Of the eight major emotional conduits of energy, affiliation is at the top. Belonging. When we add spirituality to it, it turns to love. Connection on a level almost indescribable. Attention is a method. We don't want attention. It is a way to get something else. Most people don't like someone staring at them. They feel judged. There is something else that is supposed to be happening. What?
Carl Rodgers called it Unconditional Positive Regard. To be seen at a level it gives the person a sense of value, of worth.
In the late ’50s, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann wrote, “What inner forces made her struggle with the problem of loneliness? She'd dealt with a young female catatonic patient who'd began to communicate only when Fromm-Reichmann asked her how lonely she was. The girl raised her hand with her thumb lifted, the other four fingers bent toward her palm, It stood isolated from the four hidden fingers. Frieda responded gently, “That lonely?” And at that, the woman’s “facial expression loosened up as though in great relief and gratitude, and her fingers opened.”
The power of reflective listening has been shown over and over again when one is acknowledged (seen) by another human. We are not so much alone. Belonging is everything.
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The harrowing consequences of these theories were most vividly brought to light in Romania in the 1980s and ’90s, when a ban on abortion led to a surge in orphanage babies. The longer these children were left in their cribs, simply being fed and changed without individualized affection, the more damage was seen, even if the orphanage was clean and well-run. Many children developed autistic-like behaviors, repetitively rocking or banging their heads. Some were cold and withdrawn or indiscriminately affectionate; some alternated between these extremes. And they simply didn’t grow like normal infants: their head circumferences were abnormally small and they had problems with attention and comprehension.
Austrian psychoanalyst and physician Rene Spitz proposed a theory. He thought that infants in institutions suffered from lack of love–that they were missing important parental relationships, which in turn was hurting or even killing them.
To test his theory, he compared a group of infants raised in isolated hospital cribs with those raised in a prison by their own incarcerated mothers. If the germs from being locked up with lots of people were the problem, both groups of infants should have done equally poorly. In fact, the hospitalized kids should have done better, given the attempts made at imposing sterile conditions. If love mattered, however, the prisoners’ kids should prevail.
Love won: 37% of the infants kept in the bleak hospital ward died, but there were no deaths at all amongst the infants raised in the prison. The incarcerated babies grew more quickly, were larger and did better in every way Spitz could measure. The orphans who managed to survive the hospital, in contrast, were more likely to contract all types of illnesses. They were scrawny and showed obvious psychological, cognitive and behavioral problems.
Spitz’s study suggested severe mortality risk–more than one in three The babies raised in the nursing home environment suffered seriously. Twenty-one were still living in institutions after 40 years. Most were physically, mentally, and socially retarded. It showed that serious mental health and behavioral problems could result from not having at least one loving parent devoted to a particular child. For decades, however, this research was either ignored or dismissed by behaviorists and others who couldn't believe that something as vague and seemingly immeasurable as parental love could matter that much.
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What we see over and over is: negative stimulus allows us to interact, even if it's bad. None, makes us feel we don't exist. It taps abandonment and the bleakness of worthless. Numb is worse than something, even if it is bad. All my abused patients have mentioned this. They keep going back even with broken jaws and arms.
We have to fix that empty inside before they will let go of the negative and risk alone to get better.