Does Plenty of Infancy and Childhood Love Undo Early Trauma?

I have written about the irreversibility of early trauma, gestation and birth. I stand by that but there are mitigating factors, namely plenty of early love. It never erases those traumatic imprints, but it does hold them at bay. They are never altered or diluted by later love, never mitigated by hugs and kisses, but they do not have the reach, the upper level access, they would have had without all that infancy love.


There is no way out of the biologic fact of the critical period, the time space where love must be received or forever more becomes an imprint. It has been found in many animal studies where rats not allowed to see for several weeks after birth can never see again. Damage to the kidneys during gestation will not be reversed by later love but it may not flower into serious symptoms. I was discussing this with a friend who is gay. We both had the same family configuration with a cold, tyrannical or absent father; both of us needed male love. I think that the difference was that my gay friend had a serious trauma while being carried, a trauma that I think changed his hormone balance and perhaps altered his sex hormones. This is an assumption, not a fact. But with the cold father it was enough to produce homosexual leanings in him. I did not have that. I had no love from either parent so I could “choose” when I got older not to be gay. Not really a choice but the sum of unconscious factors which led to unconscious behavior, and then a chance encounter with a loving girl at age fourteen that turned me into totally heterosexual.

 We cannot change personality so long as the imprint remains to drive us; and the little love we get later on may not be enough to allow us to change direction. And more, the shutoff that occurs with gestation and birth trauma may be so great that we are helpless before it. We no longer can let love in; we first have to feel agonizingly unloved by our parents. We cannot purposefully open up because we are then open to great pain. They have to be out of the way first. Why do we have to feel unloved first? Because it is a memory sealed in and engraved thanks to the process of methylation. That chemical helps to make sure the memory lives on in our memory bank. Once we attack the imprinted memory and help to undo the methylation process, the system opens up all on its own. We need to undo repression so that we can feel again. When we "feel" unloved we begin to feel once again. If we open up first to any feeling we will be overwhelmed with pain. If we gain access slowly over time to lesser hurts we will not. We will be on the road to fully feeling.

 I think that part of a good childhood can block the effects of first line early pain. But a bad childhood plus unloving later life creates insurmountable emotional problems. That compounding undoes us and creates damaged individuals. But having said that there is some hope. An article in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (July 27, 2010) has studied this problem in a research project studying over 400 people. It was a long-term study where at the age of eight months the interactions between mother and child was noted. And then decades later the children were studied again as adults. The early study classified the interactions as high or low loving interactions. The mothers who were judged most loving produced offspring who were low on anxiety, hostility and general distress.

 There was more than a 7 point difference in anxiety scores between love and unloved children. And a three point differential in hostility scores. Unloved offspring are more hostile. In brief, the higher the mother’s warmth the lower the score in distress. Doesn't that tell us a great deal? And it means that very early love is so, so important. Without it we have a damaged soul, someone more likely to fall ill and who has poor social skills. That lack of love makes us unable to interact lovingly with other adults … decades later. Those imprints endure perhaps for a lifetime. Affection is all, even if we had first line pain. You cannot as a parent say, “My children know I love them. I just can’t show it.” Sorry, that is not good enough. It is like saying I know my child is hungry but I cannot feed him. There is that need for warmth that cannot be abrogated. Love is love and there is no compromise. You cannot be sort of pregnant; you either are or aren't’. There is no compromise for love. Either you love or you don’t and it will show up decades later in the feelings and behavior of the person. We can “smell” a loved person; they exude it in every pore, in every word and every movement.