Neuroscience of Attachment and Resilience

On this website there are some interesting articles, on things such as ...

Neuroscience of Attachment:
Attachment research and modern neuroscience are teaching us:


1. our earliest relationships actually build the brain structures we use for relating lifelong;
2. experiences in those early relationships encode in the neural circuitry of our brains by 12-18 months of age; these patterns of attachment become the “rules” for relating that operate lifelong, the “known but not remembered” givens of our relational lives.
3. when those early experiences have been less than optimal, those unconscious patterns of attachment can continue to shape the perceptions and responses of the brain in old ways that get stuck, that can’t take in new experience as new information, can’t learn or adapt or grow from those experiences. What we have come to call the defensive patterns of personality disorders. What one clinician calls “tragic recursive patterns that become encased in neural cement.”

Fortunately, the human brain has always had the biologically innate capacity to grow new neurons – lifelong – and more importantly, to create new synaptic connections between neurons lifelong.

Attachment research explains how therapy, by providing the very same experiences in adulthood that create secure attachment in early development - presence, attunement, empathy, affect regulation, reliable reciprocal communication and practical help - help create the internal secure base in clients that is the foundation of all mental and emotional health.

Attachment-based therapy helps clients literally re-program their brains and heal from the maladaptive relational-emotional-coping strategies we term personality disorders to the flexible, adaptive, cohesive, integrated strategies that support the emergence of a fully authentic Whole Self.

Resilience:


The foundation of resilience - the development of capacities to cope - rests in the experiences of our earliest attachment relationships, where we procedurally learn to repair ruptures in relationship, regulate our emotions, and gel a stable yet flexible sense of self -- or not.

When clients consistently have trouble coping with their lives in adulthood, they may lack the foundation of resilience - the unconscious internal secure base that comes from early secure attachments. Therapy needs to do - and can do - more than help such clients explicitly learn how to think, how to make decisions, how to plan, how to look for options. Therapists need to - and can - provide a safe, empathic, attachment relationship - re-parenting, if you will - where clients recover capacities of self, relating, regulating and coping that are the true foundation of resilience.


Linda Graham
http://www.lindagraham-mft.com/articles.htm