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Calming Effect of Relationships

October 26, 2023Uncategorized
Calming relationships

During COVID, my wife and I, like many people, went for a daily walk in our neighbourhood. Over time, we would see the same people and say hi to them. It was a pleasant experience to have even a stranger smile and say hello. Of course, I wondered what the biological significance of this reaction could be. I decided that my body was getting "it's safe here" signals from other bodies.

It's not a giant evolutionary leap to come to that conclusion. We can instantly (within milliseconds) assess whether the incoming sights and sounds are a threat. Smiling faces would signal "non-threat" and even "more safety," depending on the situation.

Handling Conflict

October 18, 2023Uncategorized
Handling conflict

Most of us avoid conflict for the wrong reasons. We perceive or “feel” that it’s going to be bad for us. A situation feels uncomfortable often because of what think may happen versus what is actually happening at the moment. Conflict threatens us, not because of the conflict itself, but because of what it might represent. The idea of conflict can mean different things to different people. We have different stories or beliefs about what conflict means, what we should or shouldn’t do around conflict, and how much we should avoid it. I think it’s useful to unpack some thinking about conflict, as this can help one handle conflict better.

The Well Differentiated Company

September 25, 2023Uncategorized
Well Run Company Stands Out

Organizations often have a personality that reflects what the leadership decides is important. But just like with individuals, what a company says it'll do and what it actually does can be very different. That difference has a lot to do with the level of differentiation of the individual. I believe the same is true for a company. This is not referring to a marketing niche that is "differentiated" from competitors. I'm talking about the ability to be emotionally separate but connected to others or the level of differentiation of self. How might a well-differentiated leader impact the behaviour of their company? In many important ways, and the ways influence each other. The list below is NOT in any order of importance.

Facts versus fiction

One characteristic of well-differentiated individuals is that they recognize subjective, feeling-based thoughts as different from objective, fact-based thoughts. They know when they are 'making up a story' about something and that it is just that, a story, an opinion. Understanding all the facts of a situation, whether they are positive or negative, is important to them. These leaders encourage their teams to share good news and bad news.

Managing Climate Anxiety

September 17, 2023Uncategorized
climage change

How would a Bowen theory perspective help one handle climate anxiety? Does a systems perspective have something special to offer? I believe it does. While climate anxiety provides a timely context, I believe a systems perspective can help with any anxiety.

Humankind's impact on the planet is real and noticeable. It is affecting millions of people. The impact is also emotional, as it is a threat on many levels. For example, in British Columbia, we have dealt with fires, floods, heat, and air quality. We have had acute events that have had real and lasting effects.

Origins of Emotional Programming.

August 22, 2023Uncategorized
Approach Orienting

The previous post discussed the calming cycle theory by Welch and Ludwig. Welch's study demonstrated that an adaptive emotional connection could be regained in premature infants and mothers. They could measure this based on an automatic calming effect on both. But how does this happen naturally?

Effect of person: emotional programming?

An insight into how individuals learn came from prior research on dog behaviour. Pavlov and Gantt studied animal behaviour using dogs, and part of this work involved making dogs anxious. However, they noticed that if the dog's handler petted it, its heart rate would slow. After repeated petting sessions, a dog would become conditioned to have a lower heart rate in the handler's presence. This calming effect was so distinct that they called it the "effect of person." This was not a top-down cognitive process, so what was going on? Is this a type of emotional programming?

Calming Cycle Theory and Emotional Programming

August 15, 2023Uncategorized

New research has found important linkages between mothers at the autonomic nervous system level. This is part of our nervous system that is outside of our awareness. The linkage process starts in the womb and continues after birth. This process affects the mother's well-being and the infant's development. It's also systems theory in action.

The medical process has had increasing success in helping premature infants survive and develop. This has also created a natural experiment to study what happens when the normal gestation period is interrupted. Some mothers and infants do well, and others do not. Dr. Welch and others have wanted to understand what leads to different outcomes. Welch and Ludwig propose two ideas to explain the difference in outcomes. These are a) the Calming Cycle Theory and b) the Autonomic Socioenotional Reflex (ASR). I'll discuss the ASR in the next blog post.

Calming Cycle as Co-Regulation

The authors believe that a process of co-regulation begins in the womb, which forms an emotional connection between mother and infant. It is a co-regulation connection that promotes behaviours that have been thought to be innate mothering and infant behaviours. If the normal process occurs, as with full-term births, the mother and infant have learned to orient and approach each other automatically. This "innate" behaviour fosters caring, feeding, and a calming response in both the mother and infant.
Over the years, Welch has observed that premature birth can disrupt this approach-orienting behaviour. This can create an avoidance non-orienting behaviour, leading to distress in both the mother and infant. It then becomes a negative cycle for both the mother and child. However, Welch observed the approach-orienting behaviours of mothers and infants and developed an intervention to help correct avoidance-orienting situations. This is based on what she calls the Calming Cycle Theory and Family Nurture Intervention.

