Why are some people able to have many satisfying, intimate social relationships, while others are enduring the pain of estrangement and loneliness?
How does the sense of belonging and attachment we receive from others relate to the development of our personal sense of self?
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You might think that perfect harmony is typical of healthy relationships, but in fact, 70% of interactions are out of sync, and loss of connection is an inevitable part of interpersonal interactions.
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01
Misalignment is the norm in relationships
Leonardo da Vinci - Our Lady of Nursing
Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna and Child embody idealized parental love. In this painting, Mary gazes affectionately into each other's eyes with her young son.
Raphael - The Virgin and Child
Raphael's other painting of the same subject is more telling, with the young Jesus looking at a book in Mary's hand while Mary looks absently at the ground. Similarly, the dances of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers convey an idealized notion of love that leads us into the misconception that in a good emotional relationship, two people are always in tune.
Dirty Dancing movie poster
But in Dirty Dancing, Jennifer Grey's relationship with Patrick Swayze is closer to the truth—Jennifer stepped on Patrick's toe, and Patrick poked Jennifer in the eye. In order to dance the graceful and coordinated dance of the last act, the mistakes and confusion in the coordination are necessary. For Jennifer and Craig, their laughter as they pack their plates and order pizza is filled with joy and intimacy, all of which stem from confronting dislocations and repairing relationships.
From infancy to adulthood, navigating chaos has always been the way we grow and develop in relationships. This may seem a bit counterintuitive, as you might think there won't be conflict in a healthy relationship. Shouldn't two people in a good relationship always be in harmony?
The original "still face" experiment yielded dramatic results, revealing a new way to understand the relationship between infants and parents, but there is still a lot to know about the parent-child relationship. Our previous research on infants reflected the assumption that the more synchronized and coordinated the parent-child interaction, the more ideal, or rather, the more normal. To many's surprise, the study found that chaos is key to a solid relationship.
"Still Face" experiment
In the "still face" experiment, we first photographed typical parent-child interaction. Subsequently, we analyzed these videos frame by frame, and we slowed down the playback speed of the videos, giving us the opportunity to understand the interactions of every moment that we could not enjoy in real time. We want to see a healthy mother-baby relationship—seeing the perfect coordination between mother and baby, looking at each other, looking away, reaching out and touching each other at the same time, in short, every movement of both sides is matched. With this preconceived notion about how mother and baby interact, we describe the moment of mother-baby connection in a concise way, treating all data that is disconnected and does not conform to this perfect pattern as irrelevant information. But after months of research, we can't deny the patterns of interaction that really exist. On average, 70% of interactions in a typical healthy parent-child relationship are out of sync. Losing connectivity is an inevitable part of interaction.
For example, in one video, we observe babies staring at the straps on their high chair, comforting themselves by sucking their fingers. When the mother tries to attract the baby's attention, she ignores the mother. The mother then took her hand out of the baby's mouth and gently moved it back. The eyes of the two of them met and they both smiled. Then the mother approached the baby, but the baby looked away.
Most relationship interactions are misplaced 70% of the time, do you think that makes sense? Our study has found this result time and time again. In the field of developmental psychology, this three-seven-and-seven assertion is quite famous, and some practitioners will quote it without knowing its origin. This conclusion comes from our detailed observation of the initial loving relationship. At first, our expectations of emotional coordination led us to see misalignment as a problem, but in reality it was a norm. When we analyzed those videos, we found that what was important was not misalignment, but the repair of relationships.
02
Repairing relationships requires real action
We come to realize that relationship repair is the key to human interaction. Relationship repair brings a sense of pleasure, trust, and security, and it can lead to an implicit awareness that I can overcome difficulties. In addition, repairing a relationship can also teach us an important life lesson: when two people are finally paired successfully after hard work, the negative feelings generated by dislocation can become positive feelings. We don't have to stay in a negative emotional state. A person's belief about whether or not he or she can change his emotional state develops from the earliest interactions in infancy.
When we experimented using the "still face" paradigm, we observed typical parent-child interaction and got a clear picture. First, we observed that mothers and babies naturally played some of the games they often played, such as clapping their hands or counting. We then found that in the context of the "still face" experiment, the infants learned some interactive strategies during the misalignment–repair process, which they used to signal to the mother. Whenever stress is encountered, the infant adopts the same interaction that he or she has summed up in his or her usual interactions with caregivers. While they don't yet have the ability to speak or think consciously, they can use the experience they gain from countless moments of interaction to cope with the stress of abnormal behavior from caregivers.
