That night he was almost too happy to sleep, and so much love stirred in his little sawdust heart that it almost burst. And into his boot-button eyes, that had long ago lost their polish, there came a look of wisdom and beauty …
Margery Williams, The Velveteeen Rabbit, 1922.38
The splitting up of the ‘human control system’ into different self-regulation tools is, of course, a completely artificial thing. They develop together. They never work in isolation from each other. We split them up to understand them better and that is all.
So impulse control doesn’t solely develop from the ‘waited moment’. It also develops as a consequence of our knowledge that another way of looking at things is likely to emerge if we wait that moment. We might be furious at a friend, but still appreciate that she’s not seeing things the way we are and that waiting to find out her perspective on the situation is going to be helpful. Even without knowing exactly what feelings, knowledge and perspective she has that differs from ours, we know that there will be ‘another way to look at things’. We are able to think about thinking, and to think (and feel) about feelings. These are two vital skills for children to develop, and they begin developing very early.
These skills have separate names. Recognising and thoughtfully responding to the emotions of ourselves and others is called empathy. Less well-known is the term that describes ‘thinking about thinking’, including the ability to wonder about what other people might know or think. The term for this is skill is ‘theory of mind’. Again, this is one of those purely artificial divisions, but it is useful because these two different parts of knowing, interrelated though they are, develop at different rates. It is important to understand that your baby knows from a very early age that she is not you and your emotions aren’t hers, and that she also knows that she isn’t able to predict what you do and don’t know.
It is empathy, or heart knowledge, that comes first. And it really does come from the heart. This was, for me, a transformative piece of knowledge, because, like many people with a western medicine background, I had believed that ‘I’ was located behind my eyes. I had also believed that empathy was mostly created by baby being treated empathically and then later taught at a ‘thinking’ level: for example, ‘And how would you feel if that was you?’ I was right but I was missing out the vital first step. The groundwork for empathy is put in place from very early, beginning in the womb.
It begins when a baby’s heart speeds and slows in imitation of her mother’s. Even at birth, the ebb and flow of baby’s heart is not yet properly regulated by her own control systems. Cradled to Mum’s left side, baby’s heart learns to echo the changing and ‘environmentally responsive’ beat of the loving heart next door.39
The way our hearts vary their beats is critically important. The more variable your heart rate, the better your health, your empathic skills and your concentration skills. The words ‘high’ attached to the word ‘heart’ tend to freak us out a little, as we associate them with ‘high blood pressure’. Not in this case. You want to know that your heart is ‘highly variable’. In fact, the words ‘low heart rate variability’ are a red flag for all kinds of health issues: panic disorder, psychopathology, difficulties with glucose regulation, problems coping with stress, and also heart disease.40–44
I find it just fascinating that it is not until we are six weeks old that vision, the most important tool for learning we have, comes into regular use. Why does our vision come online so relatively late in development? I think it is because, once seen, your face becomes baby’s favourite thing in the world: nothing can compete with the sheer joy of Mum smiling. For the whole of the rest of our lives another person’s gaze is the most powerful emotional stimulus in the world. Perhaps the delay is because babies need to be protected from it for a little while so they have more time to detect and internalise the subtler cues of their mother’s body: her heart rate, respiration rate and muscle tension.
Keeping baby close to you while you are talking to another person or concentrating hard on a complex task or walking briskly or resting peacefully means that baby’s heart can learn to detect all these variations of heart rate. Having learned to ‘echo the changing beat’ of your heart in the first six weeks, down the track baby will begin to match facial expressions to different heart rates.
Of course, the more congruency between your emotions, your facial expressions and your heart rate, the better the match your baby can grow between her own emotions and body systems. That close match between her emotions and body systems helps your child understand and manage her own emotions. It also gives her a head start in recognising and responding to the emotions of others, which is the basis of empathy and social skill.11, 35, 36, 45
When you go to pick up your crying baby, you’ll find, if you listen, that your heart slows in anticipation of her need for a soothing heartbeat. A lovely encasement of calm can descend upon you as you hold her close; and in calming her, your slower heartbeat calms you too. You pick up your baby and hold her close, very frequently to your left side and with her right ear pressed close to your chest, and you slowly rock from side to side. Your dropped heart rate coupled with the slow rocking says to your baby ‘all is well’, and her heart rate drops also, no longer pounding out a raggedy, incoherent rhythm that sends out powerful messages of distress to her body and brain.
