Читать книгу When Food Is Comfort - Julie M. Simon - Страница 14
ОглавлениеWhat’s Love Got to Do with It?
Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage — a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.
— Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score
I could tell when I entered the waiting room of my office that Liz was having a bad day. Her eyes were puffy, and her mascara was smudged. Usually she sat comfortably in the large, cushioned chair, distracting herself with her phone or a magazine. Today she was sitting on the couch, her body tense and rigid and her hands clasped tightly on the edge, like a bobcat ready to pounce. When her eyes met mine, her body softened, and she began to cry.
As we walked down the hall to my office, I could feel her desperation. On her drive home from work, she had an argument with her mother, and on her way to see me, she did something that she hadn’t done in six months. She stopped at her favorite donut shop and bought a coffee, four donuts, and two cream puffs. Only one cream puff was left in the bag. She had begun to lose weight in the past couple of months, and she was furious with herself for slipping back into old patterns.
Her mother, whom she described as a “controlling and domineering woman,” had offered to throw a fortieth birthday bash for her, and in trying to firm up the plans, Liz asserted herself and suggested a restaurant she liked. Her mother quickly dismissed her choice as too expensive. And she shamed Liz, accusing her of choosing “an overpriced hole-in-the-wall with fattening food that you don’t need to be eating.” Her mother continued the tirade by highlighting Liz’s high blood pressure and failed attempts at weight loss, reminding her that she wouldn’t have many birthdays left if she didn’t change her ways.
Even though Liz described feeling some anger toward her mother, the bulk of the feelings that came up as we discussed the conversation were about herself and about how she couldn’t ever measure up. Liz often doesn’t feel heard and understood by her mother, who regularly overreacts and dismisses, criticizes, or ridicules Liz’s feelings. As Liz put it, “My mother always wins every argument.”
These repeated misses in communication with her mother, which began as far back as Liz can remember, always leave her feeling bad about herself. Her mother’s support is unpredictable: at times she is very supportive, but at other times she can be highly critical. Liz personalizes these attacks, which leave her feeling ashamed, inadequate, unworthy, and lonely. She feels bad about her abilities to make “grown-up” decisions, ashamed of her body (she inherited a body type very different from her mother’s naturally slim figure), and sad about her relationship with her mother.
Liz’s mother has shown little patience for discussing and processing their troubled interactions. They rarely transition from these negative interactions back to positive ones during the same conversation. After an interaction like this one, Liz and her mother typically go through a week or more of what Liz describes as “cold war” before reconciling, and Liz is the one who “crawls back” and tries to please her mother. It’s just too difficult for her to tolerate her mother’s displeasure and risk abandonment. Liz regularly abandons her own needs for understanding and validation in order to seek approval and secure the attachment with her mother. And Liz shames herself even further because she feels that as a social worker, she should know how to create a healthier relationship with her mother.
Liz’s mother has had difficulty offering Liz a type of care and attention essential to the development of the brain’s self-regulation circuits: attunement. This is the subtle process of adjusting to and resonating with another person’s internal states: that is, being “in tune” with someone else’s internal world. It’s an instinctive process for a parent, but it may be lacking when a parent is stressed, depressed, distracted, or impatient.
Love is not the issue: Liz has never had any doubt that her mother loves her and would do anything she could for her. And Liz likewise loves and respects her mother, whom she describes as “a bright, articulate, and funny woman.” They often have very pleasant times together. The problems generally arise when Liz is anxious or upset and turns to her mother for comfort and soothing, or when her mother strongly disagrees with the way Liz is handling something, like the upcoming birthday party.
Poor Attunement, Insecure Attachments
Attunement is an important component of another process that begins in infancy and childhood and continues throughout our lives: attachment. A vulnerable infant has an innate need to be close to a nourishing and protective other. Our drive for attachment is essential for our survival. Compared to most other mammals, we depend on our caregivers for an extended period. Yet, according to the child psychiatrist Daniel Siegel, a founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, only about one-half to two-thirds of the general population have had what researchers call a “secure attachment.”
When we have a secure attachment to a caregiver, we feel safe: we can count on them to protect us from harm and to calm, comfort, and soothe us when we are distressed. We feel that another person senses and observes our inner world and that our needs will be met. We develop positive expectations of interactions with other people and trust that these too will be fulfilling and rewarding.
