The importance of love - Power of Love

[Amor Vincit Omnia]

The need to be loved, as Bowlby’s and others’ experiments have shown, could be considered one of our most basic and fundamental needs. One of the forms that the need to be loved love takes is contact comfort—the desire to be held and touched. Findings show that babies who are deprived contact comfort, particularly during the first six months after they are born, grow up to be psychologically damaged.

I read the classic works of paediatrician Harry Bakwin, psychologist John Bowlby and psychiatrist Harry Edelston. At the beginning of the 20th century, in the US and the UK, the death rates among infants placed in orphanages, nurseries, and foundling hospitals were, in some cases, close to 100%. London’s Foundling Museum documents in depth these harsh realities. In the 1940s, the work of psychoanalyst Rene Spitz further documented high infant death rates (one out of three) and, among the babies who didn’t die, high percentages of cognitive, behavioural and psychological disfunction.

Most of these deaths were not due to starvation or disease, but to severe emotional and sensorial deprivation – in other words, a lack of love. These babies were fed and medically treated, but they were absolutely deprived of important stimulation, especially touch and affection.

Emotional Deprivation Disorder

Emotional Deprivation Disorder was first discovered by Dutch psychiatrist Dr. Anna A. Terruwe in the 1950’s. She called it the frustration neurosis (De frustratie neurose in Dutch; Deprivation Neurosis when translated into the English language by her colleague, Dr. Conrad W. Baars), as it has to do with the frustration of the natural sensitive need for unconditional love. Dr. Terruwe found that a person could exhibit symptoms of an anxiety disorder or repressive disorder when these symptoms, in fact, were not the result of repression, but rather the result of a lack of unconditional love in early life. Emotional Deprivation Disorder is a syndrome (a grouping of symptoms) which results from a lack of authentic affirmation and emotional strengthening by another. A person may have been criticized, ignored, abandoned, neglected, abused, or emotionally rejected by primary caregivers early in life, resulting in the person’s arrested emotional development. Just like children, unaffirmed persons are incapable on their own of developing into emotionally mature adults until they receive authentic affirmation from another person. However, while unaffirmed persons cannot affirm themselves, there is much they can do to help themselves. Maturity is reached when there is a harmonious integration between a person’s intellect, will and emotions and under the guidance of their reason and will.

Unloved in Childhood: 10 Common Effects on Your Adult Self

Insecure attachment
A loving and attuned mother raises a child who feels understood and supported; she learns that relationships are stable and caring, that the world is a place of opportunity to be explored, that people take care of you. She has a secure base.

The child of an emotionally unreliable mother—sometimes there and sometimes not—understands that relationships are fraught and precarious, and that nothing is guaranteed. She grows up anxiously attached, hungry for connection but always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The child with a mother who’s withheld or combative learns to armor herself, to be as self-reliant as she can be; she is avoidant in her attachment style. While the securely attached daughter seeks out intimacy, her avoidant counterpart wants no part of it; the anxiously attached daughter seeks it out but can never find her footing since she’s terrified of rejection.

These patterns of attachments arc into adulthood and affect friendships and romantic liaisons alike.

Undeveloped emotional intelligence
A child learns what she’s feeling through dyadic interaction; a mother’s gestures and words teach the baby to self-soothe when she’s stressed or uncomfortable. Later, the mother will play a key role in helping her daughter articulate her feelings, name them, and learn to manage her fears and negative emotions.

The insecurely attached daughter doesn’t learn to regulate her emotions; she’s either engulfed by them or walled off from them. Both insecure styles of attachments get in the way of naming emotions and using them to inform thought—key aspects of emotional intelligence.

Impaired sense of self
A mother’s face is the first mirror in which a daughter catches a glimpse of herself. The attuned and loving mother’s face reflects acceptance, communicating, “You are you and you are just fine as you are.” The unloving mother’s face reflects supposed flaws and inadequacies; if the daughter is shunned or ignored, she absorbs the lesson that she’s not worth dealing with or, if she’s constantly criticized, she thinks she’ll never be good enough.

