Dr. Allan Schore

Before I forget this, I want to just throw one other piece in. I said that the right brain is in a growth spurt from the last trimester. In the last five years, 10 years, there has been a real interest in utero development and evidence to show that you're even seeing lateralization in the fetus.

And there's even evidence now, scientific evidence, to show that the early memories in utero are stored in the right amygdala. So they're down there, so to speak. So we're now paying more and more attention to what is happening there. Because at birth, literally, what you have here is the deeper parts of the right brain are evolving in utero, the insula.

and the right amygdala, the central amygdala. And that's setting up. And you also have synchronization across the placenta, whereby they are regulating each other's autonomic nervous systems.

Well, first of all, most of the studies have been on cortisol. And high levels of cortisol, they're going to cross it.

So if you have, let's say the amygdala, which is in a critical period of growth, the right amygdala, and the cortisol levels are very high, that's really going to not be an optimal situation for that amygdala to evolve because you're going to have a continuous stress response there. And essentially what that means also that if the mother is in a very stressed state during a utero,

Some of that literally now is going to impact the lower areas of the brain. So as far as adrenaline goes, I'm not sure on that. I don't see why not. Although hormones certainly cross, you know, we're looking at not only changes in neuromodulators, especially, incidentally, the key here that we're trying to regulate are the neuromodulators. Excuse me. Dopamine, reward, noradrenaline.

It's those which also early in life literally form neuroplastic, so they will form circuits. That's what we're attempting to regulate here, to down-regulate very high levels of neuroadrenaline and up-regulate dopamine, etc., etc.,

Yes, yes. The key here is emotion regulation again, and again, it's implicit emotion regulation. One of the central tenets of my ideas here is that, first of all, there has been too much of an emphasis on the downregulation of negative states. Remember the original attachment theory, the secure base, the baby would come back in a stressed state, she would downregulate the negative states.

But really, attachment is about the down-regulation of negative states and the up-regulation of positive states. Still, at this point in time, the importance of positive states in the human experience are overlooked. Positive emotions, joy, enthusiasm, excitement. Positive states literally are the key, and there are hormonal aspects to that, as you just point out.

For example, dopamine, etc., etc., And this goes for therapy also. In therapy, it's not only just the down regulation and the sharing the down regulation, but it's also sharing the up regulation of positive states because that's a critical piece of it also. But there still is that bias to look one way.

Now, in the Right Brain book, I'm also talking about two types of love, quiet love and excited love. This was the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was a pediatrician, who was one of the great psychoanalysts of the 20th century. And he made the distinction between quiet love, which would again be the downregulation of noradrenaline, and excited, which is into a parasympathetic state.

So you're going from a hypersympathetic state into a parasympathetic state, quiet love. And then excited love. which would be also passionate love, which is the high arousal state out of it, so to speak. And they are both important, and ultimately they both need to be integrated. And you may have a situation whereby one can do one, but ultimately they have to come together.

Let me make this important point. In the end, we have negative emotions for adaptive reasons. It's there. Let's take shame. Shame is meant to dose down very high levels of arousal. And if one can't do that, very high levels of arousal, let's say in narcissistic personality disorders, you need to be able to... So we need to have access to both positive and negative emotion.

But the real key to a secure attachment is the ability to integrate both positive and negative emotions. So with a really good securely attached mother, when that baby is in a down state, literally, she can literally ride down with that baby and synchronize. And when it's an up state, she can really ride up with that state.

In the case of narcissistic personality disorders, let's say, for example, and I'm jumping here, we've got an insecure attachment. It can be an avoidant attachment or the other one, depends on what kind. There are two different types of narcissistic personality disorders.

No, no, but you can have two different types of narcissistic personality disorders, a vulnerable attachment and an egotistical attachment.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, sound familiar, but also egotistical attachment. But my point out of that essentially here is the stresses in life are there and that the negative stresses are there, but we can learn from those negative stresses also, etc. And ultimately what we need to do is to be able to know how to integrate. If we can't integrate the positive and the negative, will end up with splitting.

You know the term.

Yeah, yeah. So essentially the splitting goes out externally, right? That person is all bad. I am all good. So now you have that splitting. You can't see anything of a goodness in that person at this point in time.