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Early mothering-infant caregiver interactions build a human body-brain-mind-self from the foundation on up.  We cannot change the way Nature remembers to make a human being.  If Nature’s laws are broken, a surviving infant-child-adult will suffer the consequences from having to change its early physiological development in adjustment to deprivation-trauma for the rest of its life.

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I am again returning to the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999).

Siegel writes:

“What are the mechanisms by which human relationships shape brain structure and function?  How is it possible for interpersonal experience – the interactions between two people – to affect something so inherently different as the activity of neurons?”  (page 9)

I have already laid out in my thinking that human infant-children have basic needs that are met through having their Universal Human Rights met as described in the December 12, 1989 United Nations General Assembly document from the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  Yesterday’s post describes my belief that mothers are ultimately responsible for the well-being of the children they bring into the world.  Just as mothers are biologically designed to carry and birth offspring, they are also biologically designed to provide all that is necessary for an infant to continue to develop in the best way possible most critically through the first year of an infant’s life.

If a mother cannot or chooses not to provide for the necessary memory-making processes her infant requires for its best development, another WOMAN can certainly provide these experiences to an infant under the age of one.  What an infant needs, as I will begin to clarify today, is MOTHERING.  I am not using the word ‘mothering’ interchangeably with ‘nurturing’, which is certainly something anyone can provide.  Mothering is based on the biological memory contained within our specie’s DNA that forms the structure of human-being-making.

An infant’s body, including its nervous system-brain, grows best under adequate care provided by its mother.  Next in line for an infant’s best care are other women who also have the ability to adequately meet the developmental needs of the infant.  As I will describe here, those needs are very specific.  The wonder of making a human from ‘scratch’ is that under ordinary circumstances, women have always known from the origins of our species how to meet the needs of infants.  It does not take a rocket scientist to tell us how to mother.  I believe if we have not experienced infant-child deprivation and trauma-related changes in our own development ourselves as women that we are automatically born with everything we need to raise our offspring right – and by right I mean in the best way possible.

Siblings and other children have, I believe, always been important in the early care of infant-children.  They can certainly be adequate for the job on some levels if they have also been built from conception in the best way possible.  But children cannot take over the job because it is an appropriately regulated brain within the mother than interacts with the developing brain of her infant that paves the way for all future development of her offspring.  It is the ‘interpersonal experiences’ an infant has with its mother (or other mothering female) that shape its early forming (foundational) body-brain.

Love between an infant and its father is no less important than mother-infant love.  Fathers are also important to the well-being of an infant’s development, but nature has designed their contribution (other than the obvious first one) to be in the role of provider and protector of the mother and the infant so that the earliest needs of growing humans can be met by women.  Men tend to excite and overstimulate infants.  They are not biologically designed for the early job of establishing all the nerve-growth factors that create a balanced, healthy brain and nervous system in a tiny person.

Fathers are naturally meant to participate actively with their offspring AFTER the first year of life at the time that an infant has grown a body-nervous system-brain (at about a year of age) that allows it to venture away from its mother further and further into the exciting, stimulating bigger world.  Before that time it is the primary safe and secure attachment an infant has with its mothering caregiver that builds the foundation for all growth and development that will follow.

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Over the millennia of human evolution mothering has always been a basic, critically important process that happened naturally.  Mothers were adequately mothered in their own development so that nothing interfered with their memory of how to mother, and they were naturally able to go on to have offspring of their own that they, in turn, adequately mothered.

I do not believe that women evolved to share the earliest infant interactional experiences with men.  Women evolved to share these experiences with other women.  Living in cultures that today isolate women from one another is contributing to the difficulties women are facing in being the best mothers they were naturally designed to be.  In today’s world it has become too easy for women to forget what mothering young infant-children is supposed to be like.  I think it is a pitiful symptom of the decline in the value our species has always placed on the mother-infant-child relationship that makes us now have to turn to neuroscience to tell us about the specifics of building a human being that we have always naturally known how to do.

Even though women are biologically prepared to mother, even those fundamental memories can be tampered with, changed and removed through interactions a human mother has with all those around her as her own DNA memories are telling her how to prepare herself for life in the world she is born into.  The more disconnected mothering becomes from its biological roots, the more complicated our return to mothering naturally becomes.

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It does no good whatsoever to sit around, whine and wring our hands when any problem appears that needs to be resolved.  If it takes an understanding of brain development to convince women that the mothering of their infant-child is the most important job they will ever do, then so be it.  If it takes an education in the importance of safe and secure attachment experiences before an infant is one year old to build a ‘best’ human body-brain, we better get to work.

