When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

Maté suggests that most parents unconditionally love their children and that the parents’ own trauma, anxieties, or personality factors cause this love and acceptance to feel conditional to the child. This child may experience the feeling of proximate abandonment despite the parents’ best intentions. The parenting styles of individuals reflect these parents’ own experiences as children; thus, cycles of positive or negative treatment are often recreated cyclically in families.

Emotional and attachment circuits are developed in the context of children’s relationships with their parents. The tendency of monkeys towards antisocial reactivity was mediated by having nurturing mothers; these monkeys showed no signs of behavioral disorder and rose to the top of the social hierarchy. Rats with nurturing mothers had amygdalae that contained more benzodiazepine receptors, which allows for anxiety regulation.

Adult children of Holocaust survivors had disturbed HPA axis and cortisol production that mirrored the extent of their parents’ trauma. Adult Attachment Interviews, in which adults recall details of their own childhood, are correlated with their behavior as infants in the Strange Situation Test, where children’s attachment to their mother was assessed via the mother leaving and reentering a room.