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May 4 - May 20, 2025
Scientists study what puzzles them most, so that they often become experts in subjects that others take for granted. (Or, as the attachment researcher Beatrice Beebe once told me, “most research is me-search.”)
we get our first lessons in self-care from the way that we are cared for.
Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage—a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.
it does not require extraordinary talent to be what he called a “good enough mother.”10
The need for attachment never lessens.
People who cannot connect through work, friendships, or family usually find other ways of bonding, as through illnesses, lawsuits, or family feuds. Anything is preferable to that godforsaken sense of irrelevance and alienation.
Kids will go to almost any length to feel seen and connected.
With “good enough” caregivers, children learn that broken connections can be repaired. The critical issue is whether they can incorporate a feeling of being viscerally safe with their parents or other caregivers.
Children who don’t feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older.
While all parents need all the help they can get to help raise secure children, traumatized parents, in particular, need help to be attuned to their children’s needs.
the development of PTSD could be predicted by how safe they felt with their mothers.
acting as if they expected them to respond to their needs.
seemed to want their children to comfort them.
Karlen and her colleagues had expected that hostile/intrusive behavior on the part of the mothers would be the most powerful predictor of mental instability in their adult children, but they discovered otherwise. Emotional withdrawal had the most profound and long-lasting impact. Emotional distance and role reversal (in which mothers expected the kids to look after them) were specifically linked to aggressive behavior against self and others in the young adults.
“What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.”38 If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.
This does not imply that child abuse is irrelevant41, but that the quality of early caregiving is critically important in preventing mental health problems, independent of other traumas.42
“i like my body when it is with your body. . . . muscles better and nerves more”
Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created.
Being in synch with oneself and with others requires the integration of our body-based senses—vision, hearing, touch, and balance.
As the poet W. H. Auden wrote: Truth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense.
it’s not important for me to know every detail of a patient’s trauma. What is critical is that the patients themselves learn to tolerate feeling what they feel and knowing what they know.
In patients with histories of incest, the proportion of RA cells that are ready to pounce is larger than normal. This makes the immune system oversensitive to threat, so that it is prone to mount a defense when none is needed, even when this means attacking the body’s own cells. Our study showed that, on a deep level, the bodies of incest victims have trouble distinguishing between danger and safety.
the imprint of past trauma does not consist only of distorted perceptions of information coming from the outside; the organism itself also has a problem knowing how to feel safe. The past is impressed not only on their minds, and in misinterpretations of innocuous events (as when Marilyn attacked Michael because he accidentally touched her in her sleep), but also on the very core of their beings: in the safety of their bodies.
they shape the way our rapidly growing brain perceives reality. Our interactions with our caregivers convey what is safe and what is dangerous: whom we can count on and who will let us down; what we need to do to get our needs met.
This doesn’t mean, however, that our maps can’t be modified by experience.
These responses are not reasonable and therefore cannot be changed simply by reframing irrational beliefs. Our maps of the world are encoded in the emotional brain, and changing them means having to reorganize that part of the central nervous system,
Generally the rational brain can override the emotional brain, as long as our fears don’t hijack us.
the moment we feel trapped, enraged, or rejected, we are vulnerable to activating old maps and to follow their directions.
Change begins when we learn to “own” our emotional brains. That means learning to observe and tolerate the heartbreaking and gut-wrenching sensations that register misery and humiliation. Only after learning to bear what is going on inside can we start to befriend, rather than obliterate, the emotions that keep our maps fixed and immutable.
Her immune system, her muscles, and her fear system all had kept the score, but her conscious mind lacked a story that could communicate the experience.
Learning to keep her mind alive while allowing her body to feel the feelings that she had come to dread
After forty years of doing this work I still regularly hear myself saying, “That’s unbelievable,” when patients tell me about their childhoods. They often are as incredulous as I am—how could parents inflict such torture and terror on their own child? Part of them continues to insist that they must have made the experience up or that they are exaggerating. All of them are ashamed about what happened to them, and they blame themselves—on some level they firmly believe that these terrible things were done to them because they are terrible people.
Children sense—even if they are not explicitly threatened—that if they talked about their beatings or molestation to teachers they would be punished. Instead, they focus their energy on not thinking about what has happened and not feeling the residues of terror and panic in their bodies.
She was not ready to violate her loyalty to her family—deep inside she felt that she still needed them to protect her against her fears. The price of this loyalty is unbearable feelings of loneliness, despair, and the inevitable rage of helplessness. Rage that has nowhere to go is redirected against the self, in the form of depression, self-hatred, and self-destructive actions.
Nothing feels safe—least of all your own body.
In order to know who we are—to have an identity—we must know (or at least feel that we know) what is and what was “real.” We must observe what we see around us and label it correctly; we must also be able to trust our memories and be able to tell them apart from our imagination.
William Niederland called “soul murder.” Erasing awareness and cultivating denial are often essential to survival, but the price is that you lose track of who you are, of what you are feeling, and of what and whom you can trust.5
Trauma is not stored as a narrative with an orderly beginning, middle, and end. As I’ll discuss in detail in chapters 11 and 12, memories initially return as they did for Marilyn: as flashbacks that contain fragments of the experience, isolated images, sounds, and body sensations that initially have no context other than fear and panic.
people universally feel ashamed about the traumas they have experienced,
different forms of abuse have different impacts on various brain areas at different stages of development.
clinicians who spend their days treating a particular patient population are likely to develop considerable expertise in understanding what ails them.
The adults who had been abused as children often had trouble concentrating, complained of always being on edge, and were filled with self-loathing. They had enormous trouble negotiating intimate relationships, often veering from indiscriminate, high-risk, and unsatisfying sexual involvements to total sexual shutdown. They also had large gaps in their memories, often engaged in self-destructive behaviors, and had a host of medical problems.
most of their morbidly obese patients had been sexually abused as children.
People typically don’t grow up in a household where one brother is in prison but everything else is fine. They don’t live in families where their mother is regularly beaten but life is otherwise hunky-dory. Incidents of abuse are never stand-alone events. And for each additional adverse experience reported, the toll in later damage increases.
the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.20 It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration.
Childhood abuse isn’t something you “get over.” It is an evil that we must acknowledge and confront if we aim to do anything about the unchecked cycle of violence in this country.
We can hope to solve the problems of these children only if we correctly define what is going on with them and do more than developing new drugs to control them or trying to find “the” gene that is responsible for their “disease.”
Even more important, genes are not fixed; life events can trigger biochemical messages that turn them on or off
While life events can change the behavior of the gene, they do not alter its fundamental structure.
Safe and protective early relationships are critical to protect children from long-term problems.
