You’re not meant to raise children isolated and alone.
There is a direct relationship between a person’s degree of social isolation and their risk for physical and mental health problems.
As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the “certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.
Dr. Perry: That’s a wonderful example of the glue of love. It is in the small moments, when we feel the other person fully present, fully engaged, connected, and accepting, that we make the most powerful, enduring bonds.
Adrenaline increases the sugar in your blood. Her stress response, overactivated by the recent trauma, increased her adrenaline – hence much more sugar in her blood. The dose of insulin that had worked in the past was no longer adequate. Furthermore, when she was exposed to any evocative cue, such as the sirens, her sensitized system had an overreaction, releasing very high levels of adrenaline and, in turn, leading to a huge release of sugar.
What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.
You can’t give what you don’t have.
To create an effective “memory” and increase strength, experience has to be patterned and repetitive.
When we get back into balance, we feel better. Relief of distress – getting back into balance – activates the reward networks in the brain. We feel pleasure when we get back into balance – from cold to warm, thirsty to quenched, hungry to satiated.
Balance is the core of health. We feel and function best when our body’s systems are in balance, and when we’re in balance with friends, family, community, and nature.
When the attentive and responsive adult comes to the crying infant, two very important things happen. The baby feels the pleasure of being regulated after being distressed – and also experiences the sight, smell, touch, sound, and movement of human interaction.
Social connection builds resilience, and resilience helps create post-traumatic wisdom, and that wisdom leads to hope. Hope for you and hope for others witnessing and participating in your healing, hope for your community.
Connectedness counters the pull of addictive behaviors. It is the key.
Indeed, if moderate, predictable and patterned, it is stress that makes a system stronger and more functionally capable.
I believe we don’t have enough quiet conversational moments listening to a friend with no other distractions. That kind of interaction leads to a completely different quality of human connection. A different depth.
What you are pointing out is how adaptive it is to dissociate in many situations. If a soldier in combat simply went down the arousal continuum-and got to the flee and then fight stages-he would jump up and get shot. In order to maintain access to parts of his cortex-to think and behave in the ways he was trained to keep him alive in combat-he needs to dissociate to a certain degree.
Parenting is difficult. Without the neurobiological capacity to feel the joys of parenting, irritations and annoyances loom especially large.
Human social life is built on this ability to “reflect” each other and respond to those reflections, with both positive and negative results.
It is not unusual for children to be deceptive or withholding or to purposefully lie in order to avoid things they don’t want to share, especially when they have been instructed to do so by their families. However, it is far more difficult for them to hide their true thoughts and feelings in their artwork.
The brain needs patterned, repetitive stimuli to develop properly.