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They say there are only two things in life of which we can be certain—death and taxes. They are wrong. There is a third. Its truth is intensely personal and at the same time universal: along the road of life we will, each and every one of us, encounter pain.
Among the most painful are failures that are experienced when the need for love is not satisfied. This may occur because of fractured bonds, physical or emotional abuse, feelings of rejection, severed relationships, physical challenges, or the trauma of serious illness or death of those closest to us. This may occur at anytime in life, but is most long-reaching when the trauma occurs in the earliest years.
The pain does not simply exist for the period of time in which it is experienced directly. Pain has a life beyond the acute stage, often haunting us throughout life, hindering growth and sabotaging success. If we are fortunate, it will come softly, in doses that we can bear. If painful attachments come at a time in life when the left hemisphere of the brain has developed and can process cognitively what is occurring, it plays out in later relationships in less debilitating ways (Siegel, 2003).
For many, however, pain comes in the form of trauma in the earliest childhood attachments. When pain and trauma occur in the first months and years of life, the attachment trauma is recorded in the developing right brain. The emotion is experienced and the body reacts.
The ability to cognitively understand the source of pain and trauma does not develop until late in the second year of life (Schore, 2002). The sense of fragmentation, or the experience of falling into a “black hole,” results in instant reaction and defenses. Among the primitive defenses that develop to deal with attachment failures are splitting, projective identification, and dissociation. When painful relational experiences occur later in development, the protection against painful emotional encounters may be more left-brain cognitive, such as intellectualiz