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Relationships the Secret to Building Intimacy Resilience and Trust
- Claudia Gold MD
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Welcome to Healing From Within I am your host Sheryl Glick Reiki Master Energy Teacher and author of my newest book in a trilogy A New Life Awaits which offers stories and messages from Spirit which show us our challenges are not simply economic political or societal but a divide or disconnect from our inner soul wisdom. In today’s show I am delighted to welcome Claudia Gold M.D. a pediatrician and Ed Tronick a psychologist authors of The Power of Discord to help us recognize that though people think perfect harmony is the defining characteristic of healthy relationships the truth is human interactions are messy complicated and confusing but are crucial to social and emotional development.
As listeners of Healing From Within have come to expect over the years Sheryl and her intuitive and insightful guests and I share an understanding of the challenges of a physical three dimensional life and also grow to appreciate the many spiritual tools and gifts we possess and learn to share in order to improve the human and divine condition through relating to challenges with full awareness of who we are why we chose a physical life and how to improve all relationships through awareness and higher consciousness. Life is both a physical and energetic force.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Dr. Claudai Gold and Dr. Tronick will share with listeners how mind body and emotions from childhood affect our perceptions and behavior and working through the inevitable dissonance of human connection is the path to better relationships with romantic partners family friends and colleagues.
When Claudia is asked to think back to her childhood and remember a person place or event that might have signaled to her or others around her what lifestyle work and values she might pursue in adulthood she immediately tells us her mother possessed a positive outlook on life and was a child psychologist who practiced from home and Claudia saw it as important work and was inspired by her mother’s efforts. On the other hand her father who was a Holocaust
Survivor was somewhat shut down and didn’t discuss problems so she feel her full range of emotional content was not allowed to expand or be expressed. Our parents do set up a course of behavior as we model many of their fears or behaviors.
Dr. Tronick’s work and the “Still Face” experiment has brought about a game changing shift in our understanding of human development. The experiment shows that our highly evolved sense of self makes us separate, yet our survival depends on connection. The authors go on to tell us how we can gain confidence in learning about one another’s desires and correct the mistakes and misunderstandings that arise.
The authors describe why they wrote this book and write,” How is it that some people enjoy a range of satisfying intimate social connections while others suffer from painful feelings of disconnect and loneliness? Why are some human beings sad withdrawn and lacking in self-esteem where as others are angry unfocused and brittlely self-assertive and still others are happy curious affectionate and self-confident. How is our ability to feel a sense of belonging and attachment to other people linked with the way we develop our individual sense of self?” ‘The answers to these questions is why the authors wrote this book.
In answering these questions, the doctors became aware that pediatricians it seems get little education in the critical foundational role of relationships in growth and development. DW Winnicott turned psychoanalyst in post -World War 11 England discovered mothers were thought of mainly as providers of basic care feeding bathing and dressing and it was this way in western culture as well. Children often were separated from parents for long periods of time.
Winnicott was among the first to introduce a new way of thinking about child development. He expressed the term “true self” and described how parent’s won issues may cloud their view of who their children really are and of what their children’s behavior is communicating?
For Dr. Claudia Gold another mother showed her these ideas in practice. This mother who came to the office with her son was highly distraught as her older son’s need to always be first caused conflict with his younger sister. Sitting in the office she suddenly told the doctor of her older brother’s death when she was a little girl. The family never processed or addressed the loss and ran away to a new location trying to deal with it. While she was telling this story to the doctor her son was on the floor drawing a picture of her sadness and handed it to her saying, ‘This is you not me.” Now she could respond to her son’s “true self” not her own needs, setting limits on his behavior. As a doctor Dr. Gold started to see that behavior problems occurred when for a range of reasons a parent and child did not connect which she later saw as a mismatch.
Sheryl liked the endorsement of this book by Sherry Turkel author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology wrote, “A brilliant overview of our contemporary relational landscape that argues that what people—both children and adults—need most is the messiness of real relationships with their conflicts, partial resolutions, and imperfect efforts at repair. In trying to make these things work, we practice attention, connection, and listening. We practice our humanity. We learn to put technology in its place.”
Technology has recreated the still faced paradigm for developing children among other challenging issues to our well being.
