Tag: borrowed secure attachment

+AN OUTLINE – THE SCOTTISH TAKE ON INFANT ABUSE, NEGLECT, TRAUMA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

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Infant psychotherapy.  It wasn’t that many years ago that I didn’t even know this professional field even existed!  Today I understand that everything about infant psychotherapy for traumatized, neglected and abused infants (and children) applies to me – even though I am now 59 years old!

When I have days when I don’t feel ‘good’ or ‘well’ or ‘right’ it helps me to know why.  On days that seem much more difficult than others I often go searching online for information that I know will mirror back to me WHAT happened to me that created the states I find myself in today.

When I read through the information that follows in this post I KNOW it is describing me.  It could seem strange that I have to go all the way back to my first three years of life in order to locate the information I need to explain to myself that I am FINE – even when I don’t feel one bit FINE!

As I read what follows I can begin to put into perspective how the terrible abuse and trauma I was born into took away from me any possible chance of developing a normal body-brain in any normal way.  The information that follows puts a mirror in front of me that lets me see that NOBODY, absolutely NOBODY could have done any better job at surviving what happened to me than I did.

That same NOBODY could not have helped but end up in a body-brain that was forced to change its course of development in adaptation to severe abuse and trauma just as mine did.  In this information (below) there are big empty spaces along with few actual words in a PowerPoint presentation which gives me and my early abuse and trauma survivor peers plenty of room to add in between the lines any specifics about our actual beginnings that add up, in combination with the scientific facts presented here, to be who and HOW we are today – stunningly successful survivors of what could have easily killed us.

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I know that this is a strange format for a post – but I think this is important information.  It’s just that I found it online in the form of a PowerPoint presentation that Google automatically put into an HTML format for me.  This appears to have come from a presentation done by Dr. Louise Newman, director of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry in Scotland.  (I have Americanized the spelling and added a few things in italics between [brackets])

TITLE OF PRESENTATION:

THE FIRST THREE YEARS – promoting infant mental health and development

INFANCY AS A DEVELOPMENTAL PERIOD

  • Infancy is a foundational developmental period
  • Infancy is a critical period where certain experiences are required for healthy development across the life span
  • Infant development occurs in the context of caretaking relationships
  • “There is no such thing as an infant” [I have no idea what this means!]

DEVELOPMENT IN INFANCY

  • Neuropsychological processes
  • Affect regulation
  • Representations of self, other
  • Attachment Style
  • Adaptation  to Stress
  • Capacity for intimacy and empathy

INFANT CAPACITIES

  • Programmed for social interaction [from before our birth]
  • Ability to communicate emotional experience
  • Move towards development and self-regulation

EARLY BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

  • Promoted by secure attachment
  • Sharing of positive affective states
  • Caregiver maintains optimal level of arousal [essential for building the entire connection between Central Nervous System and its center set point, brain, stress-calm response system, Autonomic Nervous System, vagus nerve system immune system]
  • Mutually attuned synchronized interactions promote affective development

Rapid growth occurs in the first three years of life – connections and networks

  • Experience shapes brain development – connections develop as the result of stimulation [neglect has disasterous consequences due to too little stimulation, abuse and trauma = too much stimulation – even TOO happy can be damaging because it also can be too stimulating for a very young developing nervous system-brain]

EXPERIENCE & DEVELOPMENT

  • Experience activates specific neuronal connections
  • Sharing positive emotional states with a caretaker promotes brain growth and the development of regulatory capacities
  • Secure attachment promotes neurobiological functioning, emotional regulation and adaptation to stress

NEUROBIOLOGY OF ATTACHMENT

  • Secure attachment promotes brain growth [insecure attachment and its stress creates cortisol reactions that destroy brain cells.  Too little early joy kills brain cells in the left brain happy center]
  • Attachment relationship regulates emotional experience and level of arousal
  • Attachment figure acts as an external neurobiological regulator

NEUROBIOLOGY OF ATTACHMENT

  • SECURE ATTACHMENT – optimal level of arousal
  • AVOIDANT ATTACHMENT – downplaying of emotional display
  • AMBIVALENT ATTACHMENT – heightened emotional display
  • DISORGANIZED ATTACHMENT – high arousal and stress