If we were not adequately mothered ourselves, these regions that Siegel is describing (below) have already been altered during their early growth periods of our own infant-childhood in direct response to the deprivations-traumas we experienced during our own development.  Pay particular attention to the information Siegel is presenting on the limbic system.  This system is the main area of the brain being built by mother-infant interactional experiences from birth until age one – and is directed in its development by the degree of safe and secure attachment an infant has with its earliest, primary caregiver.

Siegel writes:

“The brain is a complex system of interconnected parts.  The “lower structures” include those circuits of brainstem deep within the skull that mediate basic elements of energy flow, such as states of arousal and alertness and the physiological state of the body (temperature, respiration, heart rate).  At the top of the brainstem is the thalamus, an area that serves as a gateway for incoming sensory information and has extensive connections to other regions of the brain, including the neocortex, just above it.” (page 10)

Pausing for a moment, I will note here that human infants are not developed enough when they are born to be able to regulate or modulate much about themselves at all.  Their body can regulate respiration and heart rate, but they are not yet developed enough to even control their bodily temperature.  An infant is born with more fat cells on its back side to keep it warm, which works fine because adults naturally remember that holding a baby close to one’s body keeps its front side warmest!  Adult caregivers, especially the mothering ones, provide all the interactional experiences necessary to ‘train’ a baby during its development so that it can increasingly regulate everything about itself in the world.  This happens through natural processes – we hope.

Siegel continues, and we have to remember that he is describing brain areas and functions that develop within an infant-child during a succession of growth and developmental windows over time (note:  He wrote the following as one paragraph that I am breaking apart for ease of reading):

“The “higher structures,” such as the neocortex at the top of the brain, mediate “more complex” information-processing functions such as perception, thinking, and reasoning.  These areas are considered to be the most evolutionarily “advanced” in humans and mediate the complex perceptual and abstract representations that constitute our associational thought processes.”

[My note:  These regions are formed later in an infant-child’s developmental journey.  The neocortex is not fully developed in humans until between the ages of 25-30.  However, as Dr. Martin Teicher notes, traumatized and abused children’s neocortex actually “atrophies early” and never finishes its course of development properly.  For these survivors, the best growth and development of their neocortex has been robbed from them during their Trauma Altered Development that also affected the development of all the other regions – and the nervous system and immune system – of the survivor during all their preceding critical developmental stages.]

The centrally located “limbic system” – including the regions called the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, and amygdala – plays a central role in coordinating the activity of higher and lower brain structures.  The limbic regions are thought to mediate emotion, motivation, and goal-directed behavior.  Limbic structures permit the integration of a wide range of basic mental processes, such as the appraisal of meaning, the processing of social experience (called “social cognition”), and the regulation of emotion.  This region also houses the medial temporal lobe (toward the middle, just to the sides of the temples), including the hippocampus, which is thought to play a central role in consciously accessible forms of memory.

The brain as a whole functions as an interconnected and integrating system of subsystems.  Although each element contributes to the functioning of the whole, regions such as the limbic system, with extensive input and output pathways linking widely distributed areas in the brain, may be primarily responsible for integrating brain activity.

When we look to understand how the mind develops, we need to examine how the brain comes to regulate its own processes.  Such self-regulation appears to be carried out in large part by these limbic regions.”  (pages 10-11 – bolding is mine)

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If I cut the fluff, I can simply say that a screwed up, dysregulated mother will ‘download’ her screwed up, dysregulated limbic brain directly into her infant’s growing brain – especially the earliest forming limbic structures —  from birth to age one.  It is within the attachment, caregiving interactions a mother has with her infant that the infant’s brain is formed.  These interactions FORM the infant brain through the ongoing interactional experiences that an infant has with its mother.

Evolution has determined that this is the way growing a body-brain happens.  No infant is ever given the choice to say, “Gee whiz!  There’s something wrong with my mother!  She has an awfully dysregulated brain and she is forcing me to grow one, too!  Help!  Somebody get me a different mother NOW!”

Nope.  Doesn’t happen this way unless someone external to the mother-infant relationship is smart enough to helpfully intervene (and this usually means consciously informed in today’s world) because they know that a dysregulated-brained mother is creating a replica of her own brain as she builds the brain of her infant.

