The Lure Of A Module Called Psychology Safety Brought Me Into This MA: Psychological Safety Essay, NUI, Ireland

PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY COMES FROM THE INSIDE-OUT

The lure of a module called Psychology Safety brought me into this MA. I came with an agenda of un-shedding my belief “You are flawed, you are stuck in old patterns, you become carried away with yourself. Indeed, you are quite impossible in many ways. And still, you are beautiful beyond measure. For the core of what you are is fashioned out of love, that potent blend of openness, warmth, and clear, transparent presence.” ~ John Welwood. goes on to say the “core trauma is not knowing love”.

Asking myself the question: What is Psychological Safety?  Brought me to explore concepts such as Attachment, Emotional safety, Unconditional love.   Does it mean if one has it that they are operating from the inside-out, or equally if one does not have it, they are compelled to operate from the outside-in? In the co-creational approach, does it mean that one has emerged? Or In the words of Carl Rogers, does it mean one is congruent with one-self. For me, the pertinent question Is – its absence considered Psychological Trauma? Is it an interruption in my relationship with myself?

I find it necessary to look at the origins of psychological safety within ourselves before I can entertain looking at its consequences in the workplace. We bring ourselves to the workplace, therefore, it is necessary to look at who we are. Psychological safety is not like a work uniform that we can wear while in the workplace and discard once outside. It is an intricate part of who we are. For me, looking at psychological safety in the workplace was a bit proscriptive without a true understanding of its origins and implications. Therefore, I choose to take a personal perspective on it.

According to Sue Gerhardt How we are treated as babies and toddlers and the emotional experiences we have in infancy and early childhood have a measurable effect on how we develop as human beings. The kind of brain that each baby develops is the brain that comes out of his or her particular experiences with people.” Therefore, It’s not nature or nurture, but both.

The wounded warriors

Scientists study what puzzles them most. Perhaps then, it’s no surprise, that research of the fundamental relationship between infants and their mothers was started by upper-class Englishmen who grew up in boarding schools without the nurturing relationship of their mothers and families. Psychiatrists such as John Bowlby, Wilfred Bion, Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott. Each of them, in his own way, had explored how our early experiences become prototypes for all our later connections with others, and how our most intimate sense of self is created in our minute-to-minute exchanges with our caregivers. By the late 1940s, Bowlby had concluded that children’s disturbing behaviour was a response to actual life experiences—to neglect, brutality, and separation.  This was to become the origins of attachment theory.

REGULATION

THE DANCE OF ATTUNEMENT

Children become attached to whoever functions as their primary caregiver. But the nature of that attachment—whether it is secure or insecure—makes a huge difference over the course of a child’s life. Secure attachment develops when caregiving includes emotional attunement. Attunement starts at the most subtle physical levels of interaction between babies and their caretakers, and it gives babies the feeling of being met and understood

Babies can’t regulate their own emotional states, much less the changes in heart rate, hormone levels, and nervous-system activity that accompany emotions. When a child is in sync with his caregiver, his sense of joy and connection is reflected in his steady heartbeat and breathing and a low level of stress hormones. His body is calm; so are his emotions. The moment this music is disrupted—as it often is in the course of a normal day—all these physiological factors change as well. You can tell equilibrium has been restored when the physiology calms down. A secure attachment combined with the cultivation of competency builds an internal locus of control, the key factor in healthy coping throughout life.

Donald Winnicott, -a pediatrician, and psychoanalyst gave us his studies on attunement. He proposed that physical interactions lay the groundwork for a baby’s sense of self—and, with that, a lifelong sense of identity.

Winnicott coined the phrase the “good enough mother.” As in most mothers do just fine. But he stated that things can go seriously wrong when mothers are unable to tune in to their baby’s physical reality. If a mother cannot meet her baby’s impulses and needs, “the baby learns to become the mother’s idea of what the baby is.” Having to discount its inner sensations, and trying to adjust to its caregiver’s needs, means the child perceives that “something is wrong” with the way it is. Children who lack physical attunement are vulnerable to shutting down the direct feedback from their bodies.

DISSOCIATION: KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING

Lyons-Ruth She found a “striking and unexpected” relationship between maternal disengagement and misattunement during the first two years of life and dissociative symptoms in early adulthood

But if your caregivers ignore your needs, or resent your very existence, you learn to anticipate rejection and withdrawal. You cope as well as you can by blocking out your mother’s hostility or neglect and act as if it doesn’t matter, but your body is likely to remain in a state of high alert, prepared to ward off blows, deprivation, or abandonment. Dissociation means simultaneously knowing and not knowing.

Bowlby wrote: “What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.” If you cannot tolerate what you know or feel what you feel, the only option is denial and dissociation.

Karlen’s research showed that dissociation is learned early: Later abuse or other traumas did not account for dissociative symptoms in young adults.

Early attachment patterns create the inner maps that chart our relationships throughout life, not only in terms of what we expect from others, but also in terms of how much comfort and pleasure we can experience in their presence. Our relationship maps are implicit, etched into the emotional brain, and not reversible simply by understanding how they were created.

Sue Gerhardt’s book Why Love Matters shows that early experience has effects on the development of both brain and personality. She’s interested in the connection between the kind of love we receive in infancy and the kind of people we turn into. Who we are is inscribed into our brains during the first two years of life in direct response to how we are loved and cared for.

Our earliest experiences are not simply laid down as memories or influences, they are translated into precise physiological patterns of response in the brain that then set the neurological rules for how we deal with our feelings and those of other people for the rest of our lives.

The Stress Hormone

 Human babies, like all mammals, are born wired for survival, but uniquely, we are wired to do so through other people. Interaction, it turns out, is the high road from merely human to fully humane. The key point is that babies can’t regulate their stress response on their own but learn to do so only through repeated experiences of being rescued, or not, from their distress by others. Through positive interactions, the baby learns that people can be relied upon to respond to its needs, and the baby’s brain learns to produce only beneficial amounts of cortisol. Baseline levels of cortisol are pretty much set by six months of age.

The key player in this unfolding drama turns out to be a hormone called cortisol. When a baby is upset, the hypothalamus, situated in the subcortex at the center of the brain, produces cortisol. In normal amounts cortisol is fine, but if a baby is exposed for too long or too often to stressful situations (such as being left to cry) its brain becomes flooded with cortisol and it will then either over-or under-produce cortisol whenever the child is exposed to stress. Too much is linked to depression and fearfulness, too little to emotional detachment and aggression. Children of alcoholics have a raised cortisol level, as do children of very stressed mothers.

When working well, attunement enables a child to feel truly understood, accepted, and ‘felt’ by their caregiver.