Our capacity for self-regulation depends upon our interactions with other people
…our capacity for self-regulation depends so much upon our interactions with other people that it might well be called “other-regulated self-regulation.” We’re not born knowing how to regulate ourselves – in fact, we’re alarmingly, chaotically, un-self-regulated creatures at birth, more so than most other newborn animals on earth. Loving parents, if we’re lucky, begin the long process of teaching us how to organize and regulate our inner selves – encoding their care and attention in the pliable neural fibers that integrate various regions throughout our brains. No matter how good we had it in the beginning, however, we’ll need reinforcement of these early lessons throughout life, and much remedial work if we were shortchanged early on. For Siegel, therapists are the remedial attachment experts and rescuers of the chronically un-self-regulated, and it is their job to, in effect, help rewire the frayed neural connections, reintegrate (or sometimes integrate for the first time) different areas and functions of the brain – implicit and explicit memory, right and left hemisphere, neocortex with limbic system and brain stem.
Mindsight: Dan Siegel Offers Therapists a New Vision of the Brain
