Tag Archives: stress

Interventions in Infancy

Important Note: The image in this post and in all the previous ones are not images of the children discussed in the posting. They are simply children whose photos I have collected throughout my travels.

Now we are ready to look at infancy. As a matter of a fact, this topic may be relevant to parents of preschool children, since these parents are often having second or third children when their first is in preschool. What we are talking about is showing parents what they can do to help their babies feel secure. If babies feel secure and safe in the infant-parent relationship, they are creating the expectation that reunion with their parent will bring comfort and safety. That expectation is correlated with a “secure attachment strategy”. When the baby is upset and cannot manage to comfort himself, he anticipates that his mother (or other primary caregiver) will comfort him, so when his mother approaches, he already begins to calm down.

The infant mental health mini-course that the nonprofit organization, Supporting Child Caregivers (SCC), teaches emphasizes the three tasks of parents – to protect, nurture, and enjoy their children. We believe that parents deserve the support of the community in raising their children. That support begins with ensuring the physical and emotional support of the pregnant mother and continuing to support the parents of the growing child. The more parents can be protected from stress, or the more they can be helped to deal with the stress in their lives, the more they can help their babies feel secure. Of course, stress can come in different packages. Most of the work SCC does is in developing countries, where there is a high incidence of chronic poverty, domestic violence, and serious illness.

However, my work in the U.S. has taught me that the stress on parents of infants even in affluent communities can be great. One important source of stress is isolation. In contrast with collectivist societies, our society does not offer new mothers easy access to alternative caregivers such as family members or neighbors. In the Indian villages I visit, mothers congregate around the village square. In the U.S., new mothers often do not have a natural way of connecting with other mothers with whom to share their worries and complaints and to gain useful information. I want to emphasize that I am not suggesting it is easier to bring up an infant in a poor country, but only that in addition to similar stresses, there are also different ones.

For example, parents of newborns in the U.S. are often burdened by the cultural demand to “multi-task”. In order to feel productive and organized they believe they must be getting many things done. It is hard to do that when you have a newborn. In order to be available to respond to the baby, it is necessary to let go of most other agendas. This can be stressful to some parents. Also, in the age of technology, parents are often “plugged in”. It is painful to observe mothers pushing their babies in strollers while they talk on their mobile phones to some distant friend, and to imagine what their sense their babies are making of the relationship.

Another big stress in Western culture is the responsibility given to parents to produce a perfect child. The expectation that good parenting produces a good child is a relatively recent one in the history of humankind. The corollary can lead to relentless self criticism- if your child has problems, then you are not a good parent. Let me clarify an important point. Whereas I have been emphasizing sensitive and responsive caregiving as a building block of healthy development, I do not mean to say that good caregiving ensures a healthy child. This is part of what I was referring to in the previous post as “uniqueness” of the child and the family.

Children are different. Infants are different. Ask any parent of more than one child whether this is true. One of my criticisms of Attachment Theory is that it does not account for the uniqueness of infants and the active role they have in making meanings about safety in the infant-parent relationship. Do we doubt that a premature infant makes the same meanings about comfort and safety as a full term baby, or that a baby with high reactive temperament can be made to feel secure as easily as a baby with an easy temperament?

Let me talk about interventions in the next posting.

Stress Regulation: From Theory to Practice

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Stress Regulation: “From Theory to Practice”

Perry’s ideas about stress regulation are particularly important to me in my clinical work. In contrast to the negative cascade stress can cause in a sensitized child, helping a child grow his stress regulation system may initiate a healthy “cascade” effect.

In my practice, if a child gets better at calming herself, she can pay more attention to my ideas about the motivations for some of her problem behavior and consider trying more adaptive ways of behaving. For example, if a child is poorly regulated, she will not be receptive to my observations that when she starts out with “loser feelings” she cannot bear to play competitive games with her peers. She is more likely to use psychological defenses such as denial and avoidance to protect herself from the stress of acknowledging her painful feelings. If, however, we begin by my giving her a “handicap” that makes it easier for her to win, and then emphasize the rhythmic, repetitive turn taking patterns of the game with my actions and with my voice, she may be able to establish and maintain a receptive, alert position in relation to my communications and even allow me to scaffold some self reflection. In play sessions with one child, I would ask her at the beginning of the session whether it was a “bad guys in” or “bad guys out” day for her before we settled into a game of Candyland. If it had been a hard day for her, we would take all the cards that send you backwards out of the pile. If it had been a good day, we would leave them in. This small ritual allowed us to play the game together, while also helping her begin to reflect on and identify her feelings, and eventually appreciate the link between her temper tantrums and her sense of herself as a “bad girl”.

