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To begin to understand my mother, how she treated me, and how her treatment of me changed me, I need to understand the most primary A-B-Cs – The patterns of Attachment our forming Brain had with our earliest Caregiver formed the foundation of our brain from which our self-in-the-world originates.

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Babies are born with the basic ‘floor plan’ of their brain already laid out.  All the regions of every human’s brain are in the same place, just as our other organs and limbs are.  A baby is also born with billions more neurons, or brain nerve cells, than will actually be needed in the brain building stages that follow birth.

Genetics in interaction with the uterine experience have already influenced early brain development before birth.  If the infant has not suffered damage-changes within its mother, at birth it has more than enough neurons for what comes next.  I think about my son, who is soon to be 25.  He was a Lego maniac from the first time he picked up one of those bright plastic little pieces at the age of three.  He eventually ended up with a foot locker packed with thousands and thousands of individual pieces (which his mother is requiring him to keep forever).

If he was even now in a Lego playing mood, he would find enough variety and type of piece to create just about anything his imagination could design.  Tear them apart, make something entirely different.  Whatever pieces he might not use in one design can be kept in reserve, recombined, used later, or never used at all.  But he has the choice of keeping them all, and keep them he does.

An infant’s brain growth and development does not work in quite this same way.  Humans are born with far more than enough neurons, and most of them are not specified in the beginning as to what region of the brain they will go to or what kind of neuron they will turn into according to what job they will eventually perform.  This is because brain building is a flexible process.  While it is intended that some of the overly abundant neurons will die, the plan is that as many of them as possible find their way into use as a best possible brain is built.

The kind of interactions and the nature of experiences an infant has within the world it was born into direct the process of body-brain building so that the resulting brain will be adapted in the best way possible for the conditions of the world the infant was born into.  This adaptive brain building process is in full motion as soon as an infant is born.

As I have said, humans are designed to receive, understand and respond to signals from within the environment in the form of communications.  A growing human brain detects signals and builds itself in partnership with the environment itself, an environment that is presented to the infant through the kinds of interactions it has with its earliest mothering caregiver.

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Most of us probably think of a brain as a wrinkled, soft, squishy organ that we would not want to hold in our hands.  Because it is probably the most important organ we have, Siegel’s following description of it might give us a better idea about what we are talking about:

“The brain has an estimated one hundred billion neurons, which are collectively over two million miles long.  Each neuron has an average of then thousand connections that directly link itself to other neurons.  Thus there are thought to be about one million billion of these connections, making it “the most complex structure, natural or artificial, on earth.” [he gives a reference here to Green et al, 1998, page 427]  A neuron sends an electrical impulse down its long axons; this releases a neurotransmitter at the space at the end, called a “synapse,” which then excites or inhibits the downstream neuron.  A synapse is the connection that functionally links neurons to one another.  Because of the spider-web-like interconnections, activation of one neuron can influence an average of ten thousand neurons at the receiving ends!  The number of possible “on-off” patterns of neuronal firing is immense, estimated as a staggering ten times ten one million times (ten to the millionth power).”  (page 13 in the writings of Dr. Daniel J. Siegel in his book The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are (The Guilford Press, 1999))

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The firing patterns in a mother’s brain specifically activate similar firing patterns in her infant’s brain as all the adaptive neurons within it are ‘learning’ what to do in relationship to being alive in a body in the world.  As an infant grows, and its newly forming brain gets up and running, the infant will be able to both receive the signals its caregiver is sending accurately, but will also get better and better at sending its own signals back to her.

A safe and securely attached infant will have its own signals received accurately by its mother and as she sends them back to the infant through am accurate mirroring process, the infant begins to clarify and BECOME ITS OWN SELF in the world.  This signaling happens with patterns and rhythms that are instructing the infant’s neurons where to go, what job to do, how to link them together into circuits and networks during this process that is designed to create brain.

An infant is born with a brain blueprint, but it is the experiences it has with its early mothering caregiver that make brain building happen according to emotional information the mother gives to her infant during the critical development stages her infant’s brain goes through.  Brain building happens in predictable stages.  Just as a Jacuzzi cannot be placed in a sky scraper’s pent house before all the steel structural components have been put into place, a baby’s brain cannot ‘think’ in the way we think about thinking from the start of its life.  A brain has to be built that an infant-child can do its thinking with.

The way an infant receives signals from its mother happen through its basic senses in the same way we receive signals from our environment during our entire lifetime.  It might be hard to believe, but at birth an infant already knows its mother.  It knows the feel of her, the rhythms of her, the sound of her and is tuned to her smell and her touch from the moment it is born.  If a newborn is removed at birth from its mother it will experience grief detectable in the physiological responses its body will demonstrate.  Foster and adoptive parents can be trained to recognize the ‘symptoms’ of a newborn’s grieving stages as it passes through and completes them.

