The Impact of Early Emotional Neglect

many of us are wandering the world bearing a lot of emotional damage we may be depressed anxious or very difficult around sex in relationships we might ask ourselves where the difficulties came from it's a continually weird provocative and yet in our view extremely accurate answer that the damage comes almost always from childhood especially early childhood how we were cared for as infants and young children has a disproportionate effect on how we will relate to others in adulthood what we need above all else is a responsive parent an adult who looks after our needs with sensitivity and kindness this is quite literally life defining and life saving it sounds like nothing much and nothing too hard but without this kind of responsive love we are wounded for life many of us have been researchers have become ever better at showing the effects of neglect on children one of the world's leading experts is dr. Edie chronic director of the Child Development unit at Harvard University together with his team he's responsible for one of the great experiments in the history of psychology known as the still face experiment babies this young are extremely responsive to the emotions and the reactivity and the social interaction that they get from the world around them this is something that we started studying 34 years ago when people didn't think that infants could engage in social interaction and this still phase experiment what the mother did was she sits down and she's playing with her baby who's about a year of age and she gives a greeting to the baby the baby gives a greeting back to her this baby starts pointing at different places in the world and the mothers trying to engage her and play with her they're working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions what they want do in the world and that's really what the baby is used to and then we ask the mother to not respond to the baby the baby very quickly picks up on this and then she uses all of her abilities to try and get the mother better she smiles at the mother she points because she's used to the mother looking where she points the baby puts both hands up in front of her and says what's happening here oh she makes that screeching sound like come on why aren't we doing this even in this two minutes when they don't get the normal reaction they react with negative emotions they turn away they feel the stress of it they actually may lose control of their posture for us of the stress that they're experienced [Music] watching the baby get distressed can be highly triggering if a child can get so upset over a few seconds of cold and unfeeling behavior we have a sense of what can happen over years or more of neglect no wonder some of us don't feel so well inside we had an equivalent of a still faced parent for our first decade and more but knowing how vulnerable we are shouldn't merely sadness we can take stock of how we've been failed and understand the link between the past and our present difficulties psychological research like the still faced experiment is at the forefront of helping us to understand ourselves emotionally shedding scientific light on the origins of our sadness and complexity along the way the experiment proves something else beyond doubt love isn't a luxury it's a gateway to our very survival and sanity most books that want to change us seek to make us richer or thinner this book wants to help us be nicer less irritable more attentive warmer people click the link to learn more