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“…effortful control has been related to higher levels of emotion regulation, sympathy and prosocial behavior, internalized conscience, committed compliance, and social competence.”
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My thinking never wanders very far away from wondering about how some people react to other people in their lives. Being somewhat aware of the trauma, drama, stress, distress and duress my daughter is in the middle of right now with her premature newborn, Connor, in neonatal intensive care where she still cannot even HOLD him, kept me from being able to sleep well last night. As a result, I came into the kitchen for my first morning cup of coffee today with far more questions in my thoughts than I had answers for.
Always when I discover that someone I care about and who is (or has been) an important figure in my life acts (or did act) in ways that are beyond my ability to comprehend I have to wonder what happened ‘way back then’ in their lives that supports and in-forms how they act in their life.
Specifically this morning I was wondering about true and genuine empathy and compassion. I think again about Dr. Dacher Keltner’s writings even about the difference between a phony smile and the only true and genuine smile – the D-smile. A genuine smile cannot be physiologically faked. It corresponds to actual and very real operations within a person’s body and brain that occur in one way and in one way only.
Although we do not pause every time we see a person smile and consciously analyze whether their smile is fake or genuine, this extremely fast (in the fraction of a millisecond range) response is immediately analyzed by us within our own social-emotional body-brain response system so that we KNOW without question – automatically and correctly – how fake or genuine anyone’s smile is as we see it.
Yet all the other human behaviors that are physiologically linked into the same body-brain vagus nerve and autonomic nervous system responses most often are not as clear to us. A smile, as a single, simple human emotional-social response, is just one of many, many human responses that happen through these same response systems.
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I am thinking about my daughter’s heart wrenching sobs that consumed her last night in her grief of not being able to hold her newborn. As hard as it is for her, this grief is a welcome, most appropriate and necessary response. If she felt detached and blithe about the absence of her tiny infant from her arms, that baby would be in big, deep trouble.
Yet even in thinking about my daughter right now, I also think about the response of others surrounding her in her life. Watching the near pandemonium that has resulted from the unanticipated too-early birth of this baby, I can see the difference between what is a natural unfolding drama, and what is happening with others in her life that reeks of trauma drama.
How can we tell the difference?
When do we see overlapping dramas unfolding around us?
My guess is that as we learn to discern the difference between genuine responses to another’s distress from ‘fake’ ones we can at the same time let ourselves know that we are watching the effects of past unresolved traumas operating. The problem is, if the traumas happened early in a person’s development, particularly in the first year or two of life, the responses that we may be victim to or witness of are not under the conscious control of those displaying them. The behaviors are automatic and completely tied into the physiological construction of the body brain of the ‘actor’.
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Just as we can actually say that a fake smile is NOT a smile – because the only true smile is a genuine D-smile, we can also say that any and all displays connected in their origins to our vagus nerve and autonomic nervous system as they, in turn, connect to our brain result in EITHER a genuine and real display of empathy and compassion, or they result in FAKE empathic and compassionate actions that are not the real thing.
How can this be possible?
I suspect that people can ACT in ways that mimic empathy and compassion in the same way we can mimic a smile. People can DO things that appear to be generous and considerate, can appear to happen with another person’s interest (rather than self interest) in mind — but in fact, when we analyze the entire picture of the presence or absence of trauma drama in the expression, we can see and know the difference.
Most simply, I can think about how my mother laundered clothes, prepared meals, taught table manners, or accomplished any of the so-called mothering duties that she knew how to perform – and did for her family. And yet I cannot ever assume that she performed these actions with genuine, empathic, compassionate concern for the well-being of her family.
I do not believe my mother had the physiological body-brain capacity to experience empathy or compassion (in part as shown by her inability to experience true embarrassment or to ever admit she was wrong).
True, real and genuine consideration and caring for other people happens, in my thinking, when people can access the calm, connecting operations of their nervous system and brain. Some peoples survival and stress response are active ALL of the time. Everything they do, every action they perform, ALL OF THEIR CONCERN is really about their own survival in the world. They are constantly assessing the degree of danger and threat their SELF might be in. Everything they do and say includes on some level (rarely conscious) a consideration of their own – NOT THE OTHERS – degree of well-being.
These people’s inner resources are depleted to the extent that they cannot ever genuinely be concerned for another person’s welfare. True, they can TRY to do good, feel good, be good – but trying to do and actually doing are not the same thing. This all becomes most obvious under circumstances when another person is in great need, such as my daughter is right now.
