Injury to the areas with the most oxytocin receptors severely impairs maternal nurturing.5 The wiring seems largely the same in infants as in their mothers—and also appears to provide some of the neural cement for the loving bond they form. Children who are well nurtured have the sense of a secure base in part because these very brain chemicals evoke the inner sense that “everything is all right” (possibly the biochemical basis for what Erik Erikson saw as an infant’s basic sense of trust in the world).
Mothers whose children will grow up to be secure are more attentive and responsive to their baby’s cries, more affectionate and tender, and more comfortable in close contact like cuddling. These attuned mothers repeatedly loop with their baby.6 But those children whose mothers were often out of synch with them display insecurity, in either of two flavors. If a mother habitually intrudes, the infant copes by shutting down, actively trying to avoid interactions. When the mother seems uninvolved, the baby reacts with a helpless passivity at being unable to connect—the very pattern brought into his adult life by Bowlby’s suicidal patient.
Less extreme than outright neglectful mothers are those who create emotional distance with their child, even keeping a physical gap between them, talking to or touching the child relatively little. Such children often display a “stiff-upper-lip” pretense of not caring, although in reality their bodies reveal signs of heightened anxiety. These children come to expect that others will be aloof and distant and so hold back emotionally. As adults they avoid emotional intimacy, tending to withdraw from people.
On the other hand, mothers who are anxious and self-preoccupied tend to be out of tune with their child’s needs. When a mother fails to be dependably available and attentive, some infants react by feeling fearful and clingy. These children, in turn, can become absorbed in their own anxieties and so are less able to attune well. In adult relationships they tend toward anxious clinging.
Happy, attuned interactions are as much a basic need for an infant as is feeding or burping. Lacking such synchronous parenting, children are more at risk of growing up with disturbed attachment patterns. In short, well-empathized children tend to become secure; anxious parenting produces anxious children; and aloof parents produce avoidant children, who withdraw from emotion and from people. In adulthood, these patterns will manifest as secure, anxious, or avoidant styles of attachment in relationships.
The transmission of these patterns from parent to child appears to be largely through the relationship. For instance, twin studies find that if a secure child gets adopted by an anxious parent, the child will most likely end up sharing that anxious pattern.7 The attachment style of a parent predicts the child’s style with about 70 percent accuracy.8
But if an anxious child can find a secure “surrogate parent”—an older sibling, a teacher, or another relative who does much of the caregiving—her emotional pattern can shift toward the secure.
STILL FACE
A mother shares some pleasant moments with her baby, when suddenly a subtle change comes over her. The mother’s face goes blank and unresponsive.
At that, her baby panics a bit, a look of anguish sweeping over his face.
The mother shows no emotion, makes no response to his distress. She has gone stone cold.
Her baby starts to whimper.
Psychologists call this scenario “still face,” and they use it intentionally to explore the foundations of resilience, the ability to recover from distress. Even after the still-face mother returns to her well-connected manner, babies continue to show distress for a while. How quickly they recover indicates how well they have mastered the rudiments of emotional self-management. During the course of the first year or two of life, that basic skill builds, as babies practice over and over going from upset to calm, from out of synch to looping.
When a mother’s face goes blank and she seems suddenly withdrawn, this invariably provokes the baby to make repair attempts to get his mother to respond. Babies signal their mother in every way they know, from flirting to crying; some eventually give up, looking away and sucking their thumb to try to soothe themselves.
In the view of Edward Tronick, the psychologist who invented the still-face method, the more successfully infants solicit “repairs” of that broken loop, the better at it they become. From this emerges another strength: such babies come to see human interactions as reparable—they believe that they have the capacity to set things right when something has gone out of synch with another person.
So they begin to build the scaffolding for a resilient lifelong sense of themselves and their relationships. Such children grow up seeing themselves as effective, as able to have positive interactions and to repair them if they go off track. They assume other people will be trustworthy and reliable partners.
Six-month-old babies have already started developing a typical style of interacting with other people and a habitual way of thinking about themselves and others. What makes this vital learning possible is that sense of safety and trust—in other words, rapport—developed with the person who is providing the guidance. This I-You relationship makes all the difference in a child’s social growth.
Mother-infant synchrony operates from a child’s first day of life; the more synchrony, the warmer and the happier are their overall interactions.9 Being out of synch, however, makes newborns angry, frustrated, or bored. If a baby gets a constant diet of dis-synchrony and solitary misery, he will learn to rely on whatever strategy for calming down he has stumbled upon. Some, seemingly giving up hope of outside help, focus on finding ways to make themselves feel better. In the adult version of this attitude, countless people, when feeling down, turn to solitary consolations like overeating, drinking, or compulsive channel surfing.
As time goes on and the child grows up, he may deploy such strategies automatically and inflexibly, no matter what the situation may be—constructing a defense against anticipated bad experiences, whether that anticipation has a solid basis or not. So instead of approaching people with an open, positive attitude, the child may reflexively withdraw into a protective shell, seeming cold and distant.
