As infants we come into the world with certain basic bodily sensations which, over time and through interaction with those who care for us, begin to be organised into what we call emotions. An infant does not “think” that they are hungry, nor do they know it the way an adult does. They feel a bodily discomfort and respond to it by crying. For an infant there are as yet no clear boundaries between physical pain and “Self”; their experience is total and absolute.
If the person caring for the infant has the emotional sensitivity and discernment to perceive that this particular cry means hunger and not something else, this concerns the degree of emotional attunement. The parent, functioning as an “external regulator” for an infant not yet able to regulate their own internal state, will mirror the infant’s experience and regulate it by caring for them. In practice, this means that an adult who responds consistently and sensitively to an infant’s different needs helps them acquire a healthy contact with their body and their needs in adult life. What the adult sees in the child will become what the child comes to make of themselves.
When an infant feels a bodily disturbance and the adult responds calmly, the infant internalises that relief as safety. Naming an infant’s feelings is an act of meaning-making that helps the child build inner bridges and connections about what is happening to them. If bodily discomfort is not systematically relieved and there is neglect, the infant is flooded by an undifferentiated anxiety — a diffuse sense of existential danger with no clear cause. Many people in psychotherapy report a diffuse anxiety that has been with them for as long as they can remember, and this may well have its foundations in this early interaction during infancy.
When a parent does not mirror a child’s pain, sadness or anger, the child does not learn to recognise and name their inner experience. Some feelings remain nameless, while others are given the wrong name (pain or sadness, for example, are often labelled “whingeing”). The phrase “don’t be angry”, which we often say to children, appears to invalidate their existential truth, whereas what would be useful to ask them is: “What do you need?”
These children often become adults marked by alexithymia (a term coined by the Greek psychiatrist at Harvard, Peter Sifneos, in 1972): a- (privative) + lexis (word) + thymos (emotion/mood). Etymologically it means the lack of words for feeling. Many people describe their experiences “photographically”, as though describing a scene from a film, but when asked “how did you feel?”, they struggle to find the words to describe their inner experience. This difficulty is more pronounced when the child’s caregiving environment included an emotionally absent parent because of addiction, mental illness or bereavement, with the result that the “bridges” between experience and meaning were never fully built, since these difficulties came between parent and child.
Since a child does not have the capacity to remove themselves from a neglectful environment, they move away psychologically from parts of themselves instead. Dissociation functions in this case as a protective defence in the service of survival: “If my body hurts and no care comes, my brain stops paying attention to internal signals.”
A related example concerns the disconnection from the body and the senses that can occur because of a parent’s own psychological difficulty — in cases where a mother is dealing with an eating disorder, for instance. There, her own difficulty in reading her body works as an obstacle to seeing her child’s needs clearly. Feeding can become a field of control and anxiety rather than a space of connection, with the infant being pressured or strictly restricted, depending on her own inner fears and distortions.
Psychotherapy offers precisely this corrective experience of connecting what was never bridged inside us. The therapeutic relationship offers the safety for a person to learn to turn their awareness towards the body, to name their inner experience, and to build the meanings and connections that will allow them to feel whole, present and connected with their authentic experience.
