The Neuroscience of Attachment
[first presented as a Clinical Conversation at the Institute for Psychotherapy, Fall 2008]
© Linda Graham, MFT
It’s fascinating to learn what’s happening in our brains as we feel accepted or rejected by people closest to us or important to us. What’s happening in our brains as we a sense of connection and or dis-connection and isolation. (You may have experienced reactions in your own brain as you even read words like acceptance or rejection or experienced either one so far today.)
While we hope it’s Love that makes the world go round, it IS human beings relating to one another that makes the world go round, either keeping it healthy and viable one generation to the next or threatening to destroy it.
Relating to one another, one on one, couples, families, or in larger social groups, is the most complex thing human beings do, more complex than writing a symphony or running a government or solving global warming, and the need to relate, to be emotionally and socially intelligent, has driven the evolution of the human brain to be the most complex anything in all of existence.
It becomes important, as clinicians, to understand what’s happening in our brains, ours and our clients, in the therapeutic relationship, to understand what attachment theory and research over the last 50 years and modern neuroscience of the last 20 years are telling us:
Fortunately, the human brain has always had the biologically innate capacity to grow new neurons – lifelong – and more importantly, to create new synaptic connections between neurons lifelong. All of us can create new patterns of neural firing from new experiences. All of us can pair old even maladaptive patterns with new, more adaptive, patterns of neural firing. All of us can all create new neural circuitry, pathways and networks that allow us to relate, moment by moment in new, healthier, more resilient ways. All of us can store those new more adaptive patterns in both the structures of explicit memory, making them retrievable to conscious awareness and conscious healthy functioning, and in the structures of implicit memory, making them the new habits of relating.
This neural plasticity of the brain was confirmed by neuroscientists in the year 2000. That’s just 8 years ago. Modern neuroscience IS new. All the new technologies that allow us to see what’s happening in the brain, as we think of a loved one or plan what to have for lunch, are new.
90% of what we know about how the brain works has been learned in the last 20 years. Dan Goleman wrote in his introduction toSocial Intelligence, which came out last year, that most of the understanding we have about the neurological substrate of things like , emotional regulation, the effect of trauma on explicit memory, interoception – how we know what’s going on in our bodies …..hadn’t even been discovered yet when he wroteEmotional Intelligence10 years before.
In that time there’s been an explosion of discoveries relevant to addressing the wounds of less-than-optimal attachment: the social engagement system of the brainstem, the fight-flight response of the amygdala, mirror neurons, bonding hormones, the social-emotional bias of the right hemisphere, the positive bias of the left hemisphere, the role of the pre-frontal cortex in attunement and learning the “rules” of attachment, the resonance circuits we can use in empathic therapeutic relationships to catalyze brain change in our clients.
The more we can become comfortable applying these discoveries to our interventions with clients, and the more we can learn specifically which interventions will most effectively accelerate change in our clients’ brains for the better, the more immediate and enduring our therapeutic interventions will be.
Interpersonal neurobiology, pioneered by Dan Siegel at UCLA, is a new field attempting to bridge the discoveries of neuroscience to the clinical world. Much of what I am presenting here has been informed by the trainings and writings available in this field, especially from Louis Cozolino’s book:The Neurobiology of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brainand Bonnie Badenoch’s new book, just out this summer,Being a Brain Wise Therapist.
This article offers recent research findings, new hypotheses and theories, but also practical skillful means to incorporate into your ongoing work with clients. I’m hoping all of this rings true to experienced and dedicated clinicians at the level of common sense. I’m aware of three things as we begin.
1. The brain is a social organ, developed and changed in interactions with other brains
We begin with the brain, understanding now that the brain is a social organ, developed and changed in interactions with other brains.
There is nature; we are genetically programmed to walk, talk, learn to share, recognize an “I” separate from “you”, on a developmental timetable. That development, however, is always stimulated or kindled by experiences we have in interactions with other people, other brains. It IS interacting in relationships that stimulates brain structures to activate and mature. This is true on the individual level and on the social level.
