Emotional Connection Theory – what is it?

Emotional Connection theory is an attempt to explain the mother infant bonding process. The authors believe that the mother infant bonding is a learned or conditional response. This learning occurs during the natural process of mother and infant interactions. The mother and newborn develop a connection by touching, looking at each other, using familiar sounds, and speaking. It is an adaptive process to have the mother and infant automatically orient and approach to each other. Based on their findings, the authors suggest that the mother and fetus develop this adaptive orientation during a full-term pregnancy. If fact, it was Dr. Welch’s work related to premature infants that let to the development of this theory.

Natural experiment of emotional connection

Dr. Welch, who has worked with infants for years, wondered why some mothers and infants did well after a premature birth while others did not. She observed some mothers did not develop a “bond” with the infant. This tended to manifest in mothers as anxiety because of having a “difficult” infant. The infants would display a non-orienting, avoidant type behavior. The infants would later have less emotional regulation and more difficulty socializing. Dr. Welch developed the Family Nurture Intervention process that can substantially restore the adaptive orienting – approach behavior (the bond). This intervention involves one-hour sessions where the mother and infant interact through smell, touch, and eye contact. Importantly, the mother talks to the infant and expresses her emotions. (Welch, et al. 2019).

Key aspects of emotional connection

This is what Dr. Welch wrote about the mother’s talking to the infant.

• “The mothers were led by the Nurture Specialist to speak directly to their infants in an emotional manner, including expression of their upset feelings about the early birth, their infant’s fragile condition, and about the hardships posed to the pair by NICU care. They were asked to speak in their native language, the emotional language spoken to them by their own mothers and family, while establishing eye contact.”

In another paper, Dr Welch expressed as follows:

• Crying is one of the deepest, most powerful, and most therapeutic emotions a mother can express to her baby in the NICU…the mother typically feels an emotional connection to her baby, most often for the first time.

Special emphasis on relationships

Another interesting aspect of the author’s work is the special emphasis on reciprocity and relationship. Both the mother and infant become conditioned to each other. They are co-regulating each other at the autonomic nervous system level and at a behavioral level. They both orient to each other and they both approach each other. It becomes so automatic that it appears to be instinctual. But that it can be disrupted and then “repaired” supports the idea that both the mother and infant learn this behavior. They learn via a Pavlovian level conditioning and not via a cognitive process, which isn’t possible for the infant.

The first stage of emotional contact

So what does this have to do with Bowen Family Systems Theory? I think it’s interesting in several ways. First, the concept of Emotional Connection is like Bowen’s concept of emotional contact. The mother is making good emotional contact with the infant. She can express anything that is meaningful and important to her child. The expression of any meaningful and important idea to is a key point in the concept of emotional contact. It would be fascinating to track reactivity in two adults over a period of six weeks of having meaningful conversations with each other. (Note – There is no trying to change the other’s thinking. Each is working to be as emotionally non-reactive as possible, while simply sharing their thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams about whatever is meaningful to them.)

Second, there is a special emphasis on the reciprocity of the relationship interactions. This is not about either the mother or the child. It’s about the relationship process.

Third, this is taking place at the level of physiology. Dr. Bowen would refer to this as the emotional system level.

An adaptive level of fusion

The term fusion often has a negative connotation when one talks about differentiation. Fusion implies that person “A” is automatically reactive to person “B”. This automatic reactivity leads to automatic behaviors that may not be thoughtful or effective. But with emotional connection, this automatic response is effective. I believe that Dr. Bowen was referring to fusion as something that represents my lack of differentiation. For example, my reduced ability to think and act for myself, while not impinging on others. Or, my ability to not change my thinking, or my principles, in order to avoid tension or conflict, or in order to gain approval.

Differentiation is a developmental process, a process of maturation, from being more fused to being far less fused and more differentiated. Thus fusion, or automatic responsiveness, isn’t all bad. Some aspects of it are adaptive.

The authors also propose an alternative to attachment theory. I’ll explore that in the next post.

Thank you for your interest in family systems.

Comments are welcome: dave.galloway@livingsystems.ca

The following articles inspired this post.

Impacts of Family Nurture Intervention

How babies learn: The autonomic socioemotional reflex

Read more about Bowen Theory here

This is a brief overview of Bowen Theory in Psychology Today: Bowen Theory.