Oriented to Survival instead of Thriving

Nestedness is the only escape from our decay

The orientation to growth or self-protection starts at the beginning, wherever you want to place that: cellular, systemic, relational. Was the coupling that produced a fertilized egg one of loving mindfulness, or not? Was the pregnancy welcomed by mother and her community, or not? Was the fetus welcomed soothingly at birth, or not?

Oh, you say, stress is a part of life. Even getting out of bed raises cortisol, the mobilizing hormone, the primary hormone measured for stressful response.

Yes, but you, adult reader, are different from a fetus, baby, or young child. The rapidly growing human being does not have the capacity to resist the detrimental effects of stress during rapid neurobiological growth. The human-in-the-making is in the process of self-organizing around experience. It is building a body-mind-brain-self. When stressed, it incorporates the stress into its neurobiology. It takes excessive stress as a signal of danger now and in the future. As a result, the fetus/baby/young child will spend more energy maintaining survival systems rather than growing.

Meanwhile, sensitive periods for system growth come and go. When the expected nurturing environment is not forthcoming, those capacities will not grow optimally but the schedule moves on anyway. A fetus will be underweight and may leave the womb prematurely, or be unwell after birth. A baby will self-organize around fear, insecurity, and distrust. These are not good beginnings.

Although many other experiences after babyhood encourage a survival orientation, first and early experiences are the most impactful. Here are some of the early life triggers for seeding a survival orientation:

• Mother’s stress during pregnancy shapes a threat-reactive fetal brain.

• Medicalized birth interferes with and raises risks for long term ill being:

  • Doctor forces baby out of the womb instead of letting baby decide on birthdate.

  • Pouring into mother’s body labor drugs (for induction and for pain control from induction), which impair the baby, and IV fluids which imbalance blood chemistry in mother and child

  • Over monitoring the fetus and mother (to avoid lawsuits after poor outcomes that claim not enough was done to avoid risks)

  • Interfering with the nine steps of skin-to-skin after birth, undermining mother-child bonding, breastfeeding success, and mutual calming

  • Separating baby and mother after birth, undermining bonding and birth recovery, promoting postpartum depression

  • Subjecting the infant to painful procedures (gastric suction, eye ointment, heel sticks, vaccination, bright lights, noxious smells)

• Baby care at home that resembles the hospital promotes fear:

  • Physical isolation

  • Most hours spent untouched

  • Separate bed and separate room

  • Swaddling or the equivalent

  • Scheduled feedings and attention based on adult preferences

  • Lack of community welcoming and supportive relationships

• Myth-based parenting practices:

  • Crying is good for baby and it’s just what babies do.

  • Sleep training to teach baby independence (which instead teaches babies to be insecure and dependent over the longterm and teaches parents to detach from baby’s signals)

  • Formula feeding as ‘good enough’ for health

• Additional species-abnormal cultural practices:

  • Daycare for babies with unfamiliar, overwhelmed carers

  • Corporal punishment

  • Baby life spent mostly in equipment (strollers, carriers, car seats, walkers, bouncers, swings, cribs) instead of in human arms

  • Adult focus on teaching child through words and punishment instead of modeling and allowing the child to pitch in.

You may be thinking that all the practices mentioned above must be evidence based, rooted in scientific experiments, for them to be so common. Nope. All the aforementioned treatment of humans-in-the-making are shown to be detrimental in human or mammalian animal studies (remember, we are mammals, but extremely immature at birth compared to most other mammals, needing even more 24/7 nurturing).

What are the outcomes of these kinds of experiences? Dysregulation of physiology, neurobiology, psychology, sociality, morality and spirituality in a plethora of possible ways (depending on timing, intensity, duration, status). Feelings of insecurity undergird it all, easily activating threat reactivity, causing inflammation (cortisol), the root of disease.

The USA is a nation of survivors, not thrivers. Even the wealthy are at a health disadvantage compared to 15 other high income nations (National Research Council, 2013).

What does it mean to have a country full of survival-oriented people, countless individuals who were not able to grow into healthy, human fullness?

Look around. Illness is widespread and of all kinds. Uncooperative, oppositional, unpeaceful behaviors are rampant as well as the inability to live cooperatively with the rest of Nature.

Society breaks down. Instead of cooperativeness and fitting into the flow of social life, angry, dysregulated, under-cared-for girls and boys are destructive to those around them. They resonate with disorder, not order. They pick up spirits of domination and wétiko (cannibalizing life). As young children, they never felt like there was enough for them (receptiveness, support, kindness, nurture, freedom) so they must grab what they can now.

As leaders the unnested destroy social welfare and cooperative systems. If they feel they were treated cruelly, they do the same to others. They may have multiple personalities, flipping into ruthlessness on a whim. Unable to resonate with the aliveness of others, they act more like machines than living beings. They act irrationally, sinfully, evilly.

We can all move into the self-protective mindsets of domination over others and our own spirits if we were undercared for, so we must learn self-calming ways to counter this potential slippage.

The remedies are multiple:

• Change the understanding of human nature, the stories we tell about ourselves.

  • We are not machines but dynamic creatures that resonate with those around us. We want them to be in a state of cooperation and love, not dysregulation and fear/hate.

  • When raised nested, we are not aggressive and self-centered. We are a communal species by nature, a feature that hierarchical systems seek to break so we lose confidence and trust in others and bow to the myths authorities purvey.

• Alter the structures of welcoming and caring for babies before and after birth (speaking to you, obstetricians and pediatricians!)

• Support mothers and families with paid leave, before and after birth to allow them to nurture their children with community support. (See advocacy groups here and here.)

• Structure workplaces so they nurture children (e.g., babies at work, flexible schedules, job sharing).

• Structure communities so they nurture our humanity (extensive park and playground systems, natural green belts around cities, sidewalks and porches, gun safety laws, environmental health regulations).

• Support joyful learning (see descriptions of Finland’s schools here and here).

• Immerse children in learning real-life skills for an Earthcentered lifestyle (e.g., foraging, habitat regeneration, outdoor living skills).

• Localize economies with self-sustaining practices (e.g., food raising, goods production)

• Change economic theory and measures to focus on wellbeing, incorporating ethics oriented to the wellbeing of future generations; in practice include ‘externalities,’ the harmful effects usually unaccounted for.

• Establish evolved nest principles and practices in every community. This means moving away from machine mediated lives and bringing back face-to-face opportunities for social enjoyment with diverse others.

Step by step, when each of us does what we can, we will return to the nested pathway, the wellness-promoting practices of our deep ancestors.

The nested pathway is the only way out of our social and planetary-destroying decay.