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Siegel continues, and this information is critically important.  Any of us who have ‘anxiety’ related disturbances in our body suffered changes in our Hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis (HPA axis responsible for regulating the stress response), as it was formed in us through combinations of early deprivation-trauma to these developing regions:

“The limbic and lower regions of the brain also house the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which are responsible for physiological homeostasis [Linda note:  or feedback control.  Our earliest attachment experiences build into our body a memory of how to BE in relationship to our center point of balanced equilibrium.  This point is set at CALM in the best safe and secure attachment environment, and is set somewhere else if we experience deprivation-trauma during this early developmental stage.], or bodily equilibrium, established by way of neuroendocrine activity (neuronal firing and hormonal release).  Stress is often responded to by the “hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis, and this system can be adversely affected by trauma.  This neuroendocrine axis, along with the autonomic nervous system (regulating such things as heart rate and respiration) and the neuroimmune system (regulating the body’s immunological defense system) are ways in which the function of the brain and body are intricately intertwined.”  (page 11)

[My note:  Autonomic Nervous System – ANS: Remember sympathetic GO arm and parasympathetic STOP arm “pair a brakes” as I have written about it earlier in relation to the age one onset of the physiological experience of shame.  I also believe, and I have tracked my thoughts through research, that it is the developing immune system itself that orchestrates through signals to the growing infant whether or not the world is a safe, secure benevolent place to be living in or not.  If the immune system, whose job it is to protect and defend us down to our most basic molecular level,  identifies deprivation-trauma, it signals the entire cascade of Trauma Altered Development to occur.]

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I will close today’s post by adding the following description Siegel presents about brain development as it applies most importantly to an infant’s early body-brain development before the age of one:

“The activation of neural pathways directly influences the way connections are made within the brain.  Though experience shapes the activity of the brain and the strength of neuronal connections throughout life, experience early in life may be especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.  For example, traumatic experiences at the beginning of life may have more profound effects on the “deeper” structures of the brain, which are responsible for basic regulatory capacities and enable the mind to respond later to stress.  Thus we see that abused children have elevated baseline and reactive stress hormone levels.”  (page 13 – bolding is mine)

Researchers seem forced to use the term “may be” in their writings to avoid some kind of potential peer sanction against their own thinking.  There is nothing “may be” about how early experience IS “especially crucial in organizing the way the basic structures of the brain develop.”  What I hope to convey today is how profound and permanent adaptations to deprivation-trauma are in terms of infant body-brain-nervous system-immune system development.

Early attachment interactional experiences that an infant has with its primary mothering caregiver tells all the mechanisms that govern its early development HOW to build themselves in preparation for either a benevolent, safe and secure world or for an unsafe, insecure and malevolent one.  Once all these critical regulatory structural systems have been built – with or without the need for changes – they will operate on an implicit memory unconscious level, guiding a person’s future interactions from within the core of their body, for the rest of their lives.

If infant mothering is inadequate so that deprivations and trauma are allowed to occur during first-year critical growth stages, Trauma Altered Development is GOING to occur.  There is no possible way it can’t.  And there is no possible way to consider Trauma Altered Development without considering the quality of mothering an infant receives because it is those interactions an infant has with its mothering caregiver that either tell an infant’s DNA to respond to trauma or not to.

If deprivation-trauma does exist in an infant-child’s interactions with its mothering caregiver, this ONLY happens because the same kind of deprivation-trauma was built into the infant’s mother at the start of her life.  This is the way dysregulated trauma-based patterns of ‘being in the world’ topple on down through the generations.  It is in this way, and through these processes that the malevolent conditions of the world are signaled through direct mother-infant communications so that Trauma Altered Development –built right into the forming infant body-brain — can change a growing human into one that can survive in a malevolent world both in the present as well as in the future.

Trauma and the memory of the experience of trauma causes physiological developmental changes because they both build the traumatized infant’s body at the same time they build themselves into it.  This is not like knitting a sweater where an identified mistake can be fixed by unraveling the sweater back to the mistake and correcting it, so a person can start over again and do things right.

Trauma-related adaptive physiological changes that happen within a developing human infant cannot be corrected later.  Any future efforts made to give such a survivor a ‘better life’ have to happen WITH and WITHIN the body-brain that was altered in the first place.  Humans do not REALLY get a second chance to mother an infant right, and we need to drop the illusion that we do.

We have no power to change the way Nature remembers how to make a human being.  The way we form, through mothering-infant social-attachment interactions happens according to Nature’s laws.  If those laws are broken through unsafe, insecure, malevolent early experiences, the developing body-brain of the infant will build all that information into its most basic, fundamental trauma-changed structures.  Survivors of infant-child abuse and maltreatment are left to live with and within a trauma-altered body-brain for the rest of their lives.  I kid you not.

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PLEASE NOTE:  Do not take anything I say as a reason to alter any ongoing treatment, therapy or medication you are receiving.  Consult with your provider if you find something in my writing that brings questions to your mind regarding your health and well-being.

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