We come to understand that the dislocation and repair of relationships is a normal, continuous experience that is crucial to the development of us as social animals. What comforting news that we only had 30% of the time in the initial emotional relationship to be fully coordinated! This number is so low that it should ease the pressure on many people to know that they don't have to seek perfect harmony in emotional relationships as adults. As long as there is an opportunity to repair the relationship, 70% misalignment is not terrible, that is not only the norm, but also helps to develop a positive, healthy relationship. In order to learn to trust each other, we need those normal messes.
After the initial "still face" experiment, we conducted decades of research and came to a central conclusion: If the relationship is to develop healthily, rather than stagnate or break down, then this process from dislocation to repair is not only inevitable, but essential.
03
What is meaning construction
What does meaning making mean? Jerome Bruner was the first to come up with the concept, a cognitive scientist, so he looked at the construction of meaning primarily from the perspective of linguistic symbols and cognition. The "still face" study shows that people can already construct meaning well before they can express meaning in words. They construct meaning on multiple levels of mental and physiological experience, including sensory systems, genes, autonomic nervous systems, and motor systems. They enrich their sense of self in the world through multiple levels of sensations—perception, thinking, touch, sight, and even smell.] They take information from multiple layers of feelings, movements, and emotional experiences that only humans can understand, and incorporate that information into their relationships with other people.
Louis Sander18, a psychoanalyst and pioneer of infant research, elaborated on what he called "open space," a metaphor for the space between the infant and the caregiver, which provides an opportunity for the emergence and growth of the infant's sense of self. In this space, babies develop a unique self in their interactions with their primary caregiver. When babies misunderstand and re-evaluate the motivations and intentions of others, instant contact with others is the process by which infants understand their own meaning.
The "still face" experiment dramatically illustrates that babies are born with the ability to influence their world and have a gift for interacting with their environment. Faced with the mother's unfamiliar indifferent expression, the baby will use many strategies to re-arouse her interest. The experimental situation represented by the "still face" paradigm challenges infants' ability to understand the meaning of their own experiences. If they could talk, they might say that the mother could no longer interact with the child, which was simply inexplicable. In different protocols, the total length of the experiment is 6 min, while the duration of the "stationary face" part varies, but the average length is 2 min. If you try to stare expressionlessly at a friend or family member who wants to grab your attention, two minutes will look like a torment. For experimental purposes, the extension of time amplifies that response, providing us with the opportunity to understand the infant process of meaning-building.
If a baby successfully goes through the process from misalignment to repair, then when faced with the stress of the "still face" experiment, various strategies are used to manage this stress. He would point, scream, and perform a series of actions to reconnect. He will show agency (i.e., his sense of control over his own life) and a sense of power—he will be able to take effective action on his own world. If he could describe his experience in words, he might say, "I don't know why my mom ignored me, but I know that if I continue to work hard, I can get her attention." "If a baby goes through the process from misunderstanding to reconnection countless times, he interacts with the mother's world in a hopeful way without feeling helpless. He constructed a special meaning for his experience, an optimistic expectation, which gave him a sense of resilience. Conversely, a baby who experiences fault but few repair experiences constructs a negative meaning: you don't love me, I can't trust you, or I'm helpless.
The patterns of coping in these interactions, and these patterns of constructive meaning, have proven to be fairly stable and rarely change over time. We conducted two "still face" experiments on 52 pairs of mothers and babies, with an interval of 10 days in between, and we found that the strategies used by infants in both experiments to attract their mother's attention and comfort themselves were the same. If the mother and baby fail to repair the rift in the relationship, the baby will exhibit behaviors consistent with grief, withdrawal, or alienation. They seem to have a hard time controlling themselves, either behaving chaotically or completely collapsing and motionless. Both types of reactions indicate that they feel helpless and powerless.
The main implication of these findings for adults is that relationship patterns in early years were not fixed and permanent. Through chaotic interactions with children, spouses, friends, teachers, psychotherapists, and others you have the opportunity to bring into your life, you can achieve sustained change and growth throughout your life. If you lack enough opportunities to repair in your early relationship, you can heal yourself by re-experiencing the moments of misalignment and repair with your original caregiver (if they are willing to change), and of course you can experience those moments with your partner in the new relationship.
If you find yourself repeatedly caught up in problematic relationships, if you feel deeply anxious or hopeless, you may feel powerless to change your environment. But constantly repeating the process from misalignment to repair in relationships with those around us can bring us agency (such as hope).
Written by Dr. Ed Tronick, a world-renowned researcher in the "still face" experiment, neuroscientist and clinical psychologist, researcher at the Department of Neonatal Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Distinguished Professor of Developmental and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Source of this article: Mechanical Industry Press, book "The Power of Conflict"