THE DEPRESSED LOOP
An Italian mother sings a happy ditty to Fabiana, her baby: “Clap, clap, your little hands / Daddy will be here soon. / He’ll bring you sweet candies / Fabiana, you’ll eat them up.”10
Her tone is joyful, the tune an upbeat allegro, and Fabiana delightedly joins in on the beat with coos.
But when another mother sings the same ditty to her baby—this time in a monotonous, low-pitched largo—her baby responds with signs of distress, not delight.
The difference? The second mother suffers from clinical depression; the first mother does not.
This simple discrepancy in how mothers sing to their babies bespeaks a vast difference in the emotional surround that their babies feel as they grow up—and in how they will feel in every other major relationship they have throughout life. Depressed mothers understandably find it difficult to engage their babies in happy protoconversation; they lack the energy for the lilting tones of Motherese.11
In their interactions with their babies, depressed mothers tend to be poorly timed and “off,” or intrusive, angry, or sad. The failure to synchronize disables looping, while the negative emotions send the message that the baby has done something wrong and needs to change somehow. That message in turn upsets the baby, who can neither get his mother to help calm him down nor effectively do so himself. With this, the mother and her infant can all too easily fall into a downward spiral of miscoordination, negativity, and messages ignored.12
Depression, behavior geneticists tell us, can be inherited. Much research has tried to calculate the “heritability” of depression—the odds that such a child will herself become clinically depressed at some point in her life. But as Michael Meaney points out, children born with a parent prone to bouts of depression inherit not only that parent’s genes but also the depressed parent—who may well act in ways that foster that gene’s expression.
13
For instance, studies of clinically depressed mothers and their infants reveal that depressed mothers tend to look away from their babies more than others, become angry more often, are more intrusive when their babies need a recovery time-out, and are less warm. Their babies typically make the only protest they know—crying—or seem to give up, becoming apathetic or withdrawn.
A given baby’s typical response may vary: if the mother tends toward anger, the baby becomes angry too; if the mother tends to be passively withdrawn, so her baby becomes. Babies seem to learn these interaction styles from the ongoing series of out-of-synch moments with their depressed mother. Moreover, they are at risk for acquiring a faulty sense of themselves, having learned already that they cannot bring about a repair when they are unhappy and out of synch, or rely on others to help them feel better.
A mother’s depression can become the transmission route by which all the personal and social ills bearing down on her affect her child. A mother’s funk, for example, has negative hormonal effects on a child that show up as early as infancy: babies of depressed mothers have higher levels of stress hormones and lower levels of dopamine and serotonin, a chemical profile linked to depression.14 A toddler may be unaware of the larger forces impinging on her family, but those forces will become embedded in her nervous system nonetheless.
Social epigenetics offers hope to such children. Parents who are somewhat depressed but can manage to show good cheer in the face of difficulty seem to minimize the social transmission of depression.15 And having additional caretakers who are not depressed offers a reliably secure base.
Some children of depressed mothers learn another lesson, one that has adaptive qualities. Many of these children become exquisite readers of their mother’s shifting emotions and as adults are artful at handling their interactions to keep them as pleasant (or minimally upsetting) as possible. Taken into the larger world, those skills can translate into a hard-earned social intelligence.16
THE WARPING OF EMPATHY
• Johnny let his best friend use his new ball. But his friend wasn’t careful and lost the ball. And he wouldn’t give Johnny another one.
• Johnny’s friend, who he really liked to play with, moved away. Johnny couldn’t play with his friend anymore.
Both of these small melodramas capture moments of high emotion in any young child’s life. But just what emotion do they reflect?
Most children learn to distinguish one feeling from another and to grasp what has led to this feeling or that. But children who are severely neglected by their parents do not. When these vignettes were read to such preschoolers, the answers they gave were wrong half the time—a far poorer rate of recognition than for preschoolers who had been well nurtured.17
To the degree a child has been deprived of the very interactions that teach this lesson, his ability to read emotions in life’s events will suffer. Children deprived of vital human contact fail to make crucial distinctions among emotions; their sense of what others feel remains fuzzy.18
When preschoolers who had been abused—whose caregivers had repeatedly injured or inflicted physical pain on them—were read the two vignettes about Johnny, they saw anger where none existed. Abused children perceive anger in faces that are neutral, ambiguous, or even sad. That overperception of anger suggests a hypersensitized amygdala. This heightened sensitivity seems selective for anger: when abused children look at faces that show anger, their brains react with stronger activation than do those of other children—though their brains respond normally to faces showing joy or fear.19
This warp in empathy means that the least sign that someone may be angry captures the attention of abused children. They scan for anger more than other kids do, “see” it when it is in fact not there, and keep looking at such signs longer.20 Detecting anger where it does not exist may have crucial benefits for such children. After all, at home they face real danger, so their hypersensitivity makes sense as protective radar.
