THREE
THE GREAT CONFLICT
Two Contradictory Commands Confounding Development
The toddler is driven and guided by two major genetic directives, or instinctual commands, on which our species has depended and a toddler’s entire life-drama hinges. First, and foremost, “Explore the world out there, and any new and unknown event or part of that world you encounter thereafter.” And, second, “Maintain contact with your caretaker or nurturing-one at all times.” This second commandment is particularly strong when the toddler is outside the family nest, such as in the wilds (an unknown backyard, garden, park, or wherever).
Generally the caretaker with which the toddler must maintain contact is the mother, the one bringing the child into the world, nurturing and protecting it from the beginning, and so a major cornerstone and touchstone of all development to begin with. At times, of course, it is the father, wherein all the same conditions hold.
These two directives of the toddler’s actions are ancient and powerful, found in some form in the young of every mammalian species. And these two primal directives—explore, and maintain contact—contain within them the key to full development and the gateway to the whole evolutionary enterprise of our life. With these two powerful commands behind the scenes at every moment of that toddler’s experience, Nature’s great question appears: Is it forward in evolution, or retreat into defense?
Every Nine Minutes
Allan Schore’s massive twelve-year study focused on the critical orbitofrontal period (see chapter 2), finding in it the most serious and crippling setback in development, and life thereafter. About every nine minutes the average American child’s excited exploration of its world is interrupted, cut short, even nullified and prevented, by an equally highly charged negative command, of parent or caretaker: No! Don’t! Don’t Touch That! Don’t Touch This! Don’t Do This! Don’t Do That! Such prohibitions are the foremost directives given and heard every way the child turns. The ubiquitous notice “Keep out of reach of children!” seems to refer to the whole world of the toddler, whether posted or not.
Unless the toddler complies with the caretaker’s command, and quickly, the caretaker automatically follows through with some form of reinforcement, punishment, verbal threat, or reprimand: Do this, Do that—Or else! And on that “Or Else” hangs the gist of the whole affair.
The issue is that parents, almost without exception, had exactly the same happen in their own infancy-childhood. They have themselves had etched into their own brain-body since earliest memory these very same overarching contradictory commands that are an integral part of culture.
This can be summarized in culture’s greatest overarching commandment concerning childhood: The child must learn to mind and obey!— with its myriad “Or Else” injunctions. This commandment is etched into the minds and memories of every enculturated person, and emerges as the most powerful of directives on becoming a parent. Neither parent nor child has much to say about the issue. Darwin’s stipulation holds: any practice repeated long enough becomes habit; any habit repeated long enough locks into our genes, and surely thus in memory.
So on the child’s obedience to this cultural ultimatum, the parent’s own social image or identity hangs. Success-as-parent in the public eye, even social acceptance in general, seems to hang in the balance here. Parents feel judged by their society according to their child’s behavior, as they and their parents were: Does the child meet the social-cultural patterns of behavior or not? Since we have all undergone this “upbringing” and respond in the same way, common sense and personal integrity, as well as conditioned reflex, demand our compliance with such commonly shared, unquestioned, and “common sense” belief. And as it is surely common to all, on this common fatal flaw we all go down, generation by generation.
A toddler’s newly forming neural system functions according to these two formative commands: explore and maintain contact, almost from the beginning of its life. So long as the child is safely in crib, playpen or such, all smiles are on him. The moment he gets up on his hind legs to move out to explore as nature directs, all eyes are on his every move in judgment of those moves (and always “for his own good”).1
This constant scrutiny, with its prohibitions and interferences, creates a contradictory situation for toddler: caretaker on the one hand, and inner directive for exploration on the other, both demanding attention-energy, yet each virtually cancelling out the other. (Years ago I heard it claimed by animal trainers that you can drive a dog mad by training it to follow two directly opposite commands and then issuing both at the same time.)
Struck by two major evolutionary signals that completely contradict each other, the toddler is driven to explore on the one hand, while on the other is commanded not to. Meanwhile a further contradiction arises when that care-taking, protective-nurturing person becomes adversarial and threatening. Where, then, does that new life turn? Abandonment threatens from every quarter.
