A Secure Connection to Family Helps Us Weather the Storms of Life
When a baby cries, it’s not broken. It just needs to be picked up and comforted. But when babies don’t get picked up when they cry, their fear and confusion around why this is happening gets internalized as a fundamental belief that they are broken, and not worthy of being loved. When these babies grow into adulthood, they are at a greater risk of being thrown off balance when strong feelings get evoked such as disappointment or loss because these feelings also trigger a memory of their brokenness, a reminder that the world is unsafe, and they have to fend all on their own.
In order to remain sturdy during those times in life when disappointment makes us feel helpless and vulnerable, drawing upon early memories of having a safe, secure connection to family helps us weather the storms of life. It also allows us to reach out for help without feeling embarrassed to do so. Children who grew up in securely attached environments don’t associate feeling vulnerable with feelings of shame or defectiveness. For children who grew up in an atmosphere of trauma and/or deprivation, the need to ask for help in adulthood is proof of their failure, proof of their defectiveness.
As sad as this may sound, there are so many people walking around with the belief at some deep level that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, not realizing that these feelings come from learned, unfair or traumatic social interactions with adults that were repeated over and over again. That makes sense. For children, it is the only world they know. Unfair treatment either becomes normalized, or the child acknowledges the unfairness but feels powerless to do anything to effect a change. This can also lead to rigidity in thinking, a self-protective posture where the core source of the pain remains hidden or under-examined. How and why does this happen?
The failure to provide a secure attachment early in life produces memories that get internalized prior to the acquisition of language, prior to when language allows us to create a personal story of who we are, a narrative to help make meaning and sense out of life. When trauma happens prior to language acquisition (and most attachment failures begin in infancy, prior to language), the internalized sense of brokenness and fear about how safe one really ever remains unconscious, stored in the body, a felt sense that has no words. Therapists understand this as a combination of fear and shame that drives people to either overcompensate to prove self-worth, or it drives people to lash out against anyone who threatens their beliefs, or their way of being. It is the unexamined nature of this over-determination that leads to polarization, fanaticism, the wish to hide, or the wish to conquer and/or destroy.
Building a secure attachment in infants and children in the first few years of life is probably the single-most important action we could take as a society, a society whose constitution claims to hold a standard of care for all. Keeping our children safe, and providing quality parenting classes and support for those who are raising all of this nation’s children, not just our own children, would be an action that could literally “save the world.” And yet we don’t treat this as a priority. Instead, this is where cost cuts and underfunding of programs happen first.
The overwhelming body of psychological research correlates most acts of aggression, violence, greed, and hatred of “the other” as stemming from deep-seated feelings of inadequacy, inadequacy that can be traced to early failures of attachment. This also includes many young children who grew up in positions of privilege, or individuals who were able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” Many of those children also internalized the message that you’re not worthy enough, or successful enough unless you accomplish great things in life. This creates a similar vulnerability and core fear of what a lack of success or the loss of positional power might mean in terms of maintaining a positive sense of self.
I am writing this blog post as I am about to attend the celebration of life of a dear, dear friend. It also happens to be my birthday. Today, more than ever, I am poignantly aware of the brevity of life, how much time can be wasted in trying to make a mark and proving self-worth, only to have it boil down to seeing more clearly that all any of us are really after is love, acceptance, leaving a legacy of hope, and giving back more than we take. It all starts at the very beginning of life, and it shapes everything we do moving forward.
Learn more in my third book, Embracing Therapeutic Complexity, I provide a diagrammatic road map that allows you to compare the difference between individuals who move through the world by putting exacting standards on themselves as a means of over-compensating for past hurts or deep-seated feelings of unworthiness vs. healthier individuals who move through the world with kindness, grace, and relative ease.