Relationships

Relationships and Connection

The human body and brain have a healthy and comfortable baseline to which they return after stressors: This system works best where the relationship with the parent/s was pretty much perfect from conception.

Within the womb, the miracle new human has a deep sensitivity to the tone of the mother’s voice, her brain chemistry and her moods. The foetus feels what the mother feels. This connection is a preparation for life, allowing the mother to intuit the child’s needs so that she can be responsive to comfort the baby after it is born.

As social animals, we constantly receive information about our environment and transmit information about ourselves. This process begins with auditory and chemical information in the womb and continues in the form of susceptibility to facial expressions in babyhood.

Infants who are strapped closely to the caregiver are given the best start in life; This method is known as kangaroo care, because of its similarity to the manner in which kangaroos carry their young. Kangaroo care optimizes the immune system, stimulates self-healing as well as giving the obvious warmth and bonding. Research reveals that infants given this form of care continue to thrive in comparison with others not given the same care, as much as 25 years later. (Charpak et al 2005)

Toddlers begin to assert some independence, as long as they can safely check back in with mother to constantly update safety information, often just at a glance.

Secure Attachment

The more tuned-in the mother with herself and with the baby, the more she is able to soothe, comfort and relax the baby, and so the child grows to understand that after discomfort comes comfort . Psychologists call this “secure attachment”.

A mother’s rapport is able to match the child’s distress and calm the child with a calmer and more relaxed tone of voice and facial expressions, as well as by the motion with which she holds the child. It is from the mother’s methods of regulating both herself and the baby, that the baby learns self-regulation.

Reforming Relationships: A spiritual journey into a land of warmth and sharing.

Enjoy a subtly scripted Guided Visualization which helps you to strengthen and deepen your relationships; all funds from the sale of these recordings fund specialist advice online.

This recording aims to foster a warm and nurturing relationship with yourself and others, while also attracting loving relationships into your life.

We unconsciously assimilate information from our surroundings all the time, so that if something needs our immediate attention, we can spring into action.

By observing the actions of others, we stimulate the neurons they are using and these same neurons become active within our own brain. The left frontal parts of the brain associated with happiness and wellbeing are stimulated when babies see happy behaviour (Davidson and lox 1982).

Seligman (2005) observed that people tend to smile more when they are with family.

The securely attached child understands that anger can be expressed without being extreme, and that others will respond within a safe time-frame.

Insecure Attachment

Some mother/baby teams work better than others. For any number of reasons, some carers are unable to match their mood with the baby’s and cannot successfully intuit the child’s needs. Babies with regular experiences of remaining highly stressed despite the primary carer’s attempts to calm the baby down, do not learn to regulate their own emotions well and become what’s known by psychologists as “insecurely attached”. These individuals often become very sensitive to criticism and afraid of losing those close to them.

Insecurely attached children have less of an understanding of their feelings and may think that their parents are not interested in what they feel and think, or that their thoughts are abnormal. The child may develop a sense of not being fine or not being ok, therefore they can’t easily return themselves to a state of feeling fine or feeling ok, after distress.

Our unconscious beliefs about others and how they will behave in response to our stress, are formed very early in life, and these beliefs form the basis of how we behave in relationships for the rest of our lives. People either believe that others will support them emotionally or that they won’t; and people generally attract the outcome they believe they will get, as a result of their behaviour when interacting with others.

Those who have the happiest and most successful lives, know that others will be there to support them and they generally are. Those who were comforted at the earliest stage can quickly comfort themselves.

I’m here to give you comfort and a sense of being normal, even though you sometimes do something that others regard as not normal. If it solves the problem it was designed to solve, then it’s normal because you’re doing what works. If the result that you get (e.g. baldness) is something you don’t want, then changing the behaviour to something else which works better, is preferable. Hair-pulling is an ingenious way of regulating feelings, though, so you’re definitely not strange or unwell, just doing something that you want to change. And you can. So sit back, relax and hear me out.

When the human genome was first discovered, it was thought that people were pretty much predetermined by their DNA. Now we know that babies have a unique set of genes which are affected and activated by environment and experience. Some babies are sensitive to internal and external changes, while other babies are more robust and less bothered by change.

