Allan Schore Quotes

If…an infant, especially one born with a genetically-encoded altered neurophysiologic reactivity, does not have adequate experiences of being part of an open dynamic system with an emotionally responsive adult human, its corticolimbic organization will be poorly capable of coping with the stressful chaotic dynamics that are inherent in all human relationships. Such a system tends to become static and closed, and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated interactive assaults that potentially trigger disorganizing and emotionally painful psychobiological states. Due to its avoidance of novel situations and diminished capacity to cope with challenging situations, it does not expose itself to new socioemotional learning experiences that are required for the continuing experience-dependent growth of the right brain. This structural limitation, in turn, negatively impacts the future trajectory of self-organization.

2.3 On the same wavelength: how our emotional brain is shaped by human relationships. Excerpts from the interview with Daniela F. Sieff (2012) In the beginning of this conversation Schore and Sieff discussed the now accepted proposition that our earliest relationships structure our emotional brain in ways that have long-lasting consequences for our emotional well-being. If we are nurtured by our caregivers, our right brain develops in such a way as to allow us to become comfortable with own emotions and to respond to our social environment healthily. We can deeply experience joy and its associated sensations as well as access coping mechanisms (regulatory strategies) that help us through the stressful moments of life. This implicit self-knowledge is at the root of the feeling of security. However, if we grow up in an environment that does not nurture our burgeoning emotional self, then the development of the emotional brain can be compromised. As a consequence, we might not to be able to learn how to regulate our emotions in a healthy fashion, and could too frequently be easily overwhelmed by them. Being emotionally overloaded for extensive periods of time can cause not only long-enduring states of stress, but also chronic dissociation from our true emotions and needs in order to prevent overwhelming emotions from reaching consciousness. If we have to revert to dissociation often enough, what initially began as a defense mechanism that has become engrained in our neurological circuits becomes part of our character.

We are trapped in a rigid way of being. We cannot cope with emotional stress, cannot grow emotionally, and cannot attain an emotional security. At the beginning of his converstion with Sieff, Schore emphasized that his scientific and clinical thinking has focused on three questions: How do some children develop emotional security? What prevents other children from developing emotional security, and what are the consequences of that? What is required of therapy if it is to help those who failed to develop emotional security as children, to develop it later in life? Schore does not just look at these questions psychologically; a fundamental principle of his work is that no theory of emotional development can be restricted to a description of psychological processes, but must also be consonant with what we now know about the biological structure of the brain. When we are born our emotions are relatively crude – we are content or we are stressed. As we develop, our emotions become increasingly differentiated, shaped and refined, yet also integrated. We learn to create blends of different emotions simultaneously. We begin life with a very small window of tolerance for intense emotions, therefore the tolerance of intense emotions has to be expanded. We need to acquire the ability to differentiate what is happening outside us from what is happening inside. As children we are not able to do so and we have to learn which emotions are internally present and what we receive externally from another person, such as the primary caregiver, and how to regulate the perceived emotions. Sieff asked the question about what features of the brain are most relevant to understand emotional regulation. Schore answered that

there are crucial differences between the right hemisphere of the brain and the left. The left brain is the thinking brain as it is highly verbal and analytical. It operates as a conscious emotion regulation system that can modulate low to medium arousal. It is the domain of cognitive strategies as it processes highly verbal emotions such as guilt and worrisome anxiety. In contrast, the right hemisphere is the emotional brain. It processes all of our intense emotions, regardless of whether they are negative, such as rage, fear, terror, disgust, shame and hopeless despair, or positive such as excitement, surprise, and joy. When our level of emotional arousal escalates the left hemisphere goes off-line and the right hemisphere dominates. Our right brain enables us to read the subjective state of others through its appraisal of subtle facial (visual and auditory) expressions and other forms of nonverbal communication. The right hemisphere is more holistic than the left, holding many different possibilities simultaneously. Dreams, music, poetry, art, metaphor and other creative processes originate in the right hemisphere. The first critical period of development of the right brain begins during the third trimester of pregnancy and this growth spurt continues into the second year of life. It is primarily the right brain which is shaped by our early relational environment and which is crucial for the development of emotional security. Around two months after birth the right anterior cingulate comes on-line, meaning that it allows for more complex processing of social-emotional information than the earlier maturing amygdala. It is responsible for developing attachment behavior. Starting from about tenth months after birth, the highest level of the emotional brain, the right orbitofrontal cortex, becomes active. It continues developing for the next twenty years and remains exceptionally plastic throughout our entire life span. During the second year of life the right orbitofrontal cortex establishes strong, bidirectional connections with the rest of the limbic system. Once these connections are established it then monitors, refines, and regulates amygdala-

