Emotional disturbance has its roots in being alone with overwhelming experiences in the earliest years of life. Emotional safety is the basis of mental health and involves not being alone with frightening experiences. Feeling cared for, loved, seen and delighted are transformative as they create a sense of ‘feeling felt’. Knowing that one exists in the heart and mind of another is at the heart of resilience.
The lack of an available caregiver to provide comfort and support may be a critical in whether an experience is traumatising. When caregivers are unable to attune to a child’s emotions it has negative impacts on development. Lack of psychological connection with painful experience is the basis of traumatic attachment. Healing, therefore, lies in restoring emotional connection in a relationship that provides a sense of safety and security in relation to earlier painful emotional experience. Secure attachment relationships are the best way to ease emotional distress from the cradle to the grave.
The adaptive capacity embedded in each emotion is thwarted when a person is left alone with difficult emotions that overwhelm one’s resources and the emotion is not processed to completion. When emotions are not regulated, they overwhelm, disorganise and feel unbearable, threatening the self. Defence mechanisms and anxiety are created to cope – survival strategies that seek to protect the self or the attachment relationship.
Emotions that are experienced as dangerous or threatening are blocked and disowned as ‘not-me’. These feelings, needs and action tendencies that go with them are cut off from conscious awareness. This means that the emotional response was never brought to a conscious level of a feeling and symbolised in language and as a result the person does not know how they were affected emotionally by an experience. Threat is now experienced in a more global generalised way. This highlights the importance of putting these old feelings into words.