Few unloved daughters see themselves with any clarity at all, especially if they’ve been scapegoated in the family.

Lack of trust
To trust others, you must believe that the world is essentially a safe place and the people in it well-intentioned, if sometimes imperfect. With an emotionally unreliable mother or one who is combative or hypercritical, the daughter learns that relationships are unstable and dangerous, and that trust is ephemeral and can’t be relied on. Unloved daughters have trouble trusting in all relationships but especially friendship.

Difficulties with boundaries
The attuned mother teaches her baby that there’s healthy space and breathing room even in close relationships; she doesn’t intrude into her baby’s space, forcing her to interact when she’s not ready. Her behavior reflects the understanding that there’s an area of overlap but that each person in the dyad is whole unto herself.

The avoidant daughter sees any overlap as too close and intrusive; she prefers to interact on more superficial levels so that her independence is never threatened. This tends to be a response to either a mother’s intrusiveness or unreliability. The anxious daughter doesn’t understand healthy space and mistakes a friend’s or partner’s need for boundaries as rejecting. She wrongly believes that being subsumed is a synonym for love.

Choosing toxic friends and partners
We all seek out the familiar (see the shared root with the word family?) which is just dandy if you have a secure base, and definitely less than optimal if you’re an unloved daughter. The chances are good that, initially at least, you’ll be attracted to those who treat you as your mother did—a familiar comfort zone that offers no comfort. Until you begin to recognize the ways in which you were wounded in childhood, the chances are good that you’ll continue to recreate the emotional atmosphere you grew up with in your adult relationships.

Dominated by fear of failure
No one likes to fail, of course, but a securely attached daughter is unlikely to see a setback or even a failure as defining her self-worth or as proof positive of some basic flaw in her character. She’ll be bruised but she’s more likely to understand her failure as a consequence of having set the bar high in the first place.

That’s absolutely not true of the unloved daughter who will take any rejection or failure as a sign that her mother was right about her after all. She remains highly motivated to avoid failing at any cost, often to her own detriment; many unloved daughters are chronic under-achievers as a result.

Feelings of isolation
Because the culture stubbornly believes that all mothers are loving and that mothering is instinctual, the unloved daughter mistakenly believes she’s the only child on the planet to find herself in this predicament. As a result, she feels isolated and afraid, and is likely to continue to self-isolate because of her deep shame. She’s not likely to tell anyone. More than anything, she wants to belong to the tribe—those girls who hug their moms and laugh with them.

Extreme sensitivity
Fear of rejection often dominates the daughter’s inner world because she’s afraid of more proof and evidence that her mother is right and that she really is worthless and unlovable. Her sensitivity is only increased by the likelihood that her mother and others accuse her of being “too sensitive”—the most common “explanation” of verbal abuse offered up by abusers.

Conflicted
What I call the core conflict—the daughter’s continuing hardwired need for her mother’s love and support versus her growing recognition of how her mother has wounded her—can dominate a daughter’s life well into adulthood. It feeds her confusion, insecurity, and inner turmoil.

Psychopaths
Some research shows that there may be a genetic factor that results in a behavioral predisposition to violence (White, 2001). However, no single gene that causes aggression or violence has been isolated. Several studies have associated psychological disorders associated with aggression back through ancestry. There are more various psychopathologies in the families of young patients with borderline personality disorders than in control group families. It was also observed that a group of children with criminal and/or socially maladapted parents had abnormally elevated levels of social delinquency and aggression. The researchers that conducted these studies conclude that both genetics and environment play a role in violent behavior, “bad seeds [i.e. products of violence-predetermining genetics] blossom in bad [i.e. negligent, abusive, or violence-glamorizing] environments” (as quoted by White, 2001

https://blogs.psychcentral.com/careg...tached-parent/




About the kid in the video:
After therapy and a great deal of love, she is now a perfectly healthy adult that works tirelessly to help others.

For those who want to learn more about the importance of love in a child's early years, I suggest that you take a look at Harlow's monkey experiments. Very similar.

