The Effect of Emotional Neglect in Childhood..."still face" experiment

I'm gonna break down a video that may be one of the most powerful videos you have ever seen in your life that will help you understand more about your own attachment style, understand more about the conclusions you have made when you were a baby and don't even know about it. And I'm gonna show you what you can begin doing with yourself that will completely change the way you show up in the world. It'll change the way you relate to yourself. It will change the way you feel about yourself, and as a result, it will change the way that you relate to other people as well. Now, what I'm talking about is something called the Still Face Experiment. Now, in the Still Face Experiment, we're going to watch that right now, and I'm going to show you why this will help you understand so much more about yourself and the deeper, in a way, infant part of yourself that may still be kind of locked in a time loop in the past. So let me go and watch this video real quick. Now, just to explain a little bit of this video before we get into it, in this video, the experiment has been replicated many times, and what it is is it's a mom and her baby, and the mom and her baby are interacting. The mom is mirroring back the baby's emotions, and what happens is the baby is regulated, calm, Feeling present, feeling good. Then the mom comes back with what is called a still face, no expression whatsoever. And let's look at how the baby responds and look at how this may relate to ourselves. So here we go.

She gives a greeting to the baby. The baby gives a greeting back to her. This baby starts pointing at different places in the world and the mother's trying to engage her in play. Play with her. They're working to coordinate their emotions and their intentions, what they want to do in the world, and that's really what the baby is used to.

A baby is completely tied to its mom for survival. So when it has the mom and the mom is being so emotionally expressive, it allows the baby to relax. It allows the baby to know that everything's okay. And let's go ahead and keep this going with this video.

And then we ask the mother to not respond to the baby. The baby very quickly picks up on this, and then she uses all of her abilities to try and get the mother back. She smiles at the mother, she points because she's used to the mother looking where she points. The baby puts both hands up in front of her and says, "What's happening here?" She makes that screechy sound at the mother, like, "Come on, why aren't we doing this?" Even in this 2 minutes when they don't get the normal reaction, they react with negative emotions, they turn away, they feel the stress of it, they actually may lose control of their posture because of the stress that they're experiencing. Okay.

Okay. I'm here. And what are you doing? Oh, yes.

Oh, would it be?

