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PARENTAL
EMOTIONAL
RELATIONAL
SOMATIC
ORGANIC
NEURO-
psychological
In ‘Attachment Trauma and Healing’ Levy and Orlans wrote: “The fetus’ nervous system is shaped by its mother’s emotional states. If a pregnant woman has chronic anxiety… high levels of the stress hormone cortisol enters the fetus’ brain and body.” Cortisol, adrenalin, dopamine, prozac, alcohol, nicotine etc., all pass easily across the placenta. Your mother’s emotional state was not only influencing yours but also configuring the expression of your genes and calibrating the thresholds of your nervous system, determining your sensitivity to stress and susceptibility to anxiety and many other vital traits.
You were suddenly thrust into a world full of diverse, intense sensations, acute pain, bright lights, dazzling colors, loud sounds and noises, pungent smells and the acrid taste of blood, and the dizzying disorientation of being moved about in strange new ways… but then, just as suddenly, everything fades into the background behind the face of your mother… pain was extinguished with pleasure, chaos was banished and harmony prevailed as delicious sweet milk flowed from her breast into your mouth. Powerful instincts and hormones made you focus and zone in to each other; to remain as one while becoming two.
Your earliest days were all about these raw visceral sensations of pain and pleasure, and the ability of your mother/caregiver to nurture and sooth. The discomfort of hunger, thirst, pooing, soiled nappies, chafing, rashes, heat/cold, aches and pains etc., were banished by the pleasure of feeding, comfort and intimacy all facilitated by the presence and actions of mummy dearest. The care that your parents/caregivers were able to give at that crucial founding phase determined how much pain vs how much pleasure you felt, and this shaped your core memory systems.
Children are not perfect little angels, nor are they rotten little baboons. They are learning to use their bodies and minds, learning to walk and talk, learning to express themselves and their emotions, testing and figuring out how things and people work, and when something doesn’t go their way they are bound to get upset. Parents can respond to a child’s upset in different ways and the child will learn to feel, express and regulate his/her emotions accordingly.
It’s tricky and many parents struggle to get that delicate balance just right… that goldilocks zone of not too hot… not too cold… just right. We would all like to be warm, loving parents and cool, fun parents but somewhere along the line we lose the plot, especially when there’s stress or upset, and we reflexively resort to old habitual ways of punishing or avoiding. We’re not sure where to draw the line because our own internal lines got blurred and skewed; our own boundaries and proportions have, long ago, been warped and distorted, and so we either under- or over-do it.
