A newborn cannot hold itself together. It has no way of managing cold, hunger, a sudden noise or the lurch of being put down too fast except by reacting with everything it has. Each time it has to react, the line of its existence breaks, and whatever was going on has to start again from the break. An infant who is mostly allowed to go on being accumulates continuity. An infant who is mostly reacting accumulates something else.

Winnicott was not describing a mood or a temperament. He was describing the precondition for there being a self to have moods at all.

Holding, impingement and the holding environment

The holding environment is Winnicott’s name for whatever keeps an infant from having to react too often. It starts with literal holding, an adult’s arms, but in the 1960 paper he extends it to “the whole routine of care throughout the day and night”: protection from physical discomfort, and attention to the infant’s sensitivity to touch, temperature, sound, sight and the pull of gravity. He was plain about its job. “The holding environment therefore has as its main function the reduction to a minimum of impingements.”

An impingement, in his usage, is something the infant has to react to before it is in a position to take it in. The minimum is not zero. Winnicott thought some impingements could be “met and dealt with by the ego organization, gathered into the infant’s omnipotence”, absorbed almost as if the infant had made them happen. A feed that arrives a little late and then arrives is plausibly that kind of break. It interrupts nothing that cannot be picked up again.

This is where going on being meets Winnicott’s good enough mother. The failures that matter are not the small ones that get absorbed. They are the ones that come too often or too unpredictably for the infant to make them its own.

The psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden, rereading Winnicott in 2004, argued that holding is best understood as a concept about being and time. On his reading, the mother safeguards the infant’s continuity of being partly by insulating it from the parts of time that belong to the world rather than to the infant, and growing up means gradually taking that holding over for yourself. The parent keeps the clock at bay until the child can carry its own continuity through the day’s interruptions. It is the same movement Winnicott traced in the capacity to be alone, where a reliable presence ends up carried inside.

What the research on unpredictable care shows

Winnicott’s account was clinical. He built it from his paediatric work at Paddington Green Children’s Hospital and from the consulting room, and he did not test it the way a laboratory claim is tested. The nearest empirical work arrived from a different direction, with no talk of holding or being, through the question the Irvine group asked about the rats: does the pattern of care matter apart from its amount and its warmth?

The same group then turned to people. Elysia Poggi Davis, Laura Glynn, Baram and colleagues filmed 128 mothers in a ten-minute play session with their babies at around one year old, coded every visual, auditory and touch signal each mother gave, and calculated how predictable the transitions between those signals were. Babies whose mothers’ signals were more fragmented scored lower on a standard developmental test at two and did worse on a memory task at six and a half. Rats raised with unpredictable care in the same paper showed the matching memory deficit. The associations were moderate, correlations of around 0.3, and in a 2019 review Glynn and Baram reported that they held after accounting for maternal sensitivity, postpartum depression, how long the baby was breastfed and the family’s socioeconomic status.

The sensitivity control matters for anyone reading Winnicott. Sensitivity, how well a parent reads and answers a baby’s cues, is the measure much of developmental research relies on and the one closest to the everyday picture of good care. Predictability turned out to be a separate dimension. A parent can score well on one and poorly on the other.

The work has limits. In the rat study, fragmented care cannot be fully separated from the stress of the poor cage itself, which the authors acknowledge. In the human study the findings are correlations, and correlations of that size leave most of the variation in outcome unexplained. And going on being itself has not been measured directly. The studies measure the predictability of signals arriving from the outside. Winnicott was describing what it is like on the inside to receive them.

When going on being keeps breaking

Winnicott did not think an infant who has to react too much simply suffers and recovers. It adapts. A self gets organised around anticipating the next demand, and the result is what he called the false self: a compliant front that handles the world so that whatever lies underneath never has to. He thought most people have one and need one. The trouble starts when it is all there is, because only the true self, in his account, can feel real. Where the breaks were severe enough, the infant met states he called primitive agonies, and the fear of them can organise a whole adult life.

In the same year as Winnicott’s paper, R. D. Laing published The Divided Self and described the ontologically secure person as one who experiences themselves as real, alive, whole and continuous in time. Continuity is on both men’s lists. What Winnicott called going on being in the infant is close to what Laing found missing in adults who could never take their own existence for granted.

The adult version rarely looks like a symptom. It looks more like the texture of a day. For some people a day is one thing that continues: interruptions come, get dealt with, and the day goes on underneath them. For others the same day is a run of responses, each one requiring them to pull themselves back together before the next arrives, with nothing felt running beneath. Winnicott’s framework reads the second as reacting where being should be, and it links that to what he called a sense of futility, a life that functions without feeling inhabited.

The rats are worth going back to here. What they lost was not safety. They were not more anxious, and they did not give up any faster when tested for despair. What they lost was pleasure in sugar and in play. Whatever fragmented care did to them, it did not make the world frightening. It made it flatter.

What is established, and what is not

The established part is this. In rats, care that is equal in amount but broken into short, unpredictable pieces is followed by measurable changes in the offspring, including reduced pleasure-seeking in adolescence. In humans, the unpredictability of a mother’s signals at around one year predicts later cognitive and memory scores, separately from how sensitive she is. The pattern of early care matters, not only its quantity and its warmth.

What is not established is the bridge. No study has shown that what those measures capture is what Winnicott meant by going on being, or that an adult who feels their days as a series of reactions is carrying the effects of fragmented care in their first year. That reading is his, made from clinical observation, and it remains an interpretation.

Nobody remembers their own first year. The evidence most people have is how the present feels, whether a day runs on beneath its interruptions or has to be put back together after each one. Winnicott thought that difference was laid down early. The research can now show that the pattern of early care leaves marks. It cannot show you which ones are yours.

FAQ

What does “going on being” mean in Winnicott?

It is D. W. Winnicott’s phrase for an infant’s experience of simply continuing to exist without interruption, before there is any sense of a self doing the existing. He also called it continuity of being. In his 1960 paper on the parent-infant relationship he set it against reacting: when an infant has to react to something it cannot yet absorb, the continuity breaks. He thought a reliable run of going on being in early life was the ground for later feeling real.

What is the holding environment?

It is Winnicott’s term for everything about early care that lets an infant go on being. It begins with being physically held, but he extended it to the whole routine of care through the day and night, including protection from physical discomfort and attention to the infant’s sensitivity to touch, temperature, sound, sight and falling. He wrote that its main function is to keep impingements to a minimum.

What is an impingement in Winnicott’s theory?

An impingement is something the infant is forced to react to before it can take it in: a demand that arrives before the infant is able to absorb it. Winnicott did not think all impingements were harmful. Some could be absorbed and experienced almost as if the infant had made them happen. The damaging ones are those that come too often or too big, so that reacting replaces being.

Is there scientific evidence for going on being?

Not directly. Nobody has measured the experience Winnicott described. The nearest evidence comes from work on the predictability of early care. In rats, mothers who gave the same total amount of care in fragmented, unpredictable bouts raised offspring who showed less pleasure-seeking in adolescence. In a human sample of 128 mothers and infants, more unpredictable maternal signals at about one year predicted poorer cognitive scores at two and poorer memory at six and a half, even after accounting for how sensitive the mothers were.