Early Relational Health: Preventing Intergenerational Transmission of Shame

Guilt can be a normal and healthy emotional experience. “I’m guilty” can also mean “I’m responsible.” Shame, in contrast is always pathological, and can have destructive effects on emotional development. But without an opportunity to hear the family story, it is impossible to distinguish between the two. Knowing Paul’s story, we can understand it as a kind of intergenerational transmission of shame. Isabel’s sad feelings and expressions of low self-esteem were a communication of distress at an environment of rage, directed both at her and between her parents. One can understand her behavior not as an illness but as an adaptive effort to change the situation.

What is Children’s Mental Health Care? An Expanded View

Emotional well-being and emotional distress both grow out of variations in the repeated moment-to-moment exchanges that make each of us who we are. On one end of the spectrum, robust interactions lead a person to experience the world as safe and filled people who can be trusted. At the other extreme, fear and mistrust inform a person’s understanding of himself and the world around him. The two extremes help us make sense of the more typical experiences that fall somewhere in between. Rather than being fixed, the meanings you make in your earliest experience are continually changing in new relationships in an ongoing process of making meaning of yourself and the world as you grow and change.

Is Disorder Healthy? Rethinking the Language of Mental Illness

“But it’s genetic” or “these are brain diseases,” are frequent response to this reframing of our concepts of mental wellness and illness. Once we recognize that our genes, brains, and bodies develop in relationships, the false duality of biology and experience, of nature and nurture collapses. Expression of our genes and wiring of our brains occurs in the interactive process of mismatch and repair in our closest relationships starting from birth. It used to be thought that brain wiring was pre-determined; that our brains had a fixed wiring plan. But now we know this is not true. Formation of new neural connections- the “wires” that make up the brain- is flexible not only in early development, but throughout our lifespan.

Mind-Altering Drugs and the Toddler

Behavior is a form of communication. Medication can silence that communication. Until we place a renewed value on protecting time for listening, we will continue to see an increase in this kind of prescribing. In effect we will be silencing the voices of the youngest members of our society.