← Scattered Minds The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder
Scattered Minds Chapter 16. It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over Unconditional Positive Regard
Author: Gabor Mate Publisher: London, UK: Random House. Publish Date: 1999 Review Date: 2023-5-3 Status:📚
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Laboratory work on the brain and clinical experience with human beings have opened up a world of possibilities. “The mammalian brain appears to have the capacity to remain responsive to environmental enrichment well into advanced age,” writes Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond, a noted brain researcher at the University of California’s Department of Anatomy–Physiology in Berkeley.1 In her laboratory, rats ranging from newborns to elderly were kept in varying degrees of social isolation, stimulation, and environmental and nutritional enrichment. Autopsies showed that the layers of the cortex in the brains of the environmentally favored rats were thicker, their nerve cells larger, their branching more elaborate, their blood supply richer. Enriched rats well past midlife could still grow connecting branches almost twice as long as their “standard” cousins, after only thirty days of differential treatment. Dr. Diamond reports these results in her book Enriching Heredity: The Impact of the Environment on the Anatomy of the Brain. “Perhaps the single most valuable piece of information learned from all our studies,” she writes, “is that structural differences can be detected in the cerebral cortices of animals exposed at any age to different levels of stimulation in the environment … at any age studied, we have shown anatomical effects due to enrichment or impoverishment.” Most encouraging was Dr. Diamond’s finding that even the brains of animals deprived before birth, or deliberately damaged in infancy, were able to compensate by structural changes in response to enriched living conditions. “Thus,” she writes, “we must not give up on people who begin life under unfavorable conditions. Environmental enrichment has the potential to enhance their brain development too, depending on the degree or severity of the insult.”
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That in humans, too, we can expect even the adult brain to be positively influenced by the environment is not surprising. The same has long been known to be true for almost any other organ or part of the body. Unused muscles atrophy but grow in size and strength if well exercised; blood supply to the heart is improved by exercise and healthy diet; lung capacity increases with aerobic training. Elderly people who remain physically and intellectually active suffer much less decline in their mental functioning than their more passive contemporaries.
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Early in life, plasticity, the responsiveness of the human brain to changing conditions, is so great that infants who suffer damage to one side of their brain about the time of birth, even if they lose an entire hemisphere, may compensate for the deficit.2 The other half develops so that these children grow up to have nearly symmetrical facial movements and only a mild or moderate limp. With age, plasticity declines, but it is never completely lost. Neurological adaptability even in adulthood may be seen in the recovery many people make from a stroke. In a cerebrovascular accident, or stroke, brain tissue is destroyed, usually because of bleeding. Although nerve cells that have died will not come back to life, often the patient will, in weeks or months, be able to use again a limb that was paralyzed by the stroke. New circuits have taken over, new connections have been made. “Under normal conditions ‘growth’ may be a characteristic of the brain throughout life,” writes the physician and neuroscientist Francine Benes.3
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One way neurological circuits change is by the strengthening or weakening of synapses, the connections between nerve cells. “Since different experiences cause synaptic strengths to vary within and across many neural systems, experience shapes the design of circuits,” observes the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. “As a result, the design of brain circuits continues to change. The circuits are not only receptive to the results of first experience, but [are] repeatedly pliable and modifiable by continued experience.”
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The strength of synapses is influenced by many factors, including the frequency of their use or disuse, or the composition of body chemistry from one situation to the next. Circuits are also weakened or enhanced by other circuits that may interfere with their functions or assist them. We see this in attention deficit disorder when the same child is able to attend to a subject in one type of environment but is unable to concentrate on the same topic in another. This situationality of ADD reflects the input of emotions, which play a powerful role in attention.
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As we know, in ADD the cortex does not exercise firm enough control over the arousal and emotion-generating centers in the lower brain areas. Dr. Benes points out that important linkages between the cortex and these emotional centers continue to mature “as late as the sixth decade.… [This] suggests that human behavior may involve, at least in part, a progressive integration of cognition with emotion.” Integration of cognition with emotion—the melding of what we know with what we feel—is the very integration the healing process in ADD requires. Lack of it underlies the fragmentation of the ADD mind.
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According to Carl Rogers, the healing process relies on the basic trustworthiness of human nature.6 It is a false belief that the human child is an egotistical savage needing to be tamed. Infants do go through a phase of complete narcissism when they have no sense of any experience or point of view other than their own and see the world only in terms of their own needs. This is a natural stage, a part of development, reflecting only the wants of the helpless young human being. It is a phase we outgrow, or become stuck in, depending on circumstances. The child will attain maturity, compassion and the capacity for focused effort if the conditions for development are provided. Many times, dealing with an ADD child seems utterly impossible. The understandable desire of parents is for point-by-point advice: What do I do in this situation? How do I handle that? Important as such questions are, they are secondary. The answers to them depend on how one interprets the child’s behaviors and on what the long-term objectives are. What we want to promote is not a mere change of behavior but a transformation of inner experience leading to the development of self-regulation.
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Every child with ADD has been wounded by a disruption in the relationship between the caregiver and the sensitive infant. All the behaviors and mental patterns of attention deficit disorder are external signs of the wound, or inefficient defenses against feeling the pain of it. If development is to take place, energy has to be liberated for growth that now is consumed in protecting the self from further hurt. The key factor is cementing the attachment relationship. Science tells us that not even in rodents can the link between emotions and mental organization be ignored. In her Berkeley laboratory, Dr. Marian Cleeves Diamond found improvements in the problem-solving capacity of rats treated with tender loving care corresponding with the growth of richer connections in their cortex. “Thus, it is important to stimulate the portion of the brain that initiates emotional expression,” Dr. Cleeves Diamond writes. “Satisfying emotional needs is essential at any age.”7
Note: Wonder if you can derive that same love from yourself
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People readily see that the angel was savior to Moses. Even though he caused his ward to be maimed, under the circumstances Gabriel had no alternative. Guilt plays the same survival role. It is a guardian. When the adult world requires, even if inadvertently, that an infant or child suppress parts of her true self—her own desires, feelings and preferences—she has to develop some internal mechanisms that would automatically force her to comply. The penalty of not doing so is to suffer the anxiety of disappointing the parent, of feeling cut off from the parent. Guilt comes along as one of these internal mechanisms. It guides the child’s hand away from the onyx stone, her own core impulses, and has her bring to her mouth the coal of fire—feelings acceptable to the parent. The child is hurt, but the indispensable relationship with the parent is preserved.
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Guilt is obsessively single-minded, knowing only one stimulus and only one response. The stimulus is this: you, child or adult, wish to do something for yourself that may disappoint someone else. This could be a true misdeed, such as stealing, or a human desire to act in accordance with your core impulses, perhaps by expressing a genuine feeling the parent cannot tolerate in you. Guilt does not know the difference. It hurls at you the same epithet for both misdeed and self-expression: selfish. It also cannot discriminate between past and present. In place of your present-day interactions—with spouse, friend, doctor, butcher, baker, computer maker—it sees only your early relationships with your caregivers.