Attachment is an emotional bond established between the child and the caregiver (parents or primary caregiver). According to attachment theory, people other than the mother can also be the primary attachment figure. In other words, for attachment to occur, the person who provides primary care to the child does not have to be the mother. The essence of attachment is to meet the baby's needs with love and affection as quickly and consistently as possible and to calm the child's fear-themed emotions.
Attachment Theory states that the quality of the bond that mothers or primary caregivers establish with their children in the first 1-2 years is lifelong. It is a theory that explains that it affects children psychologically, mentally and socio-emotionally throughout life. According to this theory, attachment forms the basis of the relationships that children establish with themselves and their environment throughout their lives.
The subject of this article is to explain the relationship between attachment and the brain and its regulation concepts, rather than explaining attachment and its types.
Let's start the explanation with "regulation"... Babies cannot cope with physical stimuli such as bedwetting and hunger, or environmental stimuli such as loud noises and bright lights, on their own. The human child is the most helpless and in need of care of all species. It is not enough to just feed a baby who is crying because he is hungry; Eye contact, tone of voice and touch are essential to calm his nervous system. All of the parent's behavior in this sense means regulating the baby. This doesn't just mean calming the baby, it means pulling a very excited baby to a more balanced point and pulling a baby who has become unresponsive to the point of numbness higher up. For both, the way to do this is through eye contact, tone of voice, and touch. Regulation is not something the baby can do on his own; it needs to be done on his behalf in the first years of his life. The way the parent or caregiver regulates the baby is called co-regulation.
As the baby grows, it internalizes the state of being regulated by the other person and becomes able to regulate itself, which is called self-regulation. In order for a person to be able to do this in later years, he must have experienced and internalized this in the first months of his life. This whole process progresses in life. It is very decisive when socializing and establishing relationships during the teenage years. While the nervous system of our partner, friend or the person we are currently in a relationship with is going up, we keep our own nervous system under control, stay in balance and bring down theirs, or they do the same to us, is interactive regulation.
To better understand interactive regulation, it is as follows: An example can be given; Think of a couple, they are having a great conversation, everything is in its natural flow. This moment of life can be called a calm flowing river. Let the relationship be a boat flowing on this river. A word or an action said when one of the couples had different intentions was misunderstood. His tone of voice rose, his eyes widened or his jaw locked; This is the fluctuation of the river. Or the opposite happened, a word said or an action done was misunderstood again and this time the other person froze; His eyes started to look blank and his face became expressionless. We can think of this as a situation where the river is frozen and does not flow at all. Understanding the reason for the wave or stagnation will not help the river return to its calm flow at that moment; what needs to be done is to save the boat, that is, the relationship, at that moment. In order to do this, it is necessary to use interactional regulation. We can say that talking about what happened after the river returns to its calm flow is one of the things that can be done to completely eliminate the problem. In this sense, the concept of regulation helps us understand how attachment and relationships with the mother affect relationships in adulthood.
In our daily lives, our nervous system; It regulates external sounds, visual stimuli, touches, body movements, our inner voices, our thoughts, our perception, our misperceptions that we call triggering, that is, many stimuli, before we even notice them, that is, it keeps it at an optimum level. It continues to keep it in balance until a danger perception occurs.
At this point, before moving on to the relationship between attachment and brain chemistry, we need to look at the functioning of the brain. To understand the brain more easily, we can divide it into two; primitive system and sophisticated system. As soon as we feel a danger in daily life, the sophisticated system is disabled and the primitive brain comes into play; In other words, it is based on running away, fighting or freezing rather than reason and logic. request. This is mostly a legacy we inherited from our ancestors; in natural life, taking time to think when faced with danger meant death, so the brain survived with reactions such as fight, flight or freezing to survive. That's why we should approach someone who is very angry, very sad, that is, someone who has gone beyond the normal regulation level, with non-verbal expressions, such as touching, using a soft tone of voice, establishing eye contact, instead of consoling with logical words, because the language of the primitive brain is non-verbal. Nowadays, maybe we do not encounter tigers, wolves or any creature that can harm us outside like primitive people, maybe instead there are some parental attitudes that make the child feel that he is in an unsafe and spooky environment. Not protected by parents; Neglected and violated children return to this primitive brain level and react from there. Unfortunately, we see that staying at this stage for too long has long-term harms in adult life; The higher function, that is, the sophisticated brain, is damaged, and if it happens for a long time, adolescents who behave like children appear as adults who cannot grow up.