So what's very interesting about that is that the baby, as it was going through the process of feeling the anxiety of mom, blank stare, no emotions, it's going through a process. What is going on here? It has this also look of seeing the stress on mom's face, which is interesting, right? They've done actually experiments with this before as well in it comes to interviews. Where what happens is people go into an interview and if somebody is reacting positively, obviously that's the best case scenario. And if someone's reacting negatively where they're like, like making weird expressions on their face when the person being interviewed is talking, that is not preferable. But even that is better than if somebody is being interviewed and the interviewer has no expression, just like this. That is more nerve-wracking. Isn't that interesting? We would rather have somebody that is expressing negative emotion to us rather than somebody that has no expression at all because at least there's some form of attunement. There's not a doubt of what this other person is feeling. So when you look at the still face experiment here, Look at what the baby did as well. The baby had a couple different what are called protest behaviors. A protest behavior, it was where a baby is protesting to get its needs met. Later on in life, this gets reflected back as protest behaviors in relationships, which we'll talk about in a few minutes. So the baby points because the mom normally looks where the baby's pointing, and then the mom doesn't look. It's like, okay, that didn't work. Confused, confusion. The baby starts shrieking, it starts making noises, starts screaming, and the mom still is still looking but has the still face. What I find interesting as well is eventually the baby doesn't even want to see it because it's so uncomfortable. So the baby tries turning in the chair, tries turning around but can't. It will do anything it can to get out of the reflection of the still face, even if that means disconnecting from the attachment of mom. So think of how this may relate in our lives as either avoidant attachment, anxious attachment, or secure attachment of having the inconsistency of mom or dad there that is not meeting the needs What little strategies would the babies use eventually even later on in life to get its needs met? And one of the needs might be to not see the still face, which is turning away. How would that then relate to us in love? Think about it. Let's talk about anxious attachment with protest behaviors. Anxious attachment are people that want love. There's a belief that there's a scarce amount of love. Mom is only around for a certain period of time a day, so I need to get it while it's here. And then think about it. Mom then leaves. Mom then is not around. Anxiety. My needs aren't being met. Protest behavior. If I shriek and make noises, maybe mom will eventually come. Maybe if I yell very loud and mom comes, then there's this belief that if I'm loud enough, I'll get my needs met. So what happens is years later, you get the anxious attachment in a relationship and says, well, if I complain enough, if I'm loud enough, Then I'll get my needs met, not knowing that it's a subconscious response as a kid to getting mom to come to give attention. And think about it as well. If mom or dad was not around when we were a kid as much and we did not receive that love and attention, we may crave that love as attention. We may literally think attention is love. So then what happens is in relationship later on, it's like, I need a certain amount of attention or certain amount of validation. I need to get my Instagram views or my Instagram likes or my YouTube views or whatever, because then there'll be a feeling of completeness, a feeling of wholeness. Now we talked about avoidant. The other side. So anxious leans in, craves love, normally ends up pushing away because of that. Avoidant wants to push away the intimacy because the intimacy seems scary. And think about it, that baby that you just saw, imagine that baby having inconsistent mirroring of emotions over a period of time. Do you think that baby is going to trust love? Do you think that baby's going to trust someone else? It's used to inconsistent pattern of love. So avoidance, push away love. On one hand, they want it, and on the other hand, it feels like once it gets too close, it gets too scary. So the avoidant, what's important to understand about this is that there's in a way a loss of trust where it felt too suffocating. Even this could also be, imagine you have a mom that's worried, a mom that's actually there that doesn't have a still face, but imagine having a mom that's like, "Everything okay? I just want you to be okay. Are you okay? Is everything okay? Don't, you can't do this yourself. I'm gonna help you do this. And we're gonna do this." So it's like this constant control. And then eventually the baby's like, "Get away from me. I can't, being in connection is stressful because you're so worried about me." So then there's this feeling of wanting space, wanting distance. Not being able to trust. Now, secure attachment, which is the Goldilocks, had the right amount of consistent attention and energy and mirroring of emotions from mom, at least more consistently to where it just kind of expects it to be there. Now, even deeper than both of these though, let's take that a step deeper on where this can really change our life. When you see that of the baby that is afraid because mom's not around, is trying to turn itself, what conclusions do you think that baby might make about itself, about its identity even later on in life? Maybe the baby then decides there's something wrong with me. What did I do wrong? Not even what did I do wrong, but I must not be good enough. There must be a reason for this. And funny enough, when it comes to shame, I've been studying a lot about shame recently. I've been so fascinated by it. One of the things about shame that I find very interesting is that as babies, because our parents are literally like God to us, they are the thing that helps us survive, if something goes wrong where our needs aren't met, instead of thinking they're bad or it was their fault, we think it was our fault and that we must be bad. We internalize it. We take it personally. One of the reasons this is is because we rely on our parents for survival. So if we think they're bad, that also, that goes against our own safety. So instead we use this mechanism called shame, which gets us to be a specific way, be perfect, to be playing small, to holding ourselves in so that we don't receive the pain of the alternative, the pain of us shining