The Importance of a Secure Base
Siegel: You know, as children, we do the best we can and our brains are shaped along lines that allow us to adapt and survive with as positive an experience as we can. One of the things that kids do is to preserve a sense of safety. They consider parents as good and mold themselves to whatever the parents are dishing out. In this case it was kind of emotional blindness, in other cases it can even be abuse, sometimes intrusiveness. There’s lots of things we have to deal with in childhood and it is an automatic self-prescription like you’re describing that gets ingrained in patterns in the brain.
Goleman: And you’re saying it’s because a child needs a secure base no matter how dicey that base may be. It’s all they’ve got.
Siegel: You can call it an illusion of a secure base. If we as outsiders would say, “These parents are really hurtful to the child, it’s not secure”, still, the child will try to create the illusion that it’s secure. For example, by thinking, “I’m bad, my parents are good, even though my parents are beating me. Or "Emotions are not important because my parents are telling me that I shouldn’t feel. My parents are good, so I shouldn’t feel.” Making sense then means looking back at those self-prescriptions we’ve made up to adapt. To look at the neural firing patterns, if you will: the way our brain has encoded patterns. Here’s the fantastic thing about being a human being: we have the ability, through deep bodily sensations, emotional experiences, ways our minds can actually think with language, and telling stories of our life, stories about how has this influenced us, to actually emerge beyond those patterns. In this ninety-one-year-old’s case, and lots of other people, by doing all those deep bodily, emotional, and thought processes, and linking those all together, you can make sense of what has happened to you, and then go on to actually let go of those adaptations, and become freer from these prisons of the past that really constrain so many people.
Goleman: I suppose you’re talking, for the most part, about doing this in therapy, later in life.
Siegel: Therapy is a really useful tool for many people, but some people financially can’t afford it, or don’t have the resources time-wise. So, in the book, Parenting from the Inside Out, for example, my daughter’s preschool director Mary Hartsell and I took this work from The Developing Mind and made it available for parents. So parents can actually use the book to make sense of their lives. For their own lives, and they don’t need to necessarily go to therapy.
Goleman: In Social Intelligence, I mention the work of Joseph LeDoux at New York University, who is perhaps the world’s expert on part of the brain, the amygdala, that is key for emotional memory. One thing he said last time I spoke with him that I found very hopeful, was that whenever we bring to mind a strong emotional memory, or a painful emotional memory, and understand it in a new way – it actually gets chemically recoded in the brain, differently. If we continually do that, and as you say, continue to make new sense of what happened to us, it actually changes the way that memory is imprinted, and the way it affects us when we think of it again. Which is, for me, eye-opening. There is actually a neural basis to the lasting changes you see people have if they do this kind of introspection and rethinking in their lives.
I’d like to go back with you now to childhood, to how we get these patterns in the first place, and to this very important point you make about how the different ways parents relate to a child can affect the orbital frontal cortex. In Social Intelligence I drew from your work and gave the example of different ways parents could handle a moment that every parent has to handle. If you have a two-year-old who is rambunctious, and they’re climbing on a table and there’s a fragile lamp. How the parent handles that moment is a sample, a piece of a behavior pattern of how that parent tends to handle such moments. And those tendencies, those repeated small interactions over weeks, months, and years actually sculpt that child’s brain. I was wondering if you could go into some of the details about the ways in which parents handle strong emotions in kids, or being naughty, and what difference that makes from a neural point of view.
Siegel: Sure. It’s so important for all of us to keep patterns in mind that we may have, so we can continually try to make sense of our own lives. So, what the research shows is that there are at least four patterns that have been described. In different cultures they may have different distributions in terms of their percentages. But, in general what we see is the majority of people have what’s called a secure attachment, which means that those children have a relationship with their primary caregiver where the parent is tuned into what’s going on inside of them. Then when are there are ruptures to that, what’s called attunement, those ruptures are repaired in a relatively rapid fashion and with an intention for loving-kindness, for bringing reconnection back to this disconnected relationship. Those children grow up to do well – emotionally, socially, and cognitively. They meet their intellectual potential and they have when they become adults, the same kind of narrative their parents do. Their narrative is the story of their life and basically they’ve made sense of what’s going on with them.
Interestingly, and I just want to say this because it’s so important to start with it, parents who’ve had some of the other forms we’re about to talk about, but who’ve made sense of their life will also have children who are securely attached to them. That’s such an important point – even if you find, whoa, my own personal history is one of these insecure forms, research absolutely demonstrates that if you take the time to make sense of what happened to you, then you can free yourself up to develop your own sense of security, and also have children who have a secure attachment to you. Because a lot of times these forms I’m about to describe get people very nervous. Sometimes people want to shut off. They don’t want to listen, and it’s understandable because if there was nothing you can do about it, then why learn about this?
Goleman: But, what you’re saying is it’s actually never too late.
Siegel: Never too late.
Goleman: It’s never too late because we can always reconsider, rethink, re-understand, make sense of and that has the potential to make us better parents.
