On Creating the Capacity to be Deeply Loved and Seen...

“The roots of resilience…are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the heart and mind of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.”?-Diana Fosha

I spent two days with my maternal family. I was cocooned in love in the form of hugs, kisses, food, care, childhood stories, laughter, loving glances, soft caresses and more food.

There is a word that captures this feeling- it’s called ‘laad’ in Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati. The closest English equivalent is pampering but it’s not the same. It’s the sense of delight and tender love reserved especially for children. Even if the child in question here is 40 years old. I was present enough to bask in the unconditional adoration that one reserves for the truly precious from great aunts, grandmoms, aunts, uncles and cousins.

Over many years of self-work, I have slowly expanded my capacity to notice and take in the nourishment that such loving connections offer.

A legacy of developmental trauma creates an impermeable membrane that keeps out connection. It distrusts all intimacy and makes it impossible to be present to ongoing moments of co-regulating ventral energy. The nervous system is used to looking at relationships as inherently threatening. They are a source of abandonment or a way for the other to colonise us or worse- both.

Part of healing is to learn to discern between safety and danger in relationships coming from the present versus as a reaction to implicit memory. Noticing and taking in the love and nourishment that close nested relationships offer us takes time and the internalisation of atleast one safe other. The sense of being connected somewhere is an important anchor in our lives. Without it, we can feel disconnected, lost, and ungrounded in the world. This feeling is often carried throughout life unless efforts are made to change the situation.

This is our primary role as therapists. To offer this sense of connection. I can do this to the extent that I am able to maintain my own presence in ventral energy. We hear countless family histories through the course of our work. We notice the patterns, the repeating of certain tendencies and the transmitting of a particular world view. We grieve the mis-atunements and cruelties with our clients. All the while we attempt to create a capacity to be deeply loved and seen without overwhelm or anxiety. To recognise that you are being tenderly held by another human, animal or plant in the moment, to ingest and metabolise it and simply be joyful in it is our birth-right. If we are wounded in the relational field, we can only be healed in deep connection.

I remember reading somewhere (can’t find the reference for the life of me. If you know please do let me know) that it takes about 1/4th of a second for neuroception to detect danger and 15-30 seconds to notice safety.

Rick Hanson describes this tendency of our nervous systems as, “Teflon for the good and Velcro for the bad.” These glimmers (the opposite of emotional triggers) become hard to notice in the moment and truly savour if you have a history of relational trauma and neglect.

Iacoboni (2011) who discovered mirror neurons puts it this way: "We empathize effortlessly and automatically with each other because evolution has selected neural systems that blend self and other’s actions, intentions, and emotions. The more we learn about the neural mechanisms of mirroring, the more we realize that the distinction between self and other may be almost fictitious in many cases. We have created the self-other distinction in our explicit discourse, along with many other constructs that divide us. Our neurobiology, in contrast, puts us “within each other.” (Iacoboni, 2011, p. 57)"

What a beautiful description of what indigenous cultures across the world have always known!

In western models of therapy emerging from individualistic cultures that prioritise self-regulation it might be helpful to notice what neuroscience tells us about connection and co-regulation. We might want to approach our own healing and the facilitation of healing in our clients by purposefully accessing or creating “relational environments that support internalization of nourishing others for ongoing co-regulation.” (Badenoch, Heart of Trauma, p. 193)

At my aunt’s we slept communally rows of mattresses in the living room, giggling, cuddling and talking late at night just as we did in childhood. I heard many stories and experienced all these gestures of love. This part of my family has so much tragedy and heartache woven into generations, yet in this moment we were all together and connected. As much as we carry inter-generational trauma from our family trees, we also carry forward their strengths, love and presence within us.