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The long-range purpose of a safe and secure early attachment between an infant and its caregivers is that it provides humans with a body (including our nervous systems (central and autonomic) and brain) with its own internal and rock solid inner sense that no matter what happens in life one can know “I will be OK.” Either we have all the active and passive coping skill abilities within our own power, OR if we encounter a threatening situation that we can’t handle alone, we trust that SOMEONE else will be there to help us do what we cannot do our self.
Given that AT LEAST half the population in America never really had a safe and secure attachment with an early caregiver from the time we were born, this half DOES NOT have a safe and secure attachment-built body and brain. Once our society recognizes that the quality of these earliest attachments determines how our genes are activated as it determines how our body builds itself to process social-emotional information (primarily through our right brain hemisphere with its deepest connections to our body itself) IN INTERACTION WITH ALL ASPECTS OF OUR ONGOING ENVIRONMENT, we will begin to look at ourselves as human beings differently.
True empathy and true compassion are the most important natural gifts that humans possess to get along as members of a SOCIAL SPECIES. If early attachments are not safe and secure, empathy and compassion systems in our body-brain will NOT operate as they are intended to. What is left for the half (or more) of our population that didn’t get a safe and secure earliest (before age one) attachment relationship is a lack of ability to process emotional-social information correctly. This means that all our body’s ‘chemicals’ that connect to and run all of our systems including our stress response system, will always operate to some degree as if danger is always present somewhere.
This state does not give us a ‘feeling’ of well-being. No amount of pills and drugs, no matter in what form they are consumed, will ever replace the natural inner balanced state a safe and secure early attachment environment is designed to give us. All attachment and all ‘addictions’ use the exact same body chemicals to transmit information. There is NOTHING magic about this fact. Humans (all mammals) are built this way.
Our inner stress response system moves to “ON” any time we do not feel safely and securely attached to others, to our own self, and to the outer world we live in. The half of the population without a body-brain built by safe and secure earliest attachment relationships will have a GREAT DEAL OF TROUBLE turning their insecurely attached system to “OFF.” Humans will then search outside of their self in every possible direction to meet the needs that most of us DO NOT UNDERSTAND are directly connected to how our early attachment system was built – and then built us – from our conception to primarily the age of two.
When our attachment system is insecurely built, we will ALWAYS feel some degree of lack of well-being that creates pain of some kind within our body. Many times this translates into our awareness as a chronic state of ‘anxiety’. We operate like a furnace system would operate that does not have a well-built thermostat to control it. Too hot, too cold, inappropriate responses to the actual environment will result.
Once these insecure attachment patterns are built into our body they are very very real and the underlying physical construction of our body will always on its own naturally keep us in some state of fear and/or sadness. As this happens our abilities to use what we should have been given through safe and secure attachment – the properly operating empathy and compassion CONNECTION end of our stress response system – will be interfered with. This means, as I have said so often before, that we are not only NOT getting the correct information as it actually exists in the environment, we are ALSO not able to process the information we get appropriately in relationship to how we actually are in the environment.
Our body-brain was built in the beginning in an environment that was not safe and secure, and our body-brain WILL NEVER let us forget that we are not safe in the world because we were NOT safe when this body we live in was built in the first place.
If we wish to change the architecture and structure of this ‘building’, this body we live in we have to understand that what is going on for us traces all the way back to those earliest infant-caregiver relationships we had in the first place. THOSE are the ones that constructed this body we live in from the start of our life. There is no magic here! There is NO WAY to erase the consequences of what early neglect, abuse, maltreatment and stress did to change how our body-brain was designed and constructed at the start of our life.
What we CAN do is identify exactly how we were built from the start and then learn to consciously REMODEL how we live in our body-brain today. This is NOT the same thing as tearing the whole ‘building’ down so we can start over – beginning with a new foundation. We can NOW learn as a society what is possible, what is not possible, and how to realistically work within the parameters of how our body ended up after being so traumatized at the start of our life.
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From the center of my being I daily send out a silent cry that those developmental neuroscientists that absolutely know the facts and details of what I am talking about will get off their proverbial butts or high horses and WRITE the information we need to know in an understandable, readable and workable format.
While the information exists in all kinds of complicated and too-hard-for-us-regular-folks to understand, it needs to be clearly communicated TO ALL OF US!
