Maternal Care:
Love &Grief (go together like a horse and carriage)
Care: When an infant is separated from the mother, it cries in grief or distress. But the feeling of grief, as painful as it is, is essential for its survival. And it keeps on crying for long periods at a time until rescued by Mother or caretaker. Arousal of the grief system feels awful.
Maternal Care
Maternal care is essential to survival in relation to the nurturing of the young. The ability of young animals to reach reproductive maturity is linked to the quality of motherly care. Fortunately, the investment of maternal attention has not been left to chance. It is grounded in a solid set of instinctual brain urges to nurture newborn infants and to bond with them.
The ways in which motherly and fatherly care help nurture the brain are of great importance for understanding how altruism, compassion, and empathy become possible. This is true not only for the offspring but for the mother herself. Animal research demonstrates that once a mother has exhibited competent and devoted maternal behavior following the birth of her first offspring, her maternal abilities remain elevated thereafter.
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Fathers CARE
Fathers are called to CAREing by an enzyme made in the brain’s hippocampus
Hypothalamus:public domain
called aromatase that converts testosterone to estrogen which then mediates production of oxytocin. A more direct calling is with an intranasal spray of oxytocin. Either way facilitates the quality of father’s play and CARE with their children.
Most new human fathers will experience an increase in oxytocin and other similar hormones of pregnancy and motherhood. And infant contact then modulates fathers’ endocrine systems in a very similar way that infant contact effects mothers. But the effect of oxytocin and infant contact is much more significant with mothers.
The Secret Sauce: Oxytocin
It takes enormous time and energy, not to mention love, to care for an infant. Why is a young woman suddenly eager to protect and sacrifice for months of their lives for a screaming, soiling infant? The investment of maternal attention could not be left to chance. It is grounded in a network of instinctual brain urges to nurture the newborn infant and bond with it. And the secret juice that sets it all into motion is oxytocin. Oxytocin transformed a young woman into a loving mother. Oxytocin, the same lustful chemical that stirs her to create this infant. She has in ample supply of what my mother seemingly lacked.
Oxytocin, one of the main maternal chemicals, is manufactured in greater quantities in female brains than in male brains. Oxytocin, like all chemical messengers of the nervous system, would be useless if it did not bind with specific chemical receptors. By increasing the number of oxytocin receptors in the hypothalamus where oxytocin is released, it makes oxytocin effective. Estrogen controls the number of oxytocin receptors throughout the cell fields of the anterior hypothalamus.
Oxytocin, one of the main maternal chemicals, is manufactured in greater quantities in female brains than in male brains. Oxytocin, like all chemical messengers of the nervous system, would be useless if it did not bind with specific chemical receptors. Estrogen controls the number of oxytocin receptors throughout the cell fields of the anterior hypothalamus. By increasing the number of oxytocin receptors in the hypothalamus where oxytocin is released, it makes oxytocin effective.
The CARE System in the Brain
Jaak Panksepp says that one aspect of the CARE system deserves particular attention. A branch of the CARE system extends through the hypothalamus from the dopamine-producing ventral tegmental area (VTA) to the heart of the SEEKING system.
SEEKING System
Injections of oxytocin into the VTA promote maternal behaviors.Overall, the effect of oxytocin and other hormones, as well as infant contact, is to enhance the CARE system
Maternal care has life-long benefits for brain and behavior. Infants who have received loving motherly care are better off emotionally and physically for the rest of their lives. But infants who have not received loving motherly care are in for a rough ride through their lives as I will attest to throughout this blog.
Of the seven primary-affect systems, perhaps CARING is the least studied but most important. We would not exist unless our brains and bodies were prepared to invest enormous time and energy in the care of offspring who could not survive without such care. You may not have heard of the primal CARE system, but, of course, you have heard of maternal care.
Affective Neuroscience
Here is where the hope of Jaak Pankseep’s Affective Neuroscience lies. Panksepp’s lifetime of research gives us a map of chemicals and receptors that need to be stimulated for each of the seven primary affects or emotions. Universities around the world are just beginning to recognize the significance of his work and are starting up Ph.D. programs in Affective Neuroscience. Someday, maybe not very far in the future it will be possible to stimulate the hypothalamus of someone like my mother to generate a bunch more oxytocin receptors and punch in the maternal urge to nourish and cherish her crying infant.
Jaak Panksepp coined the term affective neuroscience or the neuroscience of emotions. Culminating a lifetime of animal lab research, he identified seven primary-process emotions built into the brain by evolution, hardwired into the subcortical networks of all mammalian brains.
CARE Therapy
Knowledge of the primary-process states generated by the seven basic emotional systems is essential for clinical thinking about emotional disorders. For example, if emotional problems are due to recent and specific life problems that have clear cognitive precipitants, then cognitive-behavioral counseling can be effective. But with severe emotional disorders, this is not the case. Etiology extends sometimes back to infancy, so of course, few if any explicit memories remain, just imbalanced emotional states and their associated cognitive biases.
Panksepp concludes that psychotherapy is basically about CARE.
Psychotherapy may be CARE writ large. The key to an effective “therapeutic alliance” may reside in higher-order empathic resolnances, the foundation of which may be the CARE circuitry of our brains.
Self-help books that help:
Total Self-Renewal through Attention Therapies and Open Focus
The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body
