In order to understand the meaning of tall, we need to
understand the meaning of short. To know
if something is hot, we must be familiar with something cold. Likewise, good is relative to bad, wet is
relative to dry, and happy is relative to sad.
The same is true in order to understand the impact of early childhood trauma
and abuse on a child. We need to first
understand the impact of positive early childhood experiences in order to
understand the impact of negative early childhood experiences. With the comparison of this information, we
can have insight into knowing how to parent and connect with a child who
experienced early childhood trauma, abuse, and neglect.
This
article is designed first to give you the information of what happens when
children are raised in environments of love and attunement and then to give you
information on how to re-create interactions with an adopted child whose early
life experiences were void of these positive experiences and tainted by trauma
and abuse. In order to heal the broken,
we must first know what it looks like unbroken.
Tools for the adoptive parent are given in order to empower you as a
parent to overcome, with your child, the effects of toxic caregiving many
adopted children experience in orphanages or foster homes.
The Right Brain.
The first relationship an infant is
designed to experience is the relationship with his mother. This relationship begins in the womb and is
designed to continue at a high level of intensity for at least the next three
years of the child’s life. It is in
these first three years that amazing development happens due to his mother’s
attention, attunement, devotion, and connection with him.
John
Bowlby, considered the Father of Attachment Theory, identified this
relationship between mother and child as critical to the development of a
child’s ability to relate to others during his entire lifespan. Bowlby stated that early life experiences
create imprints that influence a child’s capacity to maintain healthy and
secure relationships as an adult. New
research from neurological science reinforces this concept and shows that these
early life experiences literally influence the development of a child’s
neurological system and influence the circuit wiring of his brain.
According
to Dr. Allan Shore, the “King” of affect regulation, the development of a
child’s brain occurs primarily in the right brain the first few years of life.
The right brain holds the capacity for emotional and nonverbal
information processing while the left brain holds the capacity for language and
logical processing. Thus, for the infant
and toddler, with no or limited language skills, communication happens
primarily in the right brain. These
experiences occur at the emotional level, not at the cognitive or “thinking”
level.
It is
interesting to note that as adults, we operate from mainly our left
brains. We think logically and we use
words to express ourselves—all left brain functions. Yet, our babies and children are working from
the opposite side of the brain. If you
observe a mother with her infant, she has shifted out of her left brain and
into her right brain. How logical is it
to say, “Goo-goo-gaa-gaa?” Yet, when
seen in the context of the parent-child relationship, it is perfectly
acceptable and, in fact, necessary, in order to connect with this a
child because the child’s right brain needs emotional experiences.
As adults,
it takes shifting back into our right brain, getting outside of being the
adult, and meeting our child where he is at in order to create a healthy
relationship. As adoptive parents, we
need to realize that the bond we are trying to build with our children, at whatever
age, needs to happen at the emotional level first. If we allow our children to experience what
they missed with us in their early years—parenting from our right brains and
being emotionally available and attuned—we will be creating an environment for
healing and the development of meaningful relationships with our children.
Types of Communication.
When a young child communicates
with his mother, he experiences her being predictable and manipulatable. For instance, if the baby smiles, his mother
smiles back. If the baby cries, his
mother attends to him in a soft and soothing tone in order to calm him. The child’s communication, while non-verbal,
is used to make connection with his mother.
There are three main forms of
non-verbal communication prevalent between young children and their
caregivers. First, mothers and babies
communicate through visual and facial expressions. The child is reading his mother’s face and vise-versa,
the mother is reading her child’s face.
The baby smiles, the mother smiles.
Through this communication, the baby develops a sense of coherence in
his feelings. If the baby smiles and the
mother frowns and becomes upset, the baby becomes confused and distorted in his
understanding of feelings.
Second, the mother and child make
connection through physical touch and with gestures. Think of the pleasant sensation you have when
you touch a baby’s skin. This is an
important part of positive communication between parent and child. The skin is the largest organ in the body. It needs physical stimulation that is
pleasant and enjoyable. This helps develop the child’s sensory system. Children who are not touched or held are at
risk of having sensory integration difficulties.
Third, the parent-child connection
happens through the auditory senses whereby the mother’s tone of voice
influences the child’s receptivity to his mother’s verbal communication. The baby does not have the capacity to
understand his mother’s words and vocabulary, thus the baby is comprehending
verbal communication solely through his mother’s emotional tone of voice. It is not what the mother is saying, but how
she is saying it. This verbal
communication is essentially a function of the right brain, the feeling brain,
not the left brain, the cognitive brain.
Through these non-verbal
communications, the attachment system is being created by both the child and
the mother. In this attachment system,
the mother is helping the child regulate his states of stress and fear. The mother who attends to her child’s
negative states is helping her child shift back into a positive state. This is known as “affect synchrony.” Affect synchrony is the regulatory means for
developing and maintaining positive emotional states within the relationship of
emotional communication. Positive states
are amplified and maximized for the child while negative states are minimized
and neutralized for the child.
Regulatory Difficulties.
As babies and children experience
these types of loving and calming interactions, their systems learn how to
handle high levels of both positive and negative feelings. Their internal neurological systems become
equipped to calm down on their own.
