Zeitgeist: Moving Forward Page #4

because there's nothing there to recall with.

But the emotional memory of separation and rejection

is deeply embedded in their brains.

Hence, they are much more likely

to experience a sense of rejection

and a great emotional upset

when they perceive themselves as being rejected

by other people.

That's not unique to people who are

adopted but it is particularly strong in them

because of this function of implicit memory.

People who are addicted, given all the

research literature and in my experience

the hard-core addicts virtually were all

significantly abused as children

or suffered severe emotional loss.

Their emotional or implicit memories

are those of a world that's not safe

and not helpful; caregivers who were not to be trusted

and relationships that are not

safe enough to open up to vulnerability

and hence their responses tend

to be to keep themselves separate from

really intimate relationships;

not to trust caregivers

doctors and other people who are trying to help them

and generally see the world as an unsafe place...

and that is strictly a function of implicit memory

which sometimes has to do with incidents they don't even recall.

[Touch]

Infants who are born premature or often in incubators

and various types of gadgetry and

machinery for weeks and perhaps months,

it's now known that if these

children are touched and stroked on the back

for just 10 minutes a day that promotes their brain development.

So, human touch is essential for development

and, in fact, infants who are never picked up will actually die.

That is how much of a fundamental

need being held is to human beings.

In our society, there is an unfortunate tendency

to tell parents not to pick up their kids, not to hold them

not to pick up babies who are crying for fear of spoiling them

or to encourage them to sleep through the night

you don't pick them up...

which is just the opposite of what the child needs

and these children might go back to sleep because they give up

and their brains just shut down as a

way of defending against the vulnerability

of being abandoned really by their parents

but their implicit memories will be

that of the world that doesn't give a damn.

[Childhood]

A lot of these differences are structured very early in life.

In a way, the parental experience of adversity

how tough life is or how easy it is

is passed on to children

whether through maternal depression

or parents being bad tempered with

their kids because they have had a hard day

or just being too tired at the end of the day...

and these have very powerful effects programming

children's development, which we know a lot about now

But that early sensitivity isn't just an evolutionary mistake.

It exists again in many different species.

Even in seedlings there's an early adaptive process

to the kind of environment they are growing up in

but for humans, the adaptation is to the quality of social relations.

And so, early life:

how nurturing, how much conflict, how much attention you get

is a taster of the kind of world you may be growing up in.

Are you growing up in a world where

you have to fight for what you can get;

watch your back; fend for yourself; learn not to trust others?...

or are you growing up in a society where you depend on

reciprocity, mutuality, cooperation, where empathy is important

where your security depends on good relations with other people?...

and that needs a very different

emotional and cognitive development

and that's what the early sensitivity is about

and parenting is almost, quite unconsciously

a system for passing on that experience to children...

of the kind of world they are in.

The great British child psychiatrist, DW Winnicott, said

that fundamentally, two things can go wrong in childhood.

One is when things happen that shouldn't happen

and then things that should happen but don't.

In the first category, is the dramatic, abusive

and abandonment experiences of my

downtown Eastside patients and of many addicts.

That's what shouldn't happen but did.

But then there is the non-stressed

attuned, non-distracted attention

of the parent that every child needs

that very often children don't get.

They're not abused. They are not neglected

and they're not traumatized

but what should happen

the presence of the emotionally available nurturing parent

just is not available to them because of the

stresses in our society and the parenting environment.

The psychologist Allan Surer calls that "Proximal Abandonment"

when the parent is physically present

but emotionally absent.

I have spent...

roughly the last 40 years of my life

working with the most violent of people our society produces:

murderers, rapists and so on.

In an attempt to understand what causes this violence.

I discovered that the most violent of the criminals in our prisons

had themselves been victims

of a degree of child abuse that was beyond the scale of

what I ever thought of applying the term child abuse to.

I had no idea of the depth

of the depravity with which children in our society

are all too often treated.

The most violent people I saw were themselves the survivors

of their own attempted murder often at the hands of their parents

or other people in their social environment

or were the survivors of family members who had been killed

their closest family members, by other people.

The Buddha argued that everything depends on everything else.

He says 'the one contains the many and the many contains the one'.

That you can't understand anything in isolation from its environment.

The leaf contains the sun, the sky and the earth, obviously.

This has now been shown to be true, of course

all around and specifically when it comes to human development.

The modern scientific term for it

is the "bio psycho social" nature of human development

which says that the biology of human beings

depends very much on their interaction with

the social and psychological environment.

Specifically, the psychiatrist and researcher

Daniel Siegel at the University of California, Los Angeles, UCLA

has coined a phrase "Interpersonal Neurobiology"

which means to say that the way

that our nervous system functions

depends very much on our personal relationships.

In the first place with the parenting caregivers and in the

second place with other important attachment figures in our lives

and in the third-place, with our entire culture.

So that you can't separate the

neurological functioning of a human being

from the environment in which he or she grew up in

and continues to exist in

and this is true throughout the lifecycle.

It's particularly true when you are

dependent and helpless when your brain is developing

but it's true even in adults and even at the end of life.

[Culture]

Human beings have lived in almost every kind of society.

From the most egalitarian... hunting and gathering societies

seem to have been very egalitarian

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