Beatrice and Sanderika have given you excellent feedback that is hard won from their years of dealing with an MLCer. In reading your posts, two things struck me: (1) your H is VERY confused and (2) you need to take care of yourself.
From out here in the ether, my sense is that H’s admissions to you last week followed by your recent interactions with H triggered old fear behaviors. It appears to me that these events progressed too quickly for H to process them in a healthy way, so he reverted to his “survival” behaviors. Cas, I hope you don’t mind if I share some excerpts from the book “The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain” by Louis Cozolino. I think this information puts the behaviors we observe with our MLCer into a context that we LBS’s can better understand. Cozolino does an amazing job of integrating neuroscience and psychological research findings with his own observations from his practice as a psychologist. I’ll try to summarize some of what he wrote below:
“Resiliency --- our ability to cope with life’s ups and downs --- is closely tied to the extent and quality of our support systems. We appear to be capable of coping with just about anything when we are connected to those for whom we care and who care for us. But what happens when we experience trauma at the hands of those we love and depend on? Interpersonal trauma is an especially difficult challenge, particularly for children, because it creates competing response within them: They simultaneously want to cling for support and push away for protection. It is precisely this approach-avoidance conflict that can make interpersonal trauma so damaging…….When interpersonal trauma occurs early in life, this approach-avoidance conflict can become a consistent state of being, around which our personalities are formed……For a child, the experience of simultaneous impulses to run toward and away from a parent is crazy-making………If you need to feel connected in order to heal but are too afraid to trust because you become fearful and dysregulated in relationships, you are stuck. This “Catch-22” keeps many people in a constant cycle of loneliness → approach → terror → avoidance → loneliness, and so on. Many people come to therapy for years but are too afraid to trust their therapists enough to share themselves openly. They desperately need to establish a R in order to heal, but their fears overwhelm them and they flee back into a safe isolation.”
The author goes on to talk about two areas of the brain that whose size and connections can be altered during development by traumatic experiences (e.g. parental neglect, shame-based parenting, abuse). An area called the “amygdala” is where emotional memories are stored; the body’s “fight-or-flight” responses to fearful triggers in childhood or adulthood are initiated here. The “hippocampus” is where conscious memories are stored. If this area is functioning, individuals are able to think about perceived threats in the environment and respond in a thoughtful and reasoned manner. Using the example of a fearful memory, “the hippocampus is required for the conscious memory of the experience, the amygdala is necessary for the visceral response to fear. The sight of a dog that once bit you might elicit a bodily response via the amygdala, but” if the hippocampus was damaged from this experience it “would leave you with no conscious memory of WHY you were afraid.” Research has shown that adult women who experienced childhood abuse have reduced left hippocampal” size “and increased dissociative symptoms” (the ability to “leave their bodies).
“Rejection and abandonment plunge us into states of fear, anxiety, and shame”…..and, “it is the fear of abandonment, dysregulation, and shame that often keeps us from being able to love………Based on the way our brains operate, evolution appears to have been far more interested in keeping us alive than making us happy. Overall, negative emotions trump positive ones and weigh more heavily in our evaluation of people and situations (Cozolingo cites several research studies throughout this section to support his statements)….The amygdala is quick to learn and slow to forget. Learned fears are tenacious and tend to return when we are under stress. Fear is not easily forgotten, whereas learning NOT to fear is fragile and often dissipates over time. We don’t even have to be conscious of a stimulus, either in the environment or within us, in order for it to become a conditioned cue for fear……..” a brain “pathway to the amygdala becomes activated in response to “unseen” threats and controls reflexive and autonomic response (i.e. “fight-or-flight” responses such as increased heart rate, sweating, and muscle tension). …our amygdala is attending to things around us to which we are completely oblivious, guiding our thoughts and behaviors accordingly; it teaches us to fear without us even being aware of what is happening. Because the amygdala can respond in under 100 milliseconds, our fear networks can move through several processing cycles before a frightening stimulus even enters conscious awareness……the role of the amygdala is to remember a threat, generalize it to other possible threats, and carry it into the future. “
In therapy, the psychologist works to establish new patterns of brain activity in the areas of the brain negatively impacted earlier in life. Cozolino gives an example of a depressed woman (“Sasha”) in her mid-30s. Her parents were research scientists who were proud, efficient, unemotional and very concerned with appearances and their reputations. They “focused exclusively on how Sasha behaved and performed in school. She grew up competing for the little attention their parents had to offer. (Sanderika, is this reminiscent of your H’s childhood experience?) Sasha’s parents seemed concerned only with avoiding being shamed in the eyes of others, so it was no surprise that Sasha’s daily experiences were full of shame. She described finding it everywhere, in each interaction , reflected in the eyes of everyone she encountered.” ………During their work together, their discussions would “invisibly shift into an evaluation of her worth as a person. I would notice that her face would become less expressive and her body would grow still. Soon she would stop interacting and simply nod her head, grunting in acquiescence from time to time. She would then stare at me, as if from a great distance….Each time this sequence occurred, there was a turning point in our conversation, some trigger that resulted in a shift from something she wanted to do for herself to an external test she felt doomed to fail. Clearly, this pattern was burned into her networks of attachment through countless futile attempts to please her parents. When this emotional state became triggered, I became a judging parent. With this hair-trigger shame response, Sasha’s moment-to-moment experience filled with negative evaluations of herself and those around her.) Her experiences with her mother served as Sasha’s unconscious assumptions about all R’s and all people. My work as her therapist was to disconfirm this expectation and help her to discover a newfound sense of trust in R’s. To give you some idea of the work and the time involved in this process, it took her more than a year before she could ask my permission to leave the session to use the restroom. Even the sensations from her bladder would catapult her back to childhood --- and, in her mind, to her bedside --- not knowing what to do.”
I know this was a really long and involved post, but I thought that understanding some of the biologic basis of our MLCer’s responses might give us some level of understanding and peace.
Cas, I think that you H DOES want to move toward you. He told you that himself. The main question is whether or not he can do that on a timetable that meets your needs. You have been incredibly patient. “Going dim” for the past 2 months really seems to have elicited your H’s giant step toward you. Right now I would be kind with him but I wouldn’t make any sudden moves toward him. His body and mind are on high alert right now. H will probably react negatively to any demands placed on him now. Let OW place demands on him. He will react very strongly to those demands………..and be good to yourself for the next week. Things could change during that time. You may have new information in another week.
