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Tuesday, January 14, 2014.  A dear friend just sent me a link to this article and I GET IT!  Our little ones are our greatest teachers.  Letting ourselves know this might be the biggest step we take as adults toward our own healing.  We were little once.  Knowing who paid what kind of attention to us when it mattered most can give us the most important information of our lives toward understanding HOW we are in the world.  WHO we are?  Well, we were born knowing that as every baby can show us if we pay attention.

Making A Soul Connection With Your Baby

Posted by janet on May 15th, 2012

Now that I spend my week days caring for my 17-month-old grandson I am reminded of how fragile the connection is between the soul-self of a little one and the world it lives in.  Especially tenuous is the connection a wee one has on its soul-self level to the people who matter most in its world — its adult early caregivers.

The interactions a little one has with these adults happen ONLY within attachment relationships because that is the only kind of relationship a young one CAN have.  Being dependent for its absolute survival upon the care it receives from the big people in its life make a little person vulnerably open to the reception adults give it.

I like how this article highlights HUMOR in little people!  Humor abilities, however, are directly tied to the left brain’s happiness center that has neurologically been shaped in its formation by the quality of especially MOTHER-INFANT interactions the infant experienced during the first year of its life.  Great safe and secure attachment interactions = the formation of the biggest, most solid and best working happiness center a person can acquire.  Shabby and/or hurtful interactions and an early forming happiness center in the brain will be less-than-optimal for a lifetime.

Another characteristic I am beginning to see in my grandson is a periodic display of shyness that clearly places him on one side of “a great divide” and me as his adult caregiver on the other side.

What happens at these times is important.  I cannot rush in and swoop him into MY world so much as gently recognize the presence of another soul-self “over there” as I make connection and invite him to join me on THIS side.  (Yes, “boundary issues” are very present concerns for humans of all ages!)

Humans are a social species and how we negotiate the space between our soul-self and another soul-self defines the quality of our shared lives.  Obviously when horrendous relationship trauma exists in a little one’s world the soul-self has no way to safely — and in trust of that safety — cross over into the material world where it is meant to reside in this lifetime.

This is connected to the great sorrow and grief and to the great feelings of loneliness and isolation as well as to the deep mistrust of humans that many of us severe early trauma survivors experience near our core.  We could not cross that “great divide” safely when we were little and were supposed to be given what we needed to make our soul-self (essential self) transition into this life. 

How do we now negotiate that transition as adults?  This entire blog is my attempt to answer that question!

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