So how does this happen? To understand this better, we need to focus on the primitive and sophisticated brain and how early life experiences change the chemistry of the brain. While the sophisticated part includes parts of the brain such as reasoning, decision making, planning, speech and most importantly impulse control; The primitive brain is seen as the part with primitive functions such as breathing, hearing, feeding, sleeping and survival. The baby is born with a naturally developed primitive brain; for example, he does not need to learn to feed; As soon as he takes the breast into his mouth, his sucking reflex works. The parent's duty in giving emotional care to the child is related to the development of the sophisticated brain.
When the baby comes into the world, it is born with one hundred billion neurons, that is, nerve cells. These neurons interact with each other according to our experiences and connection paths are formed. If the parent trusts the child and meets his baby's needs every time he gives a signal, the baby's mind creates thought patterns such as this world is reliable and relationships are reliable; If he has the opposite experience, adulthood or He enters the relationships in his life with the opposite networks formed. How do these neurons develop, what should the parent do for this?
It takes time and consistency for these thought patterns to form. In other words, the parent must provide the child with repeated harmonious nonverbal relationship experiences so that these circuits are permanently united and adjusted; In other words, she should make eye contact, hold him in her arms, be there to calm him down when he cries... When someone says something to the mother like "Don't hold her, don't pamper her, let her wait", the mother should run away from that environment. Those who care for the child should always keep in mind that the food of the brain is relationships, so that the child's brain does not go hungry.
If the parent is someone who scares, leaves alone, does not establish relationships, does not feel emotions, and does not make you feel safe, the primitive part of the brain can never learn how to calm itself. The amygdala, located in the limbic system of the brain, protects the primitive part of the brain and does this by reading the facial expressions and movements of those around it. When the baby is hungry, scared, not calmed, that is, when it exceeds the normal regulation level, the primitive brain needs to be able to calm down so that the sophisticated brain can develop better. When the child cannot learn this, he may exhibit attitudes such as tantrums, violence or extreme introversion.
When the baby says "I'm scared, I'm cold, I'm hungry", that is, by opening his arms to his parent, by whining, that is, by expressing non-verbal messages, stimulating chemicals are activated in the brain. These are neurotransmitters such as epinephrine and dopamine. In these situations, when the parent holds the baby, feeds it, gives affection and makes the baby feel safe, relaxing chemicals such as serotonin and GABA are activated instead, and thus the baby regains balance.
In children who have experienced trauma, stimulating chemicals such as dopamine and norepinephrine are increased. . Trauma changes the brain, and the sensitive brain changes its chemistry, causing behavior problems. The greater the trauma of the early years, the more inextricable and chronic the behavior becomes in later times. Because the balance of hormones secreted in the body is disrupted. The body secretes the cortisone hormone during stress. While a small dose of this hormone helps growth; When this hormone remains too long, it turns into toxic stress. Chronic stress sophisticated brain It causes the frontal lobe and hippocampus in the brain to shrink. Let's remember the functions of the frontal lobe at this point; decision making, impulse control, that is, the part we call self-regulation, which we mentioned at the beginning of the article. If cortisone is left in too much, the brain changes; As they get older, they become more prone to problems such as antisocial behavior, heart problems, alcohol and drug addiction.
We have painted a pessimistic picture so far, but what about adopted children or children who are separated from their families for some reasons? The issue that will console us here is the brain's healing capacity. The brain begins to learn that the world and the people around it are trustworthy. Although it takes time for this to settle in the mind and for the child to begin to find the world and the people around him trustworthy, there is only one way for the brain and the child to heal; That's the relationship. As Nilüfer Devecigil states in her book "The Way of Light": "We get hurt in relationships, we heal in relationships..."
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