I can in no way see that forgiveness is not about the patterns of rupture and repair. Lack of the ability or willingness to forgive must relate to there being a rupture for which there is no repair.
Every issue involving rupture and repair patterns occur in attachment relationship contexts of our self in relationship to our self, to others and to our world at large. All of our attachment relationships are processed through our right brain’s emotional center. This means that all our ongoing attachment relationship processes are processed through the same neuronal pathways that were built within our brains through our experiences with our early caregivers from birth to one year old.
These experiences built our social emotional brain well before we even had potential for consciousness. They will continue to operate in exactly the way they were formed unless we later can apply conscious thought and effort to change them.
When we choose to apply ‘new and more advanced’ terminology to the basic operations of our brains, minds, nervous systems and bodies, we are taking a step toward the risk of losing touch and sight of what we are actually talking about. It is no different to me than using any word in our language without knowing what the imaginal root of the word is as it came into our language from its beginnings. Words get born. They originate somewhere. They come from somewhere. They have a beginning.
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If one pays particular attention to how an infant is attached within its world at about one year old as it moves from the world of its caregiver into the wider world of its own discovery, I suspect that we can tell about the origin of the operation of what we call ‘forgiveness’ as it operates in tandem with the origin of what we call ‘the shame reaction’ that occurs at this time. This ‘shame’ reaction as it is described by Dr. Allan Schore happens when an infant’s nervous system, or more specifically the ‘go’ or sympathetic arm of its autonomic nervous system responds with excitement and outgoing energy as an infant moves into its wider world of discovery.
At the same time, the potential has correspondingly increased for the infant to experience a ‘crash’ or ‘stop’ as the other arm of the automic nervous system, the parasympathetic (I think of this as the pair of breaks) will kick in if the infant returns from its excited explorations to find that its caregiver does not respond back to the infant with the same level of ‘go’ excitement. The infant will experience this clash, or rupture as a depletion of its positive state. This ‘stop’ after ‘go’ is neurologically what we come to call the shame reaction.
There has to be the basis of a safe and secure attachment relationship between an infant and the caregiver it is returning to in order for this rupture to be repaired. These rupture and repair processes are simply further continuations of the development and growth of already existing rupture and repair patterns that have been built through caregiver-infant interactions from birth and correspond to the infant’s right brain emotional center’s development.
If that area of the brain has already suffered from enough malevolent interactions to have been ‘mis-informed’ and thus ‘misformed’ by the time an infant is one year old, all ongoing patterns related to movements within the bigger world as they relate to patterns of ‘coming back together in safety and security’ with the primary caregivers surrounding the infant will also be affected. This go and stop, rupture and repair patterning seems to me to directly connect our more advanced (and thus somewhat more obscure0 words of shame to forgiveness. Even on the most profound and basic physiological level, shame reflects rupture and forgiveness reflects repair.
Because these go and stop patterns are directly related to the right brain’s emotional social center, they are both about emotions in terms of their experience through either regulation or dysregulation. These two patterns are built into the brain from birth, as I’ve mentioned. This means to me that what we call forgiveness directly ties into the right brain’s ability to regulate emotions. Even though we think of forgiveness as being a conscious activity, it still has its roots in the original patterns of our right emotional brain.
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Infant brains formed through safe and secure early attachment relationships have the advantage regarding emotional regulation in every possible way over infant brains formed in unsafe and insecure early environmental interactions with early caregivers. The advantages of one and the disadvantages of the other are in the circuitry of the brain itself.
Caregivers need have no negative intent to cause an infant this ‘stop’ shame reaction. It is a natural reaction an infant actually needs to experience on occasion as it learns about safety and danger in the wider world, and about how to negotiate the space of the world with other people and their needs. But the resolution of shame through a repair of the shame reaction is essential if all is going to go well in an infant’s development. Looking at this repair process as a reinstatement of a secure attachment relationship in the world lets us know absolutely that ‘forgiveness’ is the counterpart of ‘shame’ and lies at the basis of our attachment interrelationships.
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I remember specifically with my middle child that once she learned to talk well, she needed to talk about things that happened in her life and in her mind long before I would have thought she had the capacity for forming memories from those experiences. It was if she knew somehow that once she had the ability to verbalize about these early experiences that process was also necessary. She had in fact waited for her own developmental abilities to catch up with her needs.
I wonder if it isn’t the same with shame in cases where very eary experiences are harmful and detrimental to an infant. Their phsyiological development might not have developed to the point that they can actually experience the physical process of the stop and go within their nervous system. Yet if those older experiences were damaging enough to a child, I suspect that they can be there waiting for the time that infant’s body is old enough to experience that shame reaction.
