Sue gerhardt why love matters 2004

The subject is examined along three lines: firstly, by establishing the neurological, hormonal, and immunological impact of early experiences. Secondly, the reader is offered a long-term perspective of the consequences of early relationship disturbances, with portraits of common behavioural and mood disorders that can be linked to them.

Finally, Gerhardt looks to ways forward, out the mires of attachment rupture and disturbance. The new edition of Why Love Matters starts at the very beginning of life, seeking to instate pregnancy as the first formative emotional-developmental stage. Gerhardt summarises the primary research data and builds it into a compelling argument. Antenatal maternal depression is similarly damaging, as it can leave the unborn child with a compromised amygdala, poor serotonin production and use, and thus susceptibility to the same condition , p.

The author ventures into politically charged territory in describing the increasingly normalised practice of working during pregnancy, including in the last trimester, as problematic , p.

To be fair, she makes clear that her target is the unfolding culture-wide shift away from interpersonal care activities, including the antenatal phase of child rearing. In this she offers a sociological perspective arguing that the pressures and expectations for the contemporary middle-class are such that women jumping on the long-hours work bandwagon has become an unquestionably virtuous thing.

Thus an evolutionary understanding of cognitive development is overlaid with a social concern. The amygdala, she points out, is often searching for cues from other people, especially for signs of danger, and this primitive EQ possesses a survival practicality where our feelings are signals for action within that social realm. That is to say, for humans the emotional-social interchange is key to survival. We perform best, and our resilience is greatest, when we are socially calibrated, and this in turn relies on our abstract intelligence and the foundational emotional signaling system both developing sufficiently so as to enter into continual conversation and mutual modification , p.

Rather than resort to genetics as the primary determinant of human behaviour, Gerhardt maintains that the precursor of associated brain formation takes place after birth, with brain size doubling in its the first year.

It follows, then, that it is our first relationship experiences that are of the utmost importance in setting up potentially life-long bio-behavioural styles , pp. In contrast to insecure attachment styles that effectively bind a person to a restricted range of habits and leave relationships brittle and people vulnerable to stress and hardship, the end goal is a neurologically well connected, secure adult who trusts the safer relationship rhythm of rupture followed by rapid repair and positive feelings , p.

But work for the parents it is! Gerhardt argues that the principle trigger for survival stress in babies and toddlers is separation from the mother in particular, and, if prolonged, will result in a distressed and overwhelmed baby.

When protracted, this leads to an engaged parasympathetic nervous system that leaves the individual in a cortisol production loop, perennially geared for emergency and emotional insecurity. This is especially the case in the 15 per cent of highly sensitive babies whom are even more reliant on calm, predictable reassurance to develop secure attachment and resilient nervous systems , pp.

Again, Gerhardt sees our Western social history as causal, particularly since the industrial era that has praised the wallpapering over of emotional vulnerability. Indeed, many parenting and interpersonal norms in the West can be identified that discourage dependence on other people , p.

Gerhardt also points to poor socio-economic conditions and low self-esteem in parents as causes of the kind of harsh parenting that can lead to avoidant attachment , p. Far reaching biological consequences include chronic inflammation caused by the continual stress, frequently experienced beneath a calm appearance — in other words, the active suppression of the feeling-action sequence — and perhaps subsequent links to cancer and heart disease , p.

Similarly, social rejection has been found to directly impact inflammation p. The message that mothers need to devote their energy to tuning into and responding sensitively to their children — Gerhardt says at least for the first two years of life — has been criticised as politically retrograde for women seeking greater independence and mobility in non-domestic realms.

This will be the case, she contends, so long as the dominant public sphere values are so at odds with caregiving , p.

Parents face the artificial choice of devoting themselves to their working life or to their babies, when the evidence is that they want both , p. Here she echoes arguments from social commentators like Anne Manne and Julie Stephens who maintain that the biological imperative of early physical and emotional attachment needs to be wrested from the grip of modern capitalism, which is turning even basic experiences into depersonalised, outsourced commodities.

Instead, they gesture towards a more integrated practice of nurturing and productive social participation Manne ; Stephens Likewise, Gerhardt makes a strong case that the push for premature independence for infants and toddlers comes at an enormous personal and social cost. It was Margaret Ainsworth, a Canadian psychologist, who first demonstrated a robust connection between early childhood experience and personality. For a large part of the s Ainsworth sat behind a two-way mirror in Baltimore and watched one-year-olds playing with their mothers.

She noted what happened when the mother left the room for a few minutes and how the child responded when she returned. She then took the study a stage further and studied what happened when, instead of the mother, a stranger entered the room and tried to engage with the child. Ainsworth's "Strange Situation" study, together with John Bowlby's attachment theory, showed that how a child developed was not the result of a general mish-mash of experiences, but the direct result of the way the child's main carer responded to and engaged with him or her.

A neglectful, stressed or inconsistent parent gave the kind of care which tended to lead to anxious, insecure or avoidant children. Further studies showed that patterns of attachment behaviour in one-year-olds could accurately predict how those children would behave aged five and eight.

Although attachment theory has been massively influential in many ways, underpinning psychology and psychotherapy ever since, it has never achieved general credibility. The kind of "proof" provided by psychologists has never quite washed with a sceptical public. Sitting in a room watching babies - what kind of proof is that?

How can anyone know what a baby is thinking and feeling? Isn't it all just woolly liberal conjecture? Added to this, an entire generation of feminists hated attachment theory from the word go, accusing Bowlby of being against working women and wanting to shackle women to the home. The whole issue of how babies develop suddenly became highly politicised - and still is. Confusion reigns about the connection between early experience and personality.

Parents are blamed when things go wrong, the rest of the time their role is downplayed. In Why Love Matters, Gerhardt, a psychotherapist, has bravely gone where most in recent years have feared to tread. She takes the hard language of neuroscience and uses it to prove the soft stuff of attachment theory. Picking up your crying baby or ignoring it may be a matter of parental choice, but the effects will be etched on your baby's brain for years to come.

Putting your one-year-old in a nursery or leaving them with a childminder may turn out to be a more momentous decision than you thought. Drawing on the most recent findings from the field of neurochemistry, Gerhardt makes an impressive case that emotional experiences in infancy and early childhood have a measurable effect on how we develop as human beings.

Wielding the language and findings of science like a haycutter in a corn field, she scythes through the confusion that normally surrounds this subject to explain how daily interactions between a baby and its main carer have a direct impact on the way the brain develops. Gerhardt is not interested in cognitive skills - how quickly a child learns to read, write, count to She's interested in the connection between the kind of loving we receive in infancy and the kind of people we turn into.

Who we are is neither encoded at birth, she argues, nor gradually assembled over the years, but is inscribed into our brains during the first two years of life in direct response to how we are loved and cared for. Our earliest experiences are not simply laid down as memories or influences, they are translated into precise physiological patterns of response in the brain that then set the neurological rules for how we deal with our feelings and those of other people for the rest of our lives.

It's not nature or nurture, but both. How we are treated as babies and toddlers determines the way in which what we're born with turns into what we are. According to Gerhardt, "There is nothing automatic about it. The kind of brain that each baby develops is the brain that comes out of his or her particular experiences with people.

The key player in this unfolding drama turns out to be a hormone called cortisol. When a baby is upset, the hypothalamus, situated in the subcortex at the centre of the brain, produces cortisol.