When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (33 page)

Experiences of proximate separation become part of the person’s psychological programming: people “trained” in this way in childhood are likely to choose adult relationships that re-enact repeated proximate separation dynamics. They may, for example, choose partners who do not understand, accept or appreciate them for who they are. Thus the physiological stresses induced by proximal separation will also continue to be repeated in adult life—and, again, often without conscious awareness.

  G
IVEN THE INFORMATION PRESENTED
in previous chapters, it may seem as though parents are to blame for the later development of illness in their offspring. Such a conclusion is quite contrary to my intentions and entirely out of keeping with the scientific evidence. Parenting styles do not reflect greater or lesser degrees of love in the heart of the mother and father; other, more mundane factors are at play. Parental love is infinite and for a very practical reason: the selfless nurturing of the young is embedded in the attachment apparatus of the mammalian brain.

If a parent’s loving
feelings
are constricted, it only because that parent has himself or herself suffered deep hurt. In my work with drug addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, I treat many substance-dependent men and women. Hardened as they are—with their criminal records, their continued drug-seeking, their HIV infections and their harassed and socially marginal lives—the deepest pain they all have is about the children whom they have abandoned or who have been taken from them. Without exception, they themselves were abused or abandoned in childhood.

Where parenting fails to communicate unconditional acceptance to the child, it is because of the fact that the child receives the parent’s love
not as the parent wishes but as it is refracted through the parent’s personality
. If the parent is stressed, harbours unresolved anxiety or is agitated by
unmet emotional needs, the child is likely to find herself in situations of
proximate abandonment
regardless of the parent’s intentions.

For better or worse, many of our parenting attitudes and responses have to do with our own experiences as children. That modes of parenting reflect the parent’s early childhood conditioning is evident both from animal observations and from sophisticated psychological studies of humans.

Rhesus monkeys are a species of primates favoured by psychological investigators because of their relatively small size and ease of care. In a troop of these monkeys, about 20 per cent are “high reactors” who are more likely than others to exhibit depressive behaviours on separation from mother, along with greater and longer activation of the HPA axis, exaggerated sympathetic nervous system arousal and deeper suppression of immune activity. In human terms, we might call the high reactors temperamentally hypersensitive. Not unlike their human counterparts, they tend to end up at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Their offspring resemble them in behaviour, reactivity and social status.

Research has revealed that the “constitutional high-reactor destiny can be interrupted by changing the environment.” The positive changes are passed on to future generations: “When reared with especially nurturing mothers, such animals show no signs of the usual behavioural disorder. Instead, they showed signs of precocious behavioural development and rose to the top of the hierarchy as adults.
Females adopted the maternal style typical of their especially nurturing mothers
.”
¹

These observations are not about learned behaviours, strictly speaking. For the most part, parent-child similarities in nurturing approach do not reflect cognitive learning, either in animals or in human beings. The intergenerational transmission of parenting style is largely a matter of physiological development, of how the limbic circuits of the brain become programmed in childhood and how the connections within the PNI super-system are established. As discussed in the
previous chapter
, the emotional brain of the child develops under the influence of the emotional brain of the parent. The child does not learn the parenting styles of his mother and father by imitation—or only in part. The biggest influence on the future parenting style of the child is the development of his emotional and attachment circuits in the context of his
relationship with his parents. The same is true of the development of the child’s stress-response apparatus.

One dramatic animal experiment will suffice to illustrate this principle. Tranquilizers like Valium and Ativan belong to a class of drugs called
benzodiazepines
. Like all pharmacological agents that affect mental functions, they work because certain brain areas have receptors for similar natural tranquilizing substances manufactured in the brain itself. The
amygdala
, an almond-shaped structure in the temporal lobe of the brain, is one of the main regulators of the fear and anxiety response. It is supplied with natural benzodiazepine receptors that, when activated, cool down our fearful reactions. Compared with adult rats who received less nurturing, in adult rats who had been licked and groomed more by their mothers
the amygdala was found to contain many more benzodiazepine receptors
. Maternal care in infancy influenced the physiology of anxiety regulation in the brain of the adult. These differences were not explained by genetic factors.
²

Although the psychological development of humans is much more complex than that of animals, intergenerational transmission of parenting behaviour and of stress is also the general rule. It is similar to the development of the child’s stress response. As a group of Canadian researchers have written, “Maternal care during infancy serves to ‘program’ behavioural responses to stress in the offspring
by altering the development of the neural systems that mediate fearfulness.”
³
In short, anxious mothers are likely to rear anxious offspring, down through the generations.

Researchers developed scores assessing the quality of parent-child bonding. Scores of parental bonding were measured across three generations: between adult mothers and their mothers, and between these same adult mothers and their own daughters. The measures of bonding between mothers and daughters were consistent across the generations.
⁴

In the adult children of Holocaust survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), disturbances of the HPA axis and cortisol production were found. The more severe was the parents’ PTSD, the greater was the impairment in their children’s cortisol mechanisms.
⁵

Mary Ainsworth, an early associate of John Bowlby’s and later professor of developmental psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, devised a method of assessing the pattern and quality of parent-child attachments. During the child’s first year of life, researchers
observed mother-infant interactions in the home, recording their perceptions. At one year, each infant-mother pair was brought into the laboratory for a brief experiment, called the Strange Situation. “At various times in the twenty-minute procedure, the infant stayed with the mother, with the mother and a stranger, with only the stranger, and alone for up to three minutes. The idea was (and still is) that separating a one-year-old from her attachment figure within a strange environment should activate the infant’s attachment system. One should then be able to study the infant’s responses at separation and reunion. The most useful assessments came at the reunion episode of this paradigm.”
⁶

The baby’s response to the returning mother, it turned out, was programmed by how the mother had interacted with her during the first year of life. Those infants who had received attuned attention from their mothers at home showed signs of missing their mothers on separation. They greeted their returning mothers by initiating physical contact. They were soothed easily and returned quickly to spontaneous play. This pattern was called
secure
. There were also a number of insecure patterns, variously named
avoidant, ambivalent
or
disorganized
. Avoidant infants did not express distress on separating from the mother and avoided or ignored the mother on reunion. Such behaviour did not denote genuine self-reliance but the pseudo-autonomy that we noted, for example, in rheumatoid patients: the belief that they must depend only on themselves, since trying to obtain help from the parent was useless. Internally, however, these avoidant infants were physiologically stressed when the parent returned, as measured by heart rate changes. The infants falling into the insecure categories had been subjected to non-attuned parenting in the home. They had received implicit messages of maternal emotional absence, or mixed messages of contact alternating with distance.

