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Shared laughter might just be the ultimate in human-to-human cooperative communication.  It has long been my suspicion that when researchers say that severe infant-child deprivation and trauma can create an ‘evolutionarily altered brain’ that is designed for life in a malevolent rather than a benevolent world that they are actually describing two different kinds of brain-body-mind self development.

Either we grow into our early body-brain information about plenty of available, necessary resources that allows cooperation to be fruitful or we grow into our early body-brain information that there are so few vital resources that cooperation is not going to really solve anything.  In this latter malevolent world environment ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘kill or be killed’ can rule supreme.  This connection to human past evolutionary conditions means that at such times in our evolutionary past existence, when the world was an impossible place for very many to survive in, individual development may well have been pushed into the direction of non-cooperation at the same time it was pushed toward competition.

When I look at all the aspects I know about my mother, it is now easy for me to say she was formed in an unfit early environment that changed her in through her earliest development to be an unfit mother.  The unfitness of her early world was retained within her body-brain and communicated to me, and to her entire family by her actions.  These actions included what she DID do as well as what she DID NOT do in regard to her children.

She did try to annihilate me.  She did not express genuine smiles or laughter.  The absence of these high profile prosocial signals communicated ‘reproductive unfitness’ in a malevolent world as powerfully as did her complete dysregulated emotional states, her impulsive actions including rage and violence, her twisted view of reality, her overall dissatisfaction with her life and her total unhappiness.

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The more I learn about how early caregiver interactions between an infant-child and its earliest caregivers directly communicate either safety and security of the world or its opposite to a little one’s developing body-brain, the less puzzling and mysterious my mother’s insanely abusive treatment of me becomes.  Early human development is designed to prepare an individual for life in a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ world, and the resulting person they become simply reflects the degrees of plenty or of deprivation that their earliest world contained.

Input early on becomes output later on.  Early infant-child input from safe and secure attachment with caregivers gives the developing body-brain information about a good enough world.  The little one knows they are not alone, that they are connected within a species-wide social fabric that tells their body-brain that cooperation can exist because it does exist.  The infant does not receive signals that it is not only completely alone, but that the environment is dangerous, toxic, deprived, malevolent, overwhelming and without adequate resources.  A safely and securely attached infant-child receives information about the opposite kind of this kind of world and its entire development happens along the cooperative end of the prosocial human continuum.

In order for an infant to grow and develop a prosocial body-brain, it has particular needs throughout the critical-window stages of its growth.  A prosocial human must first have its attachment needs met so that it can move forward in its development successfully.  Safe and secure attachment interactions include the presence of adequate and appropriate caregiving.  Building a prosocial human requires that more than an infant-child’s basic physical needs must be met.

A prosocially-built human has to experience repeated, consistent patterns of appropriate prosocial interactions with its caregivers from birth as its body-brain grows.  Secure attachment builds a prosocial, regulated emotional-social brain so that the infant is prepared to enter its next exploratory stage of development.  After that stage has been successfully completed, the infant-child continues to grow its own prosocial connection to its self along with its prosocial connection to others.  It moves into the caregiving stages that allow the infant to use empathy skills and to consider the existence of others as it builds its Theory of Mind.

From its earliest experiences an infant has received patterns of cooperative and/or competitive signals based on the quality and nature of its early caregiver interactions that have – I say again – both built the young body-brain and built themselves into it.  There is no magic here, no errors, no mistakes.  Nature has determined that the ability to flexibly adapt one’s earliest development to the conditions of the external environment is the most pro-life thing to do.

If one’s early world was both pro-life and prosocial, BINGO.  A balanced, positively cooperative-competitive person will come out the other end of childhood.  If one’s early world was in actuality malevolent and anti-life, well, we can all imagine the end result of this.  It is easy to see that the opposite end of prosocial is antisocial – and here we have a description of what happened to my mother.

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An young infant-child is a ‘show me’ kind of critter.  Human interactions directly communicate conditions of a safe and secure prosocial benevolent cooperative world to a tiny one as these patterns build its body-brain.  Its basic physical needs must be met along with its basic social ones.  Most importantly, safety and security happen are communicated socially by direct mirroring interactions between an infant-child and its caregivers.

For a prosocial person to grow out of early experiences, these interactions have to happen in a safe and secure early environment that allows for and includes smiles and laughter through playful interactions from birth.  Degrees of deprivation and trauma will be directly communicated to a developing little one by the absence of these interactions just as they equally would be communicated by the actual direct presence of violence and abuse.

It seems logical to conclude that in an abusive home the presence of trauma is coupled equally with the absence of smiling, laughter and play (those prosocial interactions that communicate safe and secure attachment in a safe and secure world).  I accept this to be a true fact, BUT in cases such as my mother’s was, I suspect a third extremely important influence.

If the one wing of a devouring buzzard is trauma, and the other wing of this devouring buzzard is the absence of happiness, the third negative influence for my mother was the deprivation caused by outright neglect.  Here we have the tail of the buzzard that devoured my mother’s chances for having a good life of well-being.  While my mother came out of her childhood grown into an adult body, the truth of the matter was that she was actually road kill.  Nothing was left for her but to wait for the buzzard of a malevolent infant-childhood to gradually devour her carcass.

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Yes, that assessment of my mother’s state and condition is extremely dark and grim, but believe me, there was nothing prosocial about my mother.  While obviously her most basic physical needs were met from birth that allowed her shell of a body to keep on living, what she needed to be given to grow into a cooperative prosocial human being was not.  I can see that gigantic buzzard that overshadowed her life.  It had one wing of trauma, one wing of anti-happiness, and long destabilizing tail feathers of the early neglect of nothing-at-all.

