Verbal First Aid: Healing Children's Pain and Fear With Words

For all our self-assumed scientific sophistication, for all our scans and labs and genetic analyses, healing has not been made all that much more understandable or all that much less mysterious.

A doctor can suture two pieces of skin together, but there is some capacity that lies beyond our ken, some talent that resides only within each one of us that allows that tissue to granulate and be reformed. The simplest paper cut still borders on the miraculous when it is gone and the skin looks untouched.

Babies are no different than adults in this ability. In fact, they are more so--more imaginative, more sensitive to their environments, more responsive and more adaptable.

The research on attachment and child development has been showing that this sensitivity is more than "emotional" in the colloquial sense. It is neurologic. What babies feel becomes the fuel for synaptic hard-wiring. Their brains are formed by their experiences, not just by their genetics. Those experiences are mostly dependent on the nature of their relationships with those around them.

When human beings feel unsafe (adults and children), the higher regions of the brain turn off. We think less and feel more. It takes 1/12,000th of a second for the sound of a rattle in the woods to get turned into adrenalin. It takes quite a bit longer for the cortical and executive functions of the brain to get involved: What's the best thing to do here? Should I run? Should I hide? Is there anything really wrong? Am I safe?

And according to Gary Sibcy, the coauthor of "Attachments: Why You Love, Feel and Act the Way You Do" (2009), it is that last question that is uppermost on the mind--and brain--of every baby: Am I safe?

Depending on their answer to that question, their brains will develop along certain pathways. If they feel safe--if their relationships are stable, if the inevitable accidents and problems are handled well--they develop into adaptable, resilient, compassionate adults. If they don't, if they feel unsafe and unsure of what to do, they become hypervigilant, anxious and incapable of processing events on their own.