Dear Moomin:

You are welcome. Thank you for wishing me a happy and healthy day, and I wish you the same. This will be another long post in which I will reply to your 1- 5 statements/ questions (and I will ask you two questions):

#1- you were hospitalized for about a week when you were 1, away from your parents, and your mother mentioned that with what you believe to be “guilt or sadness still about this”- as to whether that experience caused your 30 years long anxiety following breakups, I ask:

* Did your mother mention to you how you behaved after being re-united with her, whether your behavior after the hospital was different from your behavior before the hospital (maybe after re-uniting, you cried more, slept less, appeared more clingy, or detached)?

* Are you aware of experiencing anxiety prior to your first breakup, prior to age 16?

“Are there particular age ranges when a child is developing that make them more susceptible to forming negative associations, and carrying these through to adulthood?”-

– according to an article, Attachment and Separation: What Everyone Should Know, by Dr. Peter Cook (in natural child. org), “It is believed that children aged 6 months to 4 years are more particularly vulnerable” to separation from their mothers.

Another article, psychological emotional and physical experiences of hospitalized children in oatext. com, reads: “The experience of illness and hospitalisation.. exerts a great deal of psychological distress, one of the most distressful events people might actually experience in their life time… From the outset, we know that illness is a major stressor in one’s life. Various symptoms of the illness put the body into a state of continuous stress.. Being hospitalised, individuals may experience a wide range of short-term as well as long-term consequences… Children are particularly prone to the adverse effects of being ill… In a sense, for children ‘the hospital is like a foreign country to whose customs, language and schedules they must learn to adapt’…

“A considerate body of research on the effects of paediatric hospitalisation has been conducted since the 1950s.. When children are scared, tired or in pain, they are particularly dependent on the safe and stable environment of their  home and on the support and love of their family members… For children, this is not  only a subjective need, but also  a vital necessity… especially when they become ill, they need their families’ support more than ever…

“Recent empirical data highlights that adverse effects of hospitalisation on children, have been found to be stronger when parents are not present, or when parents are highly anxious and were not able to calmly respond to them.

“Illness and hospitalisation are traumatic, anxiety provoking and can lead to transient or long-term behavioural  and psychological difficulties in children… It has been argued that hospitalisation can be a life crisis for children, which might further highlight and aggravate their experience of fear, loneliness and frustration”.

Regarding you being hospitalized at one year old, according to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychological development theory, Wikipedia, the first stage is infancy, under 2 years old.

He called that stage “Hope: trust vs. mistrust”, it reads: “The infant depends on the parents, especially the mother, for sustenance and comfort. The child’s relative understanding of the world and society comes from the parents and their interaction with the child. A child’s first trust is always with the parent… If the parents expose the child to warmth, regularly, and dependable affection, the infant’s view of the world will be one of trust. Should parents fail to provide a secure environment and to meet the child’s basic needs; a sense of mistrust will result. Development of mistrust can lead to feelings of frustration, suspicion, withdrawal, and a lack of confidence… the major development task in infancy is to learn whether or not other people, especially primary caregivers, regularly satisfy basic needs. If caregivers are consistent sources of food, comfort, and affection, an infant learns trust- that others are dependable and reliable… the child’s number one needs are to feel safe, comforted, and well cared for”.

#2: “I imagine that pretty much every child will have had some sort of experience of feeling alone and afraid. Parents are human after all. So I wonder why for some people this would cause later issues and not for others?”-

– most parents fail their children,  most parents can do better for their children if they had the motivation to seek the help they need and to do right by their children. And therefore, most adult children have issues. No two people have the very same childhood, and as a result, different people have different combinations of issues and different extents of the same issues. It is not true that a minority of people have issues and most people are issues- free. Because there are so many people with serious issues, the state of the world is as sad as it is now.

#3: “Why would this feeling transfer to a romantic relationship, and, to my embarrassment, even to a previous relationship that only had a handful of dates? I don’t associate these people with a parent figure”-

-because as Erikson wrote: “The child’s relative understanding of the world and society comes from the parents and their interaction with the child. A child first trust is always with the parent”. Following a separation from a woman you dated  just a handful of dates, your childhood experience of separation from your mother was activated. It does not mean that you thought of that woman as a mother figure; it means that you felt some emotional attachment to her, and separation from her triggered your childhood anxiety when separated from your mother (to whom you were very attached).

#4: “Can the trigger be prevented from going off? (Without having to resort to no romantic connections, which is an option!)”-

– no, I don’t believe it is possible to prevent being triggered in the ways that you do, not for a long, long time. Over time, with healing and management, you can lessen the intensity of the triggered experience.

#5: “Emotional regulation skills. Do you have any advice on developing these? And can that be done in the absence of the stimulus, or only when triggered and hysterical?”-

– Emotional regulation skills need to be practiced every day, regardless of the presence or absence of a trigger, or a stimulus. You can start with downloading Mark William’s series of Mindfulness Mediation series. Last I checked the downloading is free of charge. I recommend him because my former therapist gave me homework after each session, and part of the homework was to listen to one or more of the meditations every day. This was my introduction to the learning of emotional regulation skills.

anita