driven responses. It is the healthy development of the right orbitofrontal cortex and its links to the amygdala that enables us to have a wide window of tolerance for intense emotions and to respond flexibly and adaptively to our interpersonal world. Next, Sieff asked how the relationship between an infant and its caregiver shape the development of the emotional right brain. Schore answered that genes code for when the various components of the emotional brain come on-line, but how each area develops depends on the infant’s epigenetically shaped emotional experiences with his primary caregiver. Those experiences, as John Bowlby first described, are circumscribed by the infant’s innate drive to become emotionally bonded to his or her primary caregiver. The infant’s experiences with his caregiver are internalized through changes in his rapidly developing brain. Typically, an attuned caregiver will minimize the infant’s discomfort, fear and pain, and, as importantly, creates opportunities for the child to feel joy and excitement. The caregiver will also mediate the transition between these emotional states. Mirroring by the attuned caretaker amplifies the infant’s emotional state. In physics, when two systems match it creates what is called “resonance,” whereby the amplitude of each system is increased, comparable to face-to-face play between an infant and an attuned caretaker who creates emotional resonance and amplifies joy. Together, infant and mother move from low arousal to high positive arousal which helps the infant to extend his window of tolerance for intense positive emotions, a key developmental task. At other times the emotional intensity becomes more than the infant can tolerate, and he will avert his gaze. When this happens, an attuned mother intuitively disengages from the infant and reduces her stimulation. Then she waits for her baby to signal his readiness to re-engage. The more the mother tunes her activity level to the infant during periods of engagement and the more she allows him to recover quietly in periods of disengagement, and the

more she responses to his signals for re-engagement, the more synchronized are their actions. At times, emotional mirroring between mother and infant can be synchronized within milliseconds. “On the same-wavelength” becomes more than a metaphor, the intersubjective internal state of both mother and infant converge, and the infant’s emotionally reality is both validated and held safely through his mother’s ability to be with his feelings. During this process a mother inevitably makes mistakes, and then the interaction becomes asynchronous. However, when asynchrony arises, a good-enough mother is quick to shift her state so that she can then help to re-regulate her infant, who is likely to be stressed and upset by their mismatch. Indeed, relational moments of rupture and repair allow the child to tolerate negative affect. Additionally, Sieff asked Schore to talk about internal models that are created as a result of interactions between mother and infant. Schore explained that in response to their caregivers, infants create unconscious working models of strategies of affect regulation in order to cope with relational stressors in the attachment relationship. These models are then generalized and applied not only to a mother but also to other people. For instance, if a caregiver is mostly attuned to the infant’s basic needs and is emotionally available, the infant creates an implicit expectation of being matched by, and is more likely able to match another human’s states. The child is likely to form a secure attachment. Similarly, moments of misattunement, if repaired in a sensitive and timely manner, lead the infant to implicitly believe that caring others will calm him when he is upset. This is the first step towards developing a sense of agency. The timely repair of misattunement also teaches an infant that instances of discourse and negative emotions are tolerable. Emotional resilience is thus key to creating an inner feeling of security and trust. On the other hand, if caregivers are chronically not attuned, an infant will create an internal model which dictates that other

