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Love is simultaneous mutual regulation, wherein each person meets the needs of the other, because neither can provide for his own. Such a relationship is not 50-50—it’s 100-100. Each takes perpetual care of the other, and, within concurrent reciprocity, both thrive. For those who attain it, the benefits of deep attachment are powerful—regulated people feel whole, centered, alive. With their physiology stabilized from the proper source, they are resilient to the stresses of daily life, or even to those of extraordinary circumstance.
Reward a child’s distress with attention, they said (and say today), and you increase the probability of recurrence. A child left alone at night, with no human presence to “reward” him, eventually stops crying and makes do without. But sleep is not a reflex, like the canine salivation a flank steak provokes. The dozing adult brain rises and descends through half a dozen distinct neural phases every ninety minutes, in gradually lengthening symphonic movements that culminate in morning wakefulness. Sleep is an intricate brain rhythm, and the neurally immature infant must first borrow the patterns from parents.
A second person transmits regulatory information that can alter hormone levels, cardiovascular function, sleep rhythms, immune function, and more—inside the body of the first. The reciprocal process occurs simultaneously: the first person regulates the physiology of the second, even as he himself is regulated. Neither is a functioning whole on his own; each has open loops that only somebody else can complete. Together they create a stable, properly balanced pair of organisms.