NEUROCHEMISTRY OF ATTACHMENT

  • Resting mutual gaze – endogenous opioids
  • Regulation of neurotransmitters – dopamine and serotonin
  • Regulation of stress hormones – noradrenalin, cortisol

ATTACHMENT DISORGANIZATION

  • Associated with trauma and abuse
  • Lack of effective strategy for dealing with caretaker
  • High levels of stress and related hormones
  • Defensive exclusion of understanding of caretaker
  • Excessive use of dissociation and opioid related states

ATTACHMENT DISORGANIZATION

  • Poor development of internal state language
  • Poor reflective function
  • Deficits in empathy
  • Contradictory representations of self and other
  • Dysregulation of behavior, affect and impulses

TRAUMA IN INFANCY & CHILDHOOD

  • Psychic trauma occurs when a sudden unexpected intense external experience overwhelms the individuals’ coping and defensive operations, creating the feeling of utter helplessness [Bold type is mine.  Well, this certainly describes the insane violent mess I was born into, formed within, and endured for the first 18 years of my life — with NO single safe and secure attachment to ANYONE.  There was no possible way for my body-brain to form the circuits, connections, networks and pathways necessary to INTERNALIZE secure attachments.  No wonder I miss my loved ones so much!]
  • Lenore Terr (1987)

TRAUMA AND DEVELOPMENT

  • Effects of trauma during critical periods of development
  • Long-term implications of attachment disruption and maltreatment
  • New infant brain research and implications for decision-making, intervention and child protection

CHRONIC TRAUMA AND DEVELOPMENT

  • Child adapts to enduring stress according to developmental stage and capacities
  • Chronic stress will effect all domains of development and neurobiological functioning [bolding is mine]
  • Vulnerability is greatest at stages of rapid neurobiological organization

SPECTRUM OF TRAUMA

  • Single overwhelming events
  • Chronic enduring stressors
  • Indirect exposure
  • Transgenerational trauma

MODERATE STRESSORS

  • Emotionally unavailable caregiver – depression, anxiety, bereavement
  • Parental hostility and anger
  • Family conflict and domestic violence
  • Unpredictability and inconsistency
  • Neglect and stimulus deprivation

EXTEME & CATASTROPHIC STRESSORS –
NCCIP Classification

  • Loss of attachment figure
  • Continued physical/sexual abuse
  • Family overwhelmed – war, displacement, terror
  • Abandonment and gross neglect

TRANSGENERATIONAL TRAUMA

  • Repetition of disturbed interactions and patterns of relationships
  • Repetition of abuse and maltreatment
  • Issues for abused parents – anxiety, compensation and reparation, envy
  • Re-enactment of unresolved attachment trauma

NEURODEVELOPMENT & TRAUMA

  • Dysregulation of HPA axis functioning – stress system
  • Altered cortisol pattern – stress hormone
  • Reduced volume of hippocampus – memory
  • Reduced volume of corpus callosum – information processing
  • Potential effects on mood and impulse control, emotional regulation

BRAIN FUNCTION & EXPERIENCE

  • STRESS – hyperactive stress response
  • CHAOS – poor sensory integration, attentional and processing problems
  • NEGLECT – poor emotional regulation, deficits in processing of socioemotional information and attachment
  • ABUSE – poor regulation of anger, aggression, impulses, anxiety; deficits in emotional understanding,

IMPACT OF TRAUMA

  • Severity of the stressor
  • Developmental level of the child
  • Availability and capacity of adult support

CHILDRENS’ RESPONSES TO TRAUMA

  • Children process and recall acute traumatic events
  • Persistent high arousal and anxiety
  • Immediate reactions include regression, clinging, muteness
  • Traumatic re-enactment in play and behavior

TRAUMA SPECIFIC DIAGNOSES

  • Acute stress responses in infants – dissociation
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder – traumatic play, fears
  • Disruptive Behavior Disorders
  • Attachment Disorders

TRAUMA AND THE BRAIN

  • Stress hormones and cortisol are neurotoxic
  • Sensitized pathways develop in right orbito-frontal brain regions – PTSD
  • Long lasting impairment in brain regions involved in regulation of the intensity of feelings
  • Persistent dissociation

