Attachment, Trauma and the Epigenetics of Resilience

Clara Mucci

1 June, 2023

What is resilience, and where does it come from? For psychoanalyst and professor of clinical psychology Clara Mucci, the answer lies securely with early attachment – while the responsibility must extend to political and social practices. Here, the author of Resilience and Survival discusses the central relevance of affect regulation to any understanding of resilience, and shares some clinical pointers for addressing interpersonal and intergenerational traumatisation.

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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.

Clara Mucci
Clara Mucci (PhD, 1999, Emory University, Atlanta, in English Literature and Psychoanalysis; Doctorate in Anglistics, Genoa University, Italy; Degree in Clinical Psychology, University of Chieti) and Specialisation in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Milan, SIPP) is full professor of Dynamic Psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy, and Director of Graduate Study in Clinical Psychology after having served as full professor of English Literature and Shakespearean Drama until 2012. She is a member of SIPP (Società Italiana Psicoterapia Psicoanalitica), IARPP, APA-Division39 (Psychoanalysis) and a Psychoanalyst with training functions for SIPeP-SF (Società Italiana Psicoanalisi e Psicoterapia-Sandor Ferenczi), in private practice in Milan, Italy. Clara is the author of various monographs on Shakespeare and psychoanalytic theory. Within the psychoanalytic field, her major publications in English are Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma, Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Therapy for Personality Disorders and Resilience and Survival: Understanding and Healing Intergenerational Trauma. She is the co-editor, with G. Craparo, of Unrepressed Unconscious: Implicit Memory and Clinical Work and with Arnold Rachman of the forthcoming Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma: A Relational Neurobiological Perspective. She lectures extensively in Europe and in the US and is a teacher and supervisor in several training schools of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, in Italy, England (Confer), Poland and the US.

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