At least 50% of our population is SUFFERING from the consequences of how early unsafe, insecure and inadequate MOTHERING changed the way our body-brain was built in the first place. That means that this half of the population is suffering in ways that the OTHER HALF are not – and never will be.
Given also that within the 50% of the population that DOES HAVE a trauma-changed body-brain there are degrees of changes that create increasingly difficult living conditions, this matter is SERIOUS. As the Center for Disease Control is clearly demonstrating just within their Adverse Childhood Experiences research, the lifelong difficulties created my early stress and trauma impact everyone – especially those living in these trauma-changed bodies.
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Until the needed information is presented clearly in my thinking not one single person of the 50% of our population with some degree of trauma-changed body is going to be accurately assessed or ‘diagnosed’ no matter what physical health (including so-called mental health) ‘symptoms’ they are showing. That this information is not collected and translated for us is a symptom itself of the terrible and fundamental splits we have within the different fields of study in the ‘healing’ professions.
I cannot fix these massive societal malfunctions. I can work my way through the writing of my share of the book my daughter and I are working on that will end up making exactly this same plea to THOSE WHO KNOW what matters about early infant-child traumatic stress and what it does to permanently change physiological development. I better get to work now on my part of this important project!!!!!
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Stop the Storm 
Excellent and clear writing. Loved it. You mentioned what we can do is “remodel” instead of starting from scratch..since we can;t do that. I dont really know what u mean by remodel though. Do u mean by accepting how we are and working within our constraints?
I had a client when I worked at a mental health day centre who was DX with szchoid personality. She could not make eye contact and would speak very little. I was slowly able to intergrate her into a social group where she would particpate when asked.Also she joined a scrapbooking class where she could express herself through that.
I knew it must have been some form of neglect or abuse. Talking to her and having her respond was like pulling teeth. It caused her a lot of distress.And in her journals which I know I wasnt suppose to look at but was dying to know how she REALLY feels and thinks…wrote about self hate .
But her doctor and the mental health profession puts their focus on the dx and the symptoms…her social withdrawal etc. Instead of digging deep into what actually made her this way?
It seems to me society puts theur focus on the surface…never gets at the root..
What does ‘DX’ mean?
That was a start at remodeling with that lady as you describe it – remodeling is “Ah, those on the lower end of the evolutionary ladder…. Gotta love ’em, the sure are trying….’ and MORE — if we knew, truly knew how our body changed we could begin to focus on making realistic changes working with our body instead of against it
So much of the time even these articles I find talk about how we are ‘damaged’ — and I don’t like that or even agree with it much of the time. We are CHANGED, and I like that so much better! We are DIFFERENT and understandably so considering how our development allowed us to adapt or DIE!
I think along with the changes we have GIFTS that we can recognize. Being able to ‘fit in better’ with a society that is not all that healthy isn’t ideal, either. It’s all a growth process, for everyone
I once worked as an art therapist in a mental health center and ‘had to’ sit in on their meetings where they talked about clients, etc.
one time they talked about a woman who was terrified/phobic about clouds (and lightning) – they made all kinds of jokes about her and laughed and laughed and it made me so MAD! I wanted to art therapy with her, I knew I could discover how her fear was tied up inside her. Once that was recognized we could have found ways to work with that toward healing. I worked for a different program in their agency and there was no way I could work with her. BOY they made me mad — and these were the clinicians and the directors!
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I was just outside until dark working in the garden. Tied up some of the newly grown stalks of some climbing roses. Best to do that when the canes are new and more flexible, but even then I have to be so careful not to overstress and break them
They will grow willy nilly all over the place, but to train them I have to change the direction into the ‘right one’ for them to begin to grow towards and around the trellis — but NOT to break them — but to work WITH them and to ENCOURAGE them to ‘remodel’ themselves into a new – and better for their longterm growth – direction
I also have to trim leaves off of some flower plants to let the sunshine in for other ones to grow – that’s remodeling the flower beds – clipping dead flowers, etc – all remodeling.
We are remodeling ourselves all of the time when we learn and grow and make goals and find things we can do to make the world a better place and us too –but we cannot start from scratch and we will never be like we would have been without the trauma changes