Calming Cycle Re-Programmed - Family Nurture Intervention

The Family Nurture Intervention comprises sessions where the mother and infant ( as soon as possible ) have skin-to-skin contact, soothing talk, eye contact, and odour contact. Over a period of repeated one-hour sessions, the mother and child's physiology calms down. Over time, the calming effect is automatic for both. This strengthens the approach-orienting behaviour and creates an adaptive emotional connection between the two. It also sets up the infant for socialization with others.
In 2016, Welch proposed that "this early introduction of repeated mother-infant sensory interactions is expected to alleviate maternal depression, anxiety, and guilt as well as lessen infant aversion to contact that stems from both separation/isolation and the many stressful medical procedures performed as life-saving interventions."
Follow-up research based on this approach has found:
  • significantly improved FNI maternal caregiving behaviors at 36 weeks (Hane et al., 2015)
  •  decreased maternal depressive and anxiety symptoms in infants assessed at 4 months of age (Welch, Hal- perin et al., 2016).
  •  FNI infants showed highly significant increases in EEG power and decreases in EEG coherence at term age in frontal areas associated with socio-emotional outcomes that predict improved out- comes (Hane et al., 2015; Myers et al., 2015; Welch, Myers et al., 2014).
  •  FNI infants also showed significantly improved social relatedness, attention, neurodevelopment, and decreased risk for autism spectrum disorder at 18 months corrected age (Welch et al., 2015, from Welch 2017)

Emotional Connection - the start of Emotional Programming?

Welch and Ludwig propose a new construct, called emotional connection, to help explain their observations and results. Dr. Bowen used the term "emotional contact" when he wrote about relationships. He wrote that when two individuals could freely share their thoughts, hopes, fears, and dreams, they had good emotional contact. Fear of rejection and criticism often prevents people from experiencing emotional contact.  Welch wrote the following about establishing a good emotional connection:
"When the mother keeps this wide array of feelings to herself, there is an emotional barrier between her and her infant. Many mothers are reluctant to allow open expression of their emotions for fear the strong negative content will negatively impact the infant. However, when the prosody of strong emotion is conveyed by the mother in her native language (i.e. the language spoken to her by her mother as a baby), we often observe a positive response; most commonly, the infants become alert and make eye contact.."
By keeping a "wide array of feelings to" oneself, individuals, like the mothers in Welch's interventions, prevent the experience of good emotional contact. This is an aspect of not being able to define oneself in relationships, which can lead to negative outcomes. I think a healthy development process establishes good emotional connections, which lay the foundation for good emotional contact later in life.
Calming Cycle Theory is based on the concept of co-conditioning at the level of the autonomic nervous system.  The authors propose the idea of an Autonomic Socioemotional Reflex to explain this.  This is the topic of the next post.

Thank you for your interest in family systems.

The three body problem

July 26, 2023Uncategorized

How does a Bowen theory perspective inform the "terror of threes?"

Three major nuclear powers instead of two. Apparently, this is a big problem. Why? According to physics, "the three-body problem" is almost impossible to solve. Thus the title of the New York Times article "The Terror of Threes." But people aren't planets, so could a human systems model provide some insight? I think it can.

un-intelligence

July 16, 2023emotional system
un-intelligence is head in the sand thinking

How does intelligence get stupid?

How is it that politicians can get involved with affairs, misuse funds, and promote false information? Many politicians have degrees from prestigious universities, so they clearly are NOT unintelligent or uneducated. In today's world of conspiracy theories, alternate facts, and outright lies, how can one think about this process from a systems perspective?

Perceptions Matter

April 23, 2023Anxiety, emotional system
perception of social threats activate social genonmic networks

Perceptions matter - just ask your genes!

A newer field of study in biology is called social genomics. It is the study of how and when different genes are activated based on social interactions. On one level, it is very obvious that relationships affect our physiology. We can get anxious if someone is angry with us, which would show up as an increase in cortisol in our blood. But the study of social genomics goes much, much further and looks at all the genes that get activated. This provides clear evidence for a physiological mechanism of how lower levels of differentiation can negatively impact health. The same mechanism provides for how higher levels of differentiation can promote health and mitigate the effects of stress.

Expectations and Emotional Demands

April 16, 2023Define self

Emotional demands and expectations go together

For most organisms, including humans, the developmental trajectory involves an individual becoming more and more capable and responsible for taking care of their own needs. Maturation is associated with the ability to function independently. As a social species, humans needed to find a partner and have children in order to survive as an extended family unit. Single families would have had a very hard time surviving on their own. This creates the need and expectation that members of the group would care for each other. A mature understanding of this recognizes the benefits and costs of interdependence so the group can survive. An immature understanding of this has unrealistic expectations of others and makes demands of others. This is pretty clear when one is talking about physical needs like food, shelter and protection that protect our physical self.