people are not trustworthy, that when stressed he cannot really emotionally stay connected to them, and that he is unworthy of being loved. This way of seeing the world is typical of insecure attachments and these unconscious emotional biases will guide overt behavior, especially under relational stress. What is more, the infant of a misattuned mother will frequently be presented with an aggressive expression on his mother’s face, implying he is a threat, or with an expression of fear-terror, implying that he is the source of alarm. Images of his mother’s aggressive and/or fearful face, and the resultant chaotic alterations in her bodily state, are internalized, meaning they are imprinted in his developing right brain limbic circuits as an implicit memory, below levels of consciousness. Although out of awareness, they can plague him and his relationships for his entire life unless he finds a way to bring them into conscious awareness and work with them. Furthermore, when the caregiver is attuned in her early interactions, her more mature nervous system is regulating the infant’s neurochemistry and homeostasis. This, in turn, has a profound influence on the structural organization of the developing brain. Conversely emotional trauma will negatively impact the parts of the brain which are developing at the time of trauma. For example, if high levels of stress hormones are circulating in a pregnant mother, it up-regulates the fetus’ developing stress response – making the child, and future adult hypersensitive to stress. Relational trauma that occurs around the time of birth has a negative impact on both the developing micro-architecture of the amygdala itself, and the amygdala’s connection to the HPA axis, as well as to other parts of the limbic system. Thus high levels of early unrepaired interpersonal stress have a profoundly harmful effect on the ability to form social bonds, and on temperament. Suffering unrepaired and frequent emotional stress after about ten months interferes with the experience-dependent maturation of the highest level regulatory systems in the right orbifrontal cortex. This opens the door

to an impaired emotional regulation system, a limited facilitation for empathy, and problems in distinguishing present reality from irrelevant memories. In the long-term there is an increased risk of developing future psychopathologies and personality disorders. As opposed to secure attachments, organized forms of insecure attachments reflect inefficient stragetgies for coping with attachment emotional stress. In cases of avoidant attachment the mother may be averse to physical contact and block her child’s attempt to get close to her. She may be intensely ambivalent about being a mother. Her avoidance of the infant is more than behavioral – psychological harm can occur through the mother who is emotionally unavailable when her infant is distressed, even if she remains in physical contact with her child. In parallel, due to the lack of interactive regulation, the child learns how to disengage from the mother under stress, as well as from his own emotional responses to her rejection. To avoid this, the stressed infant will signal his need to disengage by looking away. On the other hand unpredictable and intrusive mothering often leads to ambivalent-anxious attachment where infants can only cope with a certain limited intensity of emotional arousal before they move beyond their window of tolerance into a state of stressful emotional dysregulation. These infants are overly dependent on the attachment figure (presumably desperately seeking interactive regulation) but also angry with the caregiver’s unpredictable regulation. In the most unfortunate situation, the infant/toddler is exposed to the most intense social stressors, such as physical and/or emotional abuse. This also includes neglect, which is proving to be the most serious threat to the development of the emotional brain. The most severe forms of attachment trauma, both abuse and neglect, create “disorganized-disoriented attachment.” It occurs when an infant has no strategy that will help him to cope with his caregiver, causing the infant to be profoundly confused, physically aroused, yet emotionally paralyzed. This context thus generates

dissociation, “the escape when there is no escape.”An infant typically seeks his parents when alarmed, so when a parent actually causes alarm the infant is in an unsolvable situation in which it can neither approach or avoid. Neurobiologically this represents a simultaneous and uncoupled hyperactivation of the sympathic and the parasympathic circuits. This is subjectively experienced as a sudden transition into emotional chaos. Sieff asked what might cause a mother to behave in such a harmful way with her baby. Schore answered that this is not a conscious voluntary but an unconscious involuntary response, and that typically women who cannot mother their child in an attuned way are suffering from the consequences of their own unresolved early emotional trauma. The experience of a female infant with her mother influences how she will mother her own infants. Thus if early childhood trauma remains unconscious and unresolved it will inevitably be passed down the generations. Additionally, Sieff asked what role the father plays in a child’s emotional development. Schore explained that children form a second attachment relationship to the father especially during the second year. The quality of the attachment to the father is independent of that to his mother. At eighteen months there are two separate attachment dynamics in operation. It also appears that the father is critically involved in the development of a toddler’s regulation of aggression. This is true of both sexes, but particularly of boys who are born with a greater aggressive endowment than girls. Afterwards, a long discussion followed where Schore highlighted the damaging effects of long bouts of unregulated shame for the toddler, the differences between shame and guilt, and the enduring consequences of early chronic shame. Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of

