Emotional Neglect And The Adult In Therapy Lifelong Consequences To A Lack Of Early Attunement – Kathrin A Stauffer

By looking at the profoundly traumatized state that is represented by a maximal activity in the DVC, we can also appreciate just how disabled people are who don’t have a good and robust social engagement system. Among those people are, of course, ignored children (Powers, Ressler, & Bradley, 2009). I want to also emphasize the disastrous consequences of the lack of joyful experiences in the company of others that leaves ignored children with a heavy burden of social anxiety, avoidance, and often stigmatization as oddballs or geeky loners.

We can see how an absence of shared states of pleasure and fun early in life can easily generate an absence of reliance on the social engagement system as a go-to resource for self-regulation. Ignored children will instead have the expectation that excitement is difficult to manage and best avoided. This seems tragic in a world in which so much value is placed by most people on shared fun and noisy enjoyment in company.

The inability to engage in such activities that many ignored children experience often adds considerably to their shame and their sense that they are somehow deficient, freakish, or inadequate. There is now an increasing body of research on the social engagement system, characterizing in some detail the nerves involved (see for example Lim & Young, 2006). Porges also postulates a very interesting connection between the face, especially the area around the eyes, and the heart of a person, thus creating a scientific narrative for the common experience that loving eyes are one of the key ingredients that create a secure attachment and the potential for happiness (Porges, 2017).

A colleague has framed the loving gaze of our primary caregiver as the event that “switches us on to life”—implying that once this has happened, everything else is much easier, and life becomes a fundamentally positive experience (J. Waterston, personal communication, 2019). In psychotherapy, eye contact is a variable that can be adjusted to the therapeutic intention and to the aims of a therapeutic process as well as to the momentary needs of the client.

When working with early material, many psychotherapists find that warm and benevolent eye contact is a helpful ingredient for successful work.

A client presents for psychotherapy with anxiety and stress. They give an impression of struggling with life and finding everything hard work, without having much idea why this is so. They will be very polite, rather shy, and come across as a bit split off from their feelings. It will be hard for the therapist to get a clear history from this client, who will say things like, “Nothing bad has ever happened to me,” or “Everything was fine, and I shouldn’t be having problems really.”

This absence of a narrative to account for their difficulties will be noticeable. The client will be motivated to work hard in psychotherapy, but typically will be rather lost as to how to do this. They may need quite a lot of direction from the therapist. If the therapist does not give such direction, the therapeutic process will soon feel as if it has run aground and got stuck. The therapist may in that case begin to feel that the client does not really want to get better, and the therapist may give up on them.

If the therapist does give direction, the client may follow it with great relief; or they may argue that it is impossible for them to do so. The therapist will probably experience the client as avoidant, defended, lacking spontaneous aliveness, and generally as a person who suppresses their inner life. Typically this client will be anxious, although the anxiety may not be very noticeable, rather as if the client were at pains to hide their anxiety from others.

It may emerge in the course of several sessions just how all- pervasive the anxious feelings are. It will become apparent that the client has poor affect-regulation skills and is split off from their body, and through this from their deeper vitality. The client will have a tendency to ruminate and worry, especially about their health. They may not have many interpersonal resources and may suffer from social anxiety, shyness, or awkwardness in the company of others, including the therapist.

To the discerning therapist it will soon dawn that the client suffers from crippling shame, but it may be rather nebulous what this shame is about, other than not functioning like other people. Typically, such a client will strongly resist therapeutic change. They may give an impression of having no hope of improvement, or of being too afraid of change, or of not wanting to get better.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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