RESPONSES TO THREAT

  • HYPERAROUSAL – fight or flight response; adrenaline/noradrenaline; sympathetic
  • DISSOCIATIVE – freeze or play dead response; opioids and dopamine; parasympathetic

CHRONIC TRAUMA

  • Persistent orientation to threat and activation of stress response
  • Altered opioid, dopaminergic and serotonergic systems
  • Hyperarousal and overactivity
  • Affective dysregulation and impulsivity

TYPE 2 TRAUMA –

  • Adaptation – avoidance, repression, dissociation
  • Repetition – re-enactment, play, identification
  • Anxiety – arousal, aggression, self-harm
  • Self-Concept – depression, guilt, shame

CORE DEFICITS

  • Problems with interpersonal relationships
  • Problems with affect regulation
  • Ongoing vulnerability to stress
  • Self and other representations – negative self-concept, mistrust of others
  • Deficits in reflective function and empathy

TRAUMA SYNDROME

  • Over reaction to trauma associated stimuli
  • Poor anxiety tolerance
  • Poor modulation of aggression
  • Disorganized attachment behaviors, anger towards attachment figures
  • Poor affect control
  • Self-destructive behaviors

TRAUMA & PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

  • Dysregulation of affect and impulses
  • Disorganized attachment
  • Multiple models of self and others
  • Poor reflective function
  • Negative self-introject

HIGH RISK PARENTING

  • Parenting relationships which impact adversely on child development and particularly on  security of attachment
  • Spectrum of parenting behaviors, emotional responses, attitudes and conflicts (conscious and unconscious) which are traumatizing for the child and result in disorganization of attachment and impact on emotional and behavioral regulation
  • Influenced by parental attachment history, reflective capacity and mental state

PREVENTION IN HIGH RISK DYADS

  • Identify maternal history of abuse and trauma
  • Identify capacity to think of the infants’ needs and inner world
  • Look for patterns of identification of infant with a traumatic figure
  • Interventions focus on improving responsivity and emotional attunement
  • Aim at improving understanding of infant needs and changing perceptions of the infant
  • Infant -led interventions

IMPLICATIONS OF NEW BRAIN RESEARCH

  • Importance of protecting children during critical neurodevelopmental periods
  • Foundational role of early attachment experiences and psychosocial environment
  • Protective role of alternate attachment experiences

PARENT-INFANT CLINICAL INTERVENTION

THEORETICAL MODELS — Part 2

RATIONALE FOR INTERVENTION

  • Increasing evidence for the foundational importance of infancy
  • Need for prevention and early intervention
  • Relationship problems are transgeneratioinal
  • New knowledge of early brain development

PARENT-INFANT INTERVENTIONS

  • Focus on the infant and the caretaking environment
  • Promote infant development and attachment security
  • Preventive focus
  • Use observable interactions and their meaning
  • Model of affective communication

RANGE OF INTERVENTIONS

  • Parent-focused psychoeducational Approaches
  • Behavioral Management Approaches
  • Relationship based Approaches
  • Psychodynamic and Psychoanalytic
  • Eclectic

INTERVENTIONS

  • Dyadic or Triadic
  • Infant experience as focus
  • Understanding caregiver’s representation of the infant
  • Eclectic technique – behavioral, dynamic, systemic

DEVELOPMENT OF PROBLEMS IN INFANCY

  • Infant is born with capacities to establish a relationship with a human being
  • Born into a network of intergenerational internalized relationships
  • Infant has meaning in the mind of the parent

PROBLEMS IN INFANCY

  • Problems develop when the mother/caregiver cannot see the infant as separate and communicating
  • Unresolved parental attachment trauma permeates the relationship with the infant

WINNICOTT: MATERNAL HOLDING

  • Meeting the infants spontaneous gesture
  • Allowing the infant to take initiative and communicate internal states
  • Non-Intrusive attention
  • Allows infant to experience own impulses and promotes authentic self

BION: CONTAINING MOTHER

  • Capacity to tolerate infants’ negative affect
  • Capacity to interpret infant communication
  • Affective regulation and language
  • Capacity to tolerate dependency
  • Capacity to tolerate individuation of infant