Trouble brews when these children bring that heightened sensitivity with them into the world outside home. Schoolyard bullies (who typically have a history of physical abuse) overinterpret anger, reading antagonism into faces that are neutral. Their attacks on other children are often due to their misperceiving hostile intent where there is none.
Handling a child’s angry outbursts poses any parent a great challenge—and an opportunity. Ideally the parent will not let herself become angry in return, nor simply be passive, abandoning the child to his pique. Instead, when a parent manages her own anger, neither pushing it away nor indulging in it, while staying looped, she offers the child a safe container for learning to handle his own irritations. This does not mean, of course, that the child’s emotional surroundings must always be tranquil—just that there should be enough resilience in the family system to recover from upsets.
The family surround creates a young child’s emotional reality. A cocoon of safety that stays intact can buffer a child even against the most terrible events. What kids are most concerned about in any major crisis comes down to: how does this affect my family? For example, children living in a war zone will skirt later trauma symptoms or heightened anxiety if their parents manage to create a stable, reassuring environment from day to day.
This does not mean that parents should suppress their distress to “protect the kids.” Stanford University psychiatrist David Spiegel studied the emotional reactions in families after 9/11. Children, Spiegel notes, are hyperaware of the emotional currents within their family. As he explains, “The emotional cocoon works not when parents pretend nothing has happened but when they let children know we’re dealing with how upset we are as a family, together.”
THE REPARATIVE EXPERIENCE
His father was prone to violent rages, especially when drunk—which was just about every night. In those fits of anger, his father would grab one of his four sons and deliver a beating.
Years later he confided to his wife the fears he still carried. As he all too vividly recalled, “Whenever I saw my father’s eyes narrow, we kids knew it was time to get out of the room.”
His wife, telling me about that confession, added a more subtle lesson for her: “I realize my husband wasn’t paid attention to as a child. So even when I’m hearing the same old story over and over, I remind myself, ‘Stay here.’
“If he sees my attention flicker for a second, he gets hurt,” she adds. “He’s hypersensitive to the moments when I start to tune out. Even when I still seem to be listening, he knows the instant I go away inside.”
Anyone who in childhood was treated by caretakers as an It rather than as a You is likely to bear such sensitivities and emotional wounds. Those tender spots emerge most often in close relationships—with a spouse, children, and good friends. But in adulthood close relationships can offer a healing scenario: the person, instead of being ignored or worse, is treated as a You—as was that hypersensitive husband and his assiduously attuned wife.
Like a nourishing parent or spouse, a good psychotherapist becomes a safe base for such neglected people. UCLA psychologist Allan Schore has become a heroic figure among many psychotherapists for his massive reviews of neuroscience that center on the patient-therapist relationship.
Schore’s theory holds that the neural site for emotional malfunction is primarily in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), that keystone in the brain’s relationship pathways.21 The very growth of the OFC, he argues, depends on a child’s experience. If parents offer attunement and a secure base, the OFC flourishes. If they are unresponsive or abusive, its development goes awry—resulting in a limited ability to regulate the length, intensity, or frequency of distressing emotions like anger, terror, or shame.
Schore’s theory highlights how our interactions play a role in reshaping our brain, through neuroplasticity—the way repeated experiences sculpt the shape, size, and number of neurons and their synaptic connections. Some potent shaping occurs in our key relationships by repeatedly driving our brain into a given r
egister. In effect, being chronically hurt and angered, or emotionally nourished, by someone we spend time with daily over the course of years, can refashion the circuitry of our brain.
Schore argues that nurturing relationships later in life can to some extent rewrite the neural scripts that were encrypted in the brain during childhood. In psychotherapy the active ingredients in this emotional repair work include rapport and trust, with patient and therapist looping well.
The therapist, Schore says, serves as a projection screen for reliving early relationships. But this time the patient can live those relationships more fully and openly, without judgment, blame, betrayal, or neglect. Where a father was distant, the therapist can be available; where a mother was hypercritical, the therapist can be accepting—so offering a reparative experience that may have been yearned for but never achieved.
One mark of effective psychotherapy is the opening up of a freer emotional flow between therapist and client, who learns to loop without dreading or blocking distressing feelings.22 The best therapists create a secure emotional atmosphere, a safe container for whatever feelings the client may need to feel and express—from murderous rage to sullen sadness. The very act of looping with the therapist, then passing feelings back and forth, helps the client learn to handle those same emotions on her own.
Just as children learn how to manage their own feelings in the safety of a secure base, psychotherapists provide adults a chance to finish the job. Similar reparative effects can result with a romantic partner or a good friend who offers these nurturing human qualities. If effective, therapy—or other reparative relationships in life—can enrich the capacity for connection, which in itself has healing properties.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 20
