Attachment is a biological process that promotes survival.  A newborn will instinctively crawl to the breast of his mother to nurse.  He inherently knows how to suckle, and seek out her face.  He is able to mimic his father’s tongue sticking out moments following birth.  He is able to distinguish his mother and father’s voice from that of strangers.  He is capable of direct communication through crying.  His biological need to attach to his parents is profoundly apparent from the beginning. 

    These primary behaviors in babies are in place to elicit a response from his caregivers.  These biological cues are the neon signs that flash, “I am here, and I need you to see me.”  Optimally, the newborn’s parental preference will invite an empathic response and activate a positive dyadic dance of mutual exchanges between parent and infant, creating safety and security within their relationship.

    It is my view that trauma can dominate parental instinct.  For instance, a mother who has unacknowledged, unresolved, and unexpressed childhood trauma may not be able to rely on maternal instinct to “kick in” for her at the birth of her baby.  The imprinted trauma of her own primary attachment experiences will be her internal working model of how she perceives her infant son, and her ability to mother him.  Thusly, a cry in her newborn may not prompt an immediate empathic response, but possibly an ambivalent, delayed one…or an impatient, anxious one…or a punitive, shaming one (depending on what she experienced as an infant).  I imagine that maternal instinct continues to exist within this mother…yet, it has been so buried; it seems inaccessible. 

 "We bring our relational inheritance with us and nowhere 
    do we bring it more forcibly than into our parenting. 
And a lot of people don't realize this. 
When they think that parenting comes naturally, they're correct. 
It does come naturally, but it comes naturally the way you learned it. 
It doesn't necessarily come naturally to do it differently."
                                                                     Roy Muir
                                                                                         "When the Bough Breaks"
                                                                                              Frontline 1995

 
    The attachment experience of the human being has a very essential piece that must be put into place.  This is the piece of empathy.  Empathy can only exist within our core to the degree of which we have experienced it interpersonally.  Empathy is learned.  Empathy is the heart of humanness.  

    Lack of empathy allows caregivers to ignore, spank, hit, punch, belittle, shame, ridicule, molest, scapegoat, abandon, repress, and kill babies and children.  Tragically, these innocent children all grown up can find themselves emotionally, cognitively, and physiologically compromised;  leading to criminal activity, abuse to self and others, addictions, dissociation, interpersonal detachment, mania, depression, anxiety, etc.  How many 12-step programs, gangs, teen suicides, sex offenders, murderers, rapists, and childhood mental health issues have to exist before we recognize that there are too many empty, helpless, hopeless, lost, disconnected, emotionally hungry, depressed, enraged, and terrified human beings walking the face of the earth?  


    How many of these dis-eases would cease to exist 
     if all babies and young children felt wanted, 
   were treated empathically, and guided with integrity
 throughout their childhood?

 

  There is nothing more urgent to the evolution of humanity
than paying close attention to 
the relational quality of early life experiences and 
  its direct connection to our emotional existence;
as well as our future parenting abilities.

                                                                   ~Stacey Annand