It is the emotional experience (when parents don’t fall apart) that allows baby to become more organised. I believe this is a crucial reason why a mother suffering with post natal depression needs help. The short term terror and the long term damage to the baby can be unimaginable. It is important that this unconscious emotion can be contained, that the unbearable experience can be held onto and not thrown back. For example, in the background of borderline personality disorder is often a parent that was not able to manage themselves and subsequently felt very persecuted – likely because of their own early histories. They might then turn on their baby saying ‘YOU are bad making me feel like this. It’s YOUR fault so I’m going to leave YOU.’ Or they may react by shaking the baby or shouting. The baby will not have a feeling of being emotionally understood. They will feel uncontainable, guilty, bad. When this experience is cumulative and there is neglect and further abuse by damaged parents, there will be a negative impact and the consequences are clearly seen in adult life and in the consulting room.
Patients bring these unbearable experiences that they’ve not been able to manage into therapy. They may well now be bulimic or self harmers, trying to get rid of the badness they feel by vomitting or releasing blood. Other responses may be drinking, drug taking, or promiscuity. All of these behaviours in this context will help them feel as though they are letting out emotions, emotions deeply stored that are often non verbal. They may feel stressed and pressured so release these emotions in defensive, harmful ways. Ideally, they need help to identify these hard to manage emotions and to not just experience the stress. Another defence, is often a psychosomatic response – where the feelings are kept in the body and get reenacted through the body (and relationships). When someone hasn’t learnt how to think or feel, when it hasn’t been safe to let the feelings out, the body becomes ill. The person would rather (unconsciously) deal with a series of illnesses and ailments rather than the psychic and emotional pain. Again these people need help to think emotionally and psychologically.
2 Responses to “Personality goes a long way”
Claire Calvey
Interesting article which covers some issues I’ve wondered about myself. You talk about very early experiences having effect on the adult but what about experiences later in childhood, for example, moving abroad? I wonder this because of my own experience in childhood (leaving a happy life at 10 for an equally happy life elsewhere but without the family network which had existed before) and my own ensuing bulimia. I also wonder about the effect of moving abroad on my own children and worry there will be problems further down the line for them. In short, is it only very early experiences which can cause these problems later in life, or is it reasonable to say disruption later on, after the personality has been established, can still cause life long problems? (And apologies if this will be covered in a later blog…)
Rebecca Eyre
Thanks Claire,
Sorry, I only seem to have seen your email now.
It is the very early experiences that have the most dramatic impact on us as we are highly vulnerable and our brain is developing so rapidly as is our personalty and expectations and way we view ourselves, others and the world. Our ability to process and manage our experiences when we are young is not sophisticated to say the least. Our early experiences are often encoded into the implicit memory system rather than the explicit memory system which is when we are able to remember experiences from say about 4 years old. As a result, these experiences drive decisions, thoughts, defences etc but aren’t easily remembered or understood. Of course, later events will have an impact too, particularly severe and highly damaging ones such as abuse. As regards your experience, it is interesting that you experienced moving at a young age and now your children are too. Often issues, such as eating disorders can be triggered by life events but often have their origins in early experiences too. I think being mindful of our own histories and also of the impact of decisions in the here and now is crucial. Being as open and aware as possible to feelings around these is a great step forward in preventing mental health issues springing up seemingly out of the blue. Good luck and keep well.