E. Go for It, But Know When to Back off (Rupture and Repair)

Go for It, But Know When to Back off

(Rupture and Repair)

E. Go for It, But Know When to Back off (Rupture and Repair)

A baby's experience

Baby Tiffany has just been fed by her mother. She feels content and satisfied. Suddenly she realizes that she is no longer in her mother’s arms but at a distance from her face and they're looking at each other. An exchange begins and she starts to feel more and more excited, in keeping with what mother is doing until she feels she is going to be overwhelmed with the feelings washing through her body.  She almost feels afraid of what might happen. She can feel her heart beating faster. The intense emotion is becoming too much and instinctively causes her to stiffen and twist away, so she is no longer facing her mother, nor is she still smiling.

Then she hears mother's voice calm down and become more soothing and reassuring. This continues and gradually it relaxes her and she turns back to her mother and they exchange another smile.

The mother's experience

Mother has just finished feeding baby Tiffany and is holding her under her arms on her knee, and they have caught each other's gaze. Mother loves this moment and smiles at her daughter. Tiffany smiles back. This makes mother feel even better and she begins to talk to Tiffany, sometimes bringing her face closer, but keeping their eyes on each other. Her voice increases in tone and volume as she gets more enthusiastic playing this game with her daughter.

Suddenly, Tiffany's body tenses in her hands, her back arches and she jerks her head to the side. She almost looks afraid.

Mother realizes Tiffany has reached her limit for the moment and knows that she needs to help her calm herself. She quickly changes her manner of speaking to a calmer more soothing expression. Gradually, she feels Tiffany's body relax. Tiffany turns back to her and Mother smiles at her again.  Tiffany smiles back.

Now, let's try another variation on that scene.

A baby's experience, version 2

Baby Tiffany has just been fed by her mother. She feels content and satisfied. Suddenly she realizes that she is no longer in her mother’s arms but at a distance from her face and they're looking at each other. An exchange begins and she starts to feel more and more excited in keeping with what mother is doing until she feels she is going to be overwhelmed with the feelings washing through her body.  She almost feels afraid of what might happen. She can feel her heart beating faster. The intense emotion is becoming too much and instinctively causes her to stiffen and twist away, so she is no longer facing her mother, nor is she still smiling.

Suddenly, her mother's voice becomes louder, with an even more powerful tone to it. As mother's voice begins to wash over her, blocking everything else out, she feels her body being  twisted back to face her mother and being shaken up and down. With that, she loses all control, and some of the milk she has just drank comes pouring out of her mouth.

The mother's experience, version 2

Mother has just finished feeding baby Tiffany and is holding her under her arms on her knee, and they have caught each other's gaze. Mother loves this moment and smiles at her daughter. Tiffany smiles back. This makes mother feel even better and she begins to talk to Tiffany, sometimes bringing her face closer, but keeping their eyes on each other. Her voice increases in tone and volume as she gets more enthusiastic playing this game with her daughter.

Suddenly, Tiffany's body tenses in her hands, her back arches and she jerks her head to the side. She almost looks afraid.  But mother wants that happy moment to continue. She raises her voice to try and re-engage Tiffany, at the same time trying to turn her face back towards herself, and in what she thinks is play, bounces Tiffany on her knee to try and get her to smile again. Suddenly, Tiffany’s face contorts into a grimace and the next thing mother knows is milk is spewing out on her lap.

The explanation

I am sure all of you who are parents or have taken care of babies are very familiar with the above scenarios.  The first version is something that happens many times a day, day after day, throughout an infant and toddler's life. It is the typical exchange of a mother and child who have successfully gone through the experience of bonding and attunement.  They enjoy each other's company,  and love to play these games with one another. These shared experiences continue to strengthen the connection between them.

In that exchange, both mother and child learning how to respond to one another, to relate to one another. Of course, for the first year or more of life, the baby has no or little understanding of the words the mother is using. Therefore, it cannot really think about what is happening the way we do. All it is doing is experiencing things through the senses of touch, sound and sight. I tried to reflect that in how I wrote that section.

