Sublime

Oscar doesn’t know it, but he harbors decades of resentment and anger because his parents have seldom noticed, validated or responded to any of his feelings or emotional needs.

This last phrase is interesting given the comment by pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, who said that the mother “holds the child’s bits together.” She is his glue, his container. When the mother is really there, lovingly holding the child, it gives the child something to hold on to. Ultimately, that is the mother’s heart.

Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between

Though crestfallen that my adoptive dad abandoned me, I didn’t want to hurt Mom. I didn’t want to hurt. I’d long associated despair with relocation—in my mind they had become interlaced. And so, deep down, I feared that if I expressed sorrow, it would lead to a placement into yet another family.

Usually, the child sets out on a journey to earn love from others. They become enormously eager to please and cannot say no. They are frequent targets of abuse by others because they’re so desperate for approval and have no one to report abuse to.

If you feel safe and loved, your brain becomes specialized in exploration, play, and cooperation; if you are frightened and unwanted, it specializes in managing feelings of fear and abandonment.

A child has a mood—he or she wants to play, or stay in the room, or be loony. The grownups have bigger moods. The abusive, or depressed, or alcoholic, or workaholic, or crazy parent has an enormous mood, and it is the only mood that counts. The children and the other parent have to adapt to that big mood, serve it, cater to it, sacrifice their mood