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Recently I wrote a chapter that was published in the book, L.O.V.E is the Answer: How You Can Put Principles of Love Into Action to Build a Stronger Police-Community Marriage. The book was a follow up to the documentary, Walking While Black. My chapter focused on the long-term, developmental damage done by systemic racism. Here is part 1 of a portion of my chapter, with permission from the publisher. Part 2 will follow in a subsequent post.
We all engage in a universal process that affects everyone but affects black people and other minorities more deeply. I’m referring to the developmental process by which we gain a sense of self and our relationship to the world. The result is the establishment of what I call Primitive Gestalt Patterns. These patterns are represented in the structure and functioning of our brain and our body, and can either support or undermine healthy behavior.
We are intimately attached to these patterns. The brain develops and adapts to the earliest learning. Keep in mind that our first learning is survival learning. Thus, our attachment to these lessons holds the highest level of importance and strength. This survival-level learning is coded into lessons of how the world works and who we are, rendering adaptation and adjustment to newer information as an adult more difficult. In other words, childhood development can interfere with healthy adult adaptation. We are given the chart of the territory of life and ourselves but not the keys to make healthy changes to this chart.
Primitive Gestalts are the neurobiobehavioral patterns established as the result of early survival learning. Primitive Gestalts are fixed patterns in the brain, and they exert a gravitational force on all our behaviors, perceptions, and thinking. We are all subject to this early learning process. But much of what we learn is imparted unintentionally by our parents or primary caregivers. Their criticism, judgments, and offhand comments— “that was stupid” or “you can’t do anything right” are powerful messages. In addition, we are also subjected to the messages of our culture.
Many of these messages are delivered through an adult’s own unconscious actions. For example, when a child observes an anxious parent, the subtle message is that there is danger. Danger causes a defensive or stress reaction, even in an infant. Ongoing anxiety in a parent can result in a child believing the world is a dangerous place. A depressed or distracted parent who ignores a child sends an unconscious message that the child is not OK, that the child does not deserve attention.
Your Internal Parent
Every one of us is subject to this universal developmental process. Its tentacles reach forward into adulthood because as we grow and begin to separate from our parents, we incorporate these messages of life and ourselves into our own internal parent—the voice we hear in our head 24/7. This internal parent can be just as judgmental and even as abusive as our caregivers were. And again, most of these messages are not conveyed consciously.
If parents don’t meet a child’s needs because they are so stressed they don’t have the bandwidth to even notice the need—the result is still a deprived child. More likely than not, such children will blame themselves for what they are not getting. This negative self-judgment becomes the centerpiece of the internal parent.
One of the hallmarks of Primitive Gestalts—indeed, of most childhood training and development —is a focus on external judgments. We continually question ourselves based on what we imagine others are thinking. We constantly judge ourselves in comparison to others. The consequence of this life strategy is that we don’t give ourselves the opportunity to develop from the inside or to make independent assessments. We have, unconsciously, bought into the messages from our primary caregivers, teachers, other authority figures, and, ultimately, from the culture we are embedded in.
The lessons learned are subtle but powerful. Frequently, the underlying message is that we are not OK and that the world and people in the world are dangerous. For example, some typical lessons learned in childhood might include: “You don’t deserve,” “You are not lovable,” “You will never be successful,” or “You make bad decisions.” These messages place a ceiling on our growth and our expectations.
Disproportionate Impact on Minorities
This process is universal; we all suffer to one degree or another as a result of negative messages passed down to us. Black people and other minorities, however, are more vulnerable. Experiencing fear and danger has an inordinate impact on development. Growth and development require a safe and protected environment. Under conditions of danger, the child (as well as the adult) tends to be fearful, which shuts down creative development. Our brain and body have a choice: to defend and protect or to grow and develop. Since survival is of utmost importance, protecting takes precedence over growth.
Injustice toward black people and a heightened sense of danger when they walk down a street or drive a car—in other words, just living life—send a constant message to a growing child: “You are not OK.” They also must be “on guard.” With so much energy devoted to preparing for danger, the child is immediately handicapped in the learning and growth process.
But even beyond this notion of defense, the environment that black people grow up in produces a fear that has devastating consequences. We develop the ability to self-regulate (in other words, make adjustments in our bodies and our emotions in order to maintain balance) from our primary caregiver. In the bond between mother and child, the child’s brain uses a mimicking process to learn how to adjust the activation of its nervous system. This is facilitated by specific neurons in the brain called “mirror neurons.” That means the child automatically reacts to the facial expressions and tone of voice of its caregiver.
A smile conveys a message of calm and safety which allows the nervous system to enter a calm state. Tension in the mother’s face conveys a message of danger. When you live in fear and uncertainty, you can’t hide the tension and fear that is projected in facial expressions.
The engagement of a mother and child’s nervous systems under these conditions, instead of establishing a healthy balance, actually causes a dysregulation in the nervous system of the child and an impaired ability to maintain a healthy physiological response. So, when a parent is dealing with danger and trauma in his or her life, it disrupts healthy self-regulation development in the child.
Fear and trauma cause permanent changes in the brain and body that result in physical, emotional, and behavioral consequences. They cause a harmful dysregulation of the nervous system. Like a snowball rolling downhill, this impairment causes the body to function poorly.
Like an engine that is not running on all cylinders, the body has to work harder, fatigues faster, and can succumb to serious illness. My colleague Peter Levine and I have referred to this as “Autonomic Dysregulation Syndrome.” This further impairs performance and the ability to recover from stress.
Neurotransmitters are biochemicals that facilitate the transmission of messages in the brain. Fear and trauma hinder the functioning of these neurotransmitters. One consequence, for example, is the impairment of the functioning of the reward systems of the brain. This makes it more difficult to feel pleasure and sets the stage for vulnerability to addiction since drugs do what the brain has difficulty doing: releasing the neurotransmitter, dopamine.
In my clinical work, I help my clients recognize that their current adult environment is not the same as the difficult environment in which they grew up. Therefore, they don’t have to be as fearful, let’s say, of an abusive parent. They don’t have to be as fearful of an impoverished life.
However, many black people and minorities have not escaped the traumas of childhood into a more benevolent environment. Instead, they continue to encounter trauma and danger all around. As a result, I encounter greater difficulty encouraging a black person to let go of the fears and lessons of their childhood. They are still relevant.
The internal parent who develops out of our childhood is typically harsh, judgmental, punitive, and critical. When this is the voice one hears all the time, it can hold anyone back. Because of the spoken and unspoken messages from society that scream, “you’re not OK,” or “you are not as good as whites people,” black people can have a more vociferous internal negative parent or voice, more resistant to change.
Here is a link to the police-community partnership “L.O.V.E. is the Answer” programs.
