Liz’s mother has shown little patience for discussing and processing their troubled interactions. They rarely transition from these negative interactions back to positive ones during the same conversation. After an interaction like this one, Liz and her mother typically go through a week or more of what Liz describes as “cold war” before reconciling, and Liz is the one who “crawls back” and tries to please her mother. It’s just too difficult for her to tolerate her mother’s displeasure and risk abandonment. Liz regularly abandons her own needs for understanding and validation in order to seek approval and secure the attachment with her mother. And Liz shames herself even further because she feels that as a social worker, she should know how to create a healthier relationship with her mother.
Liz’s mother has had difficulty offering Liz a type of care and attention essential to the development of the brain’s self-regulation circuits: attunement. This is the subtle process of adjusting to and resonating with another person’s internal states: that is, being “in tune” with someone else’s internal world. It’s an instinctive process for a parent, but it may be lacking when a parent is stressed, depressed, distracted, or impatient.
Love is not the issue: Liz has never had any doubt that her mother loves her and would do anything she could for her. And Liz likewise loves and respects her mother, whom she describes as “a bright, articulate, and funny woman.” They often have very pleasant times together. The problems generally arise when Liz is anxious or upset and turns to her mother for comfort and soothing, or when her mother strongly disagrees with the way Liz is handling something, like the upcoming birthday party.
Poor Attunement, Insecure Attachments
Attunement is an important component of another process that begins in infancy and childhood and continues throughout our lives: attachment. A vulnerable infant has an innate need to be close to a nourishing and protective other. Our drive for attachment is essential for our survival. Compared to most other mammals, we depend on our caregivers for an extended period. Yet, according to the child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, a founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, only about one-half to two-thirds of the general population have had what researchers call a “secure attachment.”
When we have a secure attachment to a caregiver, we feel safe: we can count on them to protect us from harm and to calm, comfort, and soothe us when we are distressed. We feel that another person senses and observes our inner world and that our needs will be met. We develop positive expectations of interactions with other people and trust that these too will be fulfilling and rewarding.
In contrast, when we have experienced repeated, highly stressful interactions with our caregivers, our ability to form safe, secure relationships with them becomes compromised. This is true even with kind and well-meaning caregivers if they don’t have enough time for us or have difficulty relating to us and meeting our needs. Liz’s father, for example, is a kind and gentle man, but Liz has trouble relating to him because he is forty-five years older, often distracted, and a bit out of touch with her world.
Early attachment patterns create mental maps for our relationships throughout life and guide our expectations of others. Because of her insecure attachment to her parents and a history of being criticized and shamed by her mother, Liz has persistently high levels of anxiety and shame. She doesn’t feel safe and secure in her body or in the world. The shaming she has suffered has created what John Bradshaw, the author of Homecoming, calls “toxic shame: the feeling of being flawed and diminished and never measuring up.” Her shame makes it difficult for her to embrace both her strengths and weaknesses and to develop a healthy level of self-esteem and self-acceptance.
Liz is hyperreactive to intense emotions like shame and their associated bodily cues, such as heart palpitations, muscle tension, and what she describes as “a frozen feeling.” Her internal world is fragile: she is easily derailed by external stressors like her mother’s aggression and her boss’s unpredictable moods. Neural pathways connecting the emotional region of Liz’s brain to the thinking and regulating region have failed to form properly, while other circuits, geared toward handling stressful interactions, have been strengthened. She tends to be hypervigilant: her brain has become hard-wired to perceive threat quickly.
Feelings of shame are common in children whose parents are emotionally unavailable or repeatedly fail to attune to them. Children who feel invisible or misunderstood often experience this lack of attunement physiologically in the form of a shrinking or slumping sensation, or a feeling of heaviness in the chest, back, and shoulders. They often appear sad, with a downcast posture.
When brain cells, called neurons, repeatedly fire simultaneously in response to an experience, those neurons become connected to each other. As the Canadian neuropsychologist and researcher Donald Hebb puts it, “Cells that fire together wire together.” They form a network and become hard-wired in the brain: in essence, they become part of our conditioned, habitual responses to the world. The strength of these connections is influenced by many factors, including the frequency of their use.
According to Daniel Siegel:
These isolated states of being — shame intensified by humiliation — burn themselves into our synaptic connections. . . .In the future, we’ll be vulnerable to reactivating the state of shame or humiliation in contexts that resemble the original situation. The state of shame becomes associated with a 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.
Liz’s early stressful experiences with her mother have been encoded as maladaptive emotional and cognitive patterns in her brain. After experiencing her mother’s shaming look repeatedly when putting food on her plate, grabbing a snack, or trying on clothes, Liz regularly feels anxiety and shame even when no one else is around. She is quick to interpret an innocent glance from a stranger or store clerk as shaming. She has a tendency to overreact, because at times of stress, she can’t access the neural circuits that would help her calm down and regulate her emotions. At times like these, indulging in her favorite, tranquilizing comfort foods, like donuts and cream puffs, is the fastest way to quiet the agitation in her body and the storm in her brain.
Regulating Emotions and Behaviors through Attunement
A caregiver’s role is to meet a child’s basic physical needs (food, clothing, shelter) and to provide consistent emotional nurturance. Emotions — reactions in the brain that cause a change in our internal states — signal us, and our caregivers, to act. As infants and small children, we cannot regulate our emotions and behaviors alone: we rely on our primary caregivers to soothe and comfort us. Attuned interactions — experiences that let us know that someone else perceives and understands what we are feeling — allow preverbal infants, not yet capable of understanding emotions or using language, to feel close, connected, safe, and loved.
Most caregivers do a pretty good job of tuning in to an infant’s distress and offering an appropriate and soothing emotional response. For example, when a toddler hits her head on the edge of the table and starts to scream and cry, her mother identifies and acknowledges her emotions and pain: “Oh, sweetie, I see that you are sad because you bumped your head. That really hurts! Let Mommy kiss your boo-boo.” The child’s mother helps to regulate or lessen the intensity of the child’s emotions with her attuned words. By identifying the bumped head, the sadness, and the pain, the parent is teaching the child to name her emotions, her bodily sensations, and the things that cause pain.
At the same time, the mother conveys caring and empathy through her actions, kissing and cuddling the child in her arms. These behaviors help her baby feel safe and secure. An association is established between intense feeling states and the possibility of a return to safety and comfort. This is the necessary foundation for building the skills of self-soothing, self-nurturing, and self-regulation. Once her child is calm, the mother might use this situation to