Essentially, they begin to develop the ability to self-regulate.
For a child
who misses these early positive experiences due to trauma, abuse, or neglect,
he lacks the ability to read facial expressions and to feel a sense of
internal security. If his cries for help
were either met with negative reactions from his parent, as in the case of
abuse, or ignored by his parent, as in the case of neglect, the child quickly
shifts from living in a state of love and peace to a state of fear and
terror. When children miss having the
experience of a loving parent or caregiver who helps them calm down, their
systems stay in a state of stress, unable to regulate back down to a calm
state. The result is a child who is very
sensitive to stress and lacks the regulatory ability to calm down on his own.
In severe cases, children living in
these environments reach a state of absolute terror and plummet to a state of
survival—life or death. Their nervous
systems remain in a constant state of stress and hyper-vigilance, unable to
predict what type of reaction they are going to receive with each cry for help.
Some children, characteristically those who are neglected, simply stop
communicating and shut down from the world.
Healing for
these children happens when the adoptive parent can recreate positive
experiences in order to give the children the experience of being soothed
through the parent-child relationship.
The child’s nervous system needs to experience the state of calm arousal
instead of staying in a state of perpetual hyper-arousal . It takes parenting from a new understanding
that says, “Children’s behaviors are a cry for regulation—a cry for
relationship, not a cry for punishment and consequences.”
The child does not know how to say,
“Hey, mom! I’m completely stressed
out here! I’m scared, in fact, I’m quite
terrified because my world has been turned upside down and I need your help in
soothing me-NOW!” The only
communication the child knows at this point in his development is
misbehavior. Thus, instead of parents
working to extinguish and change the child’s negative behaviors, it becomes
clear that the child needs to be soothed and comforted by his parent. The child needs connection and needs
interactions with his parents that provide safety, love, and security.
It takes going beyond the behaviors
in order to create this necessary and essential parent-child bond. As adoptive parents, we have to learn the
rhythms and flows of our children and then modify our own to fit into a
parent-child matching. (For more
information on how to do this while at the same time teaching children
appropriate behaviors and maintaining boundaries, read Beyond Consequences,
Logic, and Control available at www.beyondconsequences.com). The focus of parenting then shifts from the
goal of changing behaviors to building relationships. This is the essence of creating healing and
safe homes in order to stabilize our children and prepare them for a future of
peace, joy, and abundance.
In the past, parenting focused on
ways to decrease negative behaviors and negative emotions. However, with this new understanding of brain
development, we now see that parenting is about increasing positive emotions
and creating positive experiences.
Parenting emotionally healthy children is about joy, not fear-based
punishments.
Interactive Repair.
Interactive repair is the key to
helping children heal from the effects of early childhood trauma. Repair to the nervous system and to
the child’s sense of self, safety, and security comes through interactions with
his parent. As the relationship develops
between the two, through loving, safe, and kind experiences, the child learns
to tolerate negative emotions and eventually develops his ability to
self-regulate. The key to this is the
emotional availability of the parent and the intimacy offered by the parent,
which is the central growth feature for all children.
When the parent is calm, regulated,
in a state of peace, and open to connecting emotionally with the child, this
influences the child’s ability to shift into this state of regulation and calm. Interactive repair is essentially a body to
body connection. In terms of these
interactions, both the parent and the child are co-regulating their central
nervous systems and their autonomic nervous systems. At a physiological level,
the body is changing. Cortisol levels
are dropping; oxytocin is increasing.
Their endocrine systems and their immune systems are being regulated by
the nature of their relationship.
Creating a Healing Environment.
The number
one person to help your adopted child is you.
Every interaction you have with your child is a healing moment—a moment
for interactive repair—24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. This is especially true during the difficult
interactions when your child is demonstrating difficult behaviors. That is when
he is most “raw” and needing you the most.
These are the healing moments we have traditionally missed! Instead of punishing the behavior, step
inside your child’s pain, join him in relationship, and give him understanding
and the opportunity to experience love and regulation through your relationship
with him. Being mindful that his
behaviors are requests for connection is essential to this process.
Be
proactive in working to create experiences that build connection. Here is a list of playful activities for
creating secure attachments:
- Carrying
your baby
- Rocking
your child
- Feeding
your child
- Talking
(It’s not so much as what you say as how you say it—tone of voice)
- Playing
– letting the child lead the play experience
- Hugging
- Massage
and gentle touch
- Cuddling
- Co-bathing
(when age appropriate)
- Swimming (skin to skin contact)
- Creating
a life book
- Giving
your child his story
- Playing
“hide and seek” (recreating the coming and going experience)
- Tickling
- Wrestling
(great for dads!)
Face to face play experiences feed
the wiring of the brain. Traditionally,
we have underestimated the importance of play experiences in early human
development. For many children who have
suffered trauma, abuse, and neglect, they do not know how to play. Create these play experiences and you’ll be
creating experiences that can truly repair the missing pieces from his past by
changing his physiological system, decreasing his stress state, improving his
relationship with you, and ultimately, creating the essential missing
ingredient in his life: joy!
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