When asking friends about blog post suggestions, one suggested that I write about the effects of mental health on bad relationships. This brings us to a bit of a chicken/egg scenario. Mental health and mental illness are at the core about relationships. And relationships significantly impact mental health and mental illness.
Early childhood and infant dynamics between child and caregiver result in a child learning what he or she can expect from the world. When people talk about attachment styles, they are talking about the degree to which an infant trusted that their caregiver would be there for them and meet their needs in a reliable way. Secure attachment means the infant was able to trust the caregiver and insecure attachment means that the infant was not able to trust the caregiver. As the infant grows into a child the relationships with caregivers become more complicated and dynamic which leads to the development of schemas or templates for how as the child grows into an adult, he or she will interpret the world. This includes an understanding of how best to get their needs met. Some learn to be manipulative; some learn to be giving; some learn to be charming; some just expect the world to provide for them what they need. This sets the tone for adult relationship dynamics.
The infant brain is very primitive compared to the adult brain. The system most “online” is the instinctual one, the old brain, the monkey brain, the fight flight freeze SURVIVAL brain. And that is where the attachment style, or belief that people are inherently trustworthy or not, is stored.
Next, we develop our emotional brains concurrently with motor or movement; this is moving forward and up within the brain structure from the primitive brain which is at the top of our spinal cords. This is where are schemas are stored or our understanding of what to expect from the world and people and how to get what we need. For a nice list of schemas please click here.
Finally, we develop the abilities of decision making, planning, and impulse control. This part of the brain, the frontal lobe, doesn’t finish development until we’re about 25. Based on what we learn between the emotional brain development in early childhood and full cognitive function in our 20’s, we learn what can later become thought distortions. Thought distortions are patterns of thinking that were appropriate and made sense at one point and then became thinking rules; the may later be problematic as adults because when we learned these rules, our brains didn’t function well enough to distinguish when the pattern is valid and when it is not. Click here for a list of Cognitive Distortions.
When the adult feels threatened, depending on what the “danger” is, he or she may be able to make rational decisions about how to manage the threat, may use cognitive distortions to understand the situation, or may become emotionally triggered enough for thinking to revert to early schemas and attachment styles. In essence, when we feel at risk, it’s easy for us to literally start thinking and acting like our 6-year-old selves might have acted except now we’re plopped down into much more complicated situations and relationship dynamics.
Humans are pack animals; we need relationships for survival. Without healthy relationships, we are literally at risk physically and emotionally. One of the hallmarks of mental illness is the feeling of being cut off, alone, isolated. We don’t talk about our feelings in our current culture (although this is evolving) so it becomes very easy to think that we are the only ones feeling what we feel. This isolation drives the emotional struggle even deeper, sadness becomes depression, stress or worry become anxiety, the anticipated shock of a traumatic experience becomes PTSD. This pathological level of emotional experience and perceived isolation triggers the individual to then jump from the rational brain of an adult to the more primitive brain and 6-year-old (or younger) type problem solving and trying to get needs met.
Acting like a 6-year-old when you’re in your 40’s isn’t going to go over very well with a spouse. When I say acting like a 6-year-old, I don’t mean literally tantrums on the floor etc., just that you are in your emotional brain and responding with schemas !!even if you THINK you are in your adult rational brain!! It’s “…The “gut feeling” we project onto ambiguity in our interactions. It’s driven not by a cool assessment of events but by the collapsing of time, the superimposition of the past onto the present.” https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/08/making-keeping-friends-attachment-theory-styles/671222/
A spouse can only respond to the behavior in front of them, not having access to the inner workings of the brain of their partner with PTSD or really any mental illness. Sometimes a spouse gets triggered by their partner too. It becomes very easy for communication to breakdown and suddenly you have two adults, potentially married, potentially dealing with stressors of jobs and bills, maybe raising children, and both emotionally responding with that “gut feeling” knee jerk emotional response of their childhoods.
Couples counseling can be helpful for creating a safe space where the two individuals can come out of their schema brains together and reconnect as the adults they want to be. The therapist, who will not be triggered into emotional thinking, can facilitate communication, and point out when the partners revert to a more primitive, developmentally younger brain space.
Individual therapy is important in helping each individual feel less isolated in pathology and normalize emotional experience. The therapist can help pick apart the thought and emotional patterns of the client to assist with gaining insight into their origins and determining if they still hold up and are useful to the adult self.
Group therapy breaks apart the isolation feeling so that the individual can start feeling like they are part of a pack or herd or unit again. Safety in numbers.