Attachment, Trauma and the Epigenetics of Resilience

Resilience is a term taken from physics, where it indicates the capacity of a material to absorb energy when it is deformed and then release that energy and come back to its normal state.

Applied to humans, resilience describes the ability of being stretched beyond one’s limits and then being able to return to being oneself again, having overcome the difficulties thanks to unexpected inner resources. It allows us to resist adversity and/or to respond, without too much damage, to trauma of various intensities – both interpersonal trauma, and trauma stemming from natural catastrophes or involuntary accidents, which has different consequences.

But where does this capacity to resist the momentary perturbation, to adjust and to put forth creative resources, come from?

Are these resources provoked and called forth by the challenge itself or are they created in the effort to fight back?

Are they innate and, so to speak, dormant in the system or do they become available under extremely stressful circumstances?

And why are they not available in all of us in the same quantity or quality?

My major hypothesis about resilience is that it is not innate, given by birth for some genetic reason, but stems from security of attachment with a caregiver. Their optimal care helps the child to regulate their affective states and achieve the best possible development of all the systems – neurobiological, affective, cognitive, psychological. This is the base for the creation of the most adaptive response to life events, both positive and negative or traumatic.

If I have affect regulation, my bodily response to possible future traumatic events has the capacity to better respond and further modulate the stress, the fear, and all the other negative affects.

If I have an insecure or even disorganised attachment, my system reacts with more stress (cortisol) and adrenaline, sometimes even with dissociative states, further complicating the response.

In psychotherapy, adults who have insecure or even disorganised attachment (therefore showing traces of early traumatisations or further interpersonal traumatisations, what we call Complex PTSD) unmistakably suffer from dysregulation of affects.

We may see this express itself with personality disorders, with ups and downs in mood, depression, dissociative syndromes, psychosomatic disorders, eating disorders and/or addictions – in relationships, in sexual behaviour, or with alcohol and drugs.

In our clinical work, we need to address those early or cumulative interpersonal traumatisations:
 

• To emotionally reconstruct and retrieve the missing or distorted parts of the interpersonal and sometimes even intergenerational stories (depressed caregivers, antisocial caregivers, sadistic and very emotionally damaged caregivers).
   
• To address and elaborate the emotions coming out of the retrieval of the stories (anger, sadness, desperation, desire for revenge) through what I call ‘embodied witnessing’, until the patients liberate themselves as much as possible of their emotional negative bond to the caregivers.
   
• To support patients to liberate themselves both of the emotions attached to the victim side (“poor me, I will never make it, it is my fault, I am awful, my body is disgusting”) and of the negative emotions attached to the internalised persecutor, i.e. feelings of anger, hate, aggressiveness towards the self (and one’s own body) and towards the other (sometimes their own children).
   

But the best protection towards future traumatisations and the repetition of a social cycle is to have political and social practices that create conditions of safety and care for children and their families. Good attachment is the major predictor towards the creation of empathy, compassion, care, attention for the other and for people in need. All these human qualities are epigenetic – environmental, relationally built qualities – not genetic.