Roots of Resilience : early conditioning and our nervous systems
Roots of Resilience
Before anything let’s acknowledge that there really is no beginning. In the mid 90s I trained in infant craniosacral work as Craniosacral Therapy was a modality that had become central to my practice. I wanted to get closer to the roots of the limiting patterns I felt in fully grown humans and imagined that the foundations for those patterns might begin early in our development.
What I have learned in the years since is that, of course, there is no beginning. We are born into the relational and energetic field of our parents, family and culture.
And the places of numbness/overwhelm/freeze in those greater systems are the mold or conditioning into which our nervous systems are initiated.
When we cry, if our caregiver is overwhelmed or has not experienced attuned responsive care in their own environments, there will be some disconnect or anxious response to our emotional expression of need.
In these experiences, the profound wisdom of our physiology will modify our expressions in whatever way creates more connection with our caregiver - crying more or less, or perhaps not at all to preserve or create the conditions for connection with the humans with whom we are dependent for survival.
These learned reflexive responses happen below conscious awareness and ensure our survival - even if they compromise our resting in ease in our own bodies.
If the environment can’t be with us in our experience, our deep brains know how to find what will give us the relational ‘okayness’ required to survive, even at the expense of our well being - contracting or disconnecting from our own authentic experience and expression.
After all the need for a bond and care, even of our most basic of needs, are a biological imperative for survival and will naturally be prioritized over resting in our authentic experience and being rejected, abandoned, hurt by the frustration of a caregiver who does not have the capacity to tolerate, attune to or respond in a regulating way to our experience in the moment.
Conversely, when our expressions of fear are met with attuned protection [instead of an anxious need for us to be ‘okay’, turning away or frustration] our nervous system relaxes into the connection and builds resilience, ease, an embodied sense of okayness just as we are, in which our bodies relax, our nervous systems thrive and our development moves toward our full potential.
These early patterns become like the factory settings for our operating systems.
The good news is that our deep brains’ factory settings can get updated with attuned felt reparative experiences.