A Comprehensive Online Psychoeducational Course to Supplement Your Trauma Recovery Journey as a client or clinician
Attachment relationships have a fundamental impact on the developing infant. Over the last two decades, methodological and technological advances in neuroscience have provided us with hugely enlightening insights into how our attachment history shapes and structures the brain. It has highlighted how and why, integration of the brain structures is necessary for optimal psychological health. Neural integration brings with it the ease of well-being; without it, we now know, physical neuronal firing can be constrained by past synaptic learning, which creates behavioural patterns, and engrained, sometimes chaotic, emotional responses (Siegel, 2010). Trauma and Neglect can be framed as events in childhood that should not have happened and events which should have happened but did not. Attachment is a special emotional relationship that involves an exchange of comfort, care, and pleasure. Attachment is a relationship in the service of a baby’s emotion regulation and exploration. It is the deep, abiding confidence a baby has in the availability and responsiveness of the caregiver. Attachment is about creating a safe environment for optimal brain development for the child of which non stressed consistent attuned caregiving, touch, play, laughter, meeting basic needs and positive affirmation are all important parts of. When this goes wrong it has huge implications as we have been discussing in this Section. However the right kind of psychotherapy can correct this and through this therapeutic alliance with a safe therapist gives opportunity to what we call earned secure attachment.