In this bewildering maze, the child has no choice but to automatically try to maintain contact with his caretaker, and yet move on in the other directives he also must follow. Splitting his attention between Nature’s inner directive for exploration, and the outer social-cultural demand not to (issuing from his safe-space protector herself), the toddler complies as best such a divided system can. His emotional-sensory motor system moves those muscles and limbs on to explore, while his relational-higher brain connections move him to maintain contact with that safe-space, care-taking, nurturing one.
As stated by developmental studies over and over for years, separation, isolation from, or abandonment by the caretaker is the greatest fear mammalian infants—or children in general—can experience, this being critically so in humans. So either way he goes, toddler’s confused response is not a willful decision, but a directive his inherited and ancient instinctual reactions have made from the earliest beginnings of mammalian life—now leading to paradox.
The power of this negative command concerning exploration, and its parallel danger of separation, lies in the simple fact that an infant-child abandoned or cut off from its caretaker, was, throughout mammalian history, generally saber tooth’s lunch, in one form or another. So this ancient instinct, involving that powerful amygdala and its links in both reptilian and old-mammalian brains, has built into all mammalian systems one of the strongest of all evolutionary imperatives, setting up a deadly roadblock to a response we humans are driven to follow. This apparently harmless and absolutely common-sense negative command—No! Don’t!—which we parents toss out so casually, rides on the wings of death for the wholeness of the child’s self—and no small consequence to our own self down through the years.
For most people to accept, much less believe, the implications of this scenario, seems near impossible. My own efforts, and those of many wiser than me, have met a blank wall on this issue for decades. All of our own neural systems and structures of knowledge have had this very threatening survival-directive of minding-obeying built into every cell, as a security measure itself. And security is no easily ignored factor. Further, overriding even this automatic reaction is the equally real issue of our own public image-as-parent in our society and culture’s judgmental eye. Recognizing the fact that our obedience to our parents brought and brings a heavy price in us seems outright nonsense to most people who “know right from wrong and have some common sense—after all.” Such a notion concerning child obedience arouses a thousand “what-if ” qualifying scenarios in our minds.
The only alternative is the corollary fact that the child imprints from parent-model’s behavior every bit as much as from these parental negative commands. But following through on this would demand serious and rigorous behavioral and attitudinal changes in a parent! This makes the behavioral matter even more difficult for the parent to comprehend, and is generally rejected outright. It is “the child’s behavior, after all,” and the parent’s duty to modify it according to “common sense.” Around and around, the wheel grinds on.2
Some Mechanics of Candace Pert’s Hormones
At any threatening or negative command from the caretaker, the child’s ancient defense system releases into its young brain a hormonal burst of adrenal-cortisol that brings a powerful “alert response,” redirecting all neural responses to shift to attending that primal defensive system, while putting everything else on hold until this warning-alert is tended.
The peripheral nervous system goes into survival mode, and energy from the higher cortical systems is redirected to the energizing of the lower survival instincts, prompting the toddler to reconnect with that caretaker and re-establish its safe space, even as it goes on guard. Generally the toddler makes such a re-connection by trying to make visual contact with the parent’s eyes.
At the same time, paradoxically, the equally powerful ancient directive for exploration is renewed and re-invigorated, just by the burst of adrenals if nothing else, and the two drives try to function at the same time in diametrically opposite directions. Many a time we have heard some frustrated mother or father report, “And that little devil looked me square in the eyes and did exactly what I told him or her not to do!”
The sympathetic nervous system, with its defensive release of negative hormones and tightening of body-armor, continues, well after such a restrictive episode has passed, and before the parasympathetic system can re-establish unity and calm. (As the sympathetic nervous system is designed to turn the alert on throughout the body, the parasympathetic is designed to turn that alert off, slow things down and reestablish coherence, relationships, balance, and harmony.)
