Facilitating Environments

Skilled psychotherapists, meditation teachers AND meditators, make use of the same 'common factors': http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2016/04/mindfulness-key-common-factor-of.html

One of these common factors is a ‘facilitating’ or 'holding environment'.

“Early trauma, whether in the form of parental intrusiveness or parental abandonment, sets up a yearning for a relationship that can never be, while simultaneously driving people to reproduce their traumatizing relationships, replaying them over and over again in new interactions with lovers, teachers, therapists and friends.

When early relationships with parents are not traumatizing, what develops is a capacity for attachment that makes room for separation. This non-traumatizing interaction is called a ‘facilitating environment’ by the British child therapist D.W. Winnicott.

What it facilitates is the ability to negotiate disappointment, something that meditation provides a second chance to consolidate.”

Epstein M. “Open to desire. The truth about what the Buddha taught.” Gotham Books, NY, 2005.