I recently overheard something in the locker room of my gym that tempted me to make a scene. Realizing that I’m prone to this sort of thing, I restrained myself, though just barely.

I entered the locker room as two men were wrapping up a conversation about children and memory. One of them said, “The way I look at it, it doesn’t matter what happens to them before they can talk, because they’ll never remember it anyway.” The other man laughed, and, as my better nature forced my impulsivity into a strait jacket, they finished changing and left the building. With my face boiling from unvented tension, I put on my sweats and runners and tried to exercise my agitation away. I’m writing this because exercising didn’t help and because my face is still scorching me. If by some small chance you guys are reading this article, let me be blunt: hundreds upon hundreds of well-designed scientific studies have proven you wrong.

Recent decades have seen the rise of an extremely successful theoretical framework for understanding child development, a framework that has withstood the most rigorous scientific testing. It’s called “attachment theory” and its findings have profound implications.

Two of the best articles I’ve read on the subject are The Interface Between Attachment and Intersubjectivity: Perspective From the Longitudinal Study of Disorganized Attachment, by Karlen Lyons-Ruth for Harvard Medical School, and The Effects of Early Relational Trauma on Right Brain Development, Affect Regulation, and Infant Mental Health, by Allan N Schore (Infant Mental Health Journal, 2001, 22, 201-269). Much of the information I’m about to present comes from these papers, and I encourage you to track them down on the internet.

According to attachment theorists, the goal of human psychological development is to produce people who can regulate their emotional states on their own, something we’re incapable of doing when we’re little. The theory is founded on the understanding that when infants and toddlers are frightened they simply can’t calm down by themselves: they depend upon their primary caregivers to soothe them. Caregivers can only do this by becoming attuned to their children’s emotions, by engaging in a lot of empathic face-to-face interaction with them, and by responding affectionately and appropriately to their moods. In this way, the caregiver becomes an extension of the child’s underdeveloped nervous system.

In a relatively safe and economically secure society most parents are able to manage this quite well, and their children develop what’s called a secure attachment style. These children are then able to safely explore their emotions and their world, they learn how to soothe themselves, and they become psychologically resilient. Other parents have a more difficult time, and their children suffer for it.

An ongoing pattern of mild parental rejection of close contact leads children to develop an avoidant attachment style, so-named because these children learn to avoid contact with their parents. Later in life they have problems with intimacy, they invest minimal emotion in their social and romantic relationships, and they have a hard time sharing their thoughts and feelings with others.

In contrast, parents who are habitually inconsistent in responding to their children’s emotional cues encourage their children to develop an ambivalent attachment style. These children learn that the only way to get their emotional needs met is to increase their own distress until their caregivers finally take notice. They become very clingy, and because they’re so focused on getting their parents’ attention they engage in minimal exploratory behavior. As a result, as they get older they find themselves prone to depression, anxiety, and emotional dependency. Children who develop avoidant or ambivalent attachment styles are, however, far better off than children who form disorganized attachment styles. Eighty-three percent of abused and neglected infants demonstrate this attachment style, but so do 15 percent of infants from apparently “low-risk” families. This means that at least 15 percent of Canada’s adult population suffered from disorganized attachment as infants. Keep that in mind.

The telltale sign of disorganized attachment is dissociated, trancelike, and fearful behavior displayed by a child during her interaction with her primary caregiver. The children do this because they’re stuck in an impossible psychological bind: they’re frightened of the very person they depend upon to soothe them when they’re frightened. Lyons-Ruth writes that “because the infant inevitably seeks the parent when alarmed, any parental behavior that directly alarms an infant should place it in an irresolvable paradox in which it can neither approach, shift its attention, or flee. At the most basic level, these infants are unable to generate a coherent behavioral coping strategy to deal with this emotional challenge.”

This has serious neurological consequences. Schore writes that “Severe disruption of attachment bonds in infancy leads to a regulatory failure expressed in disturbances in limbic activity, hypothalamic dysfunction, and impaired autonomic homeostasis. The dysregulating events of abuse and neglect produce extreme” neurological hyperarousal that creates “a toxic neurochemistry in the developing brain . . . . Indeed, there is now evidence to show that adverse social experiences during early critical periods result in permanent alterations in opiate, corticosteroid, corticotropin releasing factor, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin receptors. . . . Infants who experience states of terror and dissociation and little interactive repair, especially those with a genetic-constitutional predisposition and an inborn neurophysiological vulnerability, are high risk for developing severe psychopathologies at later stages of life. . . . Attachment involves limbic imprinting, and so infant trauma will interfere with the critical period of organization of the limbic system, and therefore impair the individual’s future capacity to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and to organize new learning.”

