In the previous column on Psychology & Life, we learned that the best help for health and happiness are loving relationships. Data from the 75-year-old Harvard Longitudinal Study of Adult Development had demonstrated unequivocally that warm relationships are the most important ingredients of the good life.
However, we also know that developing healthy relationships is a challenge for most, if not all, of us.
What helps us develop healthy, loving relationships that lay the foundations for health and happiness? Psychology has some reliable answers here too.
Trust: the Master Virtue
Foundations for healthy relationships are laid during childhood, through the experiences we have as well as the family environment in which we grow up. Of crucial importance is the nature of parent-child relationships. All the contemporary psychological theories as well as reputed psychological researchers are agreed on this.
Our experiences as adults are modelled and built on childhood experiences which are encoded in our muscular and neural networks, especially in a variety of sensory maps (known also as ‘implicit’ or ‘procedural’ memories) . Experiences at later stages recall these childhood experiences and maps and are in turn influenced and even conditioned by them.
One of the experiences that has a profound impact on our adult relationships is that of trust. Contemporary psychological theories emphasise the importance and implications of the trust that the infant, and later the child, develop in relation to the caregivers, especially the mother.
For example, in the psycho-social life span development theory of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, one of the major figures in developmental psychology, trust is the pivot on which all of development rests. Erikson divides the life span into eight stages, during each of which one has to face and resolve a specific task which is expressed in two polarities, one positive and the other negative. The crucial challenge of the first year of life is development trust against mistrust. Successful negotiation of the tasks of the successive stages depends on the development of trust.
How does one develop trust?
The first year of life is one in which the infant is showered with many sensuous and gratifying experiences. It is washed, oiled, powdered, massaged, breast-fed and carried around by the mother and the other family members. It is the object of much fussing. All this attention makes the infant feel very good (a ‘prince’ or princes’) and proud of itself. It begins to feel itself as worthy of all the attention and experiences the world as trustworthy. It develops trust in self and others and the world around. When such sensuous caring is missing from attentive and sensitive caregivers the infant develops mistrust.
Family milieu (atmosphere/environment) also contributes to the development of trust. When the infant finds itself in a cohesive, peaceful, warm and supportive environment, it feels secure and experiences the world as safe, friendly and comforting. It is such environment that helps the child put its trust in life.
On the other hand, when the environment is chaotic, un-nurturing, characterised by conflict and unloving relationships, the child feels very unsafe and develops distrust toward self, others and the world.
Impaired home environment compromises especially the capacity for intimacy. Children with bleak childhoods, the Harvard Study tells us, are more likely than others to be pessimistic and self-doubting. This in turn makes them unable to receive love when it is offered and fearful in offering love to others.
Other researchers have found that adults raised in impaired home environments are more likely to form insecure attachments to others, and to develop beliefs that inhibit seeking out assistance in times of need, to withdraw from caring relationships as a way to cope with uncertainty and to lack the executive functioning (planning, organizing, decision-making, critical-thinking) skills necessary to develop supportive close relationships and to avoid rejection.
The reputed trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk points out that exposure to family violence as a child makes it often difficult to establish stable, trusting relationships as an adult.
Essential Trait: Hope
The essential virtue that results from trust in self, others and the world is hope, defined as “the enduring belief in the attainability of fervent wishes.” Hope, in turn leads to optimism and enables one to relate to others with confidence and without fear.
The confidence in self and a benevolent and hopeful attitude toward others resulting from trust enables the child as it grows up to reach out others in love, feeling loved and accepted. The security it has developed enables it to take the risks involved in loving others.
Children who have failed to develop such trust grow up with a suspicious and even malevolent attitude toward life. They can develop a paranoid personality. We are all familiar with persons who are overly suspicious. They attribute malicious motivations to even the most innocent behaviours of others. They feel everyone is against them. They develop a pessimistic rather than benevolent attitude toward the world.
Along with suspicion they develop lots of fear, especially in regard to relationships. They are afraid to grow close to anyone and to let anyone come close to them; for fear that they will be exploited, taken advantage of. Without the healthy relationships which such suspicion and fear ward off, health and happiness are compromised.
As the poet Joseph Conrad has so perceptively observed: “Woe to the man (woman) whose heart has not learned to hope, to love, to put it trust in life.”
Lack of trust, and consequent attitudes of fear and suspicion, can wreak havoc in a marriage, as well as in community life. Interpersonal relationships get vitiated, resulting in stress that undermines health and happiness.
Jesus has spoken about the importance of trust. In his response to the synagogue official who pleaded him, with some desperation, to come down and cure his daughter, Jesus said: “Fear is useless; only trust is needed!” (Lk. 8, 50). Trust dissipates our fears. I am told the phrase “Do not be afraid!” occurs 365 times in the Bible, like a daily reminder to us all through the year.
When we do not trust, all kinds of fears envelop us and affect our health and happiness.
An Experiential Exercise
- Sit quietly for a while (Or, if you feel like it, lie down taking the foetal position.) in the awareness of whatever has been evoked in you by what your read.
- Stay present (be open to whatever comes into awareness) to the Trust vs Mistrust (Birth to 1st year) stage of your life. Allow your body to re-experience that time of your life. What do you experience (body sensations, thoughts, images, emotions, sounds) as you do so? (At this stage, your cognitive brain had not developed enough to hold memories. However, your body remembers and it can bring these memories into conscious awareness now as you sink back in body to that stage of your life).
- What have others told you about your life experiences at this stage, especially pre-natal (time in your mother’s womb) and peri-natal (around birth)?
- What do you know about your family circumstances and environment at this stage of your development?
- How do you think your experiences and family circumstances at this stage have impacted your later development, the person you became?
- How do you now feel about this stage of your life? What feelings come over you as reflect on it?
- Now take a sheet of paper and some crayons or charcoal and do a free drawing (draw freely whatever you feel like) to represent this stage of your life.
- When you are done, contemplate your drawing for a while. Allow the drawing to evoke in you whatever it wants – sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories, associations, desires etc… Stay with whatever washes over you and then do a free writing – expressing in words whatever comes to mind.
- You could now spend some time in prayer, sitting before God with whatever this exercise has evoked in you, speaking to God, listening to God. Offer this stage of your life to God, asking for healing of any trauma (painful/distressing experience) if there was.
- If you are married, it will be very useful to do this exercise (at least sharing the insights gained and praying) with your partner. If you live in a religious community, you can do the exercise as a community.
Please send your comments, reactions and suggestions to sumedha.bps@gmail.com
-Fr. Jose Parappully, SDB, PhD
To subscribe to the magazine Contact Us