In psychology and psychoanalysis we refer to “respecting the child’s defenses”, something that Anna Freud talked about. That means not overwhelming a child, usually by avoiding confronting him with information he is not ready to receive. Perry’s idea of “dosing” and “spacing” adds a new dimension to the concept of “defense”. It brings the body into the equation in an important way. Thinking in these terms helps us organize our interactions with a child in time and space. It helps us put the music and dance into our clinical work. Because I study videotapes of my work with children, I see the nonverbal communication, what I call the “music and dance” of psychotherapy, both in a standard time frame and in a microprocess, second by second, time frame. In the microprocess, you can see this dosing and spacing even better than in real time. For example, in one session with a 4-yo boy, you see me introduce an idea about something scary to him; I deliver my communication in short (2 sec) vocal turns defined by short internal pauses (“dosing”) and then, right after I finish, I sit back and fold my arms across my chest. This is “spacing”. When you look at the film in slow motion, you can infer my (out of my awareness) intention of giving him space, giving him a turn.

“Dosing” adds the factor of measurement, of size, which I think is very useful to keep in mind. I remember playing with a little boy who felt the need to exert extreme control over me in the session. In order to help him grow, move him towards reciprocity, I had to stress him by interrupting him sometimes, declining to jump to comply with an order, or by adding a detail of my own to the narrative that he was spinning, any of which could make him mad. Sometimes I “dosed” my contributions by adding humor, sometimes I made them very short, and other times I acted a little confused. Slowly, using dosing in that way, he began to give me a turn now and then.

Spacing is another very helpful perspective. “Spacing” is even closer to the theory of psychological defenses than “dosing”. I was observing the need for “spacing” when I sat back and folded my arms across my chest in the previous example. Another example is my work with a child who lost a parent. When he saw me in the preschool classroom, he would “pretend” reject me by playfully pushing me away or telling me in a loud voice to go away. I would play along, sometimes moving back a few inches, but not going away until it was time for me to say goodbye. When you think about it, there is a lot of communication in our behavior. He is telling me he needs to know if his behavior can cause me to disappear forever, and I am telling him that his behavior is unrelated to when I come and go. My leaving the classroom was a dosing experience for this child. One day after many months of this daily play (“spacing”), I stood to leave, and the boy approached me sideways, without giving me a direct gaze, and leaned against me. I stroked his hair and he didn’t move.

In addition to dosing and spacing, Perry’s thoughts about “distributed caregiving” have also been helpful to me. Actually, what has happened is that my own clinical experience has been moving me further and further from thinking in terms of categorical diagnoses and “clinical” interventions. Instead, I think about children’s problems more often in dimensional terms and tend to move to support the child’s caregiving environment before immediately beginning an individual psychotherapy. Supporting the child’s caregiving environment means working with the child’s parents and teachers. One of my favorite ways of intervening is to work in the preschool. Then, I not only have a chance to offer the very capable teachers an insight now and then about a particular child. I also have the chance to “be there” for certain children when and how they need me. This is what Perry means by “distributed caregiving” – allowing a child to initiate a particular kind of interaction with each caregiver in a group available to him. This kind of thinking moves away from formulations about pathology and towards developmental goals. For example, Perry talks about how after the Waco disaster, the traumatized children seemed to identify particular caregivers for specific needs of the child – one for help with schoolwork, another for rough housing, another for snuggling. I have seen the same kind of distributed caregiving activity in the preschool classroom with healthy children.

I realize that psychotherapists and even psychoanalysts like me sometimes consult to teachers in schools by sitting down with them and listening to them talk about the children and answering their questions, and even by entering the classroom to observe certain children pointed out by the teachers. What I prefer to do is “live” in the classroom so that I can see the children in action and sometimes engage directly with them, while at the same time trying from time to time to identify what the teachers can do even better. For example, I might see a little boy who seems more fearful than average and begins tentatively to play with a toy car. I might suggest to the teacher that she encourage some gentle crashing games if the child initiates them.

