In Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of the Self, Peter Fonagy and associates explain how the child learns - or does not learn - to regulate anxiety. Anxiety problems develop when the mother's mind is not available to the child, or is not available in a way that allows the child to use the mother's mind as a mirror of his experience.

A sense of identity, which is essential in emotional regulation, is gained through what is termed "mirroring". The mother's mind, transparent to the child, and available to the child as a mirror of his inner experience, allows the child to develop a concept of his own self, through finding - and recognizing - himself and his experience in the mother's mind.

When the child experiences powerful feelings, if the child finds the feelings registered in the mind of the mother, and if the mother calmly responds to these feelings, the child learns that feelings are not a threat. In fact, the child can learn that feelings are useful. Feelings can become "user friendly" when found to cause the mother to respond, so as to satisfy desire or to alleviate distress.

When the child feels secure and responded to by the mother, even when the mother is unable to alleviate physical pain, her resonance with the child's feelings is, itself, calming.

When the mother shares an experience, and attaches a word to the experience, the child gains the first building block - a symbol that represents an experience - toward an ability to do representational thinking. It is easy for physical objects to gain symbols (words) that stand for the internal experience of the object. When a child and a mother see a red ball, and the word "red ball" is spoken, we can easily see how connection between the mutual subject experience of "redness" and "ballness" object and the representation become linked to the red ball. Though it is more complex, it is even more important that experience that is solely subjective - experience which is not produced by an object in the environment - be shared and given words.

Representational Thinking And Emotional Stability

Emotional stability can be expressed in this way: how much uncertainty can an individual tolerate and remain able to use cognition. "If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs . . . ." as Kipling wrote.



The amount of external chaos that can be tolerated, I believe, is inversely proportional to the amount of internal chaos. For example, if your kitchen is arranged so that you know where every utensil, pot, pan, and device is stored, then when an emergency develops while cooking and a certain little-used item is needed or else dinner will be ruined, that uncertainty will not be a problem, for you can instantly lay your hand upon the required item.


But if the items in your kitchen are simply thrown about, piled one upon the other, thrown into a storage cabinet, and held in place until the door can be slammed shut on them to keep them from pouring out, when the cooking emergency arises, the storage cabinet door will be opened, and out everything will fall. The items must be sifted through, and may yet be in some other jam-packed cabinet. Any unexpected event causes chaos in the kitchen.



When the child expresses a subjective experience to the mother, if the mother can resonate with that experience and give the child a name for that experience, it becomes - like an item in your kitchen - stored in a specific place. Just as there are many items in a kitchen, there are many subjective experiences every child will have. Only if each of them is shared with the mother, named, and stored in memory will there be no inner chaos within the child.



On the other hand, if the mother reacts to a subject experience which lets the child know that this experience must never to again expressed, the child has to, in effect, jam that into a closet - with other things that have no place - where a door can be slammed on all of them.



Fast forward to adulthood; when something unexpected happens, if that unexpected thing connects by association with an item in that jam-packed, chaotic closet, the door opens like Pandora's box. All manner of things spill out, filling the person's inner experience with chaos, and unable to use the mind to deal with the unexpected.

Regulation, as we now see, comes from ability to share emotions, and from learning that emotions will be responded to if the gap of separateness is bridged by empathic connection. By giving emotions names, feelings can be thought about and communicated. It is through these steps that feelings become "user friendly", attachment to the parent becomes secure, and mastery of feelings - rather than fear of feelings - develops.Without mental availability, transparency, and mirroring, the child cannot learn to regulate emotion. Inability to regulate emotion comes, as Fonagy says, when "The infant has not been able to find a recognizable version of his mental states in another person's mind . . . ." If the mother hides her mind from the infant, she makes it impossibile for the infant to find - in her mind - the reflection of himself which is needed, by the child, to develop a concept of its own self.

Ones identity is far more linked to internal subjective experience
which is always present than to objects in the environment which come
and go. Concept of self is developed by mirroring of internal subject experience by the mother. A concept of self is needed by each of us in order to orient ourselves in relationship to others. When self concept is vague, disorientation can extend not only to relationship with others but to the relationship between self and reality. When a sense of self and placement in the world is inadequate, what is real and what is imagination becomes uncertain. Inability to always distinguish imagination from reality opens the door for what is imagined to become terrifying.

