In relational trauma the caregiver is hyper-intrusive or inaccessible emotionally – disengaged with a tendency towards rejecting or inappropriate responses to the infant’s stress, providing minimal and unpredictable regulation (Schore, 2019a). This ‘caregiver induced relational trauma’ is more ‘potentially psychopathogenic’ than other social or physical stressors. Studies of mothers of 4 month old infants who later show disorganised attachment, describe how these caregivers use intrusive touch and engage in ‘dyadic dysregulating’ interactions involving ‘mother-chase-infant dodge’ and ‘mother positive/ surprised while infant distressed’ (p.46). The conclusion the researchers drew was that the mothers were overwhelmed with their pasts of unresolved abuse or trauma and so cannot bear interacting with their infant’s distress. These mothers are not able to regulate their own distress and so cannot regulate the distress of the infants. Beatrice Beebe says this fearful maternal behaviour is a defensive dissociation which protects the mother from the intimacy that comes with joining the infant while distressed.
Parental affective unresponsiveness can be understood as a ‘hidden trauma’ specific to infancy which can hyperactivate the infant’s stress response over time (Schore, 2019a). A basic principle of modern attachment theory is that “early traumatic sundering of the right-brain-to-right brain attachment bonds is critical to the genesis of an enduring predisposition to a variety of early forming severe psychopathologies that characterologically access the autoregulatory, affect-deadening defence of pathological dissociation” (Schore, 2019a, p.48).
Mild to moderate stress activates the right hemisphere but intense experiences might interfere with right-brain processing and if a critical point is reached will eventually damage it (Schore, 2019). Schore suggests this damage is most evident during intensely dysregulating experiences of “hypermetabolic hyperarousal and hypometabolic hypoarousal” (p.49).
Psychopathologies of the right brain limbic system involve ‘disturbances in affect regulation’ (Schore, 2019a). This is due to an inefficient regulation by the right orbitofrontal cortex of the fear centre of the brain – the right amygdala. In the last decade evidence has emerged of ‘altered structural and functional development’ of the orbitofrontal cortex in a wide range of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, autism, affective psychosis, bipolar disorder, aggression and violence, addiction, PTSD, panic disorder, dissociative identity disorder, and depression. Dissociation, the defense against affect, is central to reactive attachment disorder and paediatric maltreatment disorder, as well as autism, psychotic disorders, DID, PTSD, eating disorders, substance abuse and alcoholism, somatoform disorders and BPD. Dissociative defences block the possibility of interactive regulation and the organisation of more complex right brain stress regulatory strategies.
References
Schore, A. N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind (Norton series on interpersonal neurobiology). W. W. Norton & Company.