According to widespread research gathered and published by HeartMath,3 such rebalancing of hormonal and neural systems after a negative experience can take up to several hours before balance is restored, depending on the nature or severity of the disruptive episode.
Every Nine Minutes (Again)
Yet, Allan Schore’s research claims the average American toddler undergoes such split of directives, on average, every nine minutes, leaving almost no time between such negative events for parasympathetic rebalancing. And even if cortisol release might cease, its residual effects of tension and fear linger on, even as the child, under his other “highcommand,” generally overrides caution and resumes his exploration as best he can.
Most parental commands of this No-Don’t order have to be issued time and again, since they go against our genetic encoding on so many levels. And sooner or later such demands will be backed up, in frustration, by physical means: a swat, shoulder-shake, or isolation. Or, more frequently, increased and ever-more-harsh verbal threats. “I’ll beat the blood out of you,” was the favorite of a parent in our neighborhood with a particularly loud voice and “obstinate” child.
Even more damaging is the threat of withholding or withdrawing love or nurturing, or actual casting out physically: standing in the corner or broom closet in shame. “Do this or that and mummy-daddy won’t love you any more, nor even want or care for you,” is how these commands are too often spelled out in the child’s mind.
Eventually the child learns not to follow its impulse to explore until he checks it out with the parent or caretaker, and even then will keep one wary eye on the parent (or authority) and the other on the venture undertaken—a splitting of attention that compromises a child’s natural inquisitiveness and spontaneous response, as well as its ability to attend single-pointedly as attention demands.
Hesitation and self-doubt generally result, a doubt that etches into that growing character as a critical flaw. Eventually, true attention—where all body-systems coordinate to focus on a single issue, the job of the prefrontal cortex—will be fragmented, and some degree of “attention-deficit” disorder displayed, as is rampant today.
Re-Routing the Orbito-Frontal Loop
The most serious result of all these split directives and errors we make with children takes place within the very neural organization of the orbito-frontal loop itself. By about the twentieth month, some eight months after the great conflict begins, actual and dramatic changes in that orbito-frontal loop’s neural structure, as well as its operations, will have become readily evident (as Schore makes clear). This is a simple neurological fact never considered before Schore’s work, and the most serious of all single aspects of a child’s life. To overstate the seriousness of this fact is hard to do; yet, for it to be accepted presents an obstacle even more difficult. Of all child-parent interactions, this resistance to change in a parent’s belief is the most difficult for a parent to recognize.
Schore’s research further demonstrates that as a result of these enforced and ongoing behavior modifications, the very neural “vertical and translateral” links within that orbito-frontal loop, connecting all four systems and generally established by the twelfth month, are dissembled and re-assembled in a number of disastrous ways. The “vertical” links between the high-level prefrontal cortex and lowest sensory motor defensive system are reduced in varying ways and to a varying extent, while the “translateral” links between the emotional brain and that defensive system are strengthened.
Those vertical links are where all systems are designed to be lifted up from their lowest level into those higher orders of functioning in the prefrontal cortex. The translateral links are between the emotional brain and defensive hind-brain, which are enlarged and strengthened, even as the higher vertical links with the prefrontals are compromised, most are re-routed into translateral connections. When Nature feels forced to reinforce her ”translateral defenses” for protection, at the expense of vertical movements toward our higher intelligence, once again Nature’s great question has been asked, and once again answered in the negative.
How, in the face of such confusion and paradox, could a young self move on into the higher realms of intelligence when it has no organized, cohesive structure for such movement, or safe space from which to operate? How else, but that his basic intuitive instinct be impelled to increase defenses and retreat yet again from movements into unknown higher realms?
Research shows that by about age three, these early events bringing modifications in the orbito-frontal loop in those first three years will have myelinated, which makes them permanent. Myelin is a fatty coating that forms on axons making up a neural field, such fields as make up the orbito-frontal loop. Myelination makes such fields impervious to the hormonal actions of the parasympathetic system’s periodic housecleaning of unwanted or useless memory-information, such as those left over from some sympathetic nervous system’s alerting fear or threat of abandonment—real or imaginary—in earlier times.