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Beginning even before birth communication signaling between and infant and its mother is already taking place.  It is through the increasingly more complex abilities an infant comes to have, through the brain development it experiences in interaction with the mother, that the brain takes its genetic potential complete with the mechanisms that tell the genes what to do, combines it with information coming into the infant from its environment, and grows all the basic brain regions and the operational connections through them.

This early brain growth happens as mother-infant communication signaling involves emotion.  It is through emotional interactions in this dyad, this connection between the two – mother and infant – through smell, touch, rhythm (prosody or the music of speech complete with pitch, loudness and tone), and most importantly through facial expressions that human brains are extremely well prepared to receive, recognize and respond back to.  Nature has specifically designed women-mothers to participate appropriately in these early required emotional interactions with infants.

Siegel writes (in the above mentioned book):

“The primary ingredient of secure attachment experiences is the pattern of emotional communication between child and caregiver….The way the mind establishes meaning – the way it places value or significance on experience – is closely linked to social interactions.  This connection between meaning and interpersonal experience occurs because these two processes appear to be mediated via the same neural circuits responsible for initiating emotional processes.”  (page 6)

The foundation of an infant’s initial brain region growth and development happens through emotional communication with its mothering caregiver.  Done ‘best’ in secure attachment environments, a ‘best world possible’ emotionally regulated brain is built in, by and for a benevolent world.  In turn, a dysregulated, jumbled, mis-qued disorganized, disoriented pattern of instability, lack of predictability, without safe and secure emotional attachment experiences builds a very different infant brain that is adapted to a malevolent world.

All the early infant brain building that goes on is directed by the nature of its early emotional caregiver experiences.  The adaptive, growing brain slides its neurons around, tells them where to go, what to do, how to connect to one anther, where to build pathways, roads and superhighways in response to these early emotional interactions.  It is the critically important emotional-social area of the brain that grows first through these caregiver experiences.  It is this area of the brain, once built, that will primarily orchestrate how a person is in the world for their lifetime.  Remembering the importance of Siegel’s words from yesterday’s post about this area of the brain, I repeat them here:

“The centrally located “limbic system” … plays a central role in coordinating the activity of higher and lower brain structures.  The limbic regions are thought to mediate emotion, motivation, and goal-directed behavior.  Limbic structures permit the integration of a wide range of basic mental processes, such as the appraisal of meaning, the processing of social experience (called “social cognition”), and the regulation of emotion.  This region also houses the medial temporal lobe (toward the middle, just to the sides of the temples), including the hippocampus, which is thought to play a central role in consciously accessible forms of memory.

The brain as a whole functions as an interconnected and integrating system of subsystems.  Although each element contributes to the functioning of the whole, regions such as the limbic system, with extensive input and output pathways linking widely distributed areas in the brain, may be primarily responsible for integrating brain activity.

When we look to understand how the mind develops, we need to examine how the brain comes to regulate its own processes.  Such self-regulation appears to be carried out in large part by these limbic regions.”  (pages 10-11 – bolding is mine)

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If an infant’s earliest mothering-caregiver interactions happen through safe and secure attachment experiences, this area of the brain will organize, integrate and regulate emotion, social interaction, meaning and activity for a ‘best’ world.  In unsafe and insecure environments, this area of the brain will grow itself a different way.

The nature of these early experiences create patterns in the brain that appear as representations of experience, and these ‘mental models’ expand through associations and connections – or through patterns of dissociations and disconnections — to affect how a person is in the world.  Our emotional regulatory abilities, our mental processes, our states of mind, our ability to transition between states of mind, the way we remember ourselves in the world, are all connected in their roots to how our infant emotional brain was formed at the time of our beginning.

Sigel:

“…different mental processes are organized within a state of mind.  These states allow disparate [fundamentally different] activities of the brain to become cohesive at a given moment in time.”  (page 7)

Through our earliest mothering-caregiver emotional experiences, as this area of our infant brain is forming, the trajectory our self-in-the-world will take is determined and set into motion.  Understanding how early infant attachment experiences build our brain gives us an accurate way to look at our self and others in the world as we come to understand the fundamental and profound affect these early experiences have on forming the regions, patterns, circuits and operation of our core brain areas.

In cases such as my mother’s, I can begin to understand that who she was on the adult end of her development cannot be disconnected from how she was formed to operate in the world from her beginnings.  Her brain, as does all of ours, formed itself in response to the kinds of mothering-caregiver interactions she had and did not have.  Obviously, her brain did not form in the ‘best way possible’ for the ‘best world possible’.  Her brain formed in adjustment to deprivation-trauma.

My mother’s case is an extreme one.  Yet, again, we are talking about degrees of deprivation-trauma and degrees of ability to adapt to it.  Once we begin to understand the power safe and secure early attachment has to form a ‘best brain’ we can also begin to understand how degrees of insecure, unsafe attachment experiences change the growing infant brain’s foundation into ‘something else’.

My mother’s brain was not built by safe and secure attachment in a benevolent world.  My mother became a ‘something else’.  No doubt about it.  I know this because I am her daughter.

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