We are used to thinking that heart rate is controlled by the brain, but that’s not quite right. The heart and the amygdala are in constant dialogue, and sometimes it is the heart that is the boss. When we are very stressed our heart begins a raggedy, incoherent beat. It also secretes stress hormones (it turns out the heart is a gland as well as a pump) and this is a double whammy emergency gong for the brain and body. The heart, which has its own ‘little brain’, sends the powerful message to the amygdala, ‘Turn off higher thought. Instinct must rule if we are to survive.’
And this is what happens. The amygdala promptly concurs and we can’t reach those higher brain regions anymore: we simply react. You can imagine how useful this was on the African savanna when faced with a giant sabre-toothed cat, but it’s a poor match for modern life, which calls for us to be able to think flexibly most of the time.
Unfortunately, our heads are no match for our hearts in this situation. We are simply not able to calm ourselves down by ‘thinking’ once our heart believes it is in an emergency situation. Trying to think usually means that we get stuck, thinking the same thoughts over and over again (a feature of depression and anxiety disorders), waiting nervously for disaster to strike (panic attacks) and defending ourselves against a world that has become too much.
So what happens if we pick up our crying baby and our heart beat ‘takes off’ under these circumstances rather than slowing down? What if we pick up our crying baby and our heart slows initially but then begins to race under the stress of dealing with a colicky or difficult-to-soothe baby?
The HeartMath Institute has pioneered the use of biofeedback to help people see what is happening in their hearts: this incoherent rhythm shows up as a ragged line. Clients are then taught how to calm their wildly beating hearts.43
One of their techniques goes like this: you are instructed to put a ‘freeze frame’ around what you are feeling. Then you are asked to place your hands on your heart and breathe in and out from there. The next instruction is to ‘Find a memory of a time when you felt good — not the event, simply the emotion. If you can’t feel that emotion, try and find the appreciation or the attitude that went with it. Aim for neutral if you can’t find positive.’
I’ve found that this technique works well for me and my friends even without a screen to watch. Once you feel that you are able to access those high brain regions again so you are not having looping thoughts, ‘He shouldn’t be crying, I must be such a bad mother’ or doom thoughts, ‘I can’t cope’, then check through to see what thoughts you are having about the baby.
Make sure you are not thinking that baby is attempting to manipulate you or that baby is rejecting you or that baby is angry with you. Remember that these are distress calls and that always responding pays big dividends. The messages of the first part of the book are important here too: listen for shark music and look for ghosts (see pages 38–40).
The take home message for parents is that heart rate variability is a vital component for empathy, and that it is created as much by the heart as the brain. And it begins in infancy. Babies with a secure, organised attachment partly get a good head start in life because their deep physical connection to you, heart to heart, helps them develop a more variable heart rate. So keep them close.
The heart research has altered how I think about myself and my children, and how I deal with illness and sadness and learning issues. It has altered the kind of programs I write for parents. More than anything, it has said to me that ‘the relationship with your children is what is paramount’.
I have always tried to write programs that would be fun for mother and child to do together, but now that has become the central goal for any therapy program. I aim to strengthen the relationship between parent and child, because that will improve every single outcome for the child.
No, this does not mean that I believe that learning difficulties are necessarily or only relationship difficulties. But every relationship can become stronger. If one of my boys is having a ‘catching everything’ patch or a ‘sad patch’, I now say to myself, ‘more time needed there’. More listening time, more cuddle time and more fun. Build the connection deeper.
When baby is about two months old the time for just gazing at each other has arrived. So enjoyable is this that parents often continue to gaze after baby has gone to sleep — and there is nothing like catching the sparkle growing in a just-awakened baby’s eyes either. It is hard not to just sit and look at them, waiting for them to wake up and look back at you. And so often, in these next few months, baby will wake and you will see quite clearly that there is more looking back at you from behind those eyes than there was when baby went to sleep. More comprehension, more curiosity, more humour … more of the person altogether. Professor Schore, the great synthesist of neurology and psychology, calls this utterly addictive mutual gazing the ‘face-to-face joy interactions’, and notes that they trigger off a new pattern of growth in both your brain and your baby’s.11, 46
One of the difficulties for parents of the premature or near-term baby is connected to gaze. A premature baby is easily overstimulated and the gaze of another person gets to be too much very quickly, so baby looks away. The risk is that this will continue past the time when gaze is overstimulating to baby, and researchers have indeed found that this pattern of only briefly meeting each other’s eyes continues past infancy. And it is not just the child who holds a gaze for less time, the mothers also show the same pattern of looking away after a few seconds. This is not just a risk factor for being able to reconnect and repair, but for less time spent in the face-to-face joy interactions.