For example, when flying, a completely normal up-and-down motion takes place when the fast-moving plane passes through air that is moving slowly up and down. The slight downward motion of the plane is by no means falling. Falling produces weightlessness, the zero-G condition felt by astronauts floating in space, and by parachutists when first jumping from a plane. Rather than the weightlessness of falling, the downward motion in turbulence produces only a fraction of the zero-G experience. This fraction of what it feels like to fall can naturally cause imagination of falling. When emotion is not present, any person can distinguish a fraction of the feeling of falling from actual falling. But things go wrong for the anxious flier. Emotion takes over the mind, pushing cognitive abilities out. Without cognition, the ability to tell real from imaginary is lost, and imagination of falling becomes - in the mind of the anxious flier - actual falling.

Psychologists call this transformation of imagination into reality "psychic equivalence", meaning what is in the mind and what is real are experienced as one and the same, or "equivalent". Normally, the mind separates imagination from reality through cognitive processes. But when fear displaces cognition, the person has no ability to distinguish the imaginative from the real.

One of the things in play here is the amount of cognitive ability the person possesses. Cognitive ability requires representational thinking. Representational thinking uses words, such as "red ball" as symbols for physical objects. To explain representation thinking, consider this. If you want to decorate your living room, you can do one of two things: one, you can go buy the furniture, and place it in the living room and physically move the furniture around until it is finally

The other way is to create a mental image of the pieces of furniture and of the room. Through cognition, you place the imaginary furniture in the room in various positions until you find a way that you like. This allows you the decided advantage of trying any number of placement combinations - without having to spend a dime or having to develop a sweat. Like the images of furniture moved around imaginarily, representational thinking involves manipulating mental symbols (words,or images) rather than the physical objects the words or the images stand for.

Representational thinking affords us a great deal of security. We can imagine various possibilities in order to decide which possibility is best without having to physically try them out. Imagination allows us a safe way to try things out, just as pilots try out things safely in the flight simulator.

Just as you need a good mental image of the furniture and the room, to plan your life, you need a good mental map of your part of the world. But you also need a good mental representation of the people in it, most importantly a good mental representation of yourself. According to Fonagy, when the child does not have access to the mother's mind where he can find a mental representation of himself, he will not gain an adequate mental representation of himself to work with.

But how accurate is your mental map of the world? If the child does not learn from the mother that what is in her mind can be different than what is in the child's mind, it may become difficult for the child to develop a clear appreciation that what is mental can - indeed - be different from reality.

Here we return to the problem of psychic equivalence. It is essential for the child to learn that what is in the mind and what is real can be different, and develop ways to tell when what is in the mind and reality are the same and when they are not. That is the cognitive ability that is needed to avoid psychic equivalence. When cognitive ability is well-developed, the person is able to distinguish imagination from reality so easily that even when emotion partly displaces cognition, the ability remains intact.

Just as boat with a heavy keel can sail in wind that would capsize a boat with only an unweighted centerboard, cognitive ability that is well-developed continues operating even when there is considerable emotion.

For the parent who is concerned about passing fears on to her children, the more useful concern is how to build emotional strength into the child. By analogy, the child needs the stability provided - not just by a centerboard, but by a weighted keel. We gain emotional strength through connection with others who, by allowing their mind to be transparent to us, afford us a view of our own selfhood mirrored in their experience of us.

Knowing Another Has Your Mind In Their Mind

Knowing another person has your mind (including your subjective experience, such as feelings) in their mind provides the basis for building emotional security. Those of you who have used the "Tracking Board" know first hand how powerful it is to know, during your flight, that someone is watching your flight on their computer, and cares about, and is thinking about, your feelings. When they are doing this, they are doing what a mother must do to build emotional strength into a child.

When flying, you would not be helped by someone tracking your flight if that information was hidden from you. On the other hand, if knowing someone is tuned - even as abstractly as by watching your flight on a computer - to you and your feelings, you can understand how powerfully calming it is when a parent tunes face-to-face into the feelings of a child.

