Brain Integration
Renowned attachment researcher, Mary Main (1996), found that the greatest predictor of a child’s secure attachment to his or her caregiver, is the caregiver’s ability to make sense of his or her own life. Put simply, this means that if a parent can understand her own life, her child will have a greater chance of feeling secure in the world. From a psychoneurobiological perspective, child psychiatrist and educator Daniel Siegel, suggests that this “making sense process’ is facilitated by the connection, or integration, between the left and right hemispheres of the brain resulting from the individual's capacity to formulate a coherent narrative of their life. If an adult caregiver is integrated in this way, Main’s research indicates, the caregiver will have the ability to nurture his or her child in a way that allows for a secure attachment relationship with the caregiver.
Your brain and your child: Your right hemisphere houses all of your autobiographical memory or the ‘story of you’, whereas your left hemisphere controls language. The right hemisphere needs the left to put your story into words, and the left hemisphere needs the actual memories stored in the right. Bilateral Integration is a term coined by Siegel (1999), to reflect the interconnectedness of the left and right sides of the brain. If a parent does not have a coherent narrative from childhood, because of early emotional trauma making it difficult to make sense of experience, for example, this indicates that the brain is not integrated -- the story of who you are is not clear. Attachment theory posits that the caregiver in this situation will be ‘preoccupied” by unintegrated aspects of their own history (thinking about it repeatedly but not making sense of it), preventing them from seeing or attending to the emotional needs of his or her child. This preoccupation, then, would cause the child to not feel seen -- resulting in an insecure attachment to the parent.
See also:
Attachment
The Infant Brain
Mindful Parenting Groups
Reflective Parenting Workshops
For further reading:
www.innerkids.org
www.mindsightinstitute.com