Love Matters

[Amor Vincit Omnia]

Neuroscientists at the University of California proved that desired and unwanted children differ from each other not only mentally, but also physiologically. The lack of parental love leads to the fact that abandoned babies’ brain develops more slowly and is smaller than that of the children, surrounded by care and attention.

American researchers came to this conclusion by conducting an experiment with three-year-olds that grew in different conditions: some had many loving relatives, others grew up in an orphanage and had to fend for themselves.

Scientists made brain scans of all the kids. The diagnostics showed that orphanage children in comparison to the “home children” have not enough volume in the areas responsible for intelligence, social adjustment, and compassion for others.

The study’s authors claim that parental love has a huge impact on the child, especially in its first two years of life. Mums and dads (and not only them) should remember that their close people should be treated the same way you want them to treat you. Therefore, if you leave a little child to fend for himself or herself, it should be no surprise that he or she will grow up a lonely wolf.

[Amor Vincit Omnia]

What's the difference between these two brains?
They both belong to three-year-olds, so why is one so much bigger? Because one was loved by its parents and the other neglected – a fact that has dramatic implications

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...wo-brains.html

[Amor Vincit Omnia]

https://childalone.wordpress.com/201...-by-the-loved/

https://childalone.wordpress.com/201...nd-leaves-her/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...d-s-well-being

http://www.michaelsamsel.com/Content..._syndrome.html

http://www.jasmincori.com/long-term-effects-of-neglect/

Yet there was a time when child care “experts” and grandparents would advise that the best way to treat your baby is to let her cry so she can learn to be tough, leave her alone so she can be independent, and not respond to her signals because it would spoil her.

Studies including that by Harlow in the 1950’s and the more recent one by Kim Bard of University of Portsmouth in England have proven these advices to be wrong. Their experiments with chimps have shown that those that are deprived of attachment turn out to be “nutty” and intellectually inferior to those who were given motherly love.

http://www.raisesmartkid.com/pre-nat...our-baby-smart

http://healthland.time.com/2010/09/2...r-kinder-kids/

-----------

Most people don’t need science to appreciate the importance of a mother’s love. But to understand how early maltreatment can derail a child’s development requires careful study — and is fraught with ethical peril.

Such research is therefore often conducted in animals. A new analysis of data on 231 rhesus macaque monkeys explored the effects of three early-childhood conditions on the animals’ later lives. About half of the monkeys were raised normally by their mothers, living in social groups with other monkeys — a condition similar to their natural environment.

One quarter of the monkeys were reared in a nursery without their mothers until day 37, when they were placed in groups of four other monkeys of a similar age.

The final group was also nursery-raised at first, but then these babies were transferred to a cage, where they spent most of their time, with a hot water bottle covered in terrycloth. (Two hours a day, these monkeys were allowed to interact with other monkeys their age.) The condition was similar to that used in the well-known “cloth mother” primate experiments by Harry Harlow, which had previously demonstrated that proper psychological and physical development of infants requires nurturing and attention from a parent, not just the provision of food and water. In that research, socially isolated monkey babies that were removed from their mothers were found to prefer clinging to a cloth-covered surrogate mother for comfort, rather than a harsh wire sculpture, even when only the metal mother provided bottles of milk.

(MORE: Never Wake a Sleeping Baby: Why Depressed Moms Don’t Follow that Advice)

While such experimentation sounds cruel, this type of research has been critical in helping change policies in human orphanages that had for centuries treated infants equally inhumanely. Despite early evidence that orphanage infants were far more likely to die than others, proponents argued that it didn’t matter whether children had “parents” specially devoted to them at the orphanage, claiming that simply feeding and changing them appropriately would be adequate until adoptive parents were found. Babies, they said, couldn’t remember anyway.

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.

Still, orphanage advocates blamed pre-existing problems that had led parents to give up the children in the first place, not institutional conditions. This debate continued until researchers were allowed to randomize abandoned infants without clear birth defects to either usual orphanage care or foster care from birth. (To mitigate the thorny ethics of the study, adoption was encouraged as early as possible for the orphanage-assigned kids, even though that could have potentially weakened the findings.)