Schore emphasized that when the caregiver is unable to help the child to regulate either a specific emotion or intense emotions in general, or – worse – that she exacerbates the dysregulation, the child will start to go into a state of hypoaroused dissociation as soon as a threat of dysregulation arises. This temporaily reduces conscious emotional pain in the child living with chronic trauma, but those who characterologically use the emotion-deadening defense of dissociation to cope with stressful interpersonal events subsequently dissociate to defend against both daily stresses, and the stress caused when implicitly held memories of trauma are triggered. In the developing brain, repeated neurological states become traits, so dissociative defense mechanisms are embedded into the core structure of the evolving personality, and become a part of who a person is, rather than what a person does. Dissociation, which appears in the first month of life, seems to be a last resort survival strategy. It represents detachment from an unbearable situation. The infant withdraws into an inner world, avoids eye contact and stares into space. Dissociation triggered by a hypoaroused state results in a constricted state of consciousness, and a void of subjectivity. Being cut off from our emotions impacts our sense of who we are as a person. Our subjective sense of self derives from our unconscious experience of bodily-based emotions and is neurologically constructed in the right brain. If we cannot connect to our bodily emotions then our sense of self is built on fragile foundations. Many who suffered early relational trauma have a disturbed sense of their bodies and of what is happening within them physiologically as well as emotionally. The interview moved along to the topic of how we can possibly master these adverse and potentially damaging relational experiences. Schore replied by explaining that the human brain remains plastic and capable of learning throughout the entire life span, and that with the right therapeutic help and intervention we can move beyond dissociation as our primary defense mechanism, and begin to regulate our emotions more appropriately. When the relationship between the therapist and the client develops enough safety, the therapeutic alliance can act as a growth-facilitating environment that offers a corrective emotional experience via “rewiring” the right brain and associated neurocircuits.

right brain and associated neurocircuits. This is predicated on the formation of a trusting relationship between the patient and therapist, who must be sensitive enough to receive the patient’s underlying negative state, and implicitly empathically resonate with what is going on within the client’s right brain and within his body. All therapeutic techniques sit on top of the therapist’s ability to access the implicit realm via right-brain-to-right-brain communications. A strong therapeutic alliance depends on the therapist’s knowledge about the patient from the inside out, rather than from the top down. The patient’s emotional growth depends on the therapist’s ability to move, and to be moved by, those that come to him for help. The therapist has to help patients to learn how to regulate feeling associated with trauma so that the patient can integrate them into his emotional life, rather than having to dissociate when they arise. When a patient is catapulted into a hyperaroused state and subjectively experiences the therapist through the lens of the previous insecure internal working models, this is the expression of “negative transference.” For a patient who is in the midst of a negative transference the therapeutic alliance is severely ruptured, and the therapist is seen as an analogue of the early misattuned other and is experienced as source of dysregulation rather than interactive regulation. However, if the therapist can maintain an attuned connection to the client, then the door opens to working with what was laid down early in the patient’s life and reorganization becomes a possibility. A problem may arise if the therapist cannot contain the negative emotions created in negative transference and in projective identification. There is an old adage in therapy that no patient can achieve a greater level of healing than the therapist has achieved. With modern scientific knowledge we can be more specific: the patient’s unconscious right brain can develop only as far as the therapist’s right brain can take them. For a therapist to stay with a dissociating patient who is projecting his trauma onto

