Your Child's Emotional Tuning

 

When an infant calls for help and her parent is consistently available and responsive in a
way that meets the child’s need, that child is implicitly learning that it is good to express need
because it will be satisfied in a timely manner. She can’t think at this age, of course, but her
body knows at the cellular level what is happening. This is the ground floor for emotional
balance in adulthood.
A child who experiences such emotional attunement and response from
her parents doesn’t have to escalate her expressions to magnum crying, screaming and flailing
to get mom and dad’s attention. Consequently, as an adult, she is likely to be able to do
without rapid escalation to bring attention to her needs in an intimate relationship but also in
friendships and the workplace. This truth debunks the old idea of letting children cry it
out…which we now know stresses the child’s system with large flows of cortisol and other
stress hormones that can actually do damage to her hippocampus—a part of the brain that is a
building block of IQ because of its key role in creating long-term memory.
Our degree and accuracy of responsiveness is what we might call “emotional tuning.”
Indeed, the entire neurological and hormonal system, of which the brain is the most obvious
component, is an instrument for sensing and feeling in the early years, not thinking. It is being
tuned by caregiver interaction as certainly as a piano is tuned by a piano master. This
emotional tuning determines which emotional notes, note sequences, chords and reaction speeds will
become the most common in the life of the individual. You can continue the metaphor by imagining what kind of parent interactions will lead the child to produce Wagner-like reactions rather than, say, Mozart, Bach, Beethoven or, in today’s terms, the quiet and contemplative music of Michael Hoppe or the blaring, machine-gun like emanations of metal rock and rap…as well as all the possible variations along that continuum.
Unfortunately, we parents are not perfect and there are plenty of times when we either
miss our children’s cues or are simply unable to satisfy them due to outside stresses pulling at
us—a bad economy, a catastrophic act of nature, ethnic strife and war, just to name a few of
the possibilities. So, many of us will pass through our critical and highly dependent first four or
five years experiencing something between inconsistent emotional attunement and response
from our parents to very little at all. When we arrive on the shores of adulthood and find
ourselves drawn into an intimate relationship, friendship or important workplace issue, it is
natural that these old deficits come with us and do a lot to shape the dynamics of those
relationships. The good news is that through the right kinds of courageous emotion-based
work in adulthood, those old tunes, as deeply written as they are, can gradually be rewritten
into a more harmonious musical score.
C 2012 Bob Kamm

Fierce Attachment, Part I

 

Two days before my father died, I felt him leave. I had just spent a few hours at his bedside. He was at home. Eighty-five years old. Until a few months before, he had seemed young for his age. Then, suddenly, it all changed. On this evening, he had slipped out of a diamond-hard clarity that had been the treasure of his last week, into delirium. With his eyes closed, he swung his legs over the side of the bed as if to get up.

I stood in front of him. He leaned forward until his forehead was resting against my stomach.

“Where you goin’, Dad?”

“School,” he said softly.

“No, Dad. You don’t have to go to school. Let me help you.” I bent over and lifted his legs. He lay back down. I caressed his forehead. He fell into silence.

An hour later, I left to drive home alone in my truck—a fifteen minute drive. When I was halfway there, I felt him go. It was as if someone had grabbed the skin at the edge of my chin and ripped it all the way down my torso. Tears came on so quickly, I had to pull off the road. Mind you, there were years when there was so much anger between us, we did not speak. Our relationship was complex, like so many parent-child relationships. If you had asked me at thirty if I would cry over his death, I’d probably have sloughed it off in the negative. But now, I was fifty-five years old. We were lucky enough to have had the time to work it all out and rediscover each other as grown men. In those sobs, I felt the purest truth. My attachment to him was fierce, fiercer than I had ever allowed myself to feel. I would simply not be me without him. It hit me in a way I had never experienced. The knowledge was straight, undeniable, painful, yet rich. Those were beautiful tears. I would not trade them for anything. I thought at the time that I had never before allowed myself to feel the full magnitude and meaning of our bond…and that this is likely true of most people.

His body lingered another day and a-half. But he was not in it.

Nine years later now, I feel my father in my own gestures, see him in the mirror, sense his presence in the shape of my thoughts and passions, hear him in the tone of my voice, my inflections, the words I chose to speak and write.

What really distinguishes humans? Is it our capacity for language? Abstract thought? Mathematics, Art, Music? I would say no. While our experience and expression of those things are certainly wonderful and unique among all known creatures, what really marks us is how fiercely the need to attach drives everything about human life. It is our primary survival strategy. How else would a creature as fragile and vulnerable as the human baby survive into adulthood? We attach first to our caregivers, but ultimately, to things spread around the 360 degrees of our field of being. We attach to our homes and hometown, to favorite places and memories, even trees, rocks, rivers, shorelines, mountains, to colors, foods, times of day, to equations, paintings and songs, to product brands, to certain sports, teachers, doctors, heroes, even villains and torturers as well as political parties, to our armed forces, our nation and, occasionally, our planet, to our clothes, toys and tools (whether high or low tech), to money, power, drugs, ideas, careers, identities, beliefs, ways of doing things and to dreams. Some of us even develop a stubborn attachment to actively denying that we are, first and last, creatures of attachment all the way through our lives…to that last delirious moment when we think we have to get up and go to our school.

To acknowledge the fierceness of attachment manifest in our very genes and brought fully into relief in our individual lives and our cultures, is to have the courage to say, “Yes, I need. I need others. I cannot fully be me without you, Mom, without you, Dad, without you, my brother and sister, without you my wife, husband, child, without you, my dear friends, students and beloved mentors. I need other hearts within which to place my own…and that I may welcome into mine. To be human is to need the solace of touch, the comfort of companionship, the safety of love…and to grieve ferociously when one to whom I have been deeply bound, dies.”
C2011 Bob Kamm