TASKS OF BIRTH

  • Adaptation to the particular infant
  • Coping with loss of fusion
  • Coping with fears of harming the infant
  • Tolerance of dependency
  • Tolerance of physicality

BABY AT BIRTH

  • Imaginary Baby
  • Relationship with developing fetus
  • Actual Infant

MEANING OF THE INFANT

  • Baby as Ghost
  • Baby as Self
  • Baby as Repetition of Past Relationship

MATERNAL SELF-CONCEPT

  • Capacity to Nurture
  • Ability to manage frustration and aggressive feelings
  • Tolerance of Dependency
  • Reworking female identity and relationship with own mother

PROBLEMS OF EARLY ATTACHMENT

  • Maternal Anxiety
  • Maternal Ambivalence
  • Transition to Parenthood
  • Partner/Systemic Issues

MATERNAL RISK FACTORS

  • Early experiences of neglect and abandonment
  • Early abuse and maltreatment
  • Unresolved anger and hostility
  • Limited access to memories and self-reflection
  • Envy and unconscious need to devalue infant experience

EARLY ATTACHMENT PROBLEMS – INFANT FACTORS

  • Intrinsic problems of interaction and regulation
  • Dysregulated infant – prematurity, neurological, substance exposure, perinatal insult
  • Neurodevelopmental Effects of trauma and stress in pregnancy

EARLY MATERNAL DISTURBACES

  • Inability to tolerate infant negative states
  • Perception of baby as attacking, hostile , rejecting or overwhelming
  • Misperception of the infant
  • Attribution of negative motives to the infant
  • Infant experiences stress, anxiety, depression, anger

PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Double Agenda – listen to mother and observe infant
  • Joint Focal Attention – therapist and mother focus on the infant and understand his/her experience and communication
  • Parallel Process – relationship between therapist and mother, mother and infant

MISPERCEIVED INFANT

  • Lack of sense of authenticity
  • Fears of abandonment and annihilation
  • Confusion about emotional states and expression
  • Neurodevelopmental effects of chronic stress

INFANT-PARENT PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Range of approaches using observable infant-parent emotional interaction
  • Model of understanding the infants difficulty as a response to relationship issues and parental impingement
  • Relationship disturbances linked to unresolved parental issues

INFANT-PARENT PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Perception of the infant is distorted by parental conflict
  • Infant is trapped in a series of reenactments or reworkings of unresolved trauma
  • Intervention aims at reconstructing past relationships and freeing infant from network of projections

LEVELS OF INTERVENTION

  • Systemic Approach:
  • Infant and parent behaviors and communication
  • Infant and parent representations

PSYCHODYNAMIC PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Formulation of the core conflict between mother and infant
  • Focus on negative affect and its origin
  • Use of interpretive interventions
  • Focus on infant experience

INFANT-PARENT PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Fraiberg: Ghosts in the Nursery
  • Unresolved parental conflict
  • Infant presence in the sessions
  • Emotional interactions and repetition
  • Infant as transference object

INFANT-LED PSYCHOTHERAPY

  • Increased focus on the infant as active communication partner
  • Aims to help parent see infant as autonomous and communicating
  • Techniques to show infant initiating, responding and being meaningful
  • Gives infant experience of being validated in the interaction

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+MY BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT WITH MY KIDS

alchemynowLeave a comment

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OK, here it is.  After spending some time outdoors now digging dirt, mixing mud and adding three more adobe blocks into my terraced walkway, I now have the third thought that follows these last two posts:

+IN THE EPIC OF MY ABUSIVE CHILDHOOD THE MOUNTAIN RAISED MY SOUL

+PUKING IN THE HIGH CHAIR: PATTERNS OF RUPTURE AND REPAIR BEFORE THE AGE OF ONE

How in the universe did I even begin to now how to appropriately interact with my own children?  After all, my mother would have reacted with an escalating, violent, terrifying and completely inappropriate and abusive fit of rage if I had done at nine months of age what my daughter did.

What do I see as being one of the major differences between my mother and myself?

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First of all, I consider it rather efficient of myself that I can make a statement here that I believe contradicts what the ‘attachment experts’ might say.  While they may claim that I had some nebulous ‘earned secure’ attachment with my children, I completely disagree.  The efficiency stems from the fact that I have not read what these experts say about this so-called (desirable) ‘earned secure attachment’, nor do I intend to waste my time doing so.

