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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,
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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