The Cause of Insecurity

On wonderful wood erected enchantingly from the gorgeous ground grows beautiful branches with lovely leaves and fine flowers. From the flowers grow fruit until such ovaries are ripe and ready to descend to the dirt. This type of ovary, sweet as an ornament is stunning, later finds itself in the fangs of a fox, paw of a polecat, beak of a bluebird, or otherwise captured by some other creature. The sweetness of the fruit salivates the mouths of the animals. The animals then spread the seeds to produce more fruit-bearing plants, and the cycle of life continues.

Unfortunately, fate has it that some fruits are snatched from their trees, vines, or bushes more swiftly than a toddler is taken from its oblivious mother in public, only to be yet another case of an abducted child. Unlike healthy fruit, these fruits stop developing, becoming as bitter as the blackest coffee bean imaginable. The bitter fruit bemoans its lot in life, even before it knows it will be spit out and abandoned by the beasts.

The sweet fruit is secure, whereas the unsweet fruit is insecure. This metaphor applies to children, and by extension, the adults they grow up to be as well. A secure person has faith in himself, other people, and the world at large.

“If we want our children to be able to relate to others and have healthy relationships, to be interdependent, they need to be able to be dependent first,” said psychologist Erica Komisar in Being There (2017). From her experience as a social worker in New York, in addition to that as a psychologist, with the help of ancillary psychological experiments, Dr. Komisar concluded that children need to be close to their mothers when young to develop into secure adults, stating that the ages from zero to three years of age is the critical period for sound mental development.

That said, the insecure are not only mentally deficient, but physiologically hampered as well. Mind and body are one; thus, they both mirror each other. An infant creates 40,000 synapses per second, and the size of a baby’s brain doubles during the first year in life. During the first three years of life, it is imperative that the right side of a child’s brain be developed – the hemisphere responsible for picking up social cues, relating to others, building durable relationships in life, and tolerating mistakes in the process of learning.

The chemical responsible for the ability to trust and bond is oxytocin. Oxytocin is produced in a mother when she gives birth and breast feeds her baby; in the baby, when its mother responds appropriately to its emotional cues and signals. Babies with neglectful mothers produce not only less oxytocin, but less receptors for said chemical as well, diminishing their ability to securely relate to others.

McGill University researcher Dr. Michel Meany demonstrated through rats that receiving affection builds resiliency in young mammals. Mother rats show affection by licking their young. The more the young are licked, the less stress hormones, such as cortisol, they produce. Such hormones reduce mental fortitude if produced continually. Another study conducted by David Waynforth showed that babies that co-slept with their mothers produced less cortisol.

Insecure children tend to show behavioral/mental problems at home and in school – temper tantrums, emotional breakdowns, inattentiveness, absent-mindedness, stubbornness, withdrawal, excess aggressiveness, violence, suicidal thoughts, to name some. With regards to suicide in particular, from the 1970s to 1986, there was a three-fold increase of suicides among children ranging from the ages of 5 to 14. A comparatively substantial number of married couples got divorced during the 80s (and 90s), forcing otherwise stay-at-home mothers to go to work to support their kids. Many kids were left alone without a maternal emotional co-regulator.

Insecure children typically grow up to be insecure adults. This is because unmet needs – be they emotional, intellectual, or spiritual – don’t vanish into thin air. They plummet into the depths of our being below our conscious awareness, only to manifest in ways that tamper with livelihoods. An excellent instance of this is a man who wants his wife to behave as a substitute mother. Such a man tends to hypocritically be aloof and unsympathetic to the needs of his wife.

Back in the Freudian era, this type of man would be labeled as “neurotic,” whereas a man who could “love as a man” would be called “normal.” So-called “neurotics” unconsciously hold on to infantile expectations, only to be disappointed when the adult world fails to respond in kind.

In contrast to the renowned Sigmund Freud, psychologist Jean Liedloff believed that virtually no one in Western, or even oriental or third-world, society is truly healthy from a psychological standpoint. She formed her conclusion based on her time spent with the South American tribe known as the Yequana, which she accounts in The Continuum Concept (1975).

It is rare for a baby of said tribe to cry. Toddlers of the Yequana virtually never throw temper tantrums. In fact, the only child Liedloff has ever observed throwing such a tantrum was a boy named Wididi. The author noted a tension in his face and the ungraceful gait of his movement to be reminiscent of those of civilized children. The boy’s father, knowing some Spanish, had previous experience working in a rubber factory. Both said father and the boy’s mother lead cosmopolitan lives. The boy had therefore been raised in a manner that divorced him from the rhythms of nature.

As babies, Yequana individuals are constantly held by their mothers and other older members of the tribe. The people hold the babies while performing their normal activities. This means the babies are being held while the respective caregiver is cooking, cleaning, walking, singing, playing and crafting items. The activities of the holder provide ample stimulation for the baby, and the holder’s body helps regulate the energy of said baby by acting as a channel for said energy to diffuse. In turn, the baby is much calmer and less fidgety than civilized babies. Liedloff called this phase of childhood development the “in-arms phase.”

Many civilized mothers hold their babies while vegetating in front of a television set or computer. This is better than not holding the baby at all, but less conducive to the future health of the child than simultaneously performing a daily task while holding it. Babies need their senses engaged for optimal mental acuity.

After this phase comes the phase in which the baby creeps, then the phase in which the baby crawls. During this phase of development, the mother, attuned to her instincts, trusts that the child will naturally not hurt itself. And guess what? Such a baby handles objects like daggers and other sharp tools without hurting itself. It senses the confidence that the level-headed mother has for its ability to regulate its motility. Civilized babies, on the other hand, sense their mothers’ lack of trust in their ability to handle themselves. Notice the word used is “sense,” not “think of.” As a reminder, babies have hardly any linguistic cognition. They are nonetheless affected by the psychic atmosphere of their environment.

Knowing the trust its other has for it, the baby develops trust in itself as its coordination increases. This leads to a robust trust in its body, which later extends to a trust in life itself – that is, an attitude of security. The older the baby gets, the less it comes back to its mother for comfort.

Many people in the West believe that comforting a crying baby spoils it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The late primatologist Jane Goodall tested this notion using her own child. She made sure to come to her then baby son every single time he cried. To the surprise of her associates, her son grew up to be a child that was healthily self-sufficient and relatively fearless in addition to respecting adults as well as his peers.

It’s not the mothers that soothe their crying babies that spoil them; rather, it’s overbearing, anxious mothers that disrupt the initiatives of their children that ruin said children. Civilized people have lost touch with their instincts, hence the delusions they concoct.

Can us civilized people reclaim our archaic instincts to trust life? Yes, we can. We just need to return to the stage(s) of life we could not adequately fulfill. Drs. Doman and Delacato observed improvements of their patients in their Philadelphia clinic when said patients were allowed to crawl and creep like babies. Again, the body is the mind. Proper use of the body enhances the mind. One’s verbal proficiency, for example, is greatly influenced by the extent to which said person was able to satisfy his urge to creep and crawl when younger.

An insecure person is one that is possessed with the visceral orientation to distrust life, irrespective of said person’s intellectual attitude. Many primitive nomads, having retained their instincts, label the emotionally ill as “demonically possessed.” Such emotionally ill people are treated by shamans or medicine men. Mentally gymnastics fail to persuade the insecure into believing themselves to be secure. One must reorient their body to fix his mind or uproot the unconscious belief systems to release the demons from his body.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate” – Carl Jung