The basis of my disagreement with these ‘experts’ is that my body in-formation tells me that in cases such as mine is, they are wrong.  Because I suffered such extreme and severe, chronic abuse from the time I was born, I don’t think there would have been any human way to EARN a secure attachment ability with my children.

For one thing, I was pregnant within six months of leaving my abusive home of origin.  There is no possible way that I could have had enough meaningful or instructive attachment experiences in that short about of time to even begin to learn something different from what I KNEW the moment I stepped on that jetliner and headed off to boot camp.

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Secondly, I object to this concept of ‘earned secure attachment‘ on principle.  As I become increasingly clear about what likely happened in my mother’s infant-childhood that ruined her and made her into the mad monster she became as my mother, I consider the concept of ‘earn‘ to be as inappropriate term to apply to parent-infant/child interactions as I consider the concept of ‘mercy‘ to be.  Both concepts are tied even in the words themselves to the idea that love is a marketable item.

I do not believe that MERCY belongs in a happy, healthy, loving parent-offspring relationship.  There is nothing my children could EVER have possibly been able to do in their childhood that could have possibly required me to respond to them with mercy.  I don’t even think there is anything they can do as adults that would even implicate this concept.

As I described in last week’s post, +DID ZERO MERCY IN MY CHILDHOOD SAVE ME? it appears extremely likely that the non-human interactions regarding ‘mercy’ being given and withheld in my mother’s early years broke her.  No child should ever be told in words or in actions that “If you were only good enough you would be given my mercy – and I would love you.”

If ‘mercy’ has to be given to repair a rupture in a relationship between a parent and offspring, there is no love present.  The infant-child is not being treated as a human being, but rather as a commodity-object.

The terrible holes my mother received as wounds in her forming self and in her relationship with others specifically prepared her to eventually — unconsciously and completely – split off the two parts of herself that had been involved in commodity-mercy interactions with her early caregivers.  I became the ‘devil’s child’ projection of Mildred who could not receive mercy.  My sister became the ‘god’s child’ projection of Mildred, the one who was innately deserving of mercy – and got it.

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Should, in my mind, any ‘expert’ to suggest that I had an ‘earned secure attachment’ with my children disgusts me because this term and the thinking behind it belong to the cultural values and actions that made my mother nuts in the first place.  No more could I ‘earn’ attachment with my own children than could my mother ‘earn’ attachment with her parents.

WRONG CONCEPT!

That leaves me with MY concept, which was first connected to what I knew and could do – in my body-self – with my own children.  Because

(1)  nobody ever offered me mercy in any transaction involving rupture and repair in my childhood –

(2)  because I was not ever tricked in believing that I could possibly repair what was wrong between me and my mother- the rupture existed as a third entity, a fact of my childhood

(3)  because it was clear from my first breath I was permanently evil and damned

(4)  unlike my mother when she was little, because there was no mercy, no hope, no trick, no illusion – because I was not human and was by nature and design the child of the devil, I was free to skip the earning-mercy mix-up completely

What I believe I was able to create with my children was/is a

BORROWED SECURE ATTACHMENT

This means to me that because I did not end up with a brain that could not operate without splitting out the good and bad and projecting it onto my children, I could simply ALLOW what happens naturally to happen!

Because my children were born with perfectly perfect safe and secure attaching abilities, all I had to do was follow their natural lead.  I say borrowed because I could not then and never can repair the developmental changes that happened inside of me through my mother’s severe abuse of me from birth.  I COULD let my children attach to me.  I COULD respond to them in accordance to their attachment potential and not interfere with their natural process.

Even though I do not believe I have inbuilt attachment circuits that allow me to FEEL attachment myself, I did not have the kind of interferences that my mother had built into her that prevented, distorted and annihilated her ability to experience attachment with me.

My term ‘borrowed secure attachment’ makes it very clear to me that the natural and healthy ability to attach is NOT within me – it is within my children.  I cannot say ‘allowed secure attachment’ because my relationship with them (or with anyone else) no longer (past my infancy-very early childhood) has the potential to change or alter the permanent (and trauma-changed) nervous system-brain circuitry that was built into me as it exists WITHOUT the ability to personally experience anything but a marginal and fleeting sensation of what safe and secure attachment to humans feels like.