On the individual level, the neurons in the limbic regions – the seat of our emotional learning that is foundational to our subjective sense of personal and social self – are not fully connected at birth. They are genetically primed to form synaptic connections through the relational experiences we have with those closest to us. Caregivers activate the growth of those regions of the brain – through emotional availability and reciprocal interactions. This includes the hormones of bonding and pleasure that are released in intimate and contingent relating. That is nurture.
Patterns of energy and information laid down in these early moments of meeting develop the actual structure of these limbic regions. This means that the very foundations of perception, particularly in regard to relationships, relies on the quality of these earliest interactions with our parents.It is essential to understand experience dependent maturation of the brain to understand the importance of early attachment experiences to shape the brain and our patterns of relating and to embrace the power of new attachment relationships in therapy to re-wire the memories learned with this part of the brain.
At the social level, it is now hypothesized that the need to communicate, non-verbally and verbally with fellow members of our clan or tribe on the savannah to survive, is what drove the phenomenal growth of the cortex in humans – the “higher brain” with all of its amazing capacities of empathy, consciousness, planning, language, thinking, discernment.
So it’s not just that we have empathy because we have the pre-frontal cortex in our brains but that we have highly evolved complex brain structures like the pre-frontal cortex because they are developed and matured by empathy. As Cozolino says, we are not the survival of the fittest; we are the survival of the nurtured.
This highly evolved human brain is the most complex structure and the most dynamic process – noun and verb – in existence.100 trillion cells in 3 pounds of firm tofu between our ears. Of which 100 billion neurons are gray matter that are the working clipboard of the brain. Each gray matter neuron is capable of connecting with – and communicating with – 7,000 – 10,000 other neurons. Those who have done the math have calculated that the number of synaptic connections – and thus neurochemical messages – possible in each human brain is 1 to the millionth power, numbering more than atoms in the universe [estimated at 1 to the 80th power].
These brain cells fire 10 – 100 times a second, sending neurochemical transmitters across the synaptic cleft to be received by another neuron. In one hand clap, billions of neurons fire in our brains. So the brain operates in a dynamic oscillation of a fraction of a moment of firing, a fraction of a moment of quiet, a moment of activity, a moment or rest. There is a moment of change, and there is a moment of stability. These oscillations are integrated across brain structures, from the bottom up and top down and right-left and other ways, too, to create continuity – yet flexibility – of self, other and relating.
These oscillations of stability and change are what underlie neural plasticity. And they are what allows us to use moments of change in the brain to help clients change their lives.
How the brain works…how relational learning works
Any experience cause neurons in our brains to fire. Repeated experiences cause neurons to fire repeatedly. Neurons that “fire together wire together,” strengthening neural connections. Strong neural connections become neural pathways and neural networks. This experience-triggered neural firing is how ALL neural pathways become patterns of response, and how all structures of the brain mature. This is how all patterns of attachment are laid down in the brain; it is also how they can change.
I’m sure many of you by now are familiar with Dan Siegel’s hand model of the brain. The arm and wrist are the spinal column and brainstem of the brain. The brain stem regulates the internal homeostasis of the body: heart rate, respiratory rate, digestion, through the autonomic nervous system (ANS) – the extension of our brain throughout our body. The ANS has two branches, the sympathetic (SNS) of arousal and the parasympathetic (PNS) of calming. These two, arousal-calming, gas and brakes, are part of the completely unconscious social engagement system that regulates the energy level or vagal tone of our bodies. Too much SNS and too little PNS, we feel restless, agitated, stressed, all the way to panic attack. Too much PNS and too little SNS, we feel slow, lethargic, numb, all the way to collapsing in a faint. When there is a balanced vagal tone, we are happy campers.
When we feel safe in relationship, we stay within our window of tolerance and our cortex stays functional. When we perceive threat or danger, the SNS arouses the amygdala to prepare for fight or flight. We can experience this as an emotional hijacking; our rational self temporarily nowhere to be found. When we perceive a life threat, the PNS calms down everything, down to the point of shut down. We go numb and freeze.
We share these functions of the brain with all life forms down to reptiles; there’s no consciousness awareness yet; there’s no attachment going on here yet. Though, with conscious awareness later, when we say someone makes us sick to our stomach or someone is breaking our heart, it is information from the internal regulation of bodily states that unconsciously informs that subjective experience.