Obviously, then, the baby cannot tell mother what she is experiencing and when it is feeling too much. It is up to the mother to figure that out. In the first version of the story, the mother quickly sensed that the baby had become excited enough for the moment and backed off. She actively tried to help the baby settle and in no time she had, and was able to turn back and look mother in the face and return the smile again.

That is the experience of the mother and child who have achieved a level of attunement with one another. Mother knows how to read the baby and meet the baby’s needs. She knows when the baby has had enough for the moment. Indeed, she also knows that the baby will need a few more moments or even minutes of calm before they play the game again.

In the second version of the story, and we all may be guilty of that at times in our care of our  children, the mother did not want to stop.  She had a good thing going and wanted to continue to experience that emotion. Rather than see that Tiffany had enough, she tried both through her voice and physical handling of the baby to get her to continue to play the game. Indeed, sometimes mothers in this situation might feel that what they are doing is trying to teach the baby compliance, doing what the parent wants them to do. Their actions might even become punitive in the worst-case scenarios. 

Indeed, in this version, there is something lacking in the mother at that moment in that she is really wanting her own needs to continue to be met. She has a certain understanding of how to achieve what she wants, no doubt based on her own upbringing and experience, and brings that to bear upon how she handles her infant. However, we can see that the infant is not prepared for that and things get worse.

This breaking of the magic moment between mother and child is what we refer to as rupture. In the first version, the mother demonstrated her ability to quickly repair that break in the exchange. In the second version, the mother obviously had difficulty with that.  So, you may well ask, what is the point of all of this?

To answer that, we need to look back at what we said all 'good enough' parents want of their children. They wanted them to learn to be able to control their emotions. They want them to learn self-regulation.

Self-regulation is something that is built within the framework of the parent-child relationship and based on the quality and success of the rupture and repair in these exchanges that we have just discussed. It is something that we as caregivers need to teach our offspring. Their nervous systems are programmed to react as we saw. However, they need us to help them learn how to regain self-control.

In the first instance, the mother's change to a calmer stance helped the infant regain control. In the second, the mother's failure or perhaps even inability to see that she had gone too far, caused the baby to lose control. If the first version is what is repeated time and again, the baby will come to know that the caregiver is there for her. She will develop a sense of predictability about what will happen in these situations and even learning this, will already help her learn to begin to calm herself. She is learning that she can depend on her parent.

In the second instance, the baby is not experiencing what it needs. Instead of being helped to regain control, the caregiver is continuing to stimulate her excessively. Indeed, the baby is not always sure how far it will go. To her this is an unpredictable situation. It can be confusing. Rather than learning how to calm herself, it is something that increases her level of anxiety. She is not experiencing her parent as someone she can depend on.

No parent is ideal, so we cannot say that there are some parents who would always exhibit the first version of this story. However, fortunately, most parents manage to do this often enough that the infant learns the skills she needs. Learning to enjoy and even anticipate these experiences with the knowledge that he can overcome them, the infant's attachment to his parent grows.  He is learning that, by and large, his parent knows and understands him well enough to meet his needs. He can depend on his parent. This is the child who will develop into a person who is generally in charge of their emotions and respectful of this parent who has helped them become who they are.

Left unchecked, the trajectory of the child who experiences too many of the second versions of the story will become the child who does not have good control of their emotions. They may exhibit undue levels of anxiety and fearfulness. This is because the world has not been presented to them as a reliable and predictable place. Their caregiver does not fully understand them.  The adults in their world have not proven themselves trustworthy to meet their needs. At other times, their frustration at this or their own inability to maintain self-control, or their anger at the world for not having met their needs, can cause them when they get older to lash out with the temper tantrums or meltdowns none of us wants to see. This is just because they cannot cope with the situation they are in, not having learned the skills of self-regulation adequately.

If one looks at this scenario and what comes out of it, on the one hand, it does not look like it takes a rocket scientist to bring up a good enough child. These situations, repeated countless times through a child's development, are what shapes them. The situation itself is not that complex. The problems with all of this lie with what we as parents bring to it. That is the subject of another chapter and more.