"In the parent-child interaction is established the child's sense of the world: whether this is a world of love and acceptance, a world of neglectful indifference in which one must root and scratch to have one's needs satisfied or, worse, a world of hostility where one must forever maintain an anxious hypervigilance. Future relationships will have as their templates nerve circuits laid down in our relationships with our earliest caregivers. We will understand ourselves as we have felt understood, love ourselves as we perceived being loved on the deepest unconscious levels, care for ourselves with as much compassion as, at our core, we perceived as young children.
For the satisfaction of attachment needs in human beings, more than physical proximity and touching is required. Equally essential is a nourishing emotional connection, in particular the quality of attunement. Attunement, a process in which the parent is "tuned in" to the child's emotional needs, is a subtle process. It is deeply instinctive but easily subverted when the parent is stressed or distracted emotionally, financially or for any other reason. Attunement may also be absent if the parent never received it in his or her childhood. Strong attachment and love exist in many parent-child relationships but without attunement. Children in non-attuned relationships may feel loved but on a deeper level do not experience themselves as appreciated for who they really are. They learn to present only their "acceptable" side to the parent, repressing emotional responses the parent rejects and learning to reject themselves for even having such responses."
- Dr. Gabor Maté, in "When The Body Says No, The Cost Of Hidden Stress."
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