I have never been satisfied with being yanked around by unconscious impulses. To be thrust deeply into storms and torments of which I have no understanding. The life in which we refuse to examine our nature and what drives us, is one in which we will be doomed to repeat the same pattern again, and again, and again. Coming from a dysfunctional home, I knew at a young age that I would struggle with love and attachment and that what drives love and attachment is typically not conscious to our perceptions. I also knew equally well that these were integral needs that I must meet if I were to ever find balance or be healthy. So I did the only thing that made sense to me, I learned.

Being an isolated, socially anxious, and naturally academic child, I learned in the only way that made sense to me at the time: I read. In my readings, I discovered a book called The General Theory of Love. This book was pivotal in helping me to create a framework of understanding around love. The knowledge in those pages not only shaped my ideas, they also shaped my relationships over the years. Armed with an understanding of WHY and HOW, I was able to foster an awareness in myself, and in creating this awareness, I was able to make changes I needed to be healthier, not only for my partner, but for myself as well.

Many of the lesson I learned about love will be explored in the two Different Functional episodes scheduled to be released this week! But for me, all of that knowledge started with the topic covered in A general Theory of Love: the neurobiology of love. Now I know that neurobiology can be a scary and oftentimes boring word. But it doesn’t have to be either. So I hope you will give this blog a chance. In doing so, maybe you will gain a bit of understanding into your own unconscious impulses. And in gaining this awareness, find yourself better able to write a (love) story you want to live.

Genetics & the Womb

So let’s begin at the beginning with genetics and the womb. Our genetic code will lay the groundwork for many aspects of our lives and being: height, weight, bone structure, propensity for various diseases, and likelihood of experiencing mental illness. Our experiences in the womb will further influence us. The stressors our mother experienced, her own mental and physical health, the nurturance we were or were not given as we developed. Both of these factors, genetics and “wombal” experience, will help to shape our temperament.

Essentially, our temperament can be considered the personality we pop out with. Some babies are quick to cry and fussy, others easy going and compliant. Each little baby, even moments after birth, already has a base temperament. This temperament will influence how those around the infant will react to it. It is much easier, for most of us, to give freely and love easily a being who is compliant with our wishes and easy to get along with. It is much harder to love those that scorn our attempts and who seem endlessly displeased no matter our attempts. Given this, the temperament we initially have will begin to inform our experiences of attachment and love immediately.

The Necessity of Connection

The next thing to keep in mind is that humans are designed to connect with others. If you have any doubt of this look at the concepts of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are little cells in our brains that respond to others. They are activated by the emotions and behaviors of those around us. We see someone hit with a frisbee and we recoil automatically in sympathy. We encounter a sad friend and find our own emotions are suddenly dampened. Their very existence indicates that on the physiological level, we are designed to connect with others.

Another example that many see as highlighting the human as a social creature is the universality of facial expressions. The facial expressions that reveal our emotions (smiles, grimaces, tightening or loosening of eyes) are not learned. They are built into our genetic code. Even individuals who are blind from birth will still show the same facial expressions for happiness. It doesn’t matter what culture, either. A smile is a smile worldwide. This universality of facial expressions means that a baby can begin interacting emotionally with those around it quickly. It doesn’t need to wait months or years for the development of awareness or language, it need only exist and it can already emotionally interact with its caregivers.

One of the reasons it is so vital for an infant to emotionally interact with its caregivers is because humans are not closed systems. While some of us would like to believe that every man is an island, the truth is that humans actually require others to balance their systems. This is especially true in infancy, where lack of physical contact and “love” from a caregiver can and does result in death, even if the infant’s “physical” needs are met.

