The Profound Impact of Nurturing: Exploring Safety, Attachment, and Mindfulness

Introduction

As a therapist specializing in long-term therapy with people with dissociative identity disorder, I have delved deeply into the complex world of trauma and its profound effects on the body and mind. My work sits firmly on a feminist foundation, and my approach emphasizes the transformative power of mindfulness—essentially the embodiment of safety within our bodies. In this blog, I will explore how early safety and attachment experiences shape our human functioning and adulthood, and the massive nurturing required to repair disrupted attachments.

The Roots of Human Functioning

Early Safety and Attachment

A lot of people associate Buddha with mindfulness. However, when Buddha discovered mindfulness, it was a really misogynistic time in our history. It never would have occurred to him that his experience and discovery had anything to do with anything other than spirituality or enlightenment.

But the surprising thing that we know now is that the brain structures involved in mindfulness are the same in secure attachment primarily in the relationship between the mother and the child and the father, but also with grandparents and other people.

The brain structures that are responsible for mindfulness are intensely massively regulatory. They regulate various bodily systems, from the lymphatic to the respiratory, and are fully developed at birth.

The things that make our bodies function are fully developed at birth, including our sense perceptions.

Evolution and Mindfulness

Evolutionary Insights

My fascination with human evolution extends to understanding how our bodies and mindfulness practices have evolved.

A human is born in a wild state like animals. However, unlike domesticated animals that revert to wild states if left alone, domesticated humans are different. We've evolved to value teamwork and cooperation. We've outgrown the wild state.

The Impact of Evolution on Behaviour

Our particular evolution points to why we can be so cruel to scared, hurt, or wounded people, and why we are also capable of profound tenderness and care.

I believe that misogyny is the bodily instinctual response to pain and suffering that comes from not being nurtured properly as infants and children.

The Infant's Experience

No Way Out of Upset

So, what we feel as adults, we feel as infants. I don't think people fully appreciate that fact and let it sink in. Ours is a patriarchal and misogynistic way of understanding humans.

Infants are born with the same physical traits, feelings, and sense perceptions they will have as adults. This is crucial because infants cannot self-regulate. When an infant is upset, they cannot meet their needs or comprehend their stress. They rely entirely on caregivers to soothe them.

They have no way of meeting their own needs. They have no way of thinking out of the upset, planning out of it, or imagining out of it.

Infants have no way of calming themselves down. They have no way of comprehending it when their entire world is stressful.

The Development of Regulatory Brain Structures

The brain structures that help us calm our system and mindfully meet our own needs, don't start until we're three or four and they don't finish until we're about 25. And that's if we had an ideal developmental environment.

Meeting infant needs is about shushing, assuring, reassuring, rocking, comforting, listening, and paying attention. It's about the caregiver being aware and focused using all the brain structures responsible for mindfulness.

The Evolution of Human Nurturing

The Role of Fire and Security

The more we evolved to be uniquely human, the fewer things we had to protect ourselves. We have no teeth, no claws, thin skin, and we don't move very fast. We have dulled senses compared to the rest of the world's animal species.

How did we end up like this?

There's lots of speculation and evidence that we evolved as the most intelligent species on the earth because we utilized fire. Fire would have given us food security: abundant, calorie-dense food. The evolution of our species suggests that we thrived due to the security provided by fire. This security allowed us to develop more complex brain structures responsible for mindfulness and attachment.

Researchers have discovered a nearly 500,000-year-old wood structure on the banks of a river bordering Zambia and Tanzania with interlocking-stacking logs. Why is this important?

It suggests that we're a species that has had food and housing security for a long time--a lot longer than we previously thought.

So, it would make sense that we didn't need strong teeth and thick skin. We'd need to get along and grow more of the brain structures responsible for mindfulness.

We Are an Alloparenting Species

We are an alloparenting species, meaning that there are supposed to be four to six adults taking care of one infant. We're not supposed to individually have and care for a bunch of kids. A caring group is supposed to give focus and attention to one child.

Thousands of years ago when we were inside the "fire circle" many adults supported the nurturing parents. Some hunted because they were better at that. That was how we functioned. Not everybody was designed to be a parent. Not everybody was designed to hunt.

In alloparenting cultures, mothers never leave their children. So children had an external gestation period of five to seven years. I'm one of those mothers designed to do that. I would have happily spent all my time with my kids for five to seven years.

While I was pregnant and nursing my kids, I was in a very mindful, intuitive state. Not everybody has that ability.

With nurturing parents and a supportive cast of others, a child would grow into an incredibly mindful, thoughtful, connected, aware, and present person with other people.

The Misconception of Emotions

Emotions as Bodily Data

Contrary to the belief that emotions are solely mental, research by Lisa Feldman Barrett reveals a different picture. She shows that emotions are constructed in real-time through the interaction of core systems, which include networks for body regulation, attention, and memory. The brain uses past experiences, cultural knowledge, and contextual information to construct emotions. This means that the same physiological state can result in different emotions depending on the context and interpretation.

This is exciting because it means we have more control over our emotional experience of life than we previously thought.

This Happens When You Think a Lot But Don't Feel a Lot

We are designed to have words, meaning, and context for the data from our bodily systems. Emotions let us know how we feel: hey, I'm cold; hey, I'm sad; hey, I feel a little lonely; hey, I'm a little unsure or hey, I'm scared.

When we think a lot but don't feel a lot, important information is scattered. When it's not put together into a cohesive narrative, as it is supposed to be, we might not make sense of what we're seeing, hearing, and feeling. This is dissociation.

When we dissociate, we can see something and it doesn't fit with anything else. We can hear something and it doesn't fit with anything else. The front of the brain is missing important data.

So, thinking is very different than "regulated thinking". It's like we're staring at a leaf of information on tsunami of scattered data. So, for most people they get scared.

If people in this state pause and bring awareness to their body, they would most likely feel tight chest muscles and a churning stomach.

Nurturing Through the Pain

When we're healing, we start to feel what we feel. We start to experience the pain, the terror, the panic, and the realizations. If you can nurture yourself or someone through that painful spot, they can start feeling the rewards from being nurtured.

We need other people to help us through the pain of being aware of being in pain, and the knowledge that we have that we've been in pain.

We heal by soothing and dancing and holding and rocking and tending to emotional pain so that we're back inside that metaphorical fire circle.

Conclusion

The journey towards emotional regulation and mindfulness begins with nurturing care in infancy.

Our species is relationally starved because the majority of our needs around being accepted, seen, and heard by others are not being met.

By understanding the profound impact of safety, attachment, and mindfulness, we can work towards a more compassionate and nurturing society.