In other words, children who form disorganized attachments suffer from a kind of developmental brain damage that makes it very hard for them to function in later life. They simply don’t develop the neural architecture to help them deal with their own emotions, and so they go through their lives under the constant threat of psychological disintegration, of re-experiencing the primal terrors they suffered as infants. They exist within a deafening emotional cacophony that regularly shatters their identities and makes them act in very self-destructive and often aggressive ways. They experience regular storms of anger, terror, and despair, emotions that make rational thought very difficult. Some of this damage can be repaired if they’re able to form long-term nurturing relationships, but many of them can’t, and even if they do, it’s unlikely they’ll ever be able to make a complete recovery.

It’s important to remember that this damage can be inflicted in ways that, to an adult, appear so subtle as to be nearly invisible. For example, the most powerful stimulus in an infant’s life is the face of its primary caregiver, because it’s through reciprocal face-to-face interaction that the parent soothes the child and helps it develop a basic awareness of its own emotions. The child can’t receive these benefits if the caregiver’s face is a perpetual mask of fear, grief, or rage. Schore writes that “During the trauma, the infant is presented with an aggressive expression on the (primary caregiver’s) face. The image of this aggressive face, as well as the chaotic alterations in the infant’s bodily state that are associated with it, is indelibly imprinted into subcortical limbic circuits as a ‘flashbulb memory’ and thereby stored in implicit-procedural memory in the visuospatial right hemisphere.” These memories contain “an intensely negative affective charge, and therefore rapidly dysregulate the infant.” Rather than being a source of comfort, the memory of the primary caregiver’s face is a source of horror, one that’s imprinted on the deepest levels of human consciousness.

There are two subtypes of primary caregivers who produce this kind of attachment style in their infants. Caregivers who are frightened of their infants fall into the first subtype. Referring to a group of such caregivers who participated in a research study, Lyons-Ruth writes that they “appeared more fearful and inhibited, in general, and sometimes appeared particularly sweet or fragile. They were very unlikely to be overtly hostile or intrusive and they usually gave in to the infant’s concerted efforts to make contact. However, they also often failed to take the initiative in greeting or approaching the infant, and they often hesitated, moved away, or tried to deflect the infant’s requests for close contact, before giving in.” Such caregivers can’t attune themselves to their children’s emotional needs, and they download their own fear into their infants’ brains.

In contrast, the second subtype demands attention from their children, but are also openly hostile towards them. Besides being completely blind to the child’s emotional cues, these caregivers actually terrorize their infants.

What unites these subtypes is their own psychological mutilation. These are caregivers who may have suffered from disorganized attachments in their own childhood, who may be struggling with severe unresolved grief and trauma, or who may simply have uncontrolled psychotic disorders. This is an important point: the parents who produce disorganized attachments in their children—or, for that matter, avoidant or ambivalent attachments—are not freely choosing to harm their kids. They’re constrained by their own psychological and neurological functioning. After all, it doesn’t matter how sincerely people with shattered arms want to cradle their children, their injuries simply won’t let them.

And this is where the personal becomes political. The best way for a society to reduce the number of children with disorganized attachments is by making their parents’ worlds as safe and supportive as possible. Since women are usually children’s primary caregivers, they need particular support from social institutions. Conversely, if we want to create armies of disorganized children who will someday become irrational and emotionally crippled adults, we only have to keep their parents, and especially their mothers, in a state of fear and grief. This can be achieved by impoverishing them, stripping them of their civil rights, destroying their communities and social support networks, and subjecting them to violence. This is what Canada has done to the First Nations people within its borders, it’s what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, and it’s what the US is doing to the Iraqis. And, because fascism only flourishes when reason withers, it’s also what fascist regimes everywhere do to their domestic populations.

Despite the best efforts of attachment theorists everywhere, there are at least two men in our city who don’t think children are affected by their earliest experiences, and for all I know, they have kids of their own. Now my face is as red as ever, so I guess I’ll head back to the gym.