brightly, the pain of us feeling worthy, whole, and complete, the pain of us feeling confident. Because there's this belief that there's already something wrong with me, which is why it's very important to become aware of these beliefs. Look at the beliefs about here that, that baby, that part of yourself that might emphasize with that video that you just watched. You may have empathized with it because there might be an inner child part of you that maybe feels the same way. So a huge part of the healing of this process, as you'll notice in that still face experiment, is that the mom still face, the mom eventually came back, re-regulated the baby's nervous system, re-mirrored its emotions back. And if many of us are stuck in childhood energetically, we're still believing there's something wrong with me. Where did mom go? It must be my fault. In life, we get a reflection of what we believe we deserve. And if we believe that we're not worthy of love, if we believe that we're not enough, then guess what? It's gonna be very hard to attract love. Not only that, these mixed connotations of not only am I not worthy for love, do I even want it? If that's what love is and it's inconsistent, is that even predictable? Is that even safe? So the questions to begin asking yourself are, how can you begin to reintegrate with your own inner child self? One thing I found to be extraordinarily powerful is to do an inner child meditation where you energetically go back to that part of yourself. Even something I've done here, I have this right here. This is a photo of me when I was a baby. When I'm out in public, I think people think it's my kid. I don't have a kid, but now I do. This is my kid. It's me. So anyways, what I do is I connect to this part of myself. I was like 2 or 3 years old in this photo, and I can imagine what that part of me may have been feeling and thinking. I can imagine that part of myself and begin to give that part of myself love, to be present with it. Here's the thing, you know, we think like we're gonna parent our inner child, we're gonna give them advice, we're gonna tell them, you know, you're worthy, you're worthy, you're worthy. All that inner child wants is for you to be present with it, to listen to it. There's a part of psychology that's called parts work where you work with the part of yourself that is that inner child. And you talk to it and you literally like, what would it say? What would it feel about love? What would it feel about connection? What does it feel about you and its connection to it? And as you begin to put words to it, it can become very emotional because maybe for the first time in your entire life, you're listening to a part of yourself that's felt trapped in the past. Been trapped feeling it's, it's their fault. Well, then you can realize it's not your fault. Mom or dad wasn't physically or emotionally there because you weren't good enough. You are worthy for simply being you. Some of the most powerful work you can do is to connect to energetically that inner child part of you and to be present with it. To send them love and healing and to hold them. And as you do, as you begin to integrate this shame from the past, the belief I'm broken, and you begin to realize that it was just an outdated belief that maybe that infant child had, you then begin to relieve— that relief comes where you feel the release of that energy. Here's the funny thing about shame. Shame is a neutral. Okay, let's, let's talk about worthiness. Here's the thing about worthiness. You are neutral. You are not less than worthy and you are not more than worthy. You just are. If you think about it, when people say, I want to become more worthy, think of it like a diamond. Heard this analogy today and I really liked it. You have a diamond and you're like looking at that diamond. Can that diamond become more of a diamond? No, the diamond's just a diamond. But what if the diamond goes, I'm a shining, I'm a beautiful diamond, I'm a diamond, I'm a diamond, I'm a diamond over and over again. Does it make it more of a diamond? No, it just already is a diamond. Now maybe there's mud on the diamond and that mud keeps it from realizing its true diamond self. So instead of it becoming more diamond, you just wash off the mud and it's shining bright. In the same way, you are not more than worthy or less than worthy. You just are. Sometimes what happens is people overcorrect on the worthiness thing 'cause they're like, I'm not worthy. They don't feel worthy. I don't feel worthy. So I'm gonna create all this success in the world and I'm gonna say I'm worthy and I'm a badass and I'm walking around. And then it's like this other side of the ego. Begin to ask yourself this. Is it possible— this helped me a lot— is it possible that it's not that you're more than worthy and it's some ego? Because that's what I'm afraid of. I'm afraid of like a spiritual ego or something that comes in. It's like, I'm freaking incredible. But realizing that you are neutral— it's easier to believe if there's this shame, this belief I'm broken or something wrong with me, to believe, is it possible that I'm actually neutral, that I, that everything is an equal amount of worthiness. And as you start to see that, you start to kind of let go of the belief that you're broken, because if you bring that everywhere you go, people will feel that off of you, opportunities will be blocked because of it. So the power in this process is becoming aware of that and making the choice to feel the love for your own inner child self. To feel the love and presence with that part of yourself, and to begin to look at your connection to other. Because if mom or dad was physically or emotionally unavailable as a kid, may have decided, emote, relationships aren't safe. I've gone through phases of myself where there's like more avoidant tendencies, more anxious tendencies, and I feel like now there's more of a secureness, more than ever I have in my life. Of feeling more secure with who I am, more secure with integrating the shame from the past or the belief I was broken. And it's so freeing just to become aware of that and then to feel and give myself permission to express the real me. And I do have an inner child meditation that you can do. It's one of my most powerful meditations that will help you to integrate all of this from the past to help you to really send that inner child love so that you can heal in a very powerful way. So if you go to aarondoughty.com/child, you will see it there. And other than that, there's a video that you can check out right here that will help you wire in these concepts even more. You can check it out right here.