2 + 2 = 4

• 20120526

  The latest research on the effects of environment and genetics on personality…

  Freedomain Radio: The Latest Science of Nature Versus Nurture

  attachment  parenting  psychology  psychohistory  power 

• 20120409

  Mindsight: Shame on the Brain

  Imagine a car with the accelerator smoothly functioning. When we need to be seen and understood by others, our attachment circuits are revved up; we are in a state of seeking connection. And when our need is met, we move forward happily through our lives. But if we are not seen, if our caregivers do not attune to us, and we are met with the experience of feeling invisible or misunderstood, our nervous system responds with a sudden activation of the brake portion of its regulatory circuits. Slamming on the brakes creates a distinctive physiological response: heaviness in the chest, nausea in the belly, and downcast or turned-away eyes. We literally shrink into ourselves from a pain that is often beneath our awareness. This nauseating and jolting shift occurs whenever we are ignored or given confusing signals by others and it is experienced as a state of shame.

  Shame states are common in children whose parents are repeatedly unavailable or who habitually fail to attune to them. When shame from nonattuned communication is combined with parental hostility, toxic humiliation ensues. These isolated states of being – shame intensified by humiliation – burn themselves into our synaptic connections. Now the slammed-on brakes of the freeze response are painfully combined with the floored accelerator of rage. In the future we’ll be vulnerable to reactivating the state of shame or humiliation in contexts that resemble the original situation – as happened when Matthew needed to be seen and cared for by a female, whether it was his mother when he was a child or his girlfriends as an adult.
  
  As the child grows older and the cortex develops more fully, the state of shame becomes associated with cortically constructed belief that the self is defective. From the point of view of survival, “I am bad” is a safer perspective than “My parents are unreliable and may abandon me at any time.” It’s better for the child to feel defective than to realize that his attachment figures are dangerous, undependable, or untrustworthy. The mental mechanism of shame at least preserves for him the illusion of safety and security that is at the core of his sanity. It is here that we begin to see the developmental and neural origins of many of Matthew’s underlying issues and of his states of humiliation and rage, fear and anxiety, shame and frozen terror: fight, flight, and freeze. Because he hadn’t integrated these reactive states into his own narrative, he was as helpless in dealing with them as he had been when he was a little boy and his mother entered his room with a grim face and a belt.

  In life we do the best we can, but the shame-based conviction that we are defective, which often goes underground, beneath our cortical consciousness, can sabotage us if it remains unconscious. Although such subterranean shame can compel us to succeed – to prove we are good and worthy of others’ respect and admiration – our developmentally ancient feelings of being damaged goods are likely to surface at any hint of stress or failure, and we may become highly reactive in order to keep others at a distance. We need to prevent them – and ourselves – from becoming aware of our shadowy past, the hidden truth of our rotten self. In our personal lives, intimacy is compromised because the closer others come to the real self beneath our public persona, the more vulnerable we feel and the more alarmed we are that this secret truth about our defective nature may be revealed.

  Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

  attachment  psychology  shame  childhood  abuse 

• 20120408

  Mindsight: A Preoccupied Mind

  On the one hand he knew that Sara loved him; on the other hand he didn’t think he could trust what she said. Other women had left him in the past – why would she be any different?

  It is characteristic of the AAI category called “preoccupied,” [that] issues from the past continue to intrude on experiences in the present.
  
  When a child gazes into his parent’s face, he is looking for a response that mirrors his own mind. When the communication we receive as a child is open and direct, receptive and attuned, we develop a clear sense of who we are. Our resonance circuits allow us to see ourselves in the face of another and our mindsight lens develops with clarity. But what if the mirror is distorted by the parent’s own preoccupations and states of mind? Ambivalent childhood attachment is associated with a history of inconsistent parental attunement combined with episodes of parental intrusiveness. The child cannot see himself clearly in the eyes of his caregiver, and the result is a confused sense of self. A central theme of the preoccupied narrative is: I need others but I cannot depend on them.
  
