Few adults today would put together the way they were treated as infants with problems they might experience in their adult lives. Still, people who undergo primal therapy and other profoundly regressive emotional therapies become just too painfully aware of these problems. For a long time in therapy, I have struggled with my pain over my overwhelming loneliness as a toddler. I was neither breastfed nor raised in my arms often enough to meet my needs. I was also forced to sleep alone at night from birth.
My therapist recently gave me a book to read because it so clearly confirmed what I experienced during my therapy with him. I would like to share this. It is a book based on archeology and called The Prehistory of Sex. It is authored by Timothy Taylor and published by Bantam Books in 1997. The interesting section can be found on pages 189-191.
Taylor states that children in hunter and gatherer communities continue to breastfeed until the age of five or six. They receive a strong comfort from the unconditional love that breastfeeding provides. From this experience, they learn confidence, confidence and ability to participate. The author points out that they do not become dependent at all as individuals, but instead show remarkable independence because they have a strong inner sense of their own worth.
He points out that the opposite is often the case in warrior societies. Often, the child is kept away from colostrum (the mother's first milk). It is usually followed by early weaning. Because of this, the child is left with an unresolved pain, anger, helplessness and anger that it cannot understand and cannot express.
This easily develops later in life into either depression or aggressive and violent tendencies, which can be targeted and acted upon by another person or group of people. In this way, such a society resembles a warrior society. (Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller discusses a similar phenomenon in her book In the Beginning, Upbringing, Wahlström and Widstrand 1995, English title For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing .)
Currently, doctors and professional pediatricians teach a method they call the five minute method. Parents are encouraged to use it to make their children more independent. Timothy Taylor has a deeper understanding of what it actually does with the infant.
He says that in order for early weaning to be successful, one must leave the child to sleep alone and ignore the crying. With the five minute method, you let the child cry a little more each night before satisfying its need for food and comfort. As a result, the child eventually stops crying completely. At that point, ignorant parents may become fond of the belief that the child has been trained in better habits.
Timothy Taylor argues that what really happens is the opposite - that a basic animal instinct is activated - as has been observed in mammals and chicks. The infant instinctively feels: "If I signal my distress and no one comes, then I have been abandoned. I will die if I do not save my powers. To cry takes on the forces. So, to survive, I have to stop crying and shield myself. " But before the child stops crying, it must take in the realization that it has been abandoned.
The consequence of this is very serious. Taylor refers to Martin Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness". He argues that if a child cries and its cry is not taken into account and its needs are not met, it begins to distance itself from reality. It instinctively feels: "It doesn't matter how hard I exert myself, nothing happens and no help comes. So why keep trying? My efforts are meaningless anyway." Such an insight is overwhelming to an infant and to survive, the child pushes that discovery down into the unconscious and tries to fall asleep by feeling numb.
Experiencing failure to influence the environment or calling a caregiver provides a basis for what is called "learned helplessness". The child has learned from the beginning that trying to meet its needs or to assert itself in some way - is meaningless. Tragically, learned helplessness is often the precursor to clinical depression. We need to help parents become aware of the fact that their "well-behaved" toddlers may be at risk of becoming depressed and may continue to be there later in life, if they do not go for years in expensive therapy. Since it is better to prevent than to cure, it is vital that we get that knowledge to new parents as early as possible.
In a dissertation, which was read at an international conference on Kangaroo Mother Care in 1998, a doctor from Cape Town, Dr. Nils Bergman, quotes a research paper by Lozoff et al (1977), who studied how hunter-gathering tribes raised their children. He says: "Common to all these tribes is the fact that newborns are constantly being carried. They sleep with their mothers, they get immediate answers if they cry, they get food every one or two hours and they continue to breastfeed for at least two or three years. " He continues to urge parents to give their children such an education if the human race is to survive.
For most of us, this information is tragically late. Something that makes me sad is that even though my mother was not a warm, caring person, she was conscientious and wanted to do everything right. If books about child care in her day had told her to hold me and comfort me when I was born, to lift me up and carry me close to her body, let me sleep with her, give me food when I was hungry and not leave me to starve for 8 hours every night, she would have followed their instructions. By then, the history of my life would probably have been completely different.
Instead, the doctor told her not to pick me up too often and that under no circumstances should I breastfeed me from 10 in the evening until 6 in the morning because my stomach "needed to rest". (Some of my most distressed toddlers have been about this nightly torment of loneliness and hunger.) As a conscientious mother, she literally followed the doctor's instructions.
She cared anyway that I was crying, so she called the doctor and said, "I can't let my baby cry like this. Shouldn't I really breastfeed her?" His response was: "Whatever you do, do not breastfeed your child before 6 o'clock, as it is harmful to the baby's stomach." So from about 4 o'clock every morning she walked around with me for two hours while I screamed, but she never gave me the breast. Later she told me that it made her feel desperate.
It made me feel desperate too. I showed her as best I could that I was cool and that I was suffering. Still, it seemed that whatever I did, I couldn't make her understand what I needed. It has contributed to problems throughout my life; such as the fear that I will never understand how clearly I express myself. It also left me with a great uncertainty about food and fear of never getting enough. In addition, I was left feeling that I was "bad" and not worthy of getting anything (not even food when I was starving) because I felt my mother's irritation and resentment at being woken up so early in the mornings.
So that's why in my adult life I've had to fight myself through problems with poor self-esteem, feelings of being unworthy, lack of determination, learned helplessness and depression. All this has contributed to my having to spend many years in primal therapy to recover from my childhood, which I - thankfully - am doing now.
There are several good websites on the internet to help parents. Two that I suggest are The Natural Child Project and The Primal Parenting Page.
I recommend them to anyone who is expecting children or planning children in the future. There are links to sites that promote so-called "attachment parenting", where you keep the child in close, loving contact with the mother's (or father's) body during the earliest months of life, so as to feed the child as soon as it is hungry and allow it to sleep near the parents' warm bodies at night to meet the child's need for touch and proximity. Hopefully, this caring and loving way of caring for children will become what parents devote themselves to in the future, just as it was in our distant past. If it doesn't, our future is truly bleak.
Dr. Nils Bergman concluded his speech on Kangaroo Mother Care with these words: "This is an imperative general health requirement. This is how the past has been shaped and our future depends on it."
