The moment you learned to walk, the entire social and power dynamic between you and your caregivers changed.



When you were an infant and lacked mobility, your caregiver would easily be able to track where you were. If they left you in the crib, they could be pretty much certain, you would still be there when they returned.

As you began to move out of their reach, your caregiver needed to take on the role of ‘socialization agent’ and inhibitor of action to protect you from walking into danger or moving too far away where you were no longer visible.



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This meant two things:



Your caregiver would start saying NO more and prohibiting your exploration

You needed a way to stay safe as you moved physically away from your protector





Which then resulted in two major changes:



You and your caregiver would begin to have power struggles as you increased your degrees of freedom

You would need to ‘check in’ to your caregiver to know if something was safe or dangerous.  This is called Social Referencing







One key way a caregiver ‘prohibited’ your action is through a sudden disruption in internal state attunement. 

Each time you began to explore your environment, your mobilization-energizing systems would have been active.   Depending on each scenario, your caregiver would need to use voice and face to get you to stop going too far.  The way to do this is to put a brake on your energized state.  Human caregivers do this by using the word NO and making facial gestures that indicate disapproval of your actions. This is the mechanism of 'shame' - an inhibitor of interest-excitement and enjoyment-joy to reduce exposure or exploration (Tomkins, 1963; Schore, 2003)*.

*more on this in an upcoming article

 

How this relates to you now...

Every caregiver has different levels of comfort and anxiety related to safety, danger and exploration

Their comfort levels are based on their past experiences. Depending on what a caregiver perceives as dangerous, they will use a lot of prohibitory mechanisms to keep a child ‘safe’ (according to their perception).

What the people around you were afraid of, disgusted by or avoided may not be things that are necessarily dangerous or inherently 'bad' for us.

These include social types of danger such as rejection, failure, looking stupid, not fitting in, meeting new people, encounters with people who are very different or unfamiliar.  Another example I’ve witnessed in certain caregivers is an over-protection against germs, scraped knees, insects, and animals that will not cause them harm

If any of these things feel aversive to you, part of your aversion may have some roots in the social referencing activity that happened between you and the people around you most when you were growing up.

Your caregivers’ and social circles' perceptions of these things created an internal state within them which they would then transmit in the form of facial expressions, smell, voice frequencies, body posture, etc. - that became the reference point you used for your own algorithms of aversion, avoidance or approach. This is extremely important for actual dangers because as a child you also were not afraid of running into the street, sharp objects or hot stoves. Instead of learning in a way that can hurt or kill us,