In Sheryl’s new book A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening Sheryl writes about technology as being both a tool for advancement as well as a damaging influence on human evolution. Sheryl writes, “While technology is necessary, it must be used reverently and simply as a tool, or it will ultimately change the way people interact with each other, the planet, and Universe. Research on happiness, health, and well-being shows us that maintaining social interaction and relationships is still the key in creating and sustaining a happier and healthier population. When people are less involved in socialization processes and are limited from speaking one-on-one, face-to-face, they lose the ability to understand body language and to gain more information from the actual physical reactions that come from this type of interaction. Text messages and e-mails are being overused and seem to be dehumanizing and affecting our capacity to feel, empathize, and communicate with skill, which aids in receiving pleasurable responses. I fear for our next generation, the children and leaders of tomorrow”
We discuss the connection between Autism and Technology. To understand the connection between autism and technology, we must understand that a child with heightened sensory sensitivity may in some settings experience the world as more threatening, or less safe, than other children do. While some children may find a social gathering fun, a child with a sensitive sensory system may interpret the situation in a different way: There is too much going on. I am confused. I need to withdraw. A child with sensory sensitivities or other neurobiological vulnerabilities may adapt by going to great lengths to shut out the outside world. Children who have challenges with socializing may naturally gravitate to the smoothed-out passive engagement offered by screens, which don’t demand a response. Parents may then turn to their own phones to calm themselves from the extreme stress of working to connect with these children. Further complicating the situation, parents under stress may convey that stress to their children, who increasingly turn to technology to self-regulate and reduce stress and anxiety.
While an association clearly exists between problematic cell phone use and stress, depression, and anxiety, there is little evidence that cell phone use causes these problems. As with behaviors associated with autism, it could well be that the phone is the response rather than the cause. In a New York Times article addressing the role of new technology in the current epidemic of anxiety in young people, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, professor of psychology at Hunter College, wrote: “When we’re anxious, we gravitate toward experiences that dull the present anxious moment. Enter mobile devices, the perfect escape into a two-dimensional half-life, one that teenagers can make sense of.” Research also demonstrates a clear connection between low self-esteem and high levels of social media use. However, as psychologist Erin Vogel is quick to point out, it’s not clear whether social media use causes low self-esteem or if individuals with low self-esteem gravitate to social media. In her research, Vogel aims to untangle this question.
On social media, people display the positive aspects of their lives. We don’t see photos of exhausted parents with unruly hair and spit-up on their clothes or couples sleeping in separate rooms after a blowout fight. These uniformly positive images may lead people looking at them to feel worse about themselves. Vogel designed an experiment to test this idea with college students in her lab at the University of California, San Francisco. She and her colleagues made social media profiles of supposedly real college students. They found a temporary drop in students’ self-esteem after viewing just two or three profiles of attractive and physically fit individuals who had more comments and likes than they had.
This experiment suggests that social media plays a role in decreasing self-esteem. But as Vogel acknowledges, in this experiment the researchers were looking at one moment in time. What variation might we see if we were able to examine behavior according to the quality of relationships across development? A person with a fragile sense of self might be more significantly affected in response to these profiles than a person with a robust sense of self. In what can quickly become a downward spiral, the device is used to quell the distress produced by the continuous comparison with others that the ever-present technology engenders. With low self-esteem and a constant need to be participating in life through technology, social media, cell-phone usage, people who need to shy away from difficult interactions on a personal level retreat to social media to alleviate their loneliness and self-doubts. It provides some form of connection to those around them without actually causing physical interaction, which is harder for them to handle now, in these difficult times.
Most people want to feel known or seen by others as they are or as we feel ourselves to be and love is a primary way to express that need.
Our overreliance on technology and social media may be a symptom of a social and cultural movement away from the normal messiness of human relationships. If so, only immersion in relationships can provide the solution. This idea of symptoms as adaptations has relevance not only to our understanding of overreliance on technology but also to the way we understand and treat all forms of emotional distress.
In the 1940s, when orphanages for young children still existed in the United States, high death rates in those institutions were attributed primarily to contagious diseases. But Austrian psychoanalyst René Spitz had a different hypothesis; he believed the deaths were due to a lack of a consistent caregiver or a lack of love. To test his theory, he observed groups of infants in two different institutions and followed them into toddlerhood. In both institutions, infants who were admitted shortly after birth received adequate nutrition, shelter, and medical care. But they differed in one significant way. In the institution he called Nursery, infants were cared for in a prison nursery by their incarcerated mothers. In the other, a hospital ward he called Foundling home, overworked nurses had to care for from eight to twelve children each. In Spitz’s summary of his findings, he wrote that the children in Nursery developed into normal healthy toddlers, but the emotionally starved children of Foundling home did not thrive, and many of them never learned to speak, walk, or feed themselves. He went on to reveal the most shocking finding: The most impressive evidence probably is a comparison of the mortality rates of the two institutions. In a five years’ observation period during which we observed a total of 239 children, each for one year or more, “Nursery” did not lose a single child through death. In “Foundling home,” on the other hand, 37 percent of the children died during the two years’ observation period.
