Building a Healthy Self in a Sometimes Hostile World
Our sense of self arises in relationship, so the quality of relationships in our social world affect our sense of self.
Let’s start at the beginning, or at least one point in the beginning, which are the first interactions you have with your primary care giver. When we come into the world as infants, we don’t differentiate between ourselves and our caregiver. In fact, our vision only allows us to see faces and object very close to our eyes initially. We gain the sense of “I exist” through the interactions and reflections of our feelings by our care giver.
If as an infant, your caregiver said, “Aww, is baby sad?” when you cried, and made a sad face, your state was reflected to you. Our initial sense of self arises in these short interchanges with our primary caregiver. The more our caregiver is comfortable with and can reflect our feelings, the more we learn it is okay to feel. If my caregiver is upset by my anger or neediness as an infant, that shapes the envelope of emotion I can safely express. Infants don’t have language yet, and do understand attuned caring responses. This goes on with different stages of growing independence and sense of “I am” as we grow older. I know I am because you reflect me back to myself.
There is an experiment that was done by Ed Tronick and others called the “still face experiment.” In it, a mother and baby are looking at each other and interacting normally, then at a signal from the researcher, the mother puts on a neutral face and doesn’t respond to the infant (for 2 minutes or so). At first the baby tries to engage the mother, then expresses frustration, and then rage, and finally collapses, cut off from the flow of connection with the mother. If this happens occasionally, it’s not a problem because the connect is quickly restored. If this is a chronic situation, it has an impact on the developing sense of self of the infant.
Our bodies are master works of rhythm: heartbeat, breath, craniosacral, digestive, a veritable symphony of rhythms. It makes sense that each person has a zone of comfortable rhythm, a tempo range that they feel most at ease within. It can happen that our caregiver and our own rhythms aren’t easily synched. This can lead to chronic feelings of mis-attunement. Even as an adult, you know that some people are just easier for you to get in the groove with, and others not so much.
As we develop, we go through increasing stages of differentiation, developing the understanding that there is a “me” and there is a “you.” For instance, at age 3 to 4 the toddler encounters the tension of leaving the safety of the primary care giver and exploring. We discover that the caregiver can’t protect from the normal bumps and bruises of their small world beyond the caregiver’s embrace. Anyone who has raised teenagers, knows the negotiation of self a developing adult must go through as their allegiance shifts from parents to peers. Young adults in their 20’s are establishing a sense of self in the larger world. And so on.
All of this takes place within the context of our culture, our socio-economic resources, and opportunities available to us. Our social self is an on-going construction. Scientists such as Antonio Damasio (author of Self Comes to Mind) have located a primal sense of self in sub-conscious body sensations as a foundation for our narrative or story of self. However, the self we construct is never in isolation. There is a fascinating story of the hermit of North Pond in Maine, a 20 year old man who walked into the woods in Maine and didn’t emerge for 27 years. He lived by raiding the summer camps around the lake and was finally captured. A journalist who was able to interview him told of his experience of himself in the summers when the weather was good. He felt himself as no different from the breezes, birds, and trees in his camp. In other words, he didn’t need or feel a separate sense of a social self.
We need a social sense of self when we interact with other humans. This is good news on one hand because it means that our sense of self is constructed, and something we can author, if we know how. Too often we have unconscious, automated programs that are defining who we think we are and sometimes limiting who we can be or become. To create a sense of self that is resilient, aligns with values we cherish, and can enact in the world, we first need to identify these learned beliefs and patterns, both in story and in the body. Once we can identify these, we can shape them. Working with embodied patterns is more than we can cover in this article.
Working with our story, our agreements from our family of origin or culture, is something we can address. Left to our own devices, we usually reproduce how we were treated as a child. Once we can identify those stories, we can open them up to new possibilities, and that creates new possibilities of self. Family constellations offer a powerful way to reveal these patterns and the stories that define us, and to open new possibilities.