  Another way to understand ambivalent attachment is to talk about “emotional entanglement.” A child like Greg is linked to his mother, but he is unable to become differentiated, to have a separate emotional life or identity. The mother’s confusing responses which are driven by her own anxieties, disrupt the balance between differentiation and linkage necessary for integration. Greg becomes filled with his mother’s anxiety even when he himself is not feeling anxious. Whatever the internal state he began with, her state has molded to his. At moments of potential loss and uncertainty, Greg’s mind bursts through his window of tolerance, pushing him towards chaos.

  Greg came to understand that his doubts about Sara were driven by his old feelings of emotional abandonment. These feelings were embedded in his implicit memory and dominated his right hemisphere’s data banks. While he did not have “flashbacks” in the PTSD sense, Greg became aware that these intrusions of intense emotion derived from past events were still driving his life narrative today.

  Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

  attachment  relationships  parenting  psychotherapy  psychology 

• 20120407

  Mindsight: The Healing Power of Presence

  Young children need attunement with caregivers to feel seen and safe in the world. As parents, we can attune not only to our child’s outbursts of categorical emotion – such as sadness or fear – but also to primary emotional states such as being energized, alert, focused, sleepy, or subdued. Parents who wait for a categorical emotion to arise before they “connect emotionally” with a child are missing the majority of important opportunities to attune. Attunement with a child’s primary emotions is available moment by moment, as we pay attention to whatever has captured her attention. We can also tune in to our child’s internal world by noting her levels of arousal. Is she engaged or depleted, lively or subdued? Having this primary emotional attunement to our children helps them feel deeply connected to others; as we resonate with them, they feel part of a larger “we.”

  If I could be present fully with Anne, if I could let my own internal world resonate with hers and remain open myself, I could help her track her sensations and uncover their meaning, widening her windows of tolerance. Recall that the resonance circuits include mirror neurons that would enable Anne to resonate with my own reactions to her. My being present fully with Anne at moments of distress could help her mirror my own feelings of safety. Here is a key fact about relationships: The resonance circuitry not only allows us to “feel felt” and to connect with one another, but it also helps to regulate our internal state. In other words, the interpersonal resonance between Anne and me could help her widen her window of tolerance, so she’d feel safe enough to feel her own feelings. This is how in the moment, face-to-face, we help one another grow, and initiate the long-term synaptic changes that help us even when we’re apart.

  Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

  attachment  psychotherapy  relationships  psychology  parenting 

• 20120406

  Mindsight: Making Sense of Our Lives

  When it comes to how our children will be attached to us, having difficult experiences early in life is less important than whether we’ve found a way to make sense of how those experiences have affected us. The research instrument that measures how we have “made sense” of our lives is called the Adult Attachment Interview. If I were to give you a version of the AAI, I would ask you a series of questions paraphrased like these.

  What was your childhood like? What was your relationship like with each parent – and were there other people with whom you were close as a child? Whom were you closest to and why?

  I’d ask you to give me several words that described your early relationship with each parent or caregiver, and then I’d ask for a few memories that illustrated each of those words.

  The questions would go on: What was it like when you were separated, upset, threatened, or fearful? Did you experience loss as a child – and if so, what was that like for you and your family? How did your relationships change over time? Why do you think your caregivers behaved as they did? When you think back on all these questions, how do you think your earliest experiences have impacted your development as an adult?

  And if you have children I’d ask you these questions: How do you think these experiences have affected your parenting? What do you wish for your child in the future? And finally, when your child is twenty-five, what do you hope he or she will say are the most important things he or she learned from you?

  Answering this set of open-ended questions is like diving deeply into areas of untapped memory. When I was doing research with the AAI, many subjects told me that the interview was the most helpful therapy session they’d ever had. As a therapist I found this especially amazing because the research protocols required that I be as neutral as humanly possible. Nevertheless, something about these questions repeatedly prompted new discoveries even in individuals who’d had years of therapy.

  Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation by Daniel Siegel (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED)

  attachment  childhood  emotional intelligence  parenting  psychology  psychotherapy 

• 20120103

  “Attachment is impossible under such circumstances.”

