A storm threatens. The sky turns metallic. The march of clouds across the sky breaks apart. Pieces of sky fly off in different directions. The wind picks up force, in silence.… The world is disintegrating. Something is about to happen. Uneasiness grows. It spreads from the center and turns into pain.
The above is a moment of growing hunger as experienced by a hypothetical six-week-old infant called Joey, as imagined by developmental psychologist Daniel Stern in his charming book Diary of a Baby. A tremendous amount of recent research on infancy informs Joey’s diary. For example, it is now thought that infants cannot separate inner from outer stimulation or sort out the different senses or the present from a remembered experience that has just happened. Nor do they have a sense of themselves as the one who is experiencing it all, the one to whom it is happening.
Given all of the above, Stern found that weather is a good analogy for an infant’s experience. Things just happen, varying mostly in intensity. Intensity is all that disturbs, by creating a storm of overarousal. HSPs take note: Overarousal is the first and most basic distressing experience of life; our first lessons about overarousal begin at birth.
Here is how Stern imagines Joey feeling after he has nursed and eased his hunger:
All is remade. A changed world is waking. The storm has passed. The winds are quiet. The sky is softened. Running lines and flowing volumes appear. They trace a harmony and, like shifting light, make everything come alive.
Stern sees infants as having the same needs as adults for a moderate level of arousal:
A baby’s nervous system is prepared to evaluate immediately the intensity of … anything accessible to one of his senses. How intensely he feels about something is probably the first clue he has available to tell him whether to approach it or to stay away … if something is moderately intense … he is spellbound. That just-tolerable intensity arouses him.… It increases his animation, activates his whole being.
In other words, it is no fun to be bored. On the other hand, the infant/body self is born with an instinct to stay away from whatever is highly intense, to avoid the state of overarousal. For some, however, it’s harder to do.
Six Weeks and Highly Sensitive
Now I will try my own hand at this new literary genre of infant diary, with the experience of an imaginary, highly sensitive infant, Jesse.
The wind has been blowing incessantly, sometimes gusting into a howling gale, sometimes falling to an edgy, exhausting moan. For a seeming eternity clouds have swirled in random patterns of blinding light and glowering dark. Now an ominous dusk is descending, and for a moment the wind seems to ebb with the light.
But the darkness is disorienting in itself, and the howling wind begins to shift directions indecisively, as it might in the region of tornadoes. Indeed, out of this rising chaos the veerings do take a shape, gaining energy from one another, until a cyclonic fury emerges. A hellish hurricane is happening in deepest night.
There is some place or time where this awfulness stops, but there is no way to find that haven, for this weather has neither up nor down, east nor west—only round and round toward the fearful center.
I imagined the above happening after Jesse had gone with his mother and two older sisters to the shopping mall, riding in his car seat, then a stroller, then back home in the car seat.’ It was a Saturday, and the mall was jammed. On the way home his two sisters had a fight about which radio station to listen to, each of them turning the volume louder. There was considerable traffic, many stops and starts. They returned home late, long after Jesse’s usual nap time. When offered a chance to nurse, he only cried and fussed, too overwhelmed to attend to his vaguer sense of hunger. So his mother tried putting him down to sleep. That is when the hurricane finally hit.
We should not forget that Jesse was hungry, too. Hunger is yet another stimulus, from inside. Besides arousing one further, it produces a diminution of the biochemical substances necessary for the usual, calmer functioning of the nervous system. My research indicates that hunger has an especially strong effect on HSPs. As one put it, “Sometimes when I’m tired it’s like I regress to this age where I can almost hear myself saying, ‘I must have my milk and cookies, right now.’” Yet once overaroused, we may not even notice hunger. Taking good care of a highly sensitive body is like taking care of an infant.
Why the Infant/Body Self?
Think of what the infant and the body have in common. First, both are wonderfully content and cooperative when they are not overstimulated, worn out, and hungry. Second, when babies and sensitive bodies really are exhausted, both are largely helpless to correct things on their own. The baby-you relied on a caretaker to set limits and satisfy your simple, basic needs, and your body relies on you to do it now.
Both also cannot use words to explain their troubles; they can only give louder and louder signals for help or develop a symptom so serious it cannot be ignored. The wise caretaker knows that much woe is avoided by responding to the infant/body at the first sign of distress.
Finally, as we noted in the last chapter, caretakers who think newborn babies or bodies can be spoiled and should be “left to cry” are wrong. Research demonstrates that if a small infant’s crying is responded to promptly (except at those times when responding just adds to the overstimulation), that infant will cry less, not more, when older.
This infant/body self is an expert on sensitivity. She has been sensitive from the day she was born. She knows what was hardest then, what is hard now. He knows what you lacked, what you learned from your parents and other caretakers about how to treat him, what he needs now, and how you can take care of him in the future. By starting here, we make use of the old adage “Well begun is half-done.”
You and Your Caretaker
About half or a little more than half of all infants are raised by adequate parents, and thus become what is called “securely attached” children. The term is taken from biology. All newborn primates hang on to Mom, and most moms want their infants to hang on tight, securely.
As the infant gets a little older, when feeling safe he or she can begin to explore and try to do things independently. The mother will feel pleased about that—watchful and ready if there is trouble but otherwise glad that her little one is growing up. But there will still be a kind of invisible attachment. The moment there is danger, their bodies will reunite and become attached again. Secure.
Now and then, for various reasons usually having to do with how the mother or father was raised, a primary caretaker may give one of two other messages, creating an insecure attachment. One is that the world is so awful, or the caretaker is so preoccupied or vulnerable, that the infant must hang on very, very tight. The child does not dare to explore very much. Maybe the caretaker does not want exploring or would leave the infant behind if he or she did not hang on. These babies are said to be anxious about, or preoccupied with, their attachment to their caretaker.
The other message an infant may receive is that the caretaker is dangerous and ought to be avoided or values more highly a child who is minimal trouble and very independent. Perhaps the caretaker is too stressed to care for a child. And there are those who at times, in anger or desperation, even want the infant to disappear or die. In that case the infant will do best not to be attached at all. Such infants are said to be avoidant. When separated from their mothers or fathers, they seem quite indifferent. (Sometimes, of course, a child is securely attached to one parent and not to the other.)
From our first attachment experiences we tend to develop a rather enduring mental idea of what to expect from someone we are close to and depend on. While that