It is face-to-face attunement by the parent that prevents passing on fears and anxieties to a child. As a parent, your child needs you to be available enough and transparent enough that she can find herself in your awareness.

Your child's experience needs to be reproduced in your own experience. This means feelings, concerns, joys, pleasures, pride, or sadness. When your child experiences any of these things, she needs to see that you are having an experience of her experiencing that.

One-ness And Two-ness

Initially, a newborn is held and nourished by its mother. The newborn lives much of its early life in a state of physical connection. Within a few weeks, the infant will be able to sense that there is a difference between itself and its mother. But it is not until around eighteen months that the young child is shocked by the realization that what is in his mind is different from what is in his mother's mind. Its mind and its mother's mind are separate. When security has depended upon one-ness, how does a young child develop security when there is two-ness? One way is to deny two-ness. And, to some degree, most of us still cling to the idea that we are not separate, but that we are one. Mental health, though, depends upon recognition of two-ness. And security depends - not on a continued illusion of unity but - upon adequate bridging of separateness via communication.

This adequate (to produce a feeling of being secure in the world) communication depends upon transparency. Your mental processes need to be available for your own viewing. And, if there is to be real security, your mother's mental processes need to be available for your viewing. Otherwise, you feel alone and unsafe. But worse, unless you can view your mother's mental processes and find a reflection of yourself over there in her mind, you feel both abandoned and have no basis for establishing - in your OWN mind - a useful conceptualization of your own identity.

Getting Rid Of Badness

When communication between mother and child breaks down, it is typically assumed by the child that the breakdown is due to something bad inside. Thus, to re-establish communication, the child believes it needs to get rid of the offending badness. Obviously, the child cannot go surgically inside and remove badness. So it is done "magically". The child pretends the badness has been placed elsewhere. The child asserts, for example, "I didn't make that mess on the floor; the dog did it."

The more the child pushes badness outside himself and pretends it is elsewhere, the more paranoia. It is like pushing a car uphill. When you get tired, the car may roll back and crush you. The same is true when a person asserts badness has been pushed elsewhere. There is fear it will roll back. That fear is what we call paranoia. Paranoia is always about something a person has tried to rid himself of. We see it in religious and political leaders who, in their efforts to rid themselves of sin, become crusader. Time and again they are found to be involved in corruption or the very sin they have crusaded against. The more a person tries to put anything - including "sin" - away from awareness, the more weight collects there to roll back and crush the person.

In therapy, the goal is not for the therapist to get to know you, but for you to get to know yourself. The therapist does have to get to know you so you can be shown the aspects of yourself that you have tried to remain unaware of. The therapist may have to introduce you to yourself slowly, at a rate you can accept. As acceptance develops, you discover that the things you were sure you needed to rid yourself of are human, and need - rather than to be gotten rid of - monitored and regulated.

This brings us to feelings. For so many of us, the feelings we expressed - as little children - separated us from the love of our parents. To regain their love, we tried to get rid of the offending feelings. We pushed them outside. The problem is, they push back. And when we tire of pushing to keep feelings out, they come rolling back in - perhaps with a vengeance. This is the dynamic that causes panic to come "out of nowhere"; there is not enough transparency to allow you to see inside yourself, not enough transparency to observe what is going on inside, and thus no safety valve to relieve the internal stresses until they cause a psychological meltdown.

So when the client says, "I don't want to pass this on to my children; I don't want them to see me being afraid," there is a failure of understanding what causes emotional security. What the client's children need is for the mother's mental process to be visible to them, and theirs to the mother, so that communication bridges separateness. In order to not pass on emotional insecurity, the mother needs to pass on security; and security is based on transparency, not the opacity of hiding the problem.

What is pushed out, pushes back. The feelings we push out, push back. This does not produce security, for when we tire of pushing, the feelings roll back and overwhelm us.

If the mother allows transparency of mind so that the child has access, what if something is going on in the mother's mind which would shock or frighten the child? First and foremost, the mother's mind must be transparent to herself, affording her access to her own mental processes. She is able to deal with her issues and concerns in a timely and appropriate manner so that these do not destabillize her in a way that would make access to her mind frightening to the child.