I can live with this.  I have all my life.  What matters to me is that I did not make my children to be like I am – any more than my mother succeeded in making me like she was.  Perhaps because I ended up with a disorganized-disoriented insecure attachment pattern, I was free to organize and orient myself as a mother around my children’s inborn ability to attach securely.

My mother, on the other hand, had no choice but to organize and or orient herself around her Borderline ‘splitting-projection’ that left no room for me to form the inner circuitry that would have allowed me to attach to human beings.  I did attach to the mountain which at least enabled ,e to retain some attachment circuits/abilities.  Evidently this was enough to allow me to allow my children to form HUMAN attachment circuitry as humans are BORN to do.

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Did I show my baby daughter MERCY when I didn’t respond inappropriately to her making herself puke for attention in her high chair?  No, I did not.  In my thinking, any parent-child relationship that includes ANY TRANSACTIONS INVOLVING MERCY holds the seeds — if not the actuality — of abuse.

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+WHAT WE MOST NEED TO KNOW: HOW MOTHERING BUILDS THE INFANT BRAIN

alchemynowLeave a comment

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There is a link here to the most important article you will ever read — complicated at the same time it describes what matters most to us as human beings.

When you click on the title of the article I am presenting here today, which is an active link that will lead you first through a series of language translations of the abstract, simply scroll down to the full article which is written in English.

It is my opinion that the information contained in this article, written by Dr. Allan N. Schore, is the most valuable we will ever read in our lifetime.  Or, I can say, the most important we will TRY to read.

Every single word I have written on my blog up until this moment is really ONLY in introduction to the information contained in this 60-page article.  I will work with this information later to try to present it in a more digestible, understandable format, but this is the ORIGIN of all of my thinking.

I discovered Shore’s neuroscientific description of the building of an infant’s brain through emotional interactions it has with its mothering earliest caregiver well before I discovered the work of Dr. Martin Teicher and his Harvard research group.  I carefully picked my way through the dense, complicated and vital information contained in Schore’s books.  The essence of all Schore’s discoveries about this critical period of infant brain development is condensed into this article I am presenting the link to today.

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Whether we have EVER thought about it up until this moment or not, when any of us ever interact with a newborn and very young infant, or as we watch a mother interacting with her newborn and very young infant, we are watching GENESIS IN ACTION.  We are watching neuroscience building a human brain – in real time, in the moment, during every single flash of a tiny millisecond interaction after another – human interactional experiences with the infant is actively BUILDING its brain.

I could say the following with every breath I ever take for the rest of my life and it would not be enough:  When an infant has a safe and secure attachment to its earliest mothering caregiver ALL these brain building interactions happen completely naturally – and adequately.  There is then no particular reason to  have to think in terms of neuroscience except that it is fascinating to understand mothers and infants together through this critically important lens of information.

HOWEVER!!!  If an infant was born to a mother whose own earliest mothering caregiver interactions were NOT safe and secure, she did not receive the kind of face-to-face brain building experiences that would have allowed her to build a BEST emotionally regulated social brain herself.  Her interactions with her infant will not follow the BEST patterns needed for her infant to build its own best brain — except under special conditions (read on).

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My daughter asked me the other day after reading my Sunday post why she doesn’t have a dysregulated brain if I have one as her mother because my own mother had one and therefore built a dysregulated brain into little infant me.

We are getting down to the most important nitty-gritty information about the truth regarding intergenerational transmission of parental unresolved trauma – through abuse, neglect and maltreatment of offspring — with her question.  She did NOT ask me why I did not abuse her the way my mother abused me.  She knows enough now to understand that the most important intergenerational issue is WHAT KIND OF BRAIN PATTERNING DOES A MOTHER TRANSMIT TO HER INFANT.

The simplest way I can answer her question is that (1) I have a different genetic composition than my mother did; (2) I suffered different patterns of deprivations-traumas than my mother did; (3) the timing during our later infant-child developmental stages that our deprivations-traumas happened to us were different; (4) these deprivations-traumas affected the genetic-change mechanisms within my mother and myself differently.

