Mirroring and Marking

[Ami]

That is a VERY elucidating interchange, Heart.                       Ami

[HeartofPilgrimage]

It's interesting how God guides your journey. I adopted my daughter from a Romanian orphanage when she was only 14 months old, and her developmental problems were so profound that I started desperately reading and researching to try to help her (really, to try to help US --- I was drowning). And then I discovered I loved psychology, and after all these years, I come around to figuring out what was going on in myself and in my mother. So I started out trying to figure out how to help my daughter, and ended up helping myself too.

Here is a link to a famous researcher ... this is his short bio (in this link) but once you know who he is, you can look out for his work. He has generated a lot of the research on mirroring and marking that I have referred to in this thread.

http://www.childrenshospital.org/cfapps/research/data_admin/Site440/mainpageS440P0.html

I have been reading Understanding the Borderline Mother by Christine Lawson. I believe that it is probable that my granddaughter's maternal grandmother has borderline personality disorder, and I'm suspicious about her (my grandbaby's) mother as well. So, I got this book to try to figure out how to best help my grandbaby NOT turn out to have this or some other related disorder. But, as fate would have it, I recognized my own mother in the "Hermit" persona the book describes. Freaked me out.

My mom's problems for the most part probably wouldn't rise to the level of a diagnosis. I feel that an almost 50 year relationship with my very stable dad is the major reason for her symptoms staying low-level.  I have said on this forum before that after he died she seemed to become the very worst version of herself.

If any of you know your mom has BPD or even suspect it, I definitely recommend this book. There is a whole section dedicated to telling adult children how to best handle a relationship with your BPD mother. The advice is based on your mother's primary persona --- there are four described in the book. It talks about limit-setting and how to handle common crises (like holidays!).

[sKePTiKal]

Just popping in for a sec...

Heart: Daniel Schore has several essays posted online; they're still lengthy and very scientific! But it is possible to glean the important stuff - I found lots of bells clanging in my head as I read them; much that was extremely familiar to me and explained so much...

Somewhere on here, I started a thread on attachment referencing an earlier thread that started my search and I posted the links to the essays.

Very very busy this week and not thinking too coherently... but this issue is the crux of how thing "go wrong" (or right) for children who grow up with these very different ways of "being" and relating to others. It is, quite fortunately, not a life sentence... what we experienced, you know. It does create a predisposition... but every jot of awareness and understanding we gain helps us overcome that predisposition and we form new, more wholesome and rewarding ways of "being".

Thanks for bringing this up for discussion! Clarity on this topic is fundamental to healing, imho.

[Portia]

Bear's earlier words said almost what I wanted to: "If you have the healthy ability to mirror your infant then marking is not far behind or may just come naturally in the process of simply comforting your baby. You don't even know you're doing it." 

As I was reading all the thread, I was thinking "isn't this obvious? Isn't this what normal people do without even thinking about it?" - a bit like what George Kelly says in his hostility piece ("It will take longer to say the same thing" etc).

Someone falls on the ice in front of me, I say "Ow!" immediately followed by "Are you okay?". It's not just for infants, it's human. I knew that my primary caregivers didn't have it and that they were different, because I knew that others did have it. I can only guess that as a baby I spent a lot of time with the others. I must have done. I learned at some early age to be wary of the primaries. Interesting.

[Gabben]

About mother-infant interactions ... Some of the newest research on mother-infant relationships go beyond the concept of mirroring to "marking." Marking is when the adult in the dyad shows the baby that his/her emotions are shared but does it in such a way that it is clear that it is the BABY's emotions and not the ADULT's emotions. This is a hard concept to put into words but most of us would understand it if we saw a video. It is also something that we might could learn if somebody taught us, but for the most part either you have the ability to both mirror and mark your baby's emotions or you don't, because you get it from your own infancy.

I just noticed something when watching my own mother try to sooth my granddaughter this weekend. While she was trying to sooth her, I was getting more and more nervous. Something about her style of soothing I found unnerving. And it occurred to me that I felt that way when she was with my own babies, and with myself when I was little. She was trying hard to be soothing but totally missing the mark.

I think that when babies get upset, she gets upset. So there was mirroring but no marking. She became nervous and upset when the baby became nervous and upset, which is not effective in soothing a baby. So even though it's not her fault she lacks this ability, I can still see how my own emotions became hard for me to manage.

As I read this I was imaging my NM, the way that I and my sister have watched her over the years try to sooth her grandchildren. It is almost the same thing as your mom. Our mom gets upset with their feelings of discomfort, as if any negative emotions from a child are a reflection on her, the caregiver, causing her nerves and a need to quickly sooth the discomfort rather than how you or I perhaps would respond with a heart that simply just acknowledges, REALLY acknowledges the babies discomfort with sweetness and acceptance as well as the empathy to understand what they may perhaps need to be comforted?

