The Calm After the Storm
How to Course-Correct and Re-pattern After Shame Stress
When my son was a baby, before I’d learned to manage my emotions with my practices, I was reactive and daily saying things I’d regret. By some grace, Joseph Chilton Pearce’s book, The Biology of Transcendence (Rochester, VT, Park Street Press, 2002) reached me, and taught me crucial truths of early brain development.
“Use of shame as a socializing technique passes on to the child the very wound inflicted on the parent. As can be seen in the phrase “It’s good for you!” which some use as an explanation for subjecting children to fear and emotional pain, throughout our lives we act out and then rationalize our shame. Having been shamed, we tend to project our shame on others, looking for shameful acts in them, our judgments always tinged with anger.”
This is not an abdication of proper, healthy boundaries or effective routines. An intuitive parent sets a handful of boundaries and creates easy-to-respect routines, which helps the child feel secure and safe. What we learn here is how we parents pass on our shame in unconscious ways.
“…the prefrontals form their major, large-scale synaptic connections with the emotional-cognitive brain in the first year of life… the period when most nurturing takes place.”
“…at about the eleventh month, a superabundance of dendritic links are grown between the prefrontal and the cyngulate gyrus, the foremost part of the emotional brain, in that critical area called the orbitofrontal loop.”
So this is when our kids begin in earnest to develop their emotional intelligence, their intuitive sense. As infants.
Chilton Pearce quotes the pivotal work of Dr. Allan N. Schore, my hero.
“Dr. Schore relates that [any] emotional shaming experience the toddler undergoes brings about a ‘degeneration and disorganization of earlier imprinted limbic circuit patterns… ‘“
Which means that every time we yell or shame a little kid, we’re causing a disorganization in their neurology. We’re not making them better or more respectful. We’re making them more afraid, more doubtful and more uncertain.
“[Dr. Schore] then details not only how the actual neural growth of structure and hormonal balance in the child are impeded by shame, but also how shame actually brings about the deactivation, severance and pruning of these superabundant connections that have just been established…”
“In this way [in the presence of shame stress], a sharp curtailment of connections with the higher, transcendent frequencies of mind and heart is brought about, in order to shift growth toward the lower, protective survival systems.”
When a parent shifts from nurturing to prohibiting too harshly and too often, that prohibition generates an unnatural self-regulatory response in the child, used to avoid reprisal and/or abandonment. Shame becomes an imprint of an inhibitory state, which involves the same overload of cortisol and withdrawal found in kids who experience psychological abandonment or separation anxiety.
Known as signal shame, this is precisely what creates a foundation of doubt in a human being, which that being carries with them for the rest of their lives, spending time, money and resources to identify and heal it.
Shame stress, Dr. Schore notes, is characterized by elevated cortisol levels, found in studies of year-old infants undergoing separation stress from their parent. Every time a child is shamed, a crucial change happens in their brain. Reading this when Jonah was an infant, I was shocked into a fresh understanding: my presence was needed, not my shouting or rules or cleanliness. While Jonah played and explored, I needed to give him my attention, not some image of a perfect house or life that I’d had in my mind.
To recap: at the precise moment when the infant or toddler is developing an intuitive instinct to experience the world and learn, the emotional, exploratory creative connection is neurologically pruned in favor of survival tactics when a parent unnecessarily inhibits or shames. The child changes their behavior unnaturally to keep the parent from shouting and/or leaving. Most chilling of all, is that when this happens, the prioritization of neural architecture shifts from higher intelligence to lower defenses, strengthening the fight-flight-freeze-fawn tendencies in the child.
“This loss of prefrontal material is brought about because the caregiver becomes the ‘socializing’ parent. Emotional deprivation takes the place of nurturing in that second year–and the excited, exuberant child is turned into a ‘terrible two.’”
All of this shook me into a new way of parenting, changing things in our home overnight. Instead of hearing myself repeating “No!” and “Don’t”, I began to offer my son and myself more nurturance and care. More empathy and patience. And anytime I’d forget and shout or become violent toward myself or him, I followed Schore’s crucial instructions as cited by Chilton Pearce, the paragraph toward which I’ve been building for this entire piece, the most important part.
“…each shame-inducing episode [should] be followed immediately by sufficient nurturing… which re-establishes the bond, which not only alleviates, but counteracts the negative effects [and] brings about a positive learning.”
So I instantly began doing this, and another result revealed itself: I felt it too. These moments of post-conflict nurturing became glorious pockets of connection, clarity and creativity in our relationship. My son and I naturally developed ways to apologize to one another and to others that felt authentic, real and healing, practices that continue to this day, outlined in Perceptive Parenting.
And his emotional intelligence has helped me navigate other issues as we’ve grown up together. He’s become a powerful and tender adult.
Chilton Pearce gave me one of the most crucial gifts of my life: this invitation to heal shame stress in real time, both in myself and in my kid. In closing, he invites us to shift our ways of defining success in our parenting.
“Make nurturing, care, love and a buoyant, happy child the entire criteria of social success in parenting.”
This is how we build cultures of peace and creative solutions.
Click here for Part I and Part II of this series. And the Perceptive Parenting course is now open. It’s my honor to serve you and your family.
