The key developmental tasks of childhood are learning to relate (communicate) and regulate. These are also two sides of the same coin – healthy relationships are one of the main resources for regulation that humans have evolved to draw on.
This is particularly critical in the first two years of life when the capacities to relate and regulate are developed most intensely. The mother or primary caregiver is an external psychobiological regulator or ‘auxiliary cortex’ (The cortex being a higher part of the brain that develops connections with the lower parts and helps them regulate.
A ‘growth-promoting’ early environment is one in which an infant receives consistent, responsive care from an attuned caregiver. The attachment bond in these relationships is inevitably ‘ruptured’ from time to time through ‘misattunements’ in which the caregiver does not pick up the signals of infant and respond appropriately. These ruptures cause the infant to enter a dysregulated state, in which the experience of a dysregulated self-with-a-misattuning-other is encoded in procedural memory, if these episodes are prolonged and remain unresolved. However, if the caregiver repairs this rupture by reattuning to the infant and re-regulating them, the episode can serve as a building block of resilience. In this case the infant encodes the expectation that moving from positive affect to negative affect will be followed by positive affect again.