One of the most well-known, and most horrifying, experiments on the importance of love/attachment came from Harry Harlow. Harlow removed newborn monkeys from their mothers, in part, to understand the importance of attachment. One of the things he discovered was that a monkey without a mother would choose a substitute that soothed it over one that fed it. When given a cold wire frame that would feed it, or a wire frame covered in terry cloth, the monkeys would choose the terry cloth. This terry cloth, though, was no true substitute. As Harlow’s study and many that followed have shown, when deprived of a caregiver that can help regulate it, an infant will at worst wither and die and at best never learn to regulate itself. Living its life in emotional and physical chaos.

This need for others does not end in childhood, though. While we learn to regulate many of our systems without external intervention and can consistently live “alone”, the human brain still typically requires others for balance. The need to which you will require others for balance will be dictated by your early experiences. It will also be influenced by the very wiring of your brain. If you are an extrovert/social, you will be more highly rewarded by social contact and more likely to NEED social contact. As you move towards the more introverted end of the scale, this NEED reduces, though I would say it is never fully eliminated in fully healthy, normative individuals.

It is actually this open-loop regulation with another human that gives rise to the feelings of homesickness, pining, and heartbreak. Without realizing it, we find ourselves using others to balance our states (physically and emotionally). When that other person is suddenly gone, it feels horrible. Imagine a breakup, the first year away from home and family, or the absence of even a few hours of a new love. What you are experiencing is, in part, literal withdrawal from that individual. Your body is reaching out again and again to them to help balance itself and is unable to find the echoing call it needs. The result is a longing, an aching, and a disarray of your emotional and physical systems.

Learning to Love

As we are first conceived, our genetic material begins informing our tendencies towards love and attachment. Once born, our temperament will begin influencing how those around us interact with us, and how they meet or fail to meet our physical needs for attachment and regulation. These early experiences, from womb to the first 2 years of our life, will be vital in informing how, and even if, we can attach to and love others.

This is where the idea of resonance begins to come into play. An infant will thrive with a caregiver who is able to resonate with the child. When an infant and caregiver are in tune, their energies, souls, emotions, brains all humming the same note, the caregiver will be able to respond quickly and effectively to meet the child’s needs. When fraying into unbalance, the child need only cry, and the caregiver is there to return balance. And, most importantly, to teach the infant what balance even means. By teaching the child to self-soothe and self-regulate, this child will become healthier and more able to securely attach to others. This child will also learn that love and attachment meet needs and create peace within. When a child is in the presence of a caregiver that is themselves unbalanced or who is unable to resonate well with the child, very different lessons will be learned, and a difficult path will likely lay ahead. Much of the data available indicates that this sense of connection and balance crucial to developing a healthy sense of love and attachment must be learned extremely early in life, if it is to be learned easily, or possibly at all.

Many theorists believe that attachment is learned during a critical or sensitive window. Critical or sensitive windows are ages or developmental periods at which are brains are primed to learn a specific concept. If the concept is not learned during this space of time, it will be impossible (if that window is critical) or very difficult (if that window was sensitive) to ever learn it later. An excellent example of this is language. Research on feral children, children from extreme traumatic beginnings, and deaf children indicated that if a child is not exposed to any form of language (spoken, written, or signed) within the critical window for learning, they will struggle with learning language when they are finally exposed and will NEVER speak fluently.

Many scientists now believe that attachment is very similar. If a child is to learn healthy (or any) attachment, they must learn it between the ages of 6 and 24 moths. I like to be hopeful and believe that this window is a sensitive one and not a critical one. Because if this window is a sensitive one, there is then hope for those that were never taught to someday learn to love. But whether it is sensitive or critical, the research indicates that children who do not learn attachment or love during this time, will struggle to ever learn it.

Part of what is happening during this crucial window of learning is the wring of the brain. The child is building roads among its neurons. These are the roads that will be traveled again and again until they may become the only roads the child knows. Every baby is born with an excessive amount of potential, that during childhood is whittled and shaped into the shape of who they will be. For example, a new born child theoretically has the ability to hear, process, and make any sound that can be created by human language. But, as the child grows, it loses this ability. It never hears these sounds made, and so the neural pathways that could lead to them are never built. They are eliminated in a process called neural pruning. Eventually leaving the child with the ability to speak, hear, and understand only those sounds of language that are familiar to it. This does not mean that it cannot later learn a second language. But it does mean that learning this language later will be much more difficult than it would have been during childhood. The brain is now REBUILDING bridges, instead of taking advantage of bridges that already exist and exert great pull over our behaviors.