Nonetheless, the study showed that the children who were placed in foster care developed normally, with appropriate head sizes, and less distress, better attentional skills and a 9-point higher IQ on average, compared with children sent to orphanages. Follow-up studies found that the orphanage-raised group was more than twice as likely to develop mental illness, compared with those who’d been in foster care. More than 50% of the orphanage group was diagnosed with at least one mental illness.

(PHOTOS: One Family’s Experiment with Attachment Parenting)

Only after this research was published in 2007 did Romania change its policies, though there are still some countries that continue to place abandoned infants in these dangerous settings. Because the problem persists, and also because other early child abuse and neglect can replicate such situations, ongoing study of what harms children in early childhood and what helps their recovery is needed.

In the new research, the monkeys remained in the various rearing conditions — with their mothers, with peers or mainly isolated — until they were about six months old. That’s the human equivalent of age 3 — when the brain is developing at a faster rate than at any other time in postnatal life.

After the 6-month period, the monkeys were placed in a mixed social group, comparable to the normal conditions for their species. They were studied when they were about 1 year old.

The results differed by gender, an effect also seen in humans suffering from child maltreatment. Male monkeys reared in isolation were nearly twice as likely to come down with physical illnesses as those reared by their mothers or with peers. They were also more than five times as likely to show stereotyped behavior, the repetitive motions similar to the rocking or head-banging seen in some cases of autism and in orphanage-reared infants. The peer-reared males were about three times more likely to engage in stereotyped behavior, compared with those raised by their mothers.

In females, surprisingly, the peer-reared group did worse than the monkeys raised in isolation. They were far more likely to be wounded and to suffer hair loss than monkeys raised by their mothers or in isolation. The researchers found that the peer-reared females were more aggressive than other monkeys, suggesting that the wounds may have resulted from fights and the hair loss from hair-pulling by others.

While the males had high levels of a stress hormone known as cortisol and low levels of the metabolite of the mood-related neurotransmitter serotonin, this difference was not seen in females. Lead author Gabriella Conti of the University of Chicago suggests that this may be because in the womb, female fetuses are also more resilient than males.

High levels of stress hormones can increase risk for both mental and physical illnesses, including depression, which also can involve low levels of serotonin.

(MORE: How to Cut Crime, Alcoholism and Addiction? It’s Not Elementary, But Preschool)

The authors conclude: “[T]he lack of a secure attachment relationship in the early years has detrimental consequences for both physical and mental health later in life, with long-lasting effects that vary by sex. The persistence of these effects after the end of treatment emphasizes the need to intervene early in life to prevent long-term damage.”

Another of the paper’s authors, the Nobel-prize-winning economist James Heckman, has long argued that investing in early childhood education provides a greater return for society than virtually any other type of spending, not only because of increased educational success and productivity, but also because of reduced crime, addiction, distress and disorder. This study, he says, “shows that early life conditions critically affect adult health. Maternal attachment plays a fundamental role in shaping who we are; remove it and the harm is great.”

Indeed, research on early interventions for at-risk families, such as the Nurse Family Partnership and the Perry Preschool Project — which, respectively, provides care for low-income mothers and babies, and offers high-quality preschool education for poor African American children — has shown significant reductions in crime and teen pregnancy, along with gains in education and employment when the children involved in the programs grow up.

It may seem obvious that an isolated, parentless toddler — with or without social contact with peers — will suffer emotionally from lack of parental love. What’s not obvious is that without devoted, repeated acts of love, a child’s brain doesn’t make the growth hormone needed for proper mental and physical development and numerous other imbalances are also created.

While we must try to spare all children, and even other primates, from being subjected to these dysfunctional early life environments, we still need to study how to best overcome them. Fortunately, children overcome troubled childhoods all the time: many children who are adopted out of harmful settings do manage to adjust and ultimately thrive. The earlier they are reached, the better they do. Comparing them with those who do not do as well — and in nonhuman primates, focusing on the resilient animals — could provide important insight into how to help.

The research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland‘s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.