A baby’s security or lack thereof is more affected by upbringing than DNA. A very unhappy baby adapts well to being fostered into a comforting and experienced family. Wolke and St. James-Robert (1987) suggested that there is no such thing as a particularly needy or “naughty” baby and that excessive crying builds up in reaction to lack of responsiveness on the part of the carers.

A demanding baby will not necessarily grow into a demanding adult (Belsky et at. 1998), but may experience on-going or re-emerging difficulties if caregivers do not learn to respond lovingly to the baby’s needs.

Human relationships are reliant on a comfortable balance between understanding and following one’s own wellbeing while simultaneously monitoring other people’s.

The temperament of a baby affects the style of care they receive from their parents also. If the child cries a lot, the mother may be more moody and less present in her care of him, while a happy smiley baby may receive more positive attention.

One mother may be more in-tune with a colicky baby and understand his need to be carried around, while another mother may be irritated by her baby’s noises. In turn, the mothering style will also affect the baby’s self-expression.

Feelings of disapproval and displeasure flicker across the face in a fraction of a second, but babies and young children are especially attentive to these changes in the face of the primary care-giver.

A sensitive baby who cannot illicit a loving and comforting response, may grow to be an adult who seeks comfort in maladaptive ways such as dependency or addiction.

Carers who cannot understand, recognise and regulate their own anger or resentment easily may find the baby’s expressions of distress, and particularly anger, unbearable. Such a mother might push what she regards as the baby’s “distasteful feelings” away. To a baby, being pushed away by the mother is quite literally life-threatening, so the baby may learn to suppress the feelings which result in such a reaction.

Such children learn to suppress their feelings so as not to upset the mother. The child learns to care for the mother, often forming early beliefs such as “I must not feel”; "I must not express myself”; “I cannot trust", and sometimes even more dangerously “I’d better not think”, which will affect them and their relationships for the rest of their lives, because whatever the beliefs, the child’s feelings don’t fade away. Feelings are less subject to change when kept to oneself, than if they were expressed and acknowledged.

Babies of depressed, withdrawn or unavailable mothers are often less expressive of positive emotion and develop a depressed manner themselves (Field et al. 1988); these problems are likely to persist into late childhood and possibly longer (Dawson et al 1992).

People need to feel accepted, in order to feel acceptable

An extremely insecurely attached child usually appears placid and calm, not unduly bothered by outside stressors, but under physical examination a different story reveals itself; with high heart rate and signs of physical distress. This is a social organism with its social source severed; a child under the (usually false) impression that the carer simply doesn’t.

From this state of covert distress, avoidance emerges.

Avoidant Attachment

Children of angry or resentful mothers particularly tend towards avoidant patterns. They think that if they don’t face the things that make them feel bad, those things will go away. These are the people who limit their social activity, because socialising can be stressful, then feel bad that they are lonely, perhaps attaching themselves to people who don’t deserve their attention.

When people can easily express their emotions, take some form of regulatory action and return to a calm or “resting” state; the body regulates itself in a similar manner. Stressful emotions, however can disrupt the body’s natural sequences. Information provided by our bodies allows us to make decisions about our behaviour, but when this information sends mixed messages, our behaviour may seem out of control. Body chemistry can quickly become hyper-active if it falsely senses danger; generating full charge so we can run away or fight for our lives. If your body and brain become over-charged and you can’t find a reason for it, this becomes anxiety, which can result in the body saying “quick, hide!”. Conflicting messages say “charge-up and fight” and “curl up and hide” in rapid succession. The inhibitory and stimulatory systems are competing rather than completing, exhausting the nervous system and often causing erratic behaviour. The heart, lungs and blood flow stays activated during suppression of feelings (Gross and Levenson 1997). Shallow breathing is often a sign of stress and grimacing (muscle tension occurs on the face and inside the body often causing pain. Hormones, particularly endorphins, vasopressin and oxytocin, are very instrumental in the process of bonding with parents, with human relationships and getting close to others; therefore hormonal and immune disorders; even chronic mental or physical health problems can begin as a result of disruption in the earliest relationships.

Some parents are more random in their reaction to their children; their children quickly learn that guessing their parents’ moods and mind-reading is the best method of safety. They aim to do what the parent seems to want at the time, hoping to be rewarded with parental attention. This intent focus on what others think and feel often continues into adulthood and may become obsessional.