At the same time I know that both my mother and I had DISSOCIATION built into our earliest forming trauma-changed infant brain.  HOW the dissociational patterns operated were different because of the four points I just made.   What is critically important to understand is that I was able to form an entire oriented and organized dissociated ME, as a mother, that did not stand in the way of or change in any way the inborn ability my own children had to build safe and secure attachments.

My mother’s brain had formed an entirely different set of patterns related to her ‘self’ than mine did.  I could organize and orient ‘a mothering self’ that put my children at the center of my life.  My mother could not do this.

I was able, within my dissociated safe and secure mothering dissociated universe to let my children form a safe and secure attachment to me – which meant most importantly not that I literally never abused my own children – but that I was able to interact with them from birth in safe and secure attachment interactions that let THEM build a BEST brain from the start.

Of course it matters that I did not abuse them.  But what my 33-year-old daughter who is now carrying her firstborn child is, herself in her own life, MOST benefiting from is that she has a SAFELY AND SECURELY built excellent brain – that was formed from its very foundation on the BEST kinds of face-to-face mothering caregiver interactions Schore is describing in this article.

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The foundational experiences that humans have as members of a social species happen through the way their earliest mothering caregiver experiences shaped their brain’s development.  Our ability to experience and regulate our emotions, our ability to read and appropriately respond to social cues, what motivates and rewards us, what gives us meaning in our lives, what tells our body how to respond and what to respond to, what coordinates all our memory storage, processing and recall for the rest of our lives happens according to HOW our earliest mothering caregiver experiences formed our brains.

If our mother was able to ALLOW a safe and secure attachment with us, even if she herself did not get a BEST brain in her own early unsafe and insecure attachment environment, our mother was probably able to avoid building into us a replica of her own dysregulated brain.  This alternative to the feared inevitable passing on of intergenerational unresolved trauma happens through what the experts call an ‘earned secure attachment’ and what I call a ‘borrowed secure attachment’.

If development from conception to birth has not been interfered with, and certainly even at times when some prior-to-birth disruptions did occur, humans are born with the ability to form safe and secure attachments, and are designed to build the best brain possible.  That best brain, however, cannot be built without signals of communication between the mother and her infant that the world is a safe and secure place to be in.  It is the nature and quality of these earliest mother-infant signals that determine what kind of a foundational brain we build — either trauma-based or not.

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I have not in my own lifetime of 58 years ever been able to change the core foundation of the trauma-built brain I received because of my mother’s far less than best treatment of me from birth.  Every experience I have had (as happens for all of us) is directed by and processed through this earliest brain we built.  As I return to my work with my mother’s 50+ year old letters, I can see the thread of her distorted relationship with herself in the world in her writing.

I now understand that her earliest brain was formed through deprivations-traumas, and that her experiences along her continued development certainly through age five sent her course of development down a road different than mine went as a young child.  A consideration of these differences is not my concern today, because the most important place we can focus our attention is on what goes right or goes so very wrong at the very beginning of our earliest brain stage development as a brain’s foundation is built.

It is at these most important earliest brain developmental stages that the following information Schore presents matters the most.  PLEASE try to read this article.  Skip what doesn’t make sense if you must, but you WILL have some (what I call) BINGO! experiences as you read.  This information can change  how you think about yourself in the world, whether you experienced Trauma Altered Development or not.  It can change how you understand every other person you know in your life, including your infant-childhood caregivers.

Skip down immediately by scrolling to his page 22 and you will get the picture, literally, as Schore presents his visual about the nature of mother-infant emotional communication signaling.  Now you can go back and begin to read the text!  Genesis of the human brain.  Neuroscience in action.  Once we truly GET this information, especially those of us who were abused, maltreated, traumatized and CHANGED through early maltreatment, light will begin to shine on the most important facts about our being in the world.  GOOD LUCK in your reading!!

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CLICK ON THIS TITLE TO REACH THIS FULL ARTICLE:

EFFECTS OF A SECURE ATTACHMENT

RELATIONSHIP ON RIGHT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT,

AFFECT REGULATION, AND

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH

ALLAN N. SCHORE

Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine

INFANT MENTAL HEALTH JOURNAL, Vol. 22(1–2), 7–66 (2001)

2001 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health

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