SIMPLE RAPPORTS DEEP IMPLICATIONS

Tim Ferris entrepreneur and author of the '4 hour work week' is interviewing Gabor Matte, a sought after researcher and writer for his expertise on trauma, addiction, stress and childhood development:

...there is a good chance that I ended up being a doctor and a writer because I was trying to fill in for the hole my mother had felt for all her life due to her losing her own father, who himself had been a doctor and a writer. The child is very open and can feel the pain and suffering going on in its immediate environment. The child is also aware of its own body, and can also feel the tension, rigidity, and pain in the body of the mother, or whoever he is with. If the mother is suffering the baby is suffering too, the pain never gets discharged, the organism never develops the confidence that it can regulate itself, that things can develop the way they should, hence, the ensuing lack of optimism. Now, my mother did not abuse me, but she was stressed, grief stricken, terrorized, and I am picking that up as a sensitive infant. Can I fight back? Change the situation? Or escape? No, so the only way for me to cope with the stress is to tune out.

How Childhood Trauma Shapes the Developing Brain

Trauma is a sense based experience, it is something we feel, hear, see, smell and touch, and something the child's ego comes to identify as belonging to itself. If hunger arises, the ego says "I am hungry", but if something is not spoken about, the ego says "I am not spoken about". 

What the ego should realise is that there is something wrong in the environment that has be to addressed, but the egoic principle of the child's mind does not allow for this. Instead, it allows for everything to become an issue of absolute importance, positioning the child's presence in the very center of all causes. It continually defines itself through the features of its present environment. 

Emotional 'Wi-Fi': The Impact of Early Relationships

Thus, the rapport with his closest carers become the major influence on its development, shaping the chemistry, the systems and circuits it develops, and which neurochemicals will be presented and in what quantities in later stages of development. Kirsten Holmberg, mother of four-adopted children, makes this process poignantly clear. Through her intense lived experience she concludes:

When you and I look into the eyes of a child, we download our brains into theirs over emotional wifi, giving them the blue print for all the relationships they will have in life. When that connection is absent, as in the case of neglect, or when that connection is negative, as in the case of abuse, the brain is structurally altered.

Together with hundred other sources her conclusions leave us with little doubts, the most important process shaping the brain is the child-adult relationship in the early stages of development, from the uterus to adolescence, with primary centers of influence being the family, the community and the school, centers which are often neither trauma-empty nor trauma-informed, but on the contrary, often neglectful of the depth of the child's scar, and ignorant of the collective trauma that breeds beneath the norms they govern.

Parental Trauma and Its Generational Cycle

Peter K. Gerlach, a mechanical engineer turned family systems therapist, and founder of the NGO Break the Cycle adds to our understanding:

A high percentage of average parents, without meaning to, traumatize and psychologically wound their children. The basis for traumatizing children is simple, it is carrying a wound and being ignorant of it. So while effective parents will teach their children Self-respect, self love and self nurturance, wounded-ignoring parents inevitably nurture self neglect, thus perpetuating the psychological split at the basis of their wound.

He goes on to argue that in his three decades long experience only 5% of his patients seemed to have been aware of their wounds, a pretty straight forward picture of how many of us may have been traumatized by our parental relationships, or are, ourselves, doing so with our own. He also suggests that there are essentially three generic types of childhood trauma derived from parental ineffective practices. I find his analysis interesting and useful, so I made a blog post for each.

There are three types of parental driven traumas: NEGLECT, ABANDONMENT, and ABUSE. Go check them out.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko