Dr. Allan Schore

The attachment relationship is there at later points in time. And really what it does, it guides us through our relationships with other people. It certainly guides us through strategies of what to do with stress. And that way that we deal with that stress is now going to depend upon how the mother is regulating that baby's stress during a critical period.

Now, the term critical period is an important one here, too, because, again, at At the first two years of life, it's the right brain is in that critical period there. But that leads to strategies of affect regulation of how we deal with stress, but also how we deal with novel situations. And again, all of it has to do with emotion.

Now, I jumped there because I talked about there was attachment models moved from behavior to cognition to emotion. And essentially, the first book that I wrote was on the neurobiology of emotional development. And in 1994, when I came out with that book, that was about the same time that Antonio Damasio came out with his book,

And really, it was not until the mid-'90s, partly because of the neuroimaging, which was coming during, you remember, the decade of the brain, that emotion really now became a matter that science was looking at for the first time. The point that I'm making here is that attachment is not psychological. It's psychobiological.

And there was always this rift between the psychological and the biological. But when you're talking about emotions, you're not only talking about psychological events, you're talking about physiological events that are associated with those events.

For example, the physiology of the stress response, the physiology of the sympathetic nervous system, which is energy expending, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is energy conserving. So the mother is a regulator of And the way that she's a regulator of that baby is that she's tracking that baby's arousal levels.

She's tracking that baby's emotions as they change in time, moment to moment. And then she's synchronizing with that, and that allows her now to be able to regulate it. So we're going from recognizing that baby's emotions synchronizing with those emotions, and then being an affect regulator. So the mother who is securely attached now is a good affect regulator of that baby.

She not only is an affect regulator of the negative states of the baby, because negative states and negative affects are adaptive, By definition.

You bet. And that's a signal she's sending there literally. And the mother then intuitively knows, intuitively knows. She's not using her left brain to figure out what to do with that baby. She's doing it intuitively. And intuition is a right brain function. And she's regulating that baby implicitly. Now- let's go back over implicit to explicit, okay?

You're seeing a lot now about the shift from explicit to implicit. Something that is implicit goes on at levels beneath awareness. So when she is intuitively knowing what to do, that right now this baby is down-regulating too much and she wants to bring that baby up, she'll now use her tone of voice literally to raise that baby up into a more excited state. Or if the baby is dysregulated,

sympathetic hyperarousal, she knows how to downregulate that. And she'll downregulate that by her facial expression, by the tone of her voice. Now her tone of her voice is now trying to soften and to quiet down. So essentially what attachment is, is the regulator of arousal, of emotional arousal. And that emotional arousal also includes the autonomic nervous system.

So what we have here is the regulation of attachment of the limbic system, the emotion processing limbic system, positive and negative, and the autonomic nervous system. So they are limbic autonomic circuits, and those circuits are in the right brain. Now, on this matter, as it turns out, the right brain has a control system of attachment.

Now, since the right brain is there first before the left because there's no speech at two years, she's regulating this baby at two months, six months, 12 months, all of it is occurring nonverbal. She's doing this implicitly, not explicitly. The left hemisphere processes explicit stimuli, conscious stimuli, rational stimuli. That's not there.

Everything is being done implicitly beneath levels of awareness. And again, that allows it to be the regulation. So attachment theory, my attachment theory, regulation theory is essentially attachment is interactive regulation. Stay with me now. Ultimately, what we have are two forms of regulation. What we're doing is we're regulating the self, right? I mean, it's the subjective self.

which is in the right hemisphere. The left is objective self. The left is verbal, conscious. She's regulating the right hemisphere, and she's doing that, again, by tracking the baby's emotional states, as I said. But again, what the child learns now from that is that her right brain is becoming more and more complex from the first year to the second year.

And it's going to turn out some of these functions that are more complex are being also stimulated by the mother. And ultimately, by the end of the second year, that baby can regulate its emotional states by itself in its right brain. But we have two forms of regulation. You can regulate your states by auto-regulation by yourself.

In other words, you're not with other human beings at this point in time. You have an efficient right brain, which can regulate. And incidentally, what we're talking about here is the regulation. of the amygdala by the right orbital frontal cortex. The right orbital frontal cortex is the highest level of the right hemisphere.

It also has the most sophisticated and the latest evolving parts of the brain are in the right frontal cortex, not the left, the right orbital frontal. not the left thoracolateral cortex is the key to this. So what we learn from attachment here, again, is how to, both in a severe attachment, how to auto-regulate your emotions when you're apart from people.

In other words, when you go to a quiet place at this point in time, you're regulating yourself down, so to speak, and you're getting a nice regulation of the amygdala by the right orbital frontal cortex, or interactive regulation, which is now you go to another human being, We go to another human being under times of stress in an optimal situation.

We also go to another human being to share joy states. And remember I said that the mother is up-regulating joy states and down-regulating negative states. So in a secure attachment, you have somebody now who can do both. In certain forms of insecure attachment, that's not gonna happen. The avoidant attachment, is always auto-regulating his states.