  Freedomain Radio: Working Moms, Daycare, and the War Against the Family

  attachment  sociology  psychology  parenting  childhood 

• →

  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

  psychology  psychotherapy  attachment  relationships  parenting 

• 20120101

  For over ten years Gabor Mate has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV, and in many cases all four. But if Dr. Mate’s patients are at the end of the spectrum, there are many others among us who are also struggling with addictions. drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, compulsive work habits, sexual seeking or spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our spirits?

  Gabor Mate: Brain Development & Addiction

  psychology  addiction  emotional intelligence  attachment  childhood  abuse  trauma 

• 20111229

  How to be happy: a psychotherapist's view

  Early relationships alter our brains before we learn to speak. As you learn together with your earliest caregivers how to regulate your emotions, your brain will be making lots of new pathways that are necessary for you to learn to become comfortable with your emotions and manage them for yourself. Your earliest bonds also serve as a model for all subsequent relationships, teaching you to form nourishing, enriching, and mutually beneficial relationships throughout your life. The bulk of these neural connections happen before you are two years old. In other words, much of the wiring up that determines how you respond emotionally and conduct relationships, happened pre-verbally. The logic, reason and language part of your brain develops so slowly that most of the patterns for how you feel are formed before you can reason with yourself and others.

  psychology  psychotherapy  emotional intelligence  happiness  relationships  attachment 

• 20111211

  Attachment in Psychotherapy

  This eloquent book translates attachment theory and research into an innovative framework that grounds adult psychotherapy in the facts of childhood development. Advancing a model of treatment as transformation through relationship, the author integrates attachment theory with neuroscience, trauma studies, relational psychotherapy, and the psychology of mindfulness. Vivid case material illustrates how therapists can tailor interventions to fit the attachment needs of their patients, thus helping them to generate the internalized secure base for which their early relationships provided no foundation. Demonstrating the clinical uses of a focus on nonverbal interaction, the book describes powerful techniques for working with the emotional responses and bodily experiences of patient and therapist alike.

  Book: Attachment in Psychotherapy (HIGHLY Recommended)
  Video: Attachment in Psychotherapy

  childhood  emotional intelligence  psychology  psychotherapy  relationships  attachment 

• 20111106

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain

  The dependent child cannot define himself or herself as a person. Whilst most of us get our sense of ourselves from the people around us and how they react to us and what they tell us, the dependent child’s evolving sense of self is even more acutely focused on the important adults in his or her life. Psychological survival depends on keeping in relationship to these others at all costs and accepting their version of us, however negative. In families which neglect or criticize their children too much, there can be a fundamental uncertainty about the worth of self. The internal working model will be one of inner worthlessness or even badness anticipating a critical or neglectful other. These expectations inform behaviour and often draw others into confirming the expectations setting up a vicious cycle that’s hard to break.

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain by Sue Gerhardt

  childhood  emotional intelligence  parenting  projective identification  repetition compulsion  statism  stockholm syndrome  attachment 

• 20110901

  A baby cries out. It is frightened, hungry, dirty or cold. The baby wants comfort, a parent and some human contact, an adult’s strength, power and protection. The initial call is in Second Circle and expects and deserves a Second Circle response. If there is no response the cry will get more distraught and desperate, and will move into Third Circle. If there is still no response, the baby will withdraw into a detached First Circle. A genuine cry should have a genuine response. Is that too much to ask? The parent won’t become the baby’s slave, which is the parent’s fear. Actually, the unanswered call will eventually come back to haunt parents and society. If appropriately answered, the baby will stop crying out, knowing they will be answered. In this way they develop confidence and self-esteem which allow them to stay present to and in the world. Confidence is a manifestation of entitlement and entitlement starts with the answered call.

  — Patsy Rodenburg in Presence

  attachment  childhood  psychology  parenting  quotes 

• 20110811

  Camila Batmanghelidjh: "These kids have got no hope. They've got nothing to lose"

  “The group mentality has taken over. It’s sort of normalized for them this unacceptable behaviour.

