Being Taken In: The Framing Relationship

Why is love not enough for children whose early lives have been disturbing? What makes it so hard for such children to make the most of new relationships? How can we help children whose minds are adapted to adversity take in new experience? In the new era of brain research, neuroscience shows the way ahead.

Being Taken In looks at the neuroscience showing how the mother/infant framing relationship wires in our way of understanding the world, and sets a navigation system, complete with built-in danger alerts. For disturbed children, these danger alerts are everywhere, and can even be triggered by the caregiver themselves. This makes the world a disturbing place, not just in the past, but right now. This book applies neuroscience and child development research to clinical practice, and points to emotional regulation through attunement and reflexivity as key factors in effecting change. This is the scientific rationale for psychoanalytic psychotherapy, which enhances neural plasticity, wiring in new connections in the brain through the therapeutic relationship, in much the same way as the early framing relationship.

Being Taken In offers insight from child psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, child development research and neuroscience which will be of use to all those living and working with disturbed children.