Even if an infant-child’s earliest world cooperates enough with the little one to provide for its basic physical needs, if it does not cooperate enough to provide for its basic emotional and social needs, such an infant will not grow a prosocial cooperation-built body or brain.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about factors that influenced my development versus those that might have influenced my mother that made me into a different kind of person than my mother was.

While I know some things as fact about my mother’s early life, there is much I will never know.  But if I look at how she turned out – full of unresolved trauma and without prosocial abilities – I can make some pretty educated (and I believe correct) important guesses.

My mother’s family had money.  They lived in what I would consider to be a pretty affluent gargantuan house.  I have it in my grandmother’s own written word that after five years of marriage without the arrival of desired children, by the time my grandmother became pregnant her husband had decided he did not want to be bothered.  My mother’s brother was born first.  I suspect that any possible joy at the prospect of parenting that the combined force of my grandfather and grandmother could muster was used up giving minimal attention to their son.

Two years later when my mother was born in 1925, I seriously doubt there was much left of parental affection left in my grandparents’ home.  I absolutely intuitively know that my mother was placed in some remote area of this huge house and tended by a maid-nanny.  I knew about my mother being cared for by a nanny before the facts recently came to light from my nephew’s search of the Mormon genealogical database that included from the 1929 census not only that the nanny-maid was in the house, but also what her name was.

Because my mother could be bottle fed, leaving her alone for extended periods of time in her little crib was not much of a problem.  I have no doubt that the outright neglect of her fundamental emotional and social developmental needs led to a large degree to her disabled prosocial body-brain.  Coupled with whatever other erroneous and cruelly stupid remnants of Victorian-age parenting practices that tormented and terrorized my mother, her earliest history of being left absolutely alone harmed her beyond repair.

My mother was left to build a body-brain-mind-self that included not the knowledge of resource plenty within a prosocial cooperative environment, but rather knowledge of how to endure and survive within a competitive environment that did not include adequate resources.  There was no ‘sharing’ in my mother’s world.  Prosocial neurological circuits and pathways did not build themselves into her body-brain.  Antisocial ones did.

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I consider the continual presence of my loving 14-month-old brother during the earliest months of my life to be the single most important influence on the direction my development took differently than my mother’s.  I do not believe that my mother’s two-year-old brother offered to her the saving interactions that my brother offered to me.  My brother’s loving, positive contact with me allowed those prosocial interactions to find their way into my physiological development.  I do not believe my mother had such a most important ally.

I had the chance to mutually smile, to mutually laugh and to mutually play with my little brother.  Because my mother’s psychosis of competitive hatred of me did not happen with her (and my father’s) most cherished first born son, my brother had been given what he needed from the time of his birth to safely and securely attach to baby me.  My mother thought my brother’s love for me was cute.  She considered it acceptable and entertaining not because it benefited me, but because it was related to her positive feelings for him.  (My intuitions about this pattern were clearly confirmed when I found my mother’s written description of my brother as she ‘pretended’ to write about my six-week infant checkup.)

As I grew into my older toddler months, my mother did intervene and increasingly isolated me from interacting with my brother.  But the good had been done and nothing my mother could ever do to me afterwards could alter those prosocial patterns my brother’s interaction with me had built into me.  I had cooperated with my brother in a mutually shared environment of positive interaction and those interactions broke the back of the buzzard that would have followed me all the days of my life as surely as it followed my mother.

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All these words that I have just written came to me today because I wanted to talk about what comes next in Dr. Dacher Keltner’s 2009 book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life about laughter as a prosocial exchange of cooperative intent between humans.  I had one of those light-bulb moments of “Ah Ha!” illumination today when I read Keltner’s words that follow.  The words literally jumped off of the page and emblazoned themselves within my body-brain-mind-self the way truth can do when you find it.  I will share these words with you.  Be prepared.  They have the power to change everything you know about yourself in the world.  I know that, because they changed me.

Keltner wrote:

“Recent neuroscience evidence suggests that when we hear others laugh, mirror neurons represent that expressive behavior and quickly activate action tendencies and experiences that simulate the original laugh in the listener’s brain.  Specifically, laughter triggers activation in a region of the motor cortex in the listener, the supplementary motor area (SMA).  Bundles of neurons leaving the SMA go to the insula and the amygdala, thus triggering the experience of mirth and amusement in the perceiver of the laugh.  When we hear others laugh, this system of mirror neurons acts as if the listener is laughing.”  (page 134)

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There is a universe of information in this paragraph.  I already know that patterns of infant-caregiver mirroring interactions (or their absence) create the foundation of our brain from the time we are born.  The light went on for me when I read these words particularly in regard to my mother’s complete inability to participate in exchanges of genuine laughter.  Her body-brain-mind-self could never magically recreate what was never built into her in the first place.  At the same time I instantly KNEW this I saw the buzzard I described above.

I leave you with a few Google search results that you can explore in order to begin to understand how profoundly the absence of a safe and secure early environment of mirroring prosocial interactions involving smiles, laughter and play changed your own abusive early caregiver into a ‘monster’.  Believe me, the information on the other end of these links is only the beginning tip of a very big iceberg that tells me more about the terrible abuse my mother did to me than will any self-help book I can ever find to read

Empower yourself – take a look at these:

— child abuse brain development mirror neurons

— child abuse brain development laughter

— child neglect brain development smiles

— child abuse brain development amygdala

— child abuse brain development insula

— child abuse brain development borderline

— child neglect brain development borderline

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