Children need constant encouragement and social responses from their parent/s. By providing perpetual feedback about the child’s feelings, the parents prepare the child for self-evaluation and self-regulation. Where feedback on feelings is not forthcoming or is predominantly negative, the child may develop high fear and low self-esteem, becoming overly sensitive to criticism and easily hurt; in turn “protecting” themselves by withdrawing from people in a pattern known as avoidant attachment.

Resistant Attachment

If early support and assistance with stress regulation is not readily accessible, children may grow up over-focusing on their feelings and unconsciously intensifying them. Intensified feelings often restrict maturity processes such as willpower and behavioural control, so dependency on the parents mayincrease with age, perhaps manifesting as impulse disorders or financial dependency due to gambling or spending. This dependency may be unconsciously encouraged by the parents due to their own anxiety. Children who grow up in this manner are said to exhibit resistant attachment. (Fonagy 2003).

Disorganised attachment occurs in families where so much distress and anxiety have accumulated that none of the above patterns can consistently develop. The parents have usually been overwhelmed by anxiety, trauma or grief that they have not learned to process their own feelings effectively and have been unable to provide consistent or useful feedback for the child. These families may have suffered trauma, bereavement, abuse or addiction. The fundamental functions of family protection and safety have not been logistically laid down so that the children become fearful of their feelings and uncertain how to respond to the pressures of life. Their everyday existence is so stressful that added stressors can invoke fear of the feelings as well as the situations.

Sometimes the behaviour and/or attitude of parents gives children the impression that strong emotions are intolerable, using words such as “I can’t cope with this” or “I’m going to have a nervous breakdown in a minute”; if children grow up thinking their feelings are intolerable, they may adopt strategies to avoid facing what they are feeling.

Parents who pick their battles with their children so that criticism is kept to a minimum and give the child choices , are realistic role models for recognising and responding to resentment in degrees so that irritations are dealt with before they build up and enrage them. As the child grows up, these parents put up with decisions the child makes which may disappoint them, but are age-appropriate and within the rights of an individual to make for themselves. They model the time and techniques to express anger appropriately, without intimidation. These children are said to be securely attached. During the process of maturity, we do learn to self-regulate to a degree, yet still deeply depend on other people to regulate our emotions and to help us fit in to society.

We also need constant feedback from our internal environment. If we lie in the sun, we are sensitive to smarting skin as a warning of sunburn, but if we are paying too much attention to our social environment, such as what others think of us in our bathing-suit, we may get sunburned without noticing.

Physical feelings such as fatigue, hunger or headache all have a positive purpose, to prompt us to take care of our physical needs, but if we put work ahead of our own needs, perhaps obsessing about our role in society, then resentment can unconsciously grow.

Society works as a result of a frequent fine-tuning of feelings, with each person responding to and regulating them as needed. Failure to notice feelings and take appropriate action erodes the social system itself; when one organism cannot self-regulate suitably, then the delicate co-operative balance of the community as a whole is jeopardised.

Feelings are therefore an integral part of our self-healing process. Anger, when suppressed, denied or internalised, has a number of serious repercussions, not least a substantial lowering of social rank. A push-over gets put-upon. Someone who easily flies off the handle is rarely delegated to. People who give in to him, defer to his supposed right to assert authority. Expressed anger has an urgent message: something needs remedying NOW and I’m insisting upon it.

A person’s attitude towards emotions is integral to their ability to function in the world and find a social rank of relevance. Developing the confidence that we can be heard means our feelings don’t scream inside our head and repeat themselves over and over. We have the head-space to pause and consider things without over-thinking or obsessing about them and this means we can consider our actions rather than acting impulsively or compulsively. Secure attachment therefore fosters a society with strong behavioural control and safe structure.

References:

Charpak, N., Ruiz, J., Zupan, J., Cattaneo, A., Figueroa, Z., Tessier, R., Cristo, M., Anderson, G., Ludington, S., Mendoza, S., Mokhachane, M., & Worku, B. (2005). Kangaroo mother care: 25 years after. Acta Paediatric, 94 (5), 514-522.