When other people around her go through the motions of caring about her, and even as they try to help, the relative position of the helper’s self to the ‘helpee’ can be seen. When on any level the helper needs to be congratulated, appreciated and/or recognized for their ‘good deeds’ or ‘good intentions’, suspect that early developmental traumas interfered with the development of the helper’s ability to experience true empathy or compassion.
What is really happening is that the helper-giver feels continually depleted and thus continually needs replenishment from outside of their own self – from others – even the needy one they are trying to offer something good to. Sometimes the neediness of the helper-giver will show up as passive-aggressive pleas for attention and recognition. Sometimes it will show us as sarcasm, irritability, even sabotage within the giving situation.
Sometimes it happens that the person who needs assistance simply finds no response helpful forthcoming from those they might expect to help them, or even rely and depend on to help them (as with inadequate parenting of children).
According to attachment experts, when a person has an insecure attachment and their attachment needs are thus never adequately or completely met, this person’s caregiving system will never be able to be activated appropriately, either. In cases of so-called earned secure attachment, or what I call ‘borrowed attachment’, it is possible that the caregiver’s insecure attachment system (that is never actually deactivated) CAN still caregive.
But at the same time their are inner costs to be paid by both giver and receiver when this pattern exists. Most simply put, at least within these altered patterns of caregiving past unresolved trauma, and their corresponding trauma dramas are not at front and center. They simply hang around in the wings exerting less of an influence on ongoing relationships — but they are not absent completely. As a result, these caregiving patterns can be very precarious, fragile and vulnerable to easy upset should the right conditions show up in the present that threaten these kinds of secure attachment relationships (such as I had and have with my children).
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It is completely natural that we hope for, desire, want and at times truly NEED a caregiving response from other people in our lives. But we need to pay attention to what our gut tells us. We can tell the difference between giving presented by securely attached versus insecurely attached people in our lives – as surely as we can all, REALLY, tell the difference between a fake and a genuine smile.
When people deprive us of care we need, such as abusive and neglectful parents do to their dependent offspring, these patterns of inadequate caregiving are obvious. But as adults, these patterns can be far more difficult to detect because of both the subtleties and the complexities of the relationships with have with others.
Any time we sense something negative within our own self tied to any kind of assistance we receive from another, we need to trust this sense. It is real. As we become more clear and conscious about how we feel in relationship to how others act toward us, we can become more clear about how UNCONSCIOUS those other people probably are about their own intentions and actions.
Most often we are unaware of how it feels within our own self to have our attachment system activated. At those times WE NEED from others. At those times our own caregiving system is either off completely or on idle. When we are in a state of need ourselves, it can be extremely difficult to give to others. Yet most of the time we can be completely unaware of how all these related caregiving versus personal need transactions are happening.
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Because our emotional-social brain, and all the nervous system connections within our body, were formed during our earliest stages of development, we are most often not going to have the ability to notice how we are responding to those around us. These early developments within our body-brain were (and are) designed to operate automatically. We have to choose to become in-formed about how they take over our lives – including our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
I am going to introduce a simple concept here today (click on the title of the article or go to this blog’s page +Effortful Control for the full manuscript) that is really taking a look at how and where the ability to experience true and genuine empathy and compassion for another person originates. This glimpse, however, as you will see as you take a look at the following notes from the article, is taking place ‘down the road’ from the earliest brain-nervous system development that takes place from conception to age (about) of six months to a year of age.
Already by the age of toddlerhood the fundamental experience of being a self with emotions has already been built into the body-brain. What this article is explaining is how outward behavior can already be changed from optimal due to ineffectual and inadequate early attachment patterns with early caregivers, particularly with the mother. This has to do with our progressed abilities that are built upon the ability to recognize and regulate emotions, an ability (or not) that is built into the earliest forming right limbic emotional-social brain and that affects our abilities to interact with our own self and with others for the rest of our life.
Notes from taken from the article:
Effortful Control
Some researchers have conceptualized emotion regulation in terms of children’s effortful or voluntary control as opposed to more reactive forms of control
Effortful control has been defined as “the efficiency of executive attention, including the ability to inhibit a dominant response and/or to activate a subdominant response, to plan, and to detect errors”
Effortful control is characterized by the ability to voluntarily focus and shift attention and to voluntarily inhibit or initiate behaviors, and includes behaviors such as delaying; these processes are integral to emotion regulation
For example, effortful attentional processes can be used to regulate emotions, such as turning away from something distressing
Empirical work has shown that orienting behaviors serve a regulatory function during an anger inducing task in infancy
In comparison to emotion regulation, the construct of effortful control is viewed as a broader construct that includes an array of skills that can be used to manage emotion and its expression
Whereas effortful control is seen as reflecting voluntary behavior, reactive control refers to aspects of functioning such as impulsivity and behavioral inhibition
Reactive control refers to behavior in which individuals are undercontrolled and are “pulled” toward rewarding situations (i.e., impulsivity) or behavior in which individuals are overcontrolled and are wary in response to novelty, inflexible, and overconstrained (i.e., behavioral inhibition).