  “What is very evident for those of us who have been working at street level – and I’ve been working for twenty years and all my colleagues have been working in a variety of settings – for us, this is not a surprise at all because what we’ve been seeing increasingly over the years is a perverse set of moral life developing in large numbers of young people. Because they don’t feel included in mainstream society, their role models and the people who are – in a funny way – providing them with solutions, are the drug dealers. And the drug dealers are their measure of powerful people. So when they are looking for their heroes in their communities, they don’t get the role models that they need, that are pro-social. What they’re getting is people who’ve made it good through criminality. And we could spend all our time blaming the young people, but I suggest that we show some curiosity as to why there are such large numbers of people who are completely divorced from mainstream society.

  “At our charity, at Kids Company, recently we had 668 of the most disturbed 14–23 year olds that we have to work with and just under 400 of them didn’t even have a birth certificate. 73% weren’t even registered with a GP. 89%+ had mental health difficulties. And it took us 3 years to work with these kids intensively to stabilize them. But we did get 97% of them back into education and/or employment. But the point is, we’ve got so many short and underfunded initiatives out there doing tokenistic little things – and they represent the face of civil society – and as far as young people are concerned, it’s ineffectual and it doesn’t solve their problems and they are left in the ghettos of Britain kind of surviving – and this perverse moral network develops.

  “They are a completely ignored underclass. When I tell you that 68% of them tell us they don’t have enough food in the house… I walk into these kids homes and they are sleeping on the floor on mattresses that are urine-stenched. They don’t even have bedding. And this group of young people, not only do they experience neglect and abuse within their family homes, when they hit the street, the agencies that are supposed to step in and protect them against the family abuse that they are experiencing equally depleted and dysfunctional. So where are they supposed to get the help? And what I really object to is that people in civil society who have power continuously set the agenda, they continuously describe these kids as ‘animal’ and ‘feral’ but nowhere do these kids get the chance to come back at civil society and explain from their perspective what’s happening to them day in day out. And that’s the point. What you’re seeing now is a kind of sick revenge on their part as well as the fact that, of course, they are participating in this greedy kind of community we have created where having material goods is so important. If you’re selling trainers at £150 a go when the kids is living on a benefit of £42.50 a week – and with that they have to pay for everything – it’s hardly surprising that these kids go steal these material stuff.

  “It’s completely unjustified what they are doing. It’s completely unacceptable. But if you actually understood how the teenage brain works, it’s already weakened in terms of self-control. Normal teenager brains are weakened in terms of self-control because the areas responsible for self-control are rewiring. And when you put a group of teenagers together they develop a sort of groupthink where whatever the activity of the group, personal decisions are diminished in the service of the activity of the group. And what you’ve got at street level is a group of very profoundly disturbed kids leading other kids into this space. And what’s also interesting is that the kids are breaking the windows because they’ve got the power and the force for it, but it’s also adults with young children going into these shops and stealing the goods. So it’s not just about the children. It’s also about a whole set of adults who are participating in this.

  “Let’s face it, nothing gets done for these vulnerable young people because they don’t vote. And their interests don’t really count. And their behaviour doesn’t really count until they become a threat to the voter. Now suddenly everyone is mobilized – and rightly so. But when all of us at street level were knocking on the politicians doors and saying, please, please pay attention, there is something brewing on the streets that is unacceptable, you need to step in a create solutions for these young people – where were all these politicians with their tough-talking ways?

  “Do you know how many children arrive at our doors and we have to buy underwear, toothbrush, we walk into their homes and the ceiling is falling because the council doesn’t come and do the repairs… Do you know how many of them don’t even understand the forms at the Jobcentre, don’t have the literacy to fill it, and when they don’t fill those forms properly they get cut off from benefits… The more punitive measures you use, the more you push these kids underground.

  “I’ve met their parents and the sad part of it is that the parents who turn up at our doors were children like this years ago. The numbers of mothers that we have who were in prostitution who were sexually and physically abused themselves as children, who were raped as teenagers, is just unbelievable, and that is the rot that is at the center of all this. People don’t want to face it because when you offer explanations, they think you’re offering excuses. I don’t excuse anything. I don’t think this behaviour is acceptable. But I urge society to take a step back and think. We’ve talked about policing. We lock up more young people than any other European country and 80% of them reoffend. Is it not time that we had a new kind of vision for re-engaging these young people and embracing them back into our community?