her takes a good deal of clinical experience. More importantly, the therapist needs to have worked deeply with her own early life experiences, and has to actively work with it throughout the life span. A successful therapeutic relation precipitates emotional growth not only in the patient but also in the therapist. Sieff refered to the fact that short-term cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is currently very popular and widely used. Can it help with healing relational trauma? Schore answered that CBT is grounded in cognitive psychology, and its research base is grounded cognitive processes such as explicit memory, rational thought, language, and effortful conscious control. Cognitively based therapy’s basic theoretical assumption is grounded in the assumption that we can change how we feel by consciously changing how we think and what we believe. This means that cognitive therapy focuses on language and thought, both of which are located in the left brain. People who have trouble regulating their emotions typically have a left brain that is already more developed than their right brain, and they may well have learned to use rational thinking and words to obscure the deeper emotional experiences and to keep them dissociated. Cognitive therapy may strengthen the very strategies that keep the affect dampening defense of dissociation in place. Even if the left brain becomes more able to control the emotions of the right brain, it can only control emotional arousal that is of low or moderate intensity. As a rule, when emotional arousal reaches a certain level of intensity the left brain goes off-line and the right brain becomes dominant. Changes made in the cognitive strategies of the left brain are unavailable when this happens. At these times, emotionally-focused therapy may enhance the neural connections between the right amygdala and the right orbifrontal cortex which allows the patient to more effectively tolerate and regulate intense emotions. Cognitive therapy which exclusively focuses on the ability of the left brain to control the right cannot directly alter changes within the right-lateralized limbic system. The

final problem of cognitive therapy is that it is generally a short-term treatment so it is unable to build a strong enough therapeutic alliance to allow the patient to experience the corrective emotional experience. Deep change does not happen when a patient is consciously reflecting on an emotion. Rather it happens when the patient actively experiences the emotion and when a resonating emotionally present therapist recognizes and regulates that emotion, thereby modeling new ways of being with another while one is under stress. There is no interpersonal space for this repair of attachment ruptures in current models of cognitive therapy, where left brain insight dominates over right brain interactive regulation. Coming to the end, Sieff asked Schore what message he would like people to take home from this interview. Schore answered that the earliest stages of life are critical as they form the foundation of everything that follows. Our early attachment relationships, for better or worse, shape our right brain unconscious system and have lifelong consequences. An attuned early attachment relationship enables us to grow an interconnected, well-developed right brain and sets us up to become secure individuals, open to new social and emotional experiences. A traumatic early attachment relationship impairs the development of a healthy right brain and locks us into an emotionally dysregulated, amygdala-driven emotional world. As a result, our only way to defend against intense unregulated emotions is via the over reliance on repression and/or pathological characterological dissociation. Faced with relational stress, we are cut off from the world, from other people, from our emotions, from our bodies and from our sense of self. Our right brains cannot further develop or grow emotionally from our interactions with other right brains. Too many people suffer alone with their desperate pain due to their early relational trauma. For somebody struggling with such emotional dysregulation, the way to emotional security, and to a more vital, alive, and fulfilling life, does not come from making the unconscious conscious – which is essentially a left brain process

– rather, it arises through physically restructuring, growing and expanding the emotional unconscious itself. The most effective way to achieve these changes is through relationally-based, emotionally-focused psychotherapy with an empathic and psychobiologically attuned therapist who is willing and able to be an active participant in this process.

Bowlby – like Freud – believed that the mother is the regulator of distressed states. Schore advances these ideas by proposing that a child in distress reaches out to its mother so that she can act as a regulator of his right brain generated negative affective states. But Schore also adds that the attachment relationship also regulates the infant’s burgeoning positive states, such as joy and excitement. Developmental neuroscience now indicates that play experiences, which start at the end of the second month after birth, are also associated with right brain functions. Attachment to the mother therefore not only minimizes negative states but also maximizes positive states.

lifelong psychobiological well-being is established during the first 1,000 days of our lives. Dr. Allan Schore, world leader in attachment theory, stresses the importance of the first 1,000 days, which encompass conception to age two. He calls these first days “the origin of the early forming subjective implicit self.”12 Neuroscience informs us that the brain doesn’t differentiate emotional pain from physical pain. The body can’t tell the difference between a broken bone and a broken heart. An infant who is hungry or lonely feels pain. When there isn’t a close caregiver to relieve her, the pain intensifies. Her brain can’t inform her body about why she’s in pain. If maternal care is compromised during the first three years, this lack of nurturance is heartbreaking for a baby.

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neurobiologist Allan Schore says, “The mother is downloading emotion programs into the infant’s right brain. The child is using the output of the mother’s right hemisphere as a template for the imprinting, the hardwiring, of circuits in his own right hemisphere.”2 You’re even determining the size of his hippocampi3 (more development confers better learning, stress management, and mental health), anterior cingulate (emotional regulation), and amygdala (emotional reactivity).