Reactive control is not considered to be part of self-regulation, and reactive undercontrol and effortful control are generally negatively related
Reactive processes seem to originate primarily in subcorticol systems, whereas executive attention, the basis of effortful control, is believed to be situated primarily in the cortex (e.g., the anterior cingulated, lateral ventral, and prefrontal cortex
effortful control is thought to emerge in late infancy and to develop rapidly during the toddler years.
Improvements in inhibitory control are exhibited between 6 and 12 months of age, and it is believed that more mature effortful control is partially evident by 18 months of age and continues to improve greatly from 22 to 36 months of age
Moreover, individual differences in toddlers’ effortful control are relatively stable in the early years and from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood
On the other hand, reactive control likely develops earlier than effortful control and may be intimately related to emotional reactions, such as fear, seen in infancy
The Relations of Effortful Control to Children’s Social Functioning
– attentional regulation (one component of effortful control)
– inhibitory control (another component of effortful control).
– internalizing problems in toddlers (separation distress)
– reactive overcontrol (inhibition to novelty).
– separation distress probably involves the inability to control negative emotions such as anxiety or sadness/depression
Children who are able to control their attention and behavior are expected to manage their emotions, plan their behavior, and develop and utilize skills needed to get along with others and to engage in socially appropriate behavior.
Indeed, effortful control has been related to higher levels of emotion regulation, sympathy and prosocial behavior, internalized conscience, committed compliance, and social competence.
The Relations of Maternal Emotion-Related Socialization to Children’s Effortful Control and Social Functioning
Although children’s effortful control reflects constitutionally based individual differences in temperament, the environment also plays a role in the development of these characteristics maternal sensitivity has been linked with infants’ and young children’s self-regulation and a reduction in negative emotion.
In toddlerhood, children with more responsive mothers have been found to display higher effortful control maternal warmth/support observed in the early years has predicted children’s ability to shift attention at 3.5 years of age, and parental warmth has been linked to children’s appropriate affect expression and regulation of positive affect.
The main goal of the current study was to examine whether toddlers’ effortful control mediates the relation between mothers’ supportive socialization strategies and four constructs reflecting the quality of toddlers’ socioemotional functioning (i.e., separation distress, inhibition to novelty, externalizing, and social competence).
In summary, in this study, we examined the relations of maternal supportive parenting to toddlers’ effortful control and social functioning at 18 months of age and 1 year later. We began the study when children were quite young because effortful control is thought to make significant improvements in the 2nd year of life, and toddlers’ problem behaviors have been found to predict maladjustment years later.
We chose to measure children’s internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors because these problems often reflect children’s deficiencies in controlling emotions and behavior. In addition, children’s effortful control likely facilitates social competence. Finally, we used multiple reporters and included observational measures of toddlers’ effortful control and maternal supportive parenting.
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As we begin to pay closer attention both to how we interact with others during times of needs, and to how they interact with us (and in our thinking about how our abusive early caregivers interacted with us), we can begin to see that when trauma built the body-brain, effortful control has been affected. As difficult as it might be to accept, this means to me that perhaps most behavior that harms others IS NOT INTENTIONALLY designed to harm another person.
This is NOT to say that ‘reactive control’ behaviors are not harmful. What I am seeking to better understand is how these behaviors can happen AT ALL, particularly when they occur in situations where a person is vulnerable (including infant-childhood). All the above information relates to later, adult stage enactments of trauma dramas.
When true consideration for another person’s feelings and needs cannot overcome a trauma-built person’s OWN feelings and needs, true empathy and compassion cannot exist. All attachment disorders include some component of this fact. As a consequence, everyone with an insecure attachment pattern, built into their body-brain through less than optimal early caregiver interactions, suffers from an empathy disorder.
That certainly includes me and many people that I know.
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CHILD’S BOOK ON COMPASSION:
Tenzin’s Deer by Barbara Soros and Danuta Mayer
More Children’s Books about Compassionate Action
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Stop the Storm 