I love this Daniel Siegel book. Here are excerpts that moved me:
For those whose histories included a sense of emotional unavailability and a lack of attuned, nurturing parenting, there may have been an adaptation that minimizes the importance of interpersonal relationships and the communication of emotion. This minimizing stance may have been very adaptive to children raised in an emotional desert. Children do the best they can, and reducing dependence on emotionally unavailable caregivers may have been an appropriate and useful adaptation for their survival. As this adaptive response continues, children may have a decreased connection not only to their parents but to other people as well…
With relationships, there can be a marked sense of independence that may lead their partners to experience loneliness and emotional distance…
For someone who is steeped in logic, it is actually helpful to offer the logical explanation…that an emotionally distant family environment early in their lives might have contributed to their left hemispheres’ becoming adaptively dominant…
A different kind of adaptation occurs in response to a family life with inconsistently available parents and can yield a sense of anxiety about whether or not others are dependable. This response to inconsistent or intrusive parenting can yield a feeling of ambivalence and uncertainty. This may be experienced by an adult as a desperate need for others and a simultaneous sinking feeling that one’s own needs can never be met. There may be a sense of urgency for connection that may ironically push others away and thus create a self-reinforcing feedback loop that others indeed are not dependable.
The pathway toward growth for aspects of adaptation that include such ambivalence and preoccupation often resides in a combination of self-soothing techniques, such as self-talk and relaxation exercises, along with open communication within intimate relationships…
The sense of self-doubt at times may come along with a deep and nonconscious sense of shame that something is defective about the self.
Understanding the mechanics of shame and how it may have been a part of our early life histories can help to free us from the ruts that these emotional reactions can create in our relationships with others. We may have developed layers of psychological defense that protect us from being consciously aware of what would otherwise be disabling anxiety, self-doubt, and painful emotions. Unfortunately, such defenses may prevent us from being aware of how these implicit emotional processes may directly influence our approach to our children. We may project onto them unwanted aspects of our own internal experience, such as anger at their helplessness and vulnerability.
…the belief that the self is defective is a child’s conclusion, arising from noncontingent connections with parents… Finding ways that work to help the right hemisphere learn to self-soothe are the keys to growth for this form of adaptation. You can give yourself the tools that your parents were not able to offer to you as a child. In many ways, this is parenting yourself from the inside out.
Though we may have had several attachment figures in our lives, the AAI (Adult Attachment Interview) finding gives us only a single state of mind classification. The idea behind this is that during adolescence we coalesce our experiences into a single classification — most likely influenced by our attachment to our primary attachment figure.
The idea of a state of mind is that there is a process by which our minds organize a stance, approach, or mental set that serves as a filter for our perceptions, biases our emotional responses, and directly influences our behaviors. Such an organizing process filled with a certain theme is characteristic of any general state of mind and its mental models: those specific to attachment can be quite tenacious and enduring.
From a brain point of view, we can say that such a mental process is “ingrained” in patterns of neuronal firing in which past experiences and the adaptations that were generated in response to them create synaptic connections that are retained in memory. In the case of attachment, the model overlaps with a form of implicit memory: it is embedded early in our lives, is activated without a sense that something is being recalled, and directly influences our perceptions, emotions, behaviors, and bodily sensations.
Transforming attachment would involve changes in these states of mind.