Dr. Claudia Gold says you can find Hope in uncertainty. And that the tyranny of certainty can lead us away from growth. And she also suggests certainty and authoritarianism go hand in hand while uncertainty fosters empathy and hope.
Sheryl says “So it seems like when you’re too comfortable in what you think you know, which could be beliefs or impressions placed upon you by parents, teachers, family or friends, you do not seem to question these stoic beliefs and this prevents evolution of your soul life plan and your intellect or ego…both are stifled.”
Certainty leads us away from growth and healing; worse, it can lead us to potentially dangerous and harmful places. Certainty and authoritarianism often go hand in hand. Tara Westover in Educated, a memoir about her troubled upbringing as a daughter of survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, tells a story of growing up in an environment characterized by authoritarian certainty. In one revealing example, her mother sustains a serious head injury in an early-morning car accident after her father insisted the family make a twelve-hour drive overnight. But because of her father’s certainty about the evils of hospitals, he kept her at home instead of seeking medical attention. She remained in their dark basement for weeks, unable to tolerate light, and the long-term impact came in the form of chronic debilitating headaches, impaired memory, and inability to resume her work as a midwife. While neither of us knows the author personally, we wonder if the creative process of writing her memoir played a role in helping her leave behind the tyrannous certainty that characterized the circumstances in which she was raised.
Uncertainty plays a critical role in the development of one’s sense of self from the earliest months of life. As we’ve seen, after the stage of what Winnicott called primary maternal preoccupation, when the mother anticipates the helpless infant’s every need, there comes an essential time when she cannot and should not do so. As a child gains increased competence and begins to develop into their own separate person, the mother will naturally be unsure of what her child needs. The good-enough mother is not perfect, and these very imperfections give her children space to grow into themselves. The concepts of certainty and uncertainty have broad implications for how we raise our children. Authoritarian parenting, as in “my way or the highway,” may be linked to difficulty with emotional regulation in children. Authoritative parenting, in contrast, is associated with children having a greater capacity for emotional regulation, flexible thinking, and social competence. An authoritative parenting stance encompasses respect for and curiosity about a child, together with containment of intense feelings and limits on behavior.
Your sense of self and your capacity for intimacy emerges in moment to moment interactions in your earliest relationships. We know that parents leave their children all the time. In fact, a child’s sense of himself and the world around him develops out of these natural comings and goings. Mama, where are you? There you are. These experiences form his core feeling of going on being. But a period of separation beyond the child’s ability to manage precipitates an unbearable anxiety. For the child, having no way to make meaning of his mother’s absence, it is as if she no longer exists. And if she no longer exists, the child’s sense of his own existence falters. The experience goes beyond terror, sadness, or rage. It is a total negation, a sense that there is no me.
The following story of a young child, struggling to make meaning of his mother’s intermittent emotional unavailability, Wyatt felt lost. As an adult, bolstered by relationships with his wife and teenage children, he could observe his reaction to his mother’s behavior. Time, therapy, and a series of new relationships had offered him the opportunity to reinterpret his mother’s intermittent emotional absence. Though unsettling and startling in its appearance after so many years, the behavior no longer precipitated the same inner panic and dissolving of his sense of self. He could contemplate the situation, including his own reaction, from a comfortable distance. You need to have a solid sense of yourself— to self-regulate—in order to be open to intimacy with others. Self-regulation is different from self-control, a relatively cold term that implies a need to rein in intense feelings. Self-regulation refers to an ability to engage in the world and experience a full range of emotions without falling apart.
Dr. Gold’s book offers a new and different approach to emotional suffering in the context of derailed relationships. A person’s physiological stress system is altered when the process of mismatch and repair is derailed early in life. The experience lives in the body, and when someone is stressed as an adult, the body may respond in ways shaped by this early experience. Learning new patterns involves using both the mind and the body. If meanings were formed before language developed, then change calls for new meanings that are not based solely in language and conscious thought. In order to be in new relationships that break the unhealthy patterns of childhood, people need to learn, as Wolfert demonstrates, new ways to breathe.