Just rambling.

[Gabben]

Hi bearwithme,

I see these issues in terms of empathy and positive differentiation.  Empathy—meaning that I can feel what you are feeling: you have communicated it to me, and therefore you are not alone, and I will be able to respond to your emotional needs.  And positive differentiation—we don’t have to feel the same thing/way for me to value you (and, therefore, ensure your survival).  Narcissistic parents fail at both.

Best,

Richard 

Reading this helped me in seeing that my mom cannot positive differentiate between herself, her feelings and another's. If I am feeling sad and she is happy she has to make me wrong for my sadness, change it or fix it, as if my different response in life or state of heart or mind does not mirror what she is feeling or thinking, therefore it invalidates her reality because she bases reality so much on image and others opinions. She needs a constant mirror that affirms her, a constant steady stream of affirmation that she is OK, without it she rages. If I am different than her it triggers her shame/belief system that perhaps she is wrong, therefore she has to fix it back to normal, her way.

Does this make sense?

[HeartofPilgrimage]

Yes it makes total sense. If I don't get upset when my mother does, she feels betrayed. She doesn't seem to have much conception of empathy that happens despite the fact you are not upset.

On the other hand, it has occurred to me that for the most part our mothers must have done better than their own mothers ... because somehow we as a group developed empathy and they as a group didn't do so well there.

The rest of you may live in parts of the world where civilization has been around a long time ... but my grandparents grew up literally on the Texas frontier. My own mother remembers when their community got electricity. Farm women had to work in the fields, and babies were left at the end of the row of cotton, and toddlers were staked out like goats to keep them from wandering away. Life was really hard, and physical survival took up most of their attention. Infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates, during childbirth) were high. My mother's father had 14 siblings, and miraculously all 15 kids grew up to adulthood ... but his mother went blind from a congenital optic nerve disease in her 20s ... what's really miraculous is that anybody in this kind of situation ends up with their emotional needs met!

[Gabben]

Farm women had to work in the fields, and babies were left at the end of the row of cotton, and toddlers were staked out like goats to keep them from wandering away. Life was really hard, and physical survival took up most of their attention.

I think that perhaps those that grew up in that generation are the more tough talking, thick skinned abled to face hardships without so much emotional response, just a get through it and do what you have to kind of mentality, a kind of life is hard deal with it song.

Infant mortality rates (and maternal mortality rates, during childbirth) were high. My mother's father had 14 siblings, and miraculously all 15 kids grew up to adulthood ... but his mother went blind from a congenital optic nerve disease in her 20s ... what's really miraculous is that anybody in this kind of situation ends up with their emotional needs met!

Yeah, I have often wondered how people from large families get their emotional needs met in childhood from the parents. One thing I have noticed is that the younger siblings of the large families seem the most well adjusted, this observation is from my two family study over a period of my lifetime so I can only make generalizations. My aunt and uncle have 7 kids and their youngest is the most well adjusted happy go lucky with a big heart. I think that his siblings raised him, that was a lot of attention and mirroring that was constant in his youngest adorable baby years.

A guy I once dated was 10th of 10 kids, he too was of the same dispostion of my cousin, happy go lucky big warm heart open and understanding and better able to articulate his emotions that most I knew. He said that he was raised by his siblings and there was hardly ever a moment when he was not getting loved and held, and played with and cared for.

[Ami]

Hi bearwithme,

I see these issues in terms of empathy and positive differentiation.  Empathy—meaning that I can feel what you are feeling: you have communicated it to me, and therefore you are not alone, and I will be able to respond to your emotional needs.  And positive differentiation—we don’t have to feel the same thing/way for me to value you (and, therefore, ensure your survival).  Narcissistic parents fail at both.

Best,

Richard 

Reading this helped me in seeing that my mom cannot positive differentiate between herself, her feelings and another's. If I am feeling sad and she is happy she has to make me wrong for my sadness, change it or fix it, as if my different response in life or state of heart or mind does not mirror what she is feeling or thinking, therefore it invalidates her reality because she bases reality so much on image and others opinions. She needs a constant mirror that affirms her, a constant steady stream of affirmation that she is OK, without it she rages. If I am different than her it triggers her shame/belief system that perhaps she is wrong, therefore she has to fix it back to normal, her way.

Does this make sense?

This says it all. Lise. How well said. Thank you!!!      xxoo  Ami