In contrast, when we have experienced repeated, highly stressful interactions with our caregivers, our ability to form safe, secure relationships with them becomes compromised. This is true even with kind and well-meaning caregivers if they don’t have enough time for us or have difficulty relating to us and meeting our needs. Liz’s father, for example, is a kind and gentle man, but Liz has trouble relating to him because he is forty-five years older, often distracted, and a bit out of touch with her world.
Early attachment patterns create mental maps for our relationships throughout life and guide our expectations of others. Because of her insecure attachment to her parents and a history of being criticized and shamed by her mother, Liz has persistently high levels of anxiety and shame. She doesn’t feel safe and secure in her body or in the world. The shaming she has suffered has created what John Bradshaw, the author of Homecoming, calls “toxic shame: the feeling of being flawed and diminished and never measuring up.” Her shame makes it difficult for her to embrace both her strengths and weaknesses and to develop a healthy level of self-esteem and self-acceptance.
Liz is hyperreactive to intense emotions like shame and their associated bodily cues, such as heart palpitations, muscle tension, and what she describes as “a frozen feeling.” Her internal world is fragile: she is easily derailed by external stressors like her mother’s aggression and her boss’s unpredictable moods. Neural pathways connecting the emotional region of Liz’s brain to the thinking and regulating region have failed to form properly, while other circuits, geared toward handling stressful interactions, have been strengthened. She tends to be hypervigilant: her brain has become hard-wired to perceive threat quickly.
Feelings of shame are common in children whose parents are emotionally unavailable or repeatedly fail to attune to them. Children who feel invisible or misunderstood often experience this lack of attunement physiologically in the form of a shrinking or slumping sensation, or a feeling of heaviness in the chest, back, and shoulders. They often appear sad, with a downcast posture.
When brain cells, called neurons, repeatedly fire simultaneously in response to an experience, those neurons become connected to each other. As the Canadian neuropsychologist and researcher Donald Hebb puts it, “Cells that fire together wire together.” They form a network and become hard-wired in the brain: in essence, they become part of our conditioned, habitual responses to the world. The strength of these connections is influenced by many factors, including the frequency of their use.
According to Daniel Siegel:
These isolated states of being — shame intensified by humiliation — burn themselves into our synaptic connections. . . .In the future, we’ll be vulnerable to reactivating the state of shame or humiliation in contexts that resemble the original situation. The state of shame becomes associated with a cortically constructed belief that the self is defective. From the point of view of survival, “I am bad” is a safer perspective than “My parents are unreliable and may abandon me at any time.” It’s better for the child to feel defective than to realize that his attachment figures are dangerous, undependable, or untrustworthy. The mental mechanism of shame at least preserves for him the illusion of safety and security that is at the core of his sanity.
Liz’s early stressful experiences with her mother have been encoded as maladaptive emotional and cognitive patterns in her brain. After experiencing her mother’s shaming look repeatedly when putting food on her plate, grabbing a snack, or trying on clothes, Liz regularly feels anxiety and shame even when no one else is around. She is quick to interpret an innocent glance from a stranger or store clerk as shaming. She has a tendency to overreact, because at times of stress, she can’t access the neural circuits that would help her calm down and regulate her emotions. At times like these, indulging in her favorite, tranquilizing comfort foods, like donuts and cream puffs, is the fastest way to quiet the agitation in her body and the storm in her brain.
Regulating Emotions and Behaviors through Attunement
A caregiver’s role is to meet a child’s basic physical needs (food, clothing, shelter) and to provide consistent emotional nurturance. Emotions — reactions in the brain that cause a change in our internal states — signal us, and our caregivers, to act. As infants and small children, we cannot regulate our emotions and behaviors alone: we rely on our primary caregivers to soothe and comfort us. Attuned interactions — experiences that let us know that someone else perceives and understands what we are feeling — allow preverbal infants, not yet capable of understanding emotions or using language, to feel close, connected, safe, and loved.
Most caregivers do a pretty good job of tuning in to an infant’s distress and offering an appropriate and soothing emotional response. For example, when a toddler hits her head on the edge of the table and starts to scream and cry, her mother identifies and acknowledges her emotions and pain: “Oh, sweetie, I see that you are sad because you bumped your head. That really hurts! Let Mommy kiss your boo-boo.” The child’s mother helps to regulate or lessen the intensity of the child’s emotions with her attuned words. By identifying the bumped head, the sadness, and the pain, the parent is teaching the child to name her emotions, her bodily sensations, and the things that cause pain.
