her brain has become hard-wired to perceive threat quickly.
Feelings of shame are common in children whose parents are emotionally unavailable or repeatedly fail to attune to them. Children who feel invisible or misunderstood often experience this lack of attunement physiologically in the form of a shrinking or slumping sensation, or a feeling of heaviness in the chest, back, and shoulders. They often appear sad, with a downcast posture.
When brain cells, called neurons, repeatedly fire simultaneously in response to an experience, those neurons become connected to each other. As the Canadian neuropsychologist and researcher Donald Hebb puts it, “Cells that fire together wire together.” They form a network and become hard-wired in the brain: in essence, they become part of our conditioned, habitual responses to the world. The strength of these connections is influenced by many factors, including the frequency of their use.
According to Daniel Siegel:
These isolated states of being — shame intensified by humiliation — burn themselves into our synaptic connections. . . .In the future, we’ll be vulnerable to reactivating the state of shame or humiliation in contexts that resemble the original situation. The state of shame becomes associated with a cortically constructed belief that the self is defective. From the point of view of survival, “I am bad” is a safer perspective than “My parents are unreliable and may abandon me at any time.” It’s better for the child to feel defective than to realize that his attachment figures are dangerous, undependable, or untrustworthy. The mental mechanism of shame at least preserves for him the illusion of safety and security that is at the core of his sanity.
Liz’s early stressful experiences with her mother have been encoded as maladaptive emotional and cognitive patterns in her brain. After experiencing her mother’s shaming look repeatedly when putting food on her plate, grabbing a snack, or trying on clothes, Liz regularly feels anxiety and shame even when no one else is around. She is quick to interpret an innocent glance from a stranger or store clerk as shaming. She has a tendency to overreact, because at times of stress, she can’t access the neural circuits that would help her calm down and regulate her emotions. At times like these, indulging in her favorite, tranquilizing comfort foods, like donuts and cream puffs, is the fastest way to quiet the agitation in her body and the storm in her brain.
Regulating Emotions and Behaviors through Attunement
A caregiver’s role is to meet a child’s basic physical needs (food, clothing, shelter) and to provide consistent emotional nurturance. Emotions — reactions in the brain that cause a change in our internal states — signal us, and our caregivers, to act. As infants and small children, we cannot regulate our emotions and behaviors alone: we rely on our primary caregivers to soothe and comfort us. Attuned interactions — experiences that let us know that someone else perceives and understands what we are feeling — allow preverbal infants, not yet capable of understanding emotions or using language, to feel close, connected, safe, and loved.
Most caregivers do a pretty good job of tuning in to an infant’s distress and offering an appropriate and soothing emotional response. For example, when a toddler hits her head on the edge of the table and starts to scream and cry, her mother identifies and acknowledges her emotions and pain: “Oh, sweetie, I see that you are sad because you bumped your head. That really hurts! Let Mommy kiss your boo-boo.” The child’s mother helps to regulate or lessen the intensity of the child’s emotions with her attuned words. By identifying the bumped head, the sadness, and the pain, the parent is teaching the child to name her emotions, her bodily sensations, and the things that cause pain.
At the same time, the mother conveys caring and empathy through her actions, kissing and cuddling the child in her arms. These behaviors help her baby feel safe and secure. An association is established between intense feeling states and the possibility of a return to safety and comfort. This is the necessary foundation for building the skills of self-soothing, self-nurturing, and self-regulation. Once her child is calm, the mother might use this situation to engage her child in problem solving for the future: “Corners of tables are sharp; it’s best if we don’t play near them.”
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
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