“If your parents’ faces never lit up when they looked at you, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be loved and cherished.
If you come from an incomprehensible world filled with secrecy and fear, it’s almost impossible to find the words to express what you have endured.
If you grew up unwanted and ignored, it is a major challenge to develop a visceral sense of agency and self-worth.”Bessel van der Kolk – The Body Keeps the Score
As I mentioned in the last post, I have recently attended the conference “Transform Trauma – Healing our relational world”, and I wanted to share some nuggets of what I have learned, as well as some of my own thoughts.
Today I will try to ease you into this topic and talk about the “Still Face Experiment” led by Ed Tronick (what a name).
In the following weeks, I plan to cover:
- Trauma as a hidden epidemic
- Somatic therapy and embodiment in trauma treatment
- Psychedelics and IFS therapy
When we think of trauma, we typically think of what is referred to as big T trauma, which describes trauma caused by singular, overwhelming events such as experiences with violence, sexual abuse, natural disasters, or other life-threatening situations.
Small t trauma, on the other hand, encompasses more frequent, distressing, but non-life-threatening experiences such as bullying, emotional abuse or neglect, or prolonged stress.
Both of these types of trauma are valid and can lead to significant psychological effects, including anxiety, depression, and difficulties forming healthy relationships. As Matthias Barker, one of the speakers at the conference, put it:
“You can die from a single blow, but you can die just as well by a thousand cuts.”
The Still Face Experiment is a perfect illustration of the severity of small t trauma and can give us an idea of how responsive children are to their needs being neglected. Have a look — it’s a 2 min video.
In this video, you first see a baby playing with his mother. He is engaged and excited, he laughs, smiles, and plays. The baby reaches out to the mother and they touch; he points somewhere, and his mother looks to where he points. There is a clear bond between the two, and the baby’s emotional needs are being met. He is clearly comfortable and happy.
In the second part of the video, you see the same mother look at the baby with a still face for a prolonged period of time. The baby tries everything he can to engage his mother. He smiles at her. He reaches out to her. Quickly he becomes confused and avoids eye contact, but he still attempts to regain her emotional attention by pointing where he previously pointed, hoping to receive the same reaction as before.
He tries all the things that usually lead to a reaction from his mother. When he realizes that nothing seems to gain her attention, he panics. He starts crying, and his nervous system gets so overwhelmed that he fully collapses into himself. He then withdraws and does not try to regain his mother’s attention anymore or to establish connection.
It’s important to note that the relationship between infants and parents, even at these early stages, is already dyadic. Infants already have needs and desires, goals and intentions. They need to make sense of themselves, their relationships, and their environment — and they need attachment for that. The baby’s panic in Tronick’s video is not only about separation — it’s a rupture of the self.
As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously stated:
“In individual emotional development, the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.”
When the mother’s face goes blank, the infant loses that mirror — the reflection that confirms, I am real, I exist, and I can impose myself on the world. Since there is no one to look back in this situation, the child loses himself and his agency, which is experienced as a threat to his safety.
John Bowlby – father of attachment theory – helps explain why. The caregiver is not just an emotional figure; they are the infant’s entire regulation system. Infants make meaning by using all the bits of their brain that they already have, which are different neuro-somatic, embodied systems. Meaning is thus made without awareness, language, or symbols, but co-created within the relationship to the caregiver and their own bodies.
When the attachment to the mother is severed, the baby’s body reads it as danger and reacts accordingly. We also see, at the very end of the video, that the mother manages to reestablish connection. She starts to engage with the child, and within seconds they are playing once more, and the baby looks visibly happy and relieved.
However, when you confront the baby with the Still Face a second time, one day later, their cortisol levels are still raised, and they experience even more arousal and stress than the first time, despite the fact that reparation has taken place.
These memory effects, of the bad experience, last up to two weeks, meaning that a mere two minutes of exposure still have an impact on the child when re-exposed two weeks later. Considering how comparatively unproblematic it is to look at a still face for two minutes, it becomes clear how big of an impact emotional abuse and neglect can have on children, especially when it occurs frequently.
Another experiment led by Ed Tronick underlines the immense sensitivity children have to the emotional state of their caregivers. They primed one group of mothers with sounds of babies crying before they interacted with their children, while making the other group listen to babies making happy noises — attempting to induce stress as well as relaxation.
More than half of the babies of the “stressed mothers” group cried during the next interaction with their mothers, while in the group with the happy noises, only one child cried. Tronick and his colleagues couldn’t find any physiological or behavioral differences between the different groups of mothers, despite trying for six months.
It lead them to the conclusion that children are more susceptible to slight changes in their caregivers’ demeanor than is observable or measurable by “a number of brilliant researchers,” as he put it.
Considering that these experiments already induced visible and measurable stress in the infants we are ought to ask ourselves: What if this stress is not just induced once or twice in the environment of a lab setting, but is a reoccurring or constant reality at home?
When caregivers have dulled emotional capacity and expression due to depression, alcoholism, or chronic stress, it is impossible for children not to be affected by it. When they create an unsafe, volatile home through verbal abuse, neglect, or emotional absence, the child is experiencing this as constant distress.
Distress, according to Tronick “wastes” energy that could better be utilized for growth and development. The calm state uses 5-6 times less energy than the distressed state.
Furthermore, the child needs to learn how to navigate this unsafe environment. It is repeatedly faced with the choice of either authentically expressing their emotions or maintaining their need for attachment and safety. They learn that love can be withdrawn and connection is volatile and can vanish and they realize that expressing certain emotions makes the caregiver uncomfortable or angry, and they adapt accordingly.
The child learns to adapt by becoming what Winnicott called a false self — a version of themselves designed to keep connection and safety at all cost. But by learning to suppress their anger, sadness and frustration, they lose connection to their true self. They start living in their heads and with a highly edited version of themselves, instead of their bodies. The problem is, we cannot escape our own nervous systems by simply ignoring them or thinking our way out of it.
These suppressions often still find an outlet — a jaw that tightens, a stomach that knots, a throat that closes, or a heavy chest. What was once a child’s adaptive silence becomes an adult’s chronic tension as the body keeps rehearsing the conversations the mouth never had. Over time, this disowned energy can surface as anxiety, irritability, fatigue, or even physical pain and illness — the nervous system’s way of saying, “I’m still here and I’m not doing so great.”
As Bessel van der Kolk often reminds us – and as the title of his book declares – “the body keeps the score”.
Dealing with trauma and working through it is essential not only for ourselves, but also for the generations that follow. Those who carry unresolved trauma often struggle to provide the safety and attunement they never received, and this is how patterns of pain repeat across generations and the trauma of cycle is passed down.
Now this might sound like a typical “therapy for all” argument, and I don’t discount the fact that good therapy would probably be able to alleviate at least some of the burden carried by many people and help them become more attuned, flexible, and healthy. However, I also think that it demands us to take a closer look at the conditions we live in, and how much they help to reproduce these cycles of trauma.
Stanley Greenman a famous child psychologist put it this way:
“If our society were truly to appreciate the significance of children’s emotional ties throughout the first years of life, it would no longer tolerate children growing up or parents having to struggle in situations which could not possibly nourish healthy growth.”
Stanley Greenman
In the next post “Trauma as a hidden epidemic” I want to discuss the prevalence and significance of trauma in our society and what we could do about it – on both an individual and a systemic level.
Thanks for reading,
Mats
Inspiration:
- Ed Tronick
- Bessel van der Kolk
- Donald Winnicott
- John Bowlby
- Stanley Greenman