The baby in this video returns, as I mentioned before, to its mother during a point in its exploration of its own self in the mirror when a sense of LACK of safety and security overwhelms it.  It returns to her for PROTECTION.  It returns to her because the baby is FEELING a sense of RUPTURE within itself that requires REPAIR.  Appropriately, its repair is tied to its reliance upon its mother.  If the baby DID NOT have — already PRIOR to this experience — a safe and secure attachment experience-relationship with its mother, where could it have possibly have turned for the REPAIR (protection, safety, security) that it so fundamentally needed at that moment?

Then I think about my own self as an infant-child.  I had NOBODY to turn to, and I never did from the moment I was born.  Then I think again about the furry baby in the video (above).  I think again about all I have learned about how the LACK of safe and secure attachment (protection) changes an infant’s total physiological development — so that the ‘stress response’ end of the continuum that is supposed to be counter-weighted and counteracted by the ‘calm connection’ end of the response system is never activated.

So development is guided by the stress hormone cortisol rather than by the optimal physiological ‘guidance system’ of safe and secure attachment.  Where do we find our CALM?  Where would the furry baby have been able to find its calm at the point it needed to down-regulate its anxiety-stress-not-feeling-safe-in-the-world response?

Being able to yet AGAIN turn its its external source of regulation for repair means that yet AGAIN those patterns of rupture WITH the experience of repair were building themselves into the little ones growing body-brain.

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The baby’s growing and developing body-brain was malleable.  It was going to adapt one way or the other to either NO REPAIR (no safety, security, protection, attachment) or to the opposite.  The resiliency factor was its MOTHER and HER ability to form and foster that attachment relationship.

This all led me to realize that just as I have said before that my mother’s orchestrated CONSTANT moving around was GOOD FOR ME.  The moving meant we went to different schools, often changing schools in the middle of the year after we had started the school year late.  I HAD to build ACTIVE COPING skills into my own self in response to those challenges.  I had NO way, on the other hand, to use active coping skills at home in response to my mother’s constant abuse of me.

My body-brain grew and developed, however, with active coping skill abilities built into it to a large extent because of the continual moving.

I also realized today that this moving, as it included moving on and off of our mountain homestead was good for me, also.  My ONLY safe and secure attachment was to the glorious wilderness that mountain provided me.  When we left it — as in the book Heidi by Johanna Spyri which was my absolute favorite story when I was growing up — I experience terrible grief when we left the mountain (RUPTURE) as I also experienced calm-connection-joy (REPAIR) when we returned to it.

Instead of having any human being (including a mother) to experience the patterns of rupture and repair with, I had the Alaskan wilderness mountain homestead.  Well, that was evidently GOOD ENOUGH!  As a result I do have rupture-repair patterns built into me.  They happened beginning when I was 7 (when we found the mountain), not before that except with my 14-month-older brother.  But evidently that was ENOUGH to get me by.

It wasn’t enough to let my body-brain avoid growing itself with a massive ‘stress-anxiety’ ON GO system being overdeveloped within me — along with the host of problems this reality creates for me.  But at least I have enough to WORK WITH as I use what I do have to learn, grow, heal and change NOW in spite of the terrible difficulties I suffered during those first 18 years of my critical growth and development.