Next, the thumb, folded into the palm, one on each side actually, represents the mid-brain limbic regions, sub-cortical but just a few cell layers away from the pre-frontal cortex (PFC). The most well-known structure of the limbic system is the amygdala, almond shaped structures of perception-appraisal-response. Our 24/7 alarm center, constantly scanning the environment for threat or danger, even in our sleep. The amygdala generates the fight – flight response, very important to attachment. We share this with mammals and birds.
The amydgala is also the core of our interactive social processing and the center of our emotional learning. The amygdala assesses every experience, including relational experience, for safety or danger, for pleasure or pain, and pairs each experience with an emotional valence, an emotional charge, positive or negative, that makes us approach or avoid similar experiences in the future. The more intense the emotional charge, the more neurons will fire in our brain and the more likely we will register the experience in implicit memory.
Any such experience that is also processed with the conscious awareness of the cortex can be stored in explicit memory. We consciously learn to approach or avoid this or that person or emotion again. But the amygdala itself operates below the level of the cortex, below the radar of conscious awareness, and it stores all of its responses to experience in implicit memory, outside of awareness.
The amygdala operates much faster than the more complex cortex – 200 milliseconds to trigger fight or flight rather than the 3-5 seconds of the cortex that notices we just got in somebody’s face or bolted out of the room just precious seconds before. So the processing of the amygdala does not have to come to our awareness for an experience to register and be stored in our implicit memory. 80% of the time it doesn’t.
Here’s the zinger about all this. Any emotional-relational-social experiences that are processed before the brain structures that can process experience consciously are fully mature, before 2 ½ -3 years of age, those experiences are stored only in implicit memory, only outside of awareness. This includes ALL early patterns of attachment. The research has proven “beyond irrefutability” that attachment patterns stabilize in our neural circuitry by 12-18 months of age. They are stable and unconscious before we have any conscious choice in the matter and unless new experiences change them, will remain stable “rules” of relating well into adulthood.
Unfortunately, for purposes of attachment, Cozolino suggests that because the amygdala is the structure of both our social emotional processing and is our fear center, the negotiation of relationships and the modulation of fear so overlap, our earliest relating, our earliest implicit experience of self can have a bias toward the negative. Because, evolutionarily, members of our species who were nervous, anxious, on alert, tended to survive. Those who are nice and mellow got eaten.
The hippocampus, one on each side of the temporal lobe near the ears, are part of the limbic system but as they mature, at about 2 ½ years of age, they begin translating experience into explicit memory, a vital link to cortical functioning. With explicit processing, conscious processing, we begin to remember our experiences, including relational experiences from 2 1/2 – 3 years of age on. So, the temporal lobe of the cortex is where memories of attachment experiences are stored, consciously and unconsciously; it’s where they get stuck, and when brought to consciousness, where they can change.
The hypothalamus located deeper in the limbic system releases many different hormones to regulate the amygdala. A very important one, that researchers have begun to understand more fully in the last 5-10 years, is oxytocin – the bonding hormone that is released through touch, warmth and movement, such as breastfeeding and orgasm. Oxytocin calms the amygdala, it can spur the pre-frontal cortex to grow GABA bearing fibers down to the anydgala and quell the fear response. Why hugs make us feel safe and bonded to the person who is helping to release oxytocin in our brains.
We are learning that even a visual image of someone we love or feel safe with can release oxytocin in our brains. Since imagining something is as real to our brains as seeing something for real – i.e., the same neurons fire if we imagine a banana as when we see a banana for real – remembering people who have given us unconditional love, or our clients remembering us giving them unconditional positive regard, can release oxytocin and calm down the fear center.
I can share an example of this from my own experience. In July 2003, I chose to have lasik eye surgery to correct lifelong near-sightedness and astigmatism. The operation is risky, so I went into the operation with considerable anxiety. I had asked friends to think of me on the day of the operation, at the time I was actually in surgery, so I felt resourced and not alone during the procedure. I had to remain conscious during the operation and focus my eyes on the light beam above me so the laser could track exactly where to remove the fluid in the eye which would re-shape the cornea and create the lens that would allow new 20-20 vision. So, while lying on the gurney staying as still as I could be, I thought of all my friends thinking of me, taking in the sense of love and caring I knew was being sent my way.