Making permanent the fear-alert patterns suffered in the first three years affects our lifelong mental-physical-hormonal responses, the sixty-year-old just as strongly as the six-year-old, since these are permanent shifts in then-permanent neural structures, which function on levels below our awareness. Those correctives, reprimands, or threats of abandonment, which so disoriented us as toddlers, will affect our sympathetic system thereafter, in any number of different forms, generally below the threshold of our awareness.
From that point of myelination forward, any incoming signals that are in any way resonant with those original negative events, which split our attention and caused distress way-back-when, will trigger that same response again and again, in ever so many different, subtle ways and resulting in ever so many different, subtle effects. Most of these effects will be below our awareness, though showing up readily enough in a myriad of not-so-subtle signs as nervousness, irritability, fear, chronic anger, high blood pressure, cancer, or other unhappy afflictions of our modern enlightened society.
And underneath all parent-child relations will be that parent’s own fear, triggered by associative actions with their child’s behavior, of the social approval or disapproval of them as persons—as well as parents—regarding their child’s own behavior. Have you taught your child to mind?
Some recent claims call our attention to the brain’s plasticity, which seems to qualify earlier convictions of neural systems being impervious to re-formation once formed. This plasticity of the brain is not an overall automatic response, however, and certainly not a handy cure-all, but at best only a possibility that can, with care and patience, perhaps help bring critical remediation to some damaged systems. But to take plasticity for granted as a loophole corrective for faulty development, rather than taking care to bring about a balanced system in the first place, is risky, and at present is not paying off. Prevention and care are always the first imperative.
In a final look at the fate of the orbito-frontal loop, we find that variations of such re-routing and shifting as take place in the toddler also take place to varying extent and in various ways at each major shift of development thereafter. They appear in the four- to six-year-old shift that will end the period of the dreaming child and bring in the operational logical stage, itself ending with a major neural pruning around age twelve, as well as in the tremendous shift into adolescence that pretty well scrambles parts of the adolescent brain for years. And on it goes.
Most of these neural shifts will reflect the effects of this early permanent re-alignment of the orbito-frontal loop in the toddler, with its parallel realignments and shifts in the amygdala and other critical memory and defense structures.
One final observation must be made of that toddler-child, driven instinctively to investigate its world to at least a minimal survival level, while also instinctively trying to modify its behavior according to parental-cultural demands (also for survival). This child develops an actual division of his previously unified self-system—his innate identity and integrity. The self-as-brain finally orients to the lowest physical survival patterns, while the complementary self-as-heart orients as best it can to the higher mental-imaginative-creative-spiritual and social imperatives inherent within the prefrontal-heart connection. This brings a fundamental split of self in what evolution designed as a simple division of labor in her two greatest and most fragile creative systems—heart and brain. Instead of a unified self, we end with a split self brought about through enculturation and behavior modification—a self now at war with itself.
Judged Guilty until Proven Innocent
From abandonment or the fear of it, that new life is compromised and brought into nothing less than servitude to the more powerful social-cultural pressures to which that person has had to adapt. The overriding judgment of being unworthy until proved otherwise, and the underlying feeling of guilt or failure until proven innocent, result from those chronic negative directives of culture and the self-system’s struggle for integrity. These cultural imperatives have created a double bind wherein self is wrong any way it turns, and they will plague that person’s every move. This underlying guilt and these feelings of failure will drive him or her to “prove themselves” to that accusing world, and so rid himself of the accusation of unworthiness, at all costs. At all costs, because this is essentially a matter of survival of self, of one’s basic capacity to orient in the world in a coherent manner. And the cost—which is borne equally by that world, social body, and self—is of no small accounting.
Which brings this little survey full circle. Examining our “human condition” has opened us into a labyrinth in which we have been lost for centuries, while blindly seeking a way out. Yet those very systems in question were designed—as we well intuit in our deepest knowing—as a way of transcendence into ever higher realms needing no way out, but simply a moving into.