Everyone knows, at a basic level, that love is one of the most important things you can give a baby, if not the most. In this excerpt from Why Love Matters, psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt explains why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life, both emotionally and physiologically.
At one with one another
Physiologically, the human baby is still very much part of the mother’s body. He depends on her milk to feed him, to regulate his heart rate and blood pressure, and to provide immune protection. His muscular activity is regulated by her touch, as is his growth hormone level. Her body keeps him warm and she disperses his stress hormones for him by her touch and
her feeding. This basic physiological regulation keeps the baby alive.
Babies need a caregiver who identifies with them so strongly that the baby’s needs feel like hers; he is still physiologically and psychologically an extension of her. If she feels bad when the baby feels bad, she will then want to do something about it immediately, to relieve the baby’s discomfort – and this is the essence of regulation. In theory, anyone can do it, especially now we have bottled milk substitutes, but the baby’s mother is primed to do these things for her baby by her own hormones, and is more likely to have the intense identification with the baby’s feelings that is needed, provided she has the inner resources to do so.
Managing emotions
Early regulation is also about responding to the baby’s feelings in a non-verbal way. The mother does this mainly with her face, her tone of voice, and her touch. She soothes her baby’s loud crying and over arousal by entering the baby’s state with him, engaging him with a loud mirroring voice, gradually leading the way towards calm by toning her voice down and taking him with her to a calm state. Or she soothes a tense baby by holding him and rocking him, or stimulates a lacklustre baby back into a happier state with her smiling face and dilated sparkly eyes. By all sorts of non-verbal means, she gets the baby back to his set points where he feels comfortable again.
Caregivers who can’t feel this with their baby, because of their own difficulties in noticing and regulating their own feelings, tend to perpetuate this regulatory problem, passing it on to their own baby. Such a baby can’t learn to monitor his own states and adjust them effectively, if mum or dad doesn’t do this for him in the first place. He may be left without any clear sense of how to keep on an even keel. He may even grow up to believe he shouldn’t really have feelings since his parents didn’t seem to notice them or be interested in them.
Picking up patterns
Babies are very sensitive to these kinds of implicit messages, and they initially respond to what parents do rather than what they say or think they are doing. But if parents do track the baby’s states well and respond quickly to them, restoring the feeling of being OK, then feelings can flow and be noticed. They can come into awareness. Particularly if caregivers respond in a predictable way, patterns will start to emerge. The baby may be noticing that ‘when I cry, mum always picks me up gently’, or ‘when she gets her coat down, I will soon smell the fresh air’.
Expectations of other people and how they will behave are inscribed in the brain outside conscious awareness, in the period of infancy and [these] underpin our behaviour in relationships through life. We are not aware of our own assumptions, but they are there, based on these earliest experiences. And the most crucial assumption of them all is that others will be emotionally available to help notice and process feelings, to provide comfort when it is needed – in other words, to help regulate feelings and help the child get back to feeling OK. Those children who grow up without this expectation are regarded as ‘insecurely attached’ by attachment researchers.
Parents are an emotional coach
Parents are really needed to be a sort of emotion coach. They need to be there and to be tuned in to the baby’s constantly changing states, but they also need to help the baby to the next level. To become fully human, the baby’s basic responses need to be elaborated and developed into more specific and complex feelings. With parental guidance, the basic state of ‘feeling bad’ can get differentiated into a range of feelings like irritation, disappointment, anger, annoyance, hurt. Again, the baby or toddler can’t make these distinctions without help from those in the know.
The parent must also help the baby to become aware of his own feelings and this is done by holding up a virtual mirror to the baby, talking in baby talk and emphasising and exaggerating words and gestures so that the baby can realise that this is not mum or dad expressing themselves, this is them ‘showing’ me my feelings.
Sue Gerhardt lives in Oxford, where she is a practising psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. She also works with the Oxford Parent Infant Project (OXPIP), which she co-founded in 1998. This charitable organisation provides parent infant psychotherapy to around 50 families each week. For more information about the book, the author and OXPIP,
please visit www.whylovematters.com
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