The brain is set up this way, in part, because our genetics cannot predict the life we will lead. So at birth our genetics provide our brain with as much potential as possible, and allows the environment to help select and shape what is truly needed. As I have said before, the genetic expectation is that that the childhood we experience will be the world we live in. So we develop and change and grow to meet that environment. It assumes this is the story we will always live within, so it prepares us to meet the needs of the future with the data it collects in our early years.

The Brains Pathways

This means that the attachment we are exposed to as children, the degree to which a caregiver resonates and responds to us, the feelings of regulation we receive or fail to receive from others will all influence this wiring. These experiences will carve pathways into our brains, and allow other potential pathways to become so overgrown in disuse that they may as well not even exist. And, because it is a waste of energy to be “on” all the time, our brains will come to use these carved pathways instinctively. It will walk the same path again and again, even when it intends to go somewhere else. Like rutted tracks in a gravel road, you will have to fight if ever you want to turn away from the path.

https://www.golfwrx.com/303690/changing-neural-pathways-to-make-a-swing-change/

Now when it comes to emotion, and especially concepts of love and attachment, these paths are carved into us implicitly. This means we are not consciously aware of them. There is a famous case study of an individual who had severe memory impairment. Due to brain damage he could NOT create new memories. Names, faces, dates were all forgotten, never to be encoded. He lived perpetually in the now as the world aged and moved beyond him. His caretakers, though, were able to teach him to braid. They showed him again and again how to braid, a skill he had never previously known, and given his damaged memory he should not be able to remember. But he learned this skill! If you were to ask him if he knew how to braid, he would deny it. If you asked if he had ever braided, he would have no memory of ever doing so. But if you placed three strands of yarn in his hands, he could perform the task. This is implicit memory at work, it does not require conscious awareness.

Another more universal example of implicit memory not accessible to our conscious minds is yet again language. If you speak the English language, you will instinctively know that thole, plast, and fitch, while not actual English words, could be. But vlas, ptak, and nyip are not and could never be English words. You will also know that the sentence “My ball can be bounced.” is quite acceptable, but “My brother can be died.” is not. And most of us will know this with little to no grammatical education. Consciously understanding and explaining grammatical and phonological rules is possible (and arduous and once done will often be beyond the comprehension of many), but using these rules and intuitively “knowing” what feels right and what feels wrong is possible, even though we cannot explain why.

It is believed that the emotional patterns we experience, the love and attachment pathways we travel, are much the same. They are carved in parts of the brain not accessible to recall and logic. Love is a homeostasis point like our temperature or resting heart rate. “Love” is set in our early years according to the pathways carved in our brains. It is something that our bodies and brains move us towards or from in order to reach a point of balance that it believes is correct, that feels “right”. But sadly, it is something that we struggle to even see, let alone control or change. We may KNOW a partner is damaging to us, we may even understand how the patters we repeat in love were forged in our childhood. But we cannot force ourselves to love someone who is “good” for us. The heart yearns for what our brains believe is “love” and will not react with love or attraction to that which does not fit the established parameters.

These parameters of love, these paths of attachment, are what will be activated when the “right” or resonating external response is found. If another being brushes against these pathways in the right way, our bodies will release estrogen and testosterone, our adrenal will activate, and we will experience lust. Follow another route down these same pathways, and your body will up the dopamine flow, activate the norepinephrine, and suddenly you will feel attraction. Yet another route on this path, and the brain lets flood the oxytocin and vasopressin, and we feel connection. If the person lights up all three lanes of the pathway, you have romantic love. The thing is, though, the release of these chemicals, the initiation of these bodily changes and system adjustments are based on neural pathways we are not even consciously aware of. Trying to alter who you release oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline for is like trying to alter your intrinsic serotonin levels or your temperature through will.