Already at one year of age the infants were exhibiting relationship responses that would characterize their personalities and behaviours in the future. The Strange Situation experiment has been duplicated hundreds of times, in many countries. The observations at one year are accurate advance indicators of behaviour at adolescence, including such features as emotional maturity, peer relationships and academic performance. On all these measures, children who had been securely attached infants scored consistently better than insecurely attached ones.

However, as Daniel Siegel explains in his book
The Developing Mind
, the most crucial finding concerning the intergenerational transmission of parenting was that
the infant’s performance in the Strange Situation could be accurately predicted even before the child was born
.

Professor Mary Main at the University of California, Berkeley, formerly a student of Dr. Ainsworth’s, developed an accurate means of assessing an adult’s childhood attachment relationship patterns with his parents. Her technique considers primarily not
what
a person said in response to questions but
how
he said it. The patterns of people’s speech and the key words they “happen” to employ are more meaningful descriptors of their childhoods than what they consciously believe they are communicating. The intended meaning of words reflect only the speaker’s conscious beliefs, from which painful memories are often excluded. The real story is told by the
patterns
of the narrative—fluent or halting, detailed or characterized by a paucity of words, consistent or self-contradicting, along with Freudian slips, revealing asides and apparent non-sequiturs.

The test developed by Mary Main is called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI). Just as the responses of infants in the Strange Situations, the narratives of adults could also be classified along lines that reflected the degrees of security they had experienced in their early interactions with their parents.

It turns out that
“the AAI is the most robust predictor of how infants become attached to their parents.”
In other words, what an adult unconsciously reveals about his own childhood during the course of the attachment interview will predict his own attachment patterns with his children. Thus, AAIs conducted with the parent
before the birth of an infant
was able to forecast accurately how the infant would behave in the Strange Situation at one year of life. Furthermore, when those children are followed two decades later, their performance in the Strange Situation is found to have accurately predicted their own patterns of narrative in the Adult Attachment Interview.

Thus, the adult’s AAI narrative of his own childhood will often predict how he will nurture his future child, and therefore how his child, at one year, will respond in the Strange Situation. And, the child’s behaviour in the Strange Situation will foretell the type of narrative she, in turn, will give about her childhood twenty years later!

Parenting, in short, is a dance of the generations. Whatever affected one generation but has not been fully resolved will be passed on to the next. Lance Morrow, a journalist and writer, succinctly expressed the multigenerational nature of stress in his book
Heart
, a wrenching and beautiful account of his encounters with mortality, thrust upon him by near-fatal heart disease: “The generations are boxes within boxes: Inside my mother’s violence you find another box, which contains my grandfather’s violence, and inside that box (I suspect but do not know), you would find another box with some such black, secret energy—stories within stories, receding in time.”

Blame becomes a meaningless concept if one understands how family history stretches back through the generations. “Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as villain,” wrote John Bowlby, the British psychiatrist whose work threw scientific light on the decisive importance of attachment in infancy and childhood. Whom do we accuse?

If we see that stress is transmitted transgenerationally, we can better understand why so many of the histories we have encountered in this book speak of families with generations of disease or of several members of the same generation affected by widely disparate and apparently unrelated illnesses. Some random examples:

• N
  ATALIE:
  multiple sclerosis. Her oldest brother was an alcoholic who died of cancer of the throat. Her younger sister is schizophrenic. Her uncles and aunts were alcoholics. Her maternal grandfather was alcoholic. Her husband, Bill, died of bowel cancer. Her son has attention deficit (hyperactivity) disorder and has struggled with drug addiction.
  

• V
  éRONIQUE:
  multiple sclerosis. She believes she was conceived during an incestuous rape. In her adoptive family, the maternal grandfather was an alcoholic and her maternal grandmother developed Alzheimer’s disease in her sixties. Among other medical problems, her father has early-onset high blood pressure.
  

• S
  UE
  R
  ODRIGUEZ:
  ALS. Her father died of alcoholic liver disease; one of her aunts died of a brain aneurysm, another in a house fire.
  

• A
  NNA:
  breast cancer. Both her mother and maternal grandmother died of breast cancer—but neither through genetic transmission.
  Anna inherited a breast-cancer gene on her father’s side. She has two sisters: one is living with an alcoholic, the other is mentally ill.
  

• G
  ABRIELLE:
  scleroderma, with features of rheumatoid arthritis. Her parents were alcoholics. Her brother has had a colectomy for cancer of the bowel, and her sister was recently diagnosed with breast cancer.
  

• J
  ACQUELINE DU
  P
  Ré:
  multiple sclerosis. Her grandmother was traumatized by the death of other children about the time her mother was born. Jacqueline’s mother predeceased her with cancer, and her father developed Parkinson’s disease.
  

• R
  ONALD
  R
  EAGAN:
  Colon cancer, Alzheimer’s disease. His father and brother were alcoholics; his second wife developed breast cancer. His daughter died of metastatic malignant melanoma.