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Regulation is the key to creating a safe connection.
When you’re on the top of a power differential, sometimes you don’t realize the power you have—or the impact your mere presence can have on others.
In order to communicate rationally and successfully with anyone, you have to make sure they’re regulated, make sure they feel a relationship with you, and only then try to reason with them.
Despite being given the same DSM labels, Thomas and James were nothing alike. I started to wonder about James as an infant. A young, inexperienced mother, struggling with depression, overwhelmed by the nonstop needs of a baby. Maybe his mother had some relational or attachment issues—what had happened to her? You can’t give what you don’t have.
In any case, here were two children with the same DSM labels, but with different behaviors and different responses to treatment. Where did the differences come from? From what happened to them as children.
The buffering effect of these caregivers and his good early start made all the difference. Thomas ended up with healthy relational neurobiology despite his trauma-sensitized stress response.
As we will talk about much more, relationships are the key to healing. But for James, every relational interaction resulted in disengagement. To him, “others” were not safe. In his worldview, people hurt you or left you. Others could not be trusted. The lesson for me was that a key aspect of What happened to you? is
What didn’t happen for you? What attention, nurturing touch, reassurance—basically, what love—didn’t you get? I realized that neglect is as toxic as trauma.
Neglect is most destructive early in life, when the brain is rapidly growing; early neglect interferes with the child’s getting the necessary stimulation required for normal development.
But as seen with the Romanian orphans, the longer you spend in a deprived developmental environment, the harder it will be to recover.
When during development did the neglect take place? What was the pattern? How severe or depriving was the neglect? How long did it last? And, since absolute total neglect is rare, what “buffering” factors were present when the neglect occurred?
The most common form of neglect is fragmented, patternless caregiving.
neglect—“splinter” neglect—occurs when many aspects of development are normal and some key systems receive appropriately timed experiences, but one or more does not—leading to the absence of a critical aspect of healthy development.
There had been a “splinter” deprivation of motor activity; the result was a family of children with grossly underdeveloped
Despite the fact that these are good languages, and that all the languages “activate” the speech and language part of the brain, there were never sufficient repetitions with any one language to properly organize the child’s full speech and language capability.
The key to having many healthy relationships in your life is having only a few safe, stable, and nurturing relationships in your first year. This lets you get adequate repetitions to build the foundation—the fundamental relational architecture—that will allow you to continue to grow healthy relational connections.
When they’re done, she’ll post a picture saying, Look at us, wasn’t that great, we did the horse and carriage ride.
The inability to be really present has a toxic impact on healthy development.
And it requires giving the infant, toddler, or child your attention. Not partial attention—fully engaged attention. I’m looking at you. I’m listening. I’m right here with you.
On the contrary, it’s building the foundation for an emotionally hungry, needy person who will long for belonging but won’t have the neurobiological capability to really find what they need.
A cold, disengaged, partially attentive caregiver can have immediate, and potentially lifelong, toxic effects on the developing child.
Do they get this? Do they like my presentation? Are they bored? And later in the day, you get into a small fender bender, and for a moment
Many of us can connect with that feeling if we have ever experienced grief, which can elicit a feeling of numbness.
Without dissociation, the more a person is threatened, the more fearful they become, and the more the cortex shuts down.
The terms “flow” and “in the zone” are used to describe some of these partial dissociative states.
Our current public education system is good at producing workers, but it can be a miserable place for creators, artists, and future leaders.
We do. But in a developmentally informed, trauma-aware school, there is an understanding that downtime plays a crucial role for memory consolidation.
“It makes me feel alive—to see my blood. It is soothing.”
A percentage of high-school students will experiment with a drug, but only 18 or 20 percent will end up having trouble with recurrent use.
Hypnosis, flow, being “in the zone”—all of these are examples of the trance state that dissociation allows.
The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged.
“You teach people how to treat you.”
He is looking for evidence that his worldview is accurate:
It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore.
“Good thing children are resilient. They’ll be just fine.”
Thousands volunteer their time in the first few weeks; six months later, no one does.
Think about a metal hanger.
Adversity impacts the developing child. Period.
All of these things are much better indicators of changes in the brain than brain scans are.
You are identifying such a central aspect of building resilience. Your connectedness to other people is so key to buffering any current stressor—and to healing from past trauma. Being with people who are present, supportive, and nurturing. Belonging.
We also know that controllable, predictable, and moderate challenges can make the CRNs even stronger.
With a safe and stable relational foundation, thousands of moderate doses of stress help create flexible stress-response capabilities.
If the challenge is going to build resilience, it has to be moderate—just right.
The key is to have challenges that are achievable—close enough to your current capabilities that you will succeed with some encouragement, practice, and repetition.
It’s very difficult to meaningfully connect with or get through to someone who is not regulated.
This is why telling someone who is dysregulated to “calm down” never works.
this is called reflective listening.
If you give a person that control and help them feel safe, in their own time they will be more capable of talking.
Controlling when, how much, and which aspect of a traumatic event they share allows a person to create their own therapeutic pattern of recovery.
Healing takes place when there are dozens of therapeutic moments available each day for the person to control, revisiting and reworking their traumatic experience.