Finding the Meaning

So what does this all mean? The attachments we experience during our childhood, especially early childhood, will set up basic neural pathways that inform us what love us. We will then seek out others who resonate with us on these frequencies, who activate these pathways. Individuals who, when we are in close contact with them, will feel familiar and “right” and will thus trigger all the right neurochemicals and system changes. Because the lessons of love are learned unconsciously, stored implicitly, we will unconsciously find ourselves repeating the same patterns again and again. Even when we logically “know” these patterns are damaging to us. But do not despair, you are not doomed to this pattern forever.

As I have said before, and I will say again, if you are alive, there is hope. Hope to change. Hope to grow. Hope to rewrite your story into something you want to live. While the brain is not as malleable and changeable in adulthood as it is during childhood, it is still malleable. Your neural pathways can still be changed, new ones created, old ones discarded. And that is exactly what changing your love story means. It means creating new neural pathways that light up in response to new stimulations. And it means refusing to travel the old damaging bridges again and again, until those bridges fall into disrepair and crumble. Some may fear that re-learning love is like learning to change your resting heart rate or your normal temperature. This is not so. It is more like changing the way you naturally walk. It will take effort, focus, practice, and most importantly repetition. But eventually, it can be done.

If you are interested in knowing some of the science behind how to change these relationship, love, and attachment patterns, please let me know. Either comment below, or contact me through Different Functional on Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, orTwitter. And if there is enough interest, I will write that blog, too!

A Reminder

I want to remind everyone out there who is not an academic or a scholar, that neurobiology (and the psychology closely associated with it) are all based largely on theories. And theories are always argued over. So the information you find here is my interpretation of the data and relies on the theories that resonate with my own education and experience. It is not fact or truth, but like all science is a combination of data and opinion.

References & Resources

Core Concept: How Synaptic Pruning Shapes Neural Development – A journal article that overviews neural pruning as it relates to neural development.

Critical/Sensitive Periods: A short blog that explains critical and sensitive learning periods in an easy to understand language.

Harry Harlow, Monkey Love Experiments – A brief article that covers the very basics of the Harlow experiments. If you are truly interested in this research, I highly recommend reading what Slater wrote about it in her book Opening Skinner’s Box. (see reference below)

How Early Experience Shape Human Development: The Case of Psychosocial Deprivation – A journal article that review the basic information on how depriving children of caregivers early in life effects outcomes.

Love Actually: The Science Behind Lust, Attraction, And Companionship – A blog article that looks at the neurochemicals that drive love, lust, and attraction.

Reading Facial Expressions of Emotions – A brief article from the American Psychological Association (APA) about the universality of facial expressions.

The Mind’s Mirror – Another brief article from the APA. This one about mirror neurons.

A General Theory of Love – I love this book! (pun intended) Some of the science is a bit outdated, and it does rely on Limbic Theory a lot, which is becoming passé these days. I feel, though, that they do a good job presenting the data. So even if you choose to draw different conclusions then they did, it’s an excellent place to get insight into many of the studies ad research done. I will warn any of the psychoanalytically minded, they do hate on Freud a lot (though I personally don’t blame them). I would also suggest to anyone that is interested in buying it, read an excerpt or two first on Amazon. It is an interesting combination of high-minded academic and poetical-ness. A writing style that can be hard for some to get through.

Opening Skinner’s Box: Chapter 6: Monkey Love – I have recommended this book before and will again. Slater does an amazing job not only explaining the research that was done, but also looking at the reality and human implications behind the experiments. I feel her overview of this experiment both acknowledges the scientific contributions as well as the horror and cruelty these poor monkeys experienced.

The Science of Love

Cages vs. Colonies: How Culture and Environment Impact Mental Illness and Addiction

Resilience and Protective Factors