From the same article, how we create people who think they need to cry louder to be heard. We do it with our children by not giving them proper care.
I know that my mother totally rejected me. I was told by my own mother, my grand mother, aunts, etc. She did not want to hug me.
But if no response came to the infant’s cries, then what? Some infants may resume their explorations and try to find a way back to safety. Others may completely go to pieces and cry in helplessness until either someone came to their aid, they became exhausted, or they shut down the feeling. In the former case the whole experience may be strengthening, building confidence for the future. In the latter case it may be severely demoralising, leading to feelings of helplessness and the consolidation of a yearning for the infant’s lost sense of safety and belonging.
In the former case the infant, confronted with an entirely new environmental demand, would have wavered between the old and the new, and then risen to the challenge, leaving the old pattern behind and incorporating her needs into a new behavioural strategy. Primal pain would have played a positive part in this example of growth by overwhelming the clinging onto the past, but not the organism as a whole. In the latter case, because the infant, for whatever reason, was unable to go forward, the primal pain just grew and grew, strengthening the imprint of the old pattern whilst at the same time engendering feelings of failure and hopelessness. The infant would have become fixated on primal pain.
In each case the different sets of feelings produce entirely different sets of expectations. The first infant becomes forward looking and adventurous. The second becomes reluctant to face the future, hates newness, and continually clings to the golden age of its past, before the pain of this world appeared. The earlier the onset of overwhelming pain the more ancient the period for which the infant yearns.