In closing, I would like to emphasize the importance of rhythmic patterned activity that is repeated over and over again in helping people grow. This is very different from what I learned in psychiatric and psychoanalytic training. It is not that I have not engaged in that kind of activity in my clinical work; I have. On the other hand, now that I have integrated it into my theory, I do it more, and I do it better.

Stress Regulation: Bruce Perry

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Every time I hear Bruce Perry speak, I hear something new, and I take a step forward in making sense of my experience with children and families. On September 16, Bruce talked to our IPMH course about his “theory of change” – Change is created by an intentional act that is repeated in a way that will influence the system in the brain relating to the function you are engaging in the action.

As always, he grounds his remarks in the science of the brain – although he is careful to remind us that all “models” of the brain are gross oversimplifications and only useful in so far as they help us understand how the brain works. That is because the brain is unbelievably complex. There are approximately 86 billion neurons in the human brain and many more glial cells. The brain is hierarchically organized both in terms of architecture and function. The most “primitive” part of the brain – the part that is most like the brain of primitive animals – is at the base of the brain. This part, including the brainstem and cerebellum, maintains bodily equilibrium – body temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration. Above that is the diencephalon that regulates functions such as appetite and sleep. Then there is the limbic system that deals with basic emotions such as anger, fear, and happiness, and also affiliation, and reward. Finally, there is the most uniquely human part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, that produces abstract though and the more complex emotions of guilt and shame. Yet, every time we introduce a model of the brain we oversimplify; these anatomical parts of the brain do not relate precisely to the functions described; it is complicated.

In addition to “intrinsic neurons” that make primarily local connections, there are neural systems in the brain that have wide distribution throughout the nervous system. These systems, such as the ones of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, are crucially important in managing stress. The stress response systems connect the lower parts of the brain with the cortex and also connect the brain to the autonomic nervous system and to the endocrine system, the immune system, the musculoskeletal system, and the internal organs.

As we have noted in other blog postings, the lower part of the brain forms earliest in intrauterine life when the brain is growing most rapidly and is most subject to influences from the environment. Although “neuroplasticity”, or brain growth, occurs throughout life, the most rapid and profound changes occur in the first few years. That is why students of development stress the importance of a good early caregiving environment. An adequately responsive, consistent, and predictable caregiving relationship can modulate the effect of adverse experiences on the developing brain.

When an infant experiences an adverse event – such as exposure to toxins in utero – there can be a “cascade” of effects. The lower part of the brain may be primarily affected, but because the child then becomes compromised in his ability to regulate stress, subsequent development of all the interrelated parts of the brain and body may be affected. That is the reason why children born into homes that suffer chronic poverty, domestic violence, and substance abuse, for example, are more likely to have problems with their emotions, their relationships, and learning.

The neural networks of the stress response system are in dynamic equilibrium. Too high a level of stress-inducing novelty will activate the system in order to lower the stress. Too low a level of novelty will cause the system to increase stimulation to restore alertness. When a child experiences repetitive, unpredictable, stressful events, her stress regulation system will be sensitized, lowering her set point and causing her to be more vulnerable to similar stresses in the future and to react with a more extreme response. A child may be sensitized by a chaotic or violent home environment. He may also be sensitized by vulnerability caused by inherited developmental vulnerabilities or serious childhood illnesses. For example, a child who inherits genes associated with “autistic spectrum disorder” (I put this in quotes since I consider this a highly problematic diagnostic category.) may be highly stressed by making eye contact with another person. A child with this inherited vulnerability is sensitized early in life and will inevitably have multiple repetitive adverse experiences while living in what for another child might be a comfortable home life.

In order to change the regulatory set point of a stress response system in a healthy direction, it is necessary to activate the same system with small repetitive stressors that are organized in an appropriate pattern of dose and space. The last time I wrote about Bruce Perry, I introduced his idea of “dosing”, one that I find very important in my therapeutic work. This time Dr. Perry introduced another important concept, that of “spacing”. Dosing means that you apply a stressor but not in a dose that is beyond the capacity of the child to manage; you do not overwhelm him. Spacing means that you time the doses so that the child is prepared for another challenge. For example, if I am working with a child who becomes easily dysregulated by negative affect states, I am likely to accept her protestations that she really loves her little brother for some time before gently questioning them.

I will continue the discussion of how I use Bruce Perry’s ideas in my work with young children in my next blog, “Stress Regulation: From Theory to Practice”.

Bruce Perry, Lecture, U Mass Boston Infant Parent Mental Health Course, September 16, 2016