Siegel: Better parents, better spouses, better people. So, the making-sense process makes a lot of sense too. These other three groups are groups that have less than the majority. But they’re different amounts, some twenty to twenty-five percent. It depends on your study. The first one is called avoidantly attached child. Now, you never say a child is avoidant because these terms refer to a relationship, not to a child. That’s a very, very important point.
Goleman: Meaning they only manifest when you’re with another person?
Siegel: With that specific person, right. One should never call a child avoidant or the other terms we’re about to talk about. So, this relationship is avoidant. What does that mean? It means that the parent is offering experiences that don’t focus on the mind. They don’t focus on the internal nature of experience. They’re more dealing with behaviors, managing calendars, doing things like that. So, these children are taken care of, in the sense that they’re fed and clothed and given shelter, but the rich, textured emotional connection is absent. And the researchers asked, why is this the way it is? They actually found it’s this narrative that the parents have developed, this overarching self-perception, that relationships don’t matter. They don’t have much recall of what happened in their childhoods, about relationships, and they’ll tell you that whatever happened to them in their childhood, even though they can’t remember much, didn’t have any negative impact on them. They’ll insist on that over and over again, that it didn’t have any impact or, in general, relationships don’t affect you. So, you’ll see this in at least twenty-percent of the non-clinical US population.
One thing I’ve written about is that adult, whom now we know is also likely to have had an avoidant attachment with their own primary caregiver, that adult has developed a neural mechanism by which they’re not in touch with the world of the mind, either in themselves or in others. They’re not autistic, because you see this also in autism. It’s more that they don’t use the capacity for Mindsight. It’s like the basic gears are there, but they’re not engaging them. So, I have a lot of couples I treat where one spouse will say, I think my spouse is autistic. They don’t recognize my nonverbal signals, my eye contact, they don’t recognize when I’m crying, my facial expressions, they don’t recognize my shift in tone of voice. I’ll do an assessment and sure enough this adult is not picking up on their spouse. But when I do the one-on-one with them, where I’ll make my face show certain emotions, they get it very rapidly. They just don’t engage the gears. The spouse’s concern that there is some kind of neurological problem, like a form of Autism or Asperger’s syndrome, you can look at that in general terms by seeing how the person actually responds to facial expressions and can identify them. They can even identify their own internal states, and it seems almost just that the gears are not engaged in this avoidantly attached child, now become what’s called a dismissing approach to attachment adult.
It's helpful, in a very caring and supportive way, to gently nurture individuals with a dismissing attachment status toward awareness of the nonverbal world. Beginning inside of themselves, in a way that’s not threatening. Moving perhaps to a relationship with me where I’ll show them nonverbal expressions. Remembering that nonverbal means: eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, posture, gestures, timing and intensity of response. Sometimes they’ll put those seven items on a card, put them in their pocket to remember the nonverbal, they’ll pull it out because if they’ve had a lifetime of not attending to nonverbal signals, then this is an opportunity for them to really learn a foreign language. The brain is incredibly plastic. Plastic means being open to change in response to experience. So, even in this ninety-one-year-old I was mentioning earlier, or in this case in this spouse, we take them out of the heat of a very disappointed spouse, and allow him, in the safety of a relationship with me, to slowly develop this way of attending to nonverbal signals.
What was amazing was that soon he developed what I call a more integrated state – that is, the right side of the brain which both perceives and sends nonverbal signals is now being developed in him. So, his well-developed language-based and logical left side could now work together with his nonverbal right. That’s called neural integration. Left and right working together in this particular case. Once you get that going, it sort of takes off on its own. So his wife actually came to me and said, “Dan, have you given my husband a brain transplant?” Because he was so different, and other people who knew him in other settings thought he had just transformed himself. Well, he had been half a person before! All I did was assist him in becoming the full person he was just waiting to become.
Goleman: We’re finding out now that Asperger’s and autism seem to be related to deficits in the social brain – in the circuitry which can sense another person, which pays attention to these nonverbal cues, and so on. Do you suppose that there might be a program, or a structured learning environment that would help those kinds of kids in the same way?
Siegel: There are a number of programs around the country that are making initial statements that they think they can really make a difference. We want to wait for the research to clarify if that’s true. But, what we found out at UCLA was that one of the difficulties in kids with Asperger’s syndrome is that the part of the brain called the mirror neuron system, part of the social circuitry you are referring to, is not functioning as well as in people without Asperger’s syndrome. What the mirror system seems to involve is the ability of one brain to actually create an image of the internal state or intention of another brain. If there’s something either not well-developed or absent perhaps in those mirror neurons, then the larger circuit doesn’t allow you to resonate with someone else. When that happens, other people are more like objects than entities with their own internal subjective experience. So, if we could somehow stimulate the mirror neuron system and these resonance circuits… I’m not sure people have figured out how to do that yet, but there’s a hope that maybe we could do that.