I say this because the process of rupture and repair, as it builds the early infant social emotional right limbic brain, has already deeply formed itself into the brain itself well before a child reaches the age of one, the age when the infant can physically move itself around in the larger world. I believe that it is possible that if ruptures have not already been adequately met with repair early on, that even the beginnings of the physical shame and forgiveness patterns will be interfered with.
This is true because expectation, anticipation, hope and hopelessness have already begun the foundational development of the right brain from very early on. For example, when a tiny infant is hungry and someone responds adequately to feed it, that infant’s brain is already building hope into it as it learns within itself that in this safe and secure world it can trust that its needs will be met. These experiences form the basis of the first thought processes as they involve the early formation of mental representations.
If harmful and inadequate experiences are the ones that operate at these crucial early stages, hopelessness, despair and even rage can fill in the cracks where these misshapen mental representations are forming. They will already be firmly in place well before the age of one, and will influence what an infant anticipates and expects upon its return to its caregiver once it enters into the world.
This puts hope — its fulfillment or disappointment — at the pivotal point where shame and forgiveness operate from the start. These inner relationships are physiologically formed into the body and brain of an infant, and will obviously form the foundation for all our hope, shame and forgiveness experiences we have for the rest of our lives.
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There is no mystery here. If we want to change the patterns that were built into our brains and bodies from the beginning we have to become conscious of how these patterns are operating within us, even though we will probably never retrieve the actual facts of the experiences we had as infants that built our inner operating systems in the first place. First we have to recognize that these patterns exist, and directly realize that they involve our right emotional brain.
Shame normally happens for an infant when it anticipates a emotional state reaction from an attachment figure that matches the infant’s own state. When that state is not matched the infant experiences this as a rupture that we come to know as shame. It is an interactional experience.
Forgiveness normally happens for an infant when the mismatch between what it anticipated from the caregiver and did not get is repaired. When a caregiver reestablishes rapport with the infant it is acting our forgiveness. The infant actually accepts the forgiveness willingly because an infant’s natural state is to be united with or reunited with its attachment figures.
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In looking at both shame and forgiveness in the dictionary, both have origins in the English language before the 12th century. It is rare to find a word in what we would call modern English that came into the language earlier than that. This means to me that both these words refer to states that have been consciously known for a long, long time.
Both words, however, reflect at their basis, at least in modern English, that they relate to conditions of the mind and states of being — as they are rooted in our human physiological body and experience of being alive in that body. They are therefore related to mentalizing abilities and to Theory of Mind. Both of these two operations are interfered with in cases of mental illness like my mother had, and both are also interfered with through early trauma as they become reflected in insecure attachment disorders.
This is because the true issue at stake in both the shame rupture and the forgiveness repair require the context of an attachment relationship in order to operate in the first place. They are both physiologically rooted in our body, brain, nervous system and mind because we are members of a social species and we must form this way. Shame reflects a breech in ongoing attachment and forgiveness repairs and heals this breech.
Early developmental experiences in a malevolent world change how these two corresponding parts of who we are form and operate. If we suffered early abuse and trauma, without having access to adequate secure and safe attachment figures we could always depend on to mediate the damage-forming process as we formed our shame-forgiveness response system, we will experience complications throughout our lives related to these changes.
If we hope to affect healing for ourselves related to shame and forgiveness, I believe we need to understand and accept how and why we got these problems in the first place. To do so we must consider the quality of our attachment relationships from birth so that we can begin to understand how they were already operating in our brains, nervous system and body by the time we were old enough to begin to enter the bigger, wider world on our own at about one year old.
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Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
\ˈshām\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle English, from Old English scamu; akin to Old High German scama shame
Date:
before 12th century
1 a: a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety b: the susceptibility to such emotion <have you no shame?>2: a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute : ignominy <the shame of being arrested>3 a: something that brings censure or reproach ; also : something to be regretted : pity <it’s a shame you can’t go> b: a cause of feeling shame
rom http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shame
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Main Entry:
Pronunciation:
\fər-ˈgiv, fȯr-\
Function:
verb
Inflected Form(s):
for·gave \-ˈgāv\ ; for·giv·en \-ˈgi-vən\ ; for·giv·ing
Etymology:
Middle English, from Old English forgifan, from for- + gifan to give
Date:
before 12th century
transitive verb1 a: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for <forgive an insult> b: to grant relief from payment of <forgive a debt>2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender) : pardon <forgive one’s enemies>intransitive verb: to grant forgiveness
synonyms see excuse
— for·giv·able \-ˈgi-və-bəl\ adjective
— for·giv·er noun
from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/forgive
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Stop the Storm 