Sheryl tells of a story when she was younger and felt derailed. After breaking up with her first boyfriend who was 6 years older and moving into another phase of his life while Sheryl was still in college she found out in a newspaper article that he had married shortly after At that time she was unable to understand how it all happened. She couldn’t understand how what was a loving relationship had not been able to sustain itself. But now realizes there was a mismatch and different life paths that awaited both young people. The story she played in her head for many years, was one of complete loss of self as she had been so invested in the relationship. Now as an intuitive healer and medium, understanding the needs of the soul, which is often different than the physical reality of life, she simply realizes that each relationship is meant to last as long as it does, and there was never any reason to feel sad about how it could not be something else. For life is not random, and the people and relationships we have are simply there to help our soul remember that we are love itself, and our souls’ cross paths beyond time and space, in many wonderous ways to bring us love and joy. Once Sheryl understood this, she was grateful to know him and to remember feelings of love, for the time they shared. Each played the role that was necessary as part of our evolution and journey in this time and place.
Dr. Gold does believe there is a myth of biology vs. environment and nature vs. nurture. Behavioral epigenetics specifically refers to the way environment, or life experience, influences gene expression and subsequent behavior and development. A child may be born with a particular gene for some problematic trait, but the expression of that gene, and so the effects of that gene on behavior, will vary according to the environment. Whether or not a given gene is expressed directly affects the developing structure and biochemistry of the brain. Thus, experience shapes genetic potential, early life relationships are critical in influencing development of the brain.
In these two stories Dr. Gold shares in the book, we see the extremes of influence of nature and nurture. Because of the qualities Simon was born with, his childhood was characterized by more unrepaired mismatch than his easygoing siblings experienced. For Mona, the paucity of repair resulted primarily from her parents’ troubles. In each situation, distorted meanings of the world as an overwhelming and hopeless place, might have been carried forward into new relationships, creating a knotted meshwork of difficulties. As we have seen, in reality, nature and nurture are intimately intertwined from the moment we engage in relationships with others. To be able to change for the long term, Simon and Mona needed something different: a new network of relationships and activities. None of the change was quick or easy. Over time, each developed a more full and complex sense of self.
Dr. Claudia Gold and her co-author Ed Tronick might want readers to take away with them after reading The Power of Discord to consider the following story.
In his musical Company, Stephen Sondheim beautifully portrays the messiness of human relationships. The play’s different married couples each express deep discord along with warmth and closeness, but the main character, Bobby, remains safely outside the fray. Toward the end of the play Bobby finally understands what he’s been missing out on, and when he sings “Being Alive,” he celebrates how being in the mess is to be fully alive. When you accept that you will never be completely in sync with another person, you open yourself to intimacy. Embracing the inevitably muddled, untidy nature of moment-to-moment interactions, creating space to be alone together with others, offers a path to meaningful engagement in the world.
We thank co-authors Claudia Gold M.D. and Ed Tronick Ph.D authors of The Powers of Discord for helping us to know that relationships with attachment figures are often difficult sometimes messy and filled with discord as mismatches rupture the attuned or desired alignments that are possible and that most people desire in relationships. The choice to reframe ruptured relationships are opportunities for personal and collective growth.
In summarizing today’s episode of “Healing from Within” we have explored the dance of connection and disconnection from attachment figures that molds our nervous system, our emotional lives and our sense of Self and our ability to be in harmony and balance with others. We find there are scientifically based ways for negotiating the complexities of social interactions and we find rather than searching for perfection which is impossible, we find that the mistakes we and everyone around us make at times as parents, friends and lovers, that the repair of our mistakes is what really matters. Reframing any disparities or ruptures can be seen as opportunities rather than burdens and can afford us the interactive reconnection experiences that will provide the foundation for building a joyful. Prosperous, purposeful life. Relationships offer us the means to refine our thoughts and actions and evolve as human and soul beings.
The author’s write: “In creating something, whether a piece of sculpture, a painting, or a book, you go through a lot of material that isn’t quite right until you find your way to what you really want to communicate. When you anxiously strive to produce a fully formed idea from the start, you can become stuck, unable to create anything. In contrast, by embracing the mess, you find your own artistic voice. In the same way, when you seek to create yourself anew out of a history of distorted and troubled meanings, in new relationships, you need to move through countless imperfect interactions that aren’t quite right.”
Claudia and Sheryl would like you to remember that each of the traumas or wounds of childhood were not in vain, but were the glue of our evolving, strong sense of soul and ego, eventually balancing our relationships and challenges throughout our lives. A clearer sense of who we are, who we have become, and the possibilities for continuous awareness and higher consciousness is the result.
Sheryl Glick RMT, host of Healing From Within, author of a new book in the trilogy A New Life Awaits: Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening, and invite you to visit her website www.sherylglick.com to read about and listen to visionaries, spiritualists, scientists, medical professionals, psychologists, lawyers, educators and those in the arts and music fields, share their insights on the nature of human and divine life. Shows may also be heard on www.webtalkradio.net and www.dreamvisions7radio.com.