  “I don’t have sympathy with their bad behaviour or the way they have harmed other people. I don’t think two wrongs make a right. What I do think we should be thinking is, at our loss and at our peril do we just perceive this situation as simply large numbers of kids simply being morally flawed. I think that explanation falls short. If there is such a thing called childhood then surely adults should be taking responsibility for it. And if the biological carers can’t take care of their children properly, then the safety net of the state must be there to prevent this cycle of degeneration that we’re seeing now. You know, you can look at someone like me and say, here she goes again, bleeding heart liberal, carrying on, poor children. But the fact is, this is the truth at street level. Those of us who have worked in it are telling the rest of society these kids have got no hope and when people feel they have no hope they become very dangerous because they’ve got nothing to lose.

  “I could easily fall into line with everyone else, condemn these kids, hold the moral high ground and that’s it, it’s blown under the carpet. But the point is, I condemn these kids’ behaviours. It’s wrong the way they’re behaving. But until we show some curiosity as to why this is happening, we’re not going to come up with real solutions. We have had for years gang problems at street level with gangs attacking each other. We’ve had something like a thousand young people stabbed and shot in London just last year alone. If this had been an airplane with adults falling out of the sky they’d be a memorial. But we don’t hear about it. Nobody really talks about it. No-one comes out with solutions. Is it hardly surprising that these kids then develop such anti-social, anti-establishment attitudes?

  “It’s not just about poverty, actually. I completely agree and there are lots of people out there that will tell you that they’ve been to Oxford and Cambridge and university and succeeded, and they came from poor backgrounds. I’m not talking about material poverty alone. You can just about survive material poverty if you have some kind of an emotional care around you. But these children have a double-whammy damage. Their carers are disturbed and dysfunctional, addicted to substances often – and they live in the ghettos of Britain where civil society doesn’t offer them a way out.

  “What price do you pay if your parents are the biggest risk to you and then you leave your home and you turn for help to other agencies and the other agencies just simply turn you away because they are too depleted and they don’t have the resources to solve your problem. You’re condemned, then, to a space where the solution is not provided for you to be able to work your way out of your ghetto.”

  BBC Radio 5: Camila Batmanghelidjh: “These kids have got no hope. They’ve got nothing to lose”

  Interview MP3 (15mins)

  childhood  sociology  attachment 

• 20110722

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain

  When you don’t know how to manage difficult feelings, you avoid them. The attempt to escape from feelings has its origins in a babyhood in which the baby’s feelings have not been identified and responded to in a contingent way. Babies in this situation can’t take their own regulation for granted. They are confronted prematurely with their own raw needs, lacking the ability to meet them by themselves. This seems to leave a sort of unfinished business for the baby. As he or she grows up, the adult still longs to be properly taken care of, to be understood without words, to have all wishes fulfilled by magic, and to have needs anticipated without saying anything. People in this state are ultimately seeking the baby’s experience of perfect unity and merger with an attuned mother.

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain by Sue Gerhardt

  childhood  emotional intelligence  parenting  psychology  attachment 

• 20110711

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain

  The attempt to escape from feelings has its origins in a babyhood in which the baby’s feelings have not been identified and responded to in a contingent way. You can only change emotional processing by doing it differently. When a particular feeling is aroused, neurotransmitters are released from the subcortex and old neural networks automatically become activated to manage this state of arousal in the old way. But with the help of a therapist, new forms of regulation can be practiced. If your therapist accepts your feelings, they do not have to be denied by the neural network which would normally do that, or acted upon by the neural network that would normally respond in that way. The therapist’s acceptance allows a mental space to reflect on the feelings and consider how to respond afresh. Whilst the feelings are alive and active, so too are the stress hormones which will assist new (higher brain) cortisol synapses to be made in response to the sub-cortical signals. Together with the therapist, new networks can be developed.

  Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain by Sue Gerhardt

  childhood  emotional intelligence  parenting  psychology  psychotherapy  attachment