How can we correct such a thing? Can it be corrected? Should it be corrected? Or is it perhaps a maternal response to ongoing sensitivities in the child?
It does need to be corrected, and the only way to correct it is by increasing your awareness of what is happening. If your baby is still little and you are not already doing it, switch to kangaroo care or loads of skin-to-skin contact. It is difficult to accept, but some hospitals still promote incubators over kangaroo care despite the overwhelming evidence in favour of it, for everything from more responsive temperature control and better weight gain to improved synchrony between mother and child. So hold your baby and touch him with love. But make sure you tell him what you are doing, give him warning of your presence and your actions, and move slowly. The beginnings of gaze are supported by loads of skin-to-skin contact.47
Talking is also important. Copy the smallest of your baby’s happy vocalisations (the gurgles, small exploratory sounds, coos) back to him, whether he is looking at you or not. Focus yourself on getting that sound back like the most faithful of echoes, mixed in with the love you feel. And, of course, always respond instantly to cries with soothing and the warmth and steadiness of your body.
As many times a day as possible, banish all the world you can and immerse yourself utterly in your baby. This means that you put all else from your mind — the emotional difficulties of an early birth, any accompanying fear that may still be rearing multiple heads — to just be in the moment with your baby Keep baby curled up, his little legs over his tummy, his head absolutely supported but free to look away. Watch your baby with every bit of dedication and ‘in the moment’ that you can muster: let the task become a moving meditation, as if you were watching the flickering flame of a candle, mentally itemising baby’s cues. Pull back gently if there is a hint of disengagement — a premature baby has far more subtle signs that require much more skilled reading. Be patient and keep your baby’s corrected age in mind. It is not until a baby is two months old that the face-to-face joy interactions even begin.
In parenting literature, one researcher has used the word ‘moist’ to describe early gaze, in an attempt to characterise the very gentle ‘adhering’ quality of gaze between a baby and mother. Without intruding or imposing on your baby, try to keep gaze going longer with that very subtle stickiness. You will find that your face is opening and brightening as you hold baby’s gaze, and your body is softening. Relax into that exchanged gaze and your baby will learn to do so also. See if you can build the amount of time and increase the elasticity and length of gaze. Play little stretching games: slowly turn your face sideways while smiling and holding eye contact with just one eye, and then come back to full face. These stretching games are the mutual limbering up for more complicated games like peek-a-boo. For example, when your baby is sad, your face empathically reflects back that sadness, but not only the sadness. You automatically mix in other messages too: your loving concern, your patience derived of your knowledge that ‘this too shall pass’ and even a hint of ‘you are gorgeous even when you are crying’.
How reassuring this is to your baby.46 Each of those messages is read, and the feeling that prompted them in you is caught by him as his ‘mirror system’ picks up those fine gradations in your expression and matches them to changes in your heart rate and breathing. It is in this way that he discovers that a ‘let’s play’ smile is matched with an increasing heart rate; a look of focus with a steady slow heart rate; surprise with a sudden freezing in the gut (the ‘swoop’ we all feel); an open-mouthed smile with a feeling of openness and ‘lift’ through the body.48, 49
How especially important those joyous moments are! From them comes our drive to explore and discover, our motivation to master, our curiosity and, most of all, our desire to relate well to other people. The ‘ah-ha’ moment beloved of the student and scientist, the moment of recognition in our love stories, the satisfaction of a completed project. All are moments of joy.
The ‘lift’ mentioned, the one that seems to roll outwards from our hearts through our bodies at such times, is no illusion either. When you smile in response to your baby’s smile, and talk back in response to his talk, joy rolls like an express train through his whole body, leaving a trail of good in its wake. The ‘joy express’ is the vagus nerve. In babyhood this is the carrier of messages from the heart to the amygdala; as we grow up it links through to the right brain. Vagus means ‘wanderer’ and this nerve wanders from brain to colon, taking in the throat and the heart on the way.
