Oprah Winfrey

What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.

The brain can be divided into four interconnected areas: brainstem, diencephalon, limbic, and cortex. The structural and functional complexity increases from the lower, simpler areas of the brainstem up to the cortex. The cortex mediates the most uniquely “human” functions such as speech and language, abstract cognition, and the capacity to reflect on the past and envision the future.

Our brain is organized to act and feel before we think. This is also how our brain develops—sequentially, from the bottom up. The developing infant acts and feels, and these actions and feelings help organize how they will begin to think.

Not only is “What happened to you?” the key question if you want to understand someone, it is the key question if you want to understand the brain. In other words, your personal history—the people and places in your life—influences your brain’s development. The result is that each of our brains is unique. Our life experiences shape the way key systems in our brain organize and function. So each of us sees and understands the world in a unique way.

Starting in the womb, the developing brain begins to store parts of our life experience. Fetal brain development can be influenced by
a host of factors including mother’s stress; drug, alcohol, and nicotine intake; diet; and patterns of activity. During the first nine months, development is explosive, at times reaching a rate of twenty thousand new neurons “born” each second. (In comparison, an adult may, on a good day, create seven hundred new neurons.) By birth, the newborn has 86 billion neurons; these will continue to grow and connect to create complex networks that allow the newborn to begin making sense of their world.

The brain categorizes every bit of sensory input and sends it “up the triangle” to other parts of the brain to integrate and process it further. This creates an increasingly rich and detailed version of any experience, as various inputs become linked based on how they’re sorted. For example, the brain sends some visual input to the same areas it sends auditory (sound), tactile (touch), and olfactory (smell) sensations that come in at exactly the same time. These different sensations—the sights, sounds, smells, and movements of the same
experience—then become connected. This is the beginning of making sense of the world.

For one child, eye contact means, “I care for you; I’m interested in you.” For another it may mean, “I’m about to yell at you.” Moment by moment in early life, our developing brain sorts and stores our personal experiences, making our personal “codebook” that helps us interpret the world. Each of us creates a unique worldview shaped by our life’s experiences.

While a very young child may not understand the words used in language, they do sense the nonverbal parts of communication, like tone of voice. They can feel the tension and hostility in angry speech, and the exhaustion and despair of depressed language. And because the brain is growing so rapidly in the first years of life and creating thousands upon thousands of associations about how the world works, these early experiences have more impact on the infant and young child.

Yes, I believe every environment has a tone. If you were to walk into any home as a stranger, not speaking the language, you could absolutely feel whether this is a place where people are loved. Just as you can sense when something’s off. You may not know what it is, but something feels off.

We tend to be a very verbal society—written and spoken words are important—but the majority of communication is actually nonverbal.