This tuning-in session may only last a few minutes, but situations like this will occur thousands of times in the child’s early years, not only with Mom but also with other caregivers. We need our caregivers to help us identify and name our emotions, to allow us to feel and express all of our emotions, and to help us tolerate and navigate challenging emotional and bodily states by soothing us and teaching us how to soothe ourselves. This requires an atmosphere of patience, warmth, empathy, understanding, acceptance, fairness, respect, and above all, nondistracted emotional availability.
These attunement experiences not only develop and strengthen the caregiver-child attachment but also play a role in the child’s brain development. Research suggests that good attunement promotes the growth of the self-regulation region of the brain.
Over time, as the child’s brain develops, her reliance on her mother to “coregulate” her emotions lessens, and she begins to self-regulate, or manage her emotions independently. This ability is crucial. Children with good emotional self-regulation do better in school. They have an easier time making friends because they can manage their emotions and relate to others without aggression or impulsiveness and without alienating them. And they are less likely to engage in substance use or abuse.
Young children who do not experience this kind of attunement will most likely experience difficulties with self-regulation. In the words of the addiction specialist Gabor Maté, the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: “Children who suffer disruptions in their attachment relationships will not have the same biochemical milieu in their brains as will their well-attached and well-nurtured peers. As a result, their experiences and interpretations of their environment, and their responses to it, will be less flexible, less adaptive, and less conducive to health and maturity.”
A Good Kid in a Not-So-Good Environment
Stop for a moment and reflect on the type of caregiving you received as an infant and small child. Were your parents or caregivers kind and empathic? Were they good listeners? Did they tune in to your emotions and bodily states? Were they patient, soothing, and comforting when you were upset or discouraged? Did you feel that you wouldn’t be judged or ridiculed, no matter what you did or said? Did you feel safe and secure? Did your caregivers show you how to deal with worrisome thoughts? Did they make time for you when you needed them to? Were you treated with fairness and respect? Did you feel loved and valued? Did you feel that they appreciated and honored your uniqueness?
If your caregivers were stressed, anxious, distracted, or depressed when you were young, they may have had difficulty tuning in to your emotional states on a consistent basis. They may not have had their own basic emotional needs adequately met when they were young. Their parenting style may have been controlling, domineering, intimidating, hypercritical, angry, or shaming. They may have been overprotective, indifferent, or out of touch.
Even well-meaning, loving caregivers can be distracted by their own struggles. They may be working too many hours or have excessive responsibilities. They may have physical or mental health challenges. A parent can deeply love her child and feel a loving attachment but be unable to adequately tune in to her child’s emotional states. Children in these types of relationships will know that they are loved but feel that their parents don’t “get” them or don’t have time for them.
When our caregivers cannot assist us in regulating our emotional and physical arousal and understanding our experiences, we are left in distress. Overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions, uncomfortable bodily sensations, and self-defeating thoughts, our ability to self-regulate, or keep our emotional environment on an even keel, is compromised.
The Importance of Internal Attunement
If, like Liz, you missed out on consistently nourishing attunement experiences and secure parental attachment in your childhood, take heart. Your adult brain can be influenced and altered by your current life experiences. Mindfulness practice — a form of internal attunement — can help you fill developmental skill gaps resulting from early attachment misses and nurture and strengthen the circuitry of your brain for improved self-regulation. We’ll explore that practice in part 2.
In later chapters we’ll revisit my sessions with Liz, focusing on her difficulty with staying with her feelings, validating them, and regulating them by soothing and calming herself. We’ll also look at her challenges in relating to her mother. Without clear personal boundaries, Liz lives with a constant source of stress that taxes her physically and emotionally and fuels her overeating.
In the next chapter, we look at how this distress overwhelms our brain’s self-regulation circuitry and chemical communication systems. Chronic distress also taxes our stress-control mechanisms and can lead to a residue of energy becoming trapped in our nervous system, where it wreaks havoc on our body, mind, and spirit. When we cannot regulate emotional and physical arousal in any other way, the lure of brain-numbing foods like donuts and cream puffs becomes irresistible.
One of the most striking peculiarities of the human brain is the great development of the frontal lobes — they are much less developed in other primates and hardly evident at all in other mammals. They are the part of the brain that grows and develops most after birth.
— Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars
It’s your mind that gets you into trouble when it comes to overeating. On your way home from another exhausting day at work, you can’t stop thinking about pizza, so you stop and buy one. You did well at managing your eating all day, and you had the best of intentions when making that last stop at the supermarket to pick up some fruit and vegetables. But somehow that cheesecake sampler ended up in your cart. You know these foods aren’t the healthiest choices and that buying more than a serving size of any of them isn’t wise. You rationalize that you’ll just have one piece of pizza and one slice of cheesecake and save the rest for later. And that Zumba class you were going to take — well, you’re just too tired tonight, but you’ll go tomorrow for sure.
When tomorrow comes and your friend invites you to dinner, you accept the invitation without hesitation and once again skip the dance class. After all, you still have many more days this week to fit in exercise. On the drive to the restaurant, you promise yourself that you’ll order soup and salad — you almost don’t remember ordering the cheesy noodle dish and that second glass of wine. What happened between making that promise to yourself and now? Truly, you want to do better, but something always gets in the way.
It’s your brain. And it’s not your fault! When we have not received consistent and sufficient emotional nurturance during our early years, we are at greater risk of seeking it from external sources, like food and alcohol, later in life. Many of us have been raised to interpret undisciplined behavior patterns, like overeating and underexercising, as a sign of character weakness or laziness and a general lack of control. This kind of judgmental labeling is not only inaccurate — many overeaters I work with are extremely disciplined in many areas of their lives — but also unhelpful. Disordered eating patterns represent resourceful survival strategies for regulating emotional or physical arousal (or lack of arousal), coping with adverse experiences, and increasing pleasure. Understanding this takes the shame out of recovery and shows us the way forward.
When you have a strong urge to detach from unpleasant emotions or bodily sensations, turn off painful thoughts, distract yourself, numb out, and comfort, soothe, and pleasure yourself with food, the part of you that turns to food is very, very young. You can’t manage or modify your behavior with logical arguments, because that very young part of you doesn’t respond to reason. You are under the influence of an emotionally dominant part of your brain about the shape and size of an almond, called the amygdala (pronounced uh-MIG-duh-luh).
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