So what happens in that smiling moment when your eyes meet in mutual delight? The vagus nerve releases oxytocin (the love, learning and anti-stress hormone), relaxing your baby, coaxing his heart to match the moment and simultaneously dropping his blood pressure. At the same time, the oxytocin release increases his immunity by increasing the production of white blood cells and decreasing the production of corticosteroids. If something is hurting him, the oxytocin surge will make it feel a bit better. On reaching his tummy, the oxytocin makes it feel ‘warm’ and helps along digestion of food. And for an encore, oxytocin prods along the release of growth hormone and helps your baby grow.50, 51, 52
These social interactions have a long term effect too. In the 1960s, attachment theorist Dr Daniel Stern said that every social interaction between mother and child was a mini-narrative or a ‘micro-story’. There is a beginning — baby catches mother’s eye; a middle with some tension, some build-up — ‘Is Mum going to tickle me? She is! Oh oh!’; and an end — the game winds down, or baby is beginning to get too excited and must be soothed, or a different game starts.53 In the 2000s Dr Schore synthesised those stories with the underlying biology. Baby and mother’s heart rate speeds up in synchrony as the game gets going. Oxytocin is released in both brains — it is not just the love but the learning hormone — and both brains are primed to learn. Learning is a biological process — if someone has learned something, their brain has changed.
What is baby actually about to learn? He’s going to learn about keeping the game going longer through building concentration span and paying attention to one thing. He’s going to learn about reading the most fleeting expressions on Mum’s face and guess when the gentle fingers will poke him next, thus building his social skills by predicting what is going to happen. He’s going to practise his burgeoning communication skills by giggling and gurgling in anticipation. By matching his mum’s body systems’ changes he’s going to learn more about controlling his own heart rate and hormone release so that he can keep playing and keep that positive feeling going longer.11, 46
And what is happening in Mum’s brain? Is she just going through the motions? No. If baby is learning then Mum is fully engaged in the game too. Creating synchrony is an emotional process, and if the adult isn’t fully present it can’t happen. Mum is growing not just her right brain, but the identical part of the right brain to her baby. She doesn’t just monitor her baby’s but also her own emotions, and learns when to turn off the stressful emotions in both of them. This is multitasking at a most refined level. A mother’s brain keeps growing to keep up with the job as the social interactions with her child become ever more complex.
Dr Schore concludes one of his papers with the extraordinary suggestion that the baby grows his conciousness of himself as different to other selves because his mother has also grown a map of who he is in her brain.[11] Faithfully copying her brain growth as he has throughout, why should his idea of himself not have begun in her mind and then taken root in his? And can a person develop ‘self-hood’ without being a self in someone else’s mind first? I don’t think they can. I believe it is not ‘I think therefore I am’, but ‘I am loved, therefore I am’.
Perhaps the strongest support for this comes from those who work with troubled youth. Youth workers often comment on these children’s and teenagers’ lack of a sense of self. So pronounced is this missing sense of self that it is not possible to deliver self-esteem or self-confidence programs because there is ‘no-one there’ to deliver it to. But, say the youth workers, it is possible to help these troubled kids develop that sense of self. They often note, in passing, that when that has been achieved, they find that they keep that relationship forever. Those kids never fully leave their lives.
I believe what has happened is that the youth worker has been the first person to ever ‘attune’ to that child. And the first person to ever grow a map of that individual in their own brain. And in doing both those things, they trigger in the teenager’s brain the process of building a ‘core self’. They know who they are now because someone else does too. No wonder they never want to lose touch with that person.
In the light of this research I’ve been left to wonder just what happens when a person is transformed by a spiritual experience. It is quite definitely their right brain that is involved in that experience, the emotional, pattern detecting, non-verbal right. Can a person ‘imagine’ such a powerfully transformative experience? I believe they cannot. I believe that the evidence suggests we cannot claim that right brain growth in a baby requires an ‘other’ but that right brain growth in adults does not. This last bit, of course, would be considered simply speculation by scientists, and I’m just sharing it with you as part of my journey through the research as promised. It is taking some courage!