Survival of the Nurtured
Our first months of life are dedicated to getting to know our mother: her smell, taste, feel, and the look of her face. We gradually experience her ability to attune to us and soothe our distress as her presence becomes synonymous with safety. Our mothers and fathers shape our brains from the inside out in a dance of interacting instincts. For a human baby, survival doesn't depend on how fast it can run, whether it can climb a tree, or if it can tell the difference between edible and poisonous mushrooms. Rather, we survive based on our abilities to detect the needs and intentions of those around us. For humans, other people are our primary environment. If we are successful in relationships, we will have food, shelter, protection, and children of our own. We get what we need through our interdependence with others.
When I think of Darwin's survival of the fittest, I picture body-builders, Alpha male gorillas, or lions stalking their ultimately doomed prey. These images have little to do with natural selection and everything to do with a misunderstanding of Darwin’s theory. Fitness in Darwin’s terms is the ability to adapt to the environment. As environments change, those best suited to it will survive, reproduce, and reflect the new features of adaptability. But what does it mean to be the "fittest" in our modern society? At the beginning of the 21st century, we are adapting to information overload, spiraling expectations, and being stuck in traffic. The freeway is our savanna; the Internet superhighway our Galapagos. Could the fittest in our society actually be the average citizen, going about his daily routine with a solid sense of self, able to successfully navigate relationships, and regulate the stress of sitting in business meetings?
In contemporary society, the real challenges are multi-tasking, balancing the demands of work and family, information-management, and coping with stress. We need to maintain perspective, pick our battles carefully, and remain mindful of ourselves in the midst of countless competing demands. What prepares us best for these abilities? In some ways, it is the same thing that prepared our ancestors to survive in their world: early nurturance, which plays a vital role in the development and integration of the diverse systems within our brains. Optimal sculpting of the prefrontal cortex through healthy early relationships allows us to think well of ourselves, trust others, regulate our emotions, maintain positive expectations, and utilize our intellectual and emotional intelligence in moment-to-moment problem-solving. We can now add a corollary to Darwin's survival of the fittest: Those who are nurtured best, survive best.
When a parent abuses, neglects, or abandons a child, the parent is communicating to the child that he is less fit. Consequently, the child’s brain may become shaped in ways that do not support his long-term survival. Non-loving behavior signals to the child that the world is a dangerous place and tells him “do not explore, do not discover, and most of all, do not take chances.” When children are traumatized, abused, or neglected, they are being given the message that they are not among the chosen. They grow to have thoughts, states of mind, emotions, and immunological functioning that are inconsistent with health and long term survival. With all due respect to the old adage, we could also say that what doesn't kill us, makes us weaker.
Maternal and paternal instincts, in fact all caretaking behaviors, are acts of nurturance that trump one's personal survival. Achieving such an altruistic state depends upon the successful inhibition of selfish, competitive, and aggressive impulses. Too often, however, that inhibition is incomplete. Secure attachments, which may be very adaptive in a safe environment, may be quite maladaptive in terms of war or in dangerous neighborhoods. The fact that much of psychotherapy is dedicated to coming to terms with negative or conflicting messages from parents strongly suggests that our evolution as caretakers is still a work in progress.
This is an excerpt from Dr. Cozolino’s book The Neuroscience of Human Relationships.