At the same time, the mother conveys caring and empathy through her actions, kissing and cuddling the child in her arms. These behaviors help her baby feel safe and secure. An association is established between intense feeling states and the possibility of a return to safety and comfort. This is the necessary foundation for building the skills of self-soothing, self-nurturing, and self-regulation. Once her child is calm, the mother might use this situation to engage her child in problem solving for the future: “Corners of tables are sharp; it’s best if we don’t play near them.”
This tuning-in session may only last a few minutes, but situations like this will occur thousands of times in the child’s early years, not only with Mom but also with other caregivers. We need our caregivers to help us identify and name our emotions, to allow us to feel and express all of our emotions, and to help us tolerate and navigate challenging emotional and bodily states by soothing us and teaching us how to soothe ourselves. This requires an atmosphere of patience, warmth, empathy, understanding, acceptance, fairness, respect, and above all, nondistracted emotional availability.
These attunement experiences not only develop and strengthen the caregiver-child attachment but also play a role in the child’s brain development. Research suggests that good attunement promotes the growth of the self-regulation region of the brain.
Over time, as the child’s brain develops, her reliance on her mother to “coregulate” her emotions lessens, and she begins to self-regulate, or manage her emotions independently. This ability is crucial. Children with good emotional self-regulation do better in school. They have an easier time making friends because they can manage their emotions and relate to others without aggression or impulsiveness and without alienating them. And they are less likely to engage in substance use or abuse.
Young children who do not experience this kind of attunement will most likely experience difficulties with self-regulation. In the words of the addiction specialist Gabor Maté, the author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: “Children who suffer disruptions in their attachment relationships will not have the same biochemical milieu in their brains as will their well-attached and well-nurtured peers. As a result, their experiences and interpretations of their environment, and their responses to it, will be less flexible, less adaptive, and less conducive to health and maturity.”
A Good Kid in a Not-So-Good Environment
Stop for a moment and reflect on the type of caregiving you received as an infant and small child. Were your parents or caregivers kind and empathic? Were they good listeners? Did they tune in to your emotions and bodily states? Were they patient, soothing, and comforting when you were upset or discouraged? Did you feel that you wouldn’t be judged or ridiculed, no matter what you did or said? Did you feel safe and secure? Did your caregivers show you how to deal with worrisome thoughts? Did they make time for you when you needed them to? Were you treated with fairness and respect? Did you feel loved and valued? Did you feel that they appreciated and honored your uniqueness?
If your caregivers were stressed, anxious, distracted, or depressed when you were young, they may have had difficulty tuning in to your emotional states on a consistent basis. They may not have had their own basic emotional needs adequately met when they were young. Their parenting style may have been controlling, domineering, intimidating, hypercritical, angry, or shaming. They may have been overprotective, indifferent, or out of touch.
Even well-meaning, loving caregivers can be distracted by their own struggles. They may be working too many hours or have excessive responsibilities. They may have physical or mental health challenges. A parent can deeply love her child and feel a loving attachment but be unable to adequately tune in to her child’s emotional states. Children in these types of relationships will know that they are loved but feel that their parents don’t “get” them or don’t have time for them.
When our caregivers cannot assist us in regulating our emotional and physical arousal and understanding our experiences, we are left in distress. Overwhelmed by unpleasant emotions, uncomfortable bodily sensations, and self-defeating thoughts, our ability to self-regulate, or keep our emotional environment on an even keel, is compromised.
The Importance of Internal Attunement
If, like Liz, you missed out on consistently nourishing attunement experiences and secure parental attachment in your childhood, take heart. Your adult brain can be influenced and altered by your current life experiences. Mindfulness practice — a form of internal attunement — can help you fill developmental skill gaps resulting from early attachment misses and nurture and strengthen the circuitry of your brain for improved self-regulation. We’ll explore that practice in part 2.
In later chapters we’ll revisit my sessions with Liz, focusing on her difficulty with staying with her feelings, validating them, and regulating them by soothing and calming herself. We’ll also look at her challenges in relating to her mother. Without clear personal boundaries, Liz lives with a constant source of stress that taxes her physically and emotionally and fuels her overeating.
In the next chapter, we look at how this distress overwhelms our brain’s self-regulation circuitry and chemical communication systems. Chronic distress also taxes our stress-control mechanisms and can lead to a residue of energy becoming trapped in our nervous system, where it wreaks havoc on our body, mind, and spirit. When we cannot regulate emotional and physical arousal in any other way, the lure of brain-numbing foods like donuts and cream puffs becomes irresistible.
