The Myth of Normal 107

correction. Operating from this attitude may even allow us to see the child’s “misbehavior” in a broader, more forgiving frame—perhaps it expresses a need frustrated, a communication unheard, an emotion unprocessed. We understand and respond to the needs and emotions the child is “acting out,” rather than simply punishing the behavior and banishing the feeling. Neufeld’s point about maturation being “spontaneous but not inevitable” is crucial here. The same evolution that has over many millennia honed us to be social and empathic creatures also assumes—or, to hearken back to chapter 8, “expects”—a particular kind of developmental environment. “We are indeed born for love,” assert the science writer Maia Szalavitz and the child psychiatrist and neuroscientist Bruce Perry, “[but] the gifts of our biology are a potential, not a guarantee.”[8] Certain kinds of experiences water the seeds of love and empathy that Nature has planted in us; absent that consistent nourishment, growth is compromised. The essence of those experiences can be expressed in one word: security. My eldest son, Daniel, co-writer of this book, pinpoints the lack of security as a central feature of his own early memories. “I didn’t know up from down,” he says, “because up could become down at any moment, depending on what mood the two of you were in, or the state of your relationship on a particular day. I had recurring nightmares as a kid where the ground kept opening up under me, and I’d fall through into another dimension, only for it to happen again. The dreams aren’t hard to decipher: in the world of my childhood, the floor was not the floor.” Indeed, without a “floor” of secure attachment, a young person is hard-pressed to feel any stable ground on which life can be experienced. Despite all our love for our three children, Rae and I did not know how to provide the stable milieu they required, having lacked some essential aspects of nurturing in our own early years. Nor did the setup of our late-twentiethcentury lives help us create the needed environment, what with our relationship tensions and my driven, workaholic tendencies, entrenched and amplified by the exigencies of medical training and practice. We were far from unique in these limitations