A Secure Base

I read this book titled “The Body Keeps The Score” by Bessel Van Der Kolk. It has shed light on my own past, and hopefully, it may shed light on yours. Here’s an excerpt from the book:

A Secure Base

As we enter this world, we scream to announce our presence. Someone immediately engages with us, pays us, swaddled us, and fills our stomachs, and, best of all, our mother may put us on her belly or breast for delicious skin-to-skin contact. We are profoundly social creatures; our lives consist of finding our place within the community of human beings. The great French psychiatrist Pierre Janet said it best, “every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available.”

As we grow, we gradually learned to take care of ourselves, both physically and emotionally, but we get our first lesson in self-care from how we are cared for. Mastering the skill of self-regulation depends to a large degree on how harmonious our early interactions with our caregivers are. Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage–a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.

The more responsive the parent is to the child, the deeper the attachment and the more likely the child will develop healthy responses to the people around them. Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment.-whether it is secure or insecure-makes a huge difference over the course of the child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between babies and their caregivers, and it gives a baby the feeling of being met and understood.