Understanding the profound impact of early experiences on human development is crucial. The dichotomy of love versus fear shapes our cellular responses, attachment styles, and brain architecture from the very beginning of life.
A mentor of mine, cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton, has concluded from extensive research that human cells have the ability to respond to stimuli in only two ways. If the environment is safe and nurturing, they will grow; if the environment is threatening, they will protect themselves. They cannot do both at the same time! This responsiveness, according to Dr. Lipton, means that cells are either in a state of love and growth or in a state of fear and protection.
Most of our beliefs were instilled (I love this pun—in stillness—meaning when we could not argue) at a cellular level based on how we perceived our environment: as threatening and fearful or as nurturing and loving.
Ongoing research by clinicians like Dr. John Gottman has studied the chemistry of love. When we are in love, we secrete a hormone called oxytocin. This neuropeptide is produced in the hypothalamus of our brains and is stored in, and subsequently secreted from, the posterior pituitary gland. According to Gottman, oxytocin appears to down-regulate fear responses. He contends that the hormones of love, “oxytocin and vasopressin appear to be the hormones of trust in all relationships.” I’m quoting myself here as I wrote a position paper that included a piece on Love vs Fear in 2022 for The Foundation of Living Medicine. Enduring health is predicated on experiencing love early in life.
In another section of this website, I introduced psychologist Eric Erikson’s stages that occur in our psychosocial development. During the first stage, an infant must have its needs met by caregivers and faces the challenge of learning to trust or mistrust. The success or failure of meeting this challenge establishes whether individuals feel safe in the world knowing that their needs will be met throughout life or feeling fearful constantly anticipating that their needs will not be met. Infants will perceive the care provided in a way that shapes their developing personalities. They will unconsciously be asking the existential question, “Can I trust the world and the people in it?” Children, even infants, have an uncanny ability to discern whether a person is trustworthy or not. If children feel safe and loved, they learn to trust; if they experience neglect, abuse, or inconsistent care, they learn to distrust. This choice mirrors the polarity of love or fear.
The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University has reported on the development of our brain architecture, the physical structure of our brains:
The attachment style we develop will reflect our earliest experiences and reveal an underlying sense of love or fear. A European longitudinal study found that being unwanted in early pregnancy has detrimental effects on a child’s psychosocial development. Again, quoting my earlier paper, “those people who exhibit violent behavior, and harm others and themselves, all seem to have a deficit in their ability to love.” In addition, if a Mother giving birth was deprived of the “cocktail of hormones” that accompany a natural physiological birth, there can be long-term negative consequences for her child. It takes early experiences of love to form the neural scaffolding, a template, to be able to give and receive love later in life.
Everyone, in my opinion, needs to be brave enough to consider how conception, gestation, and birth affected their beginnings so that they can evaluate the patterns operating in their lives that are the result of their earliest experiences and then determine what they would like to do with that information. If old programming/conditioning is causing distress or discomfort, efforts can be made to change it. Even the attachment style developed so long ago can be changed. There is a sense that we are changing the past—who’d’a thunk it?
