How Relationships Shape Your Brain | Dr. Allan Schore

Summary

Dr. Allan Schore, a clinical psychoanalyst and neuroscientist at UCLA, explains how the first 24 months of life shape the brain’s right hemisphere through attachment interactions with primary caregivers. These early patterns of emotional regulation become the foundation for all adult relationships and can be modified through therapeutic processes that mirror the original mother-infant dynamic.

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Key Takeaways

• 90–95% of behavior is unconscious, governed by right brain processing that operates continuously beneath conscious awareness
• The right hemisphere dominates brain development from the last trimester of pregnancy through age 2–3, meaning all early attachment is fundamentally a right-brain process
• Attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized) are shaped by how well a primary caregiver synchronized and regulated the infant’s emotional arousal states
• The same right-brain circuits formed in infancy are directly repurposed for adult romantic, social, and professional relationships
• Secure attachment requires two skills: psychobiological attunement (synchronizing with the infant’s emotional state) and repair of misattunement (re-connecting after disconnection)
• Effective therapy works through the same right-brain-to-right-brain communication as early caregiving — the therapeutic relationship itself is the primary change mechanism
• Interactive regulation (co-regulating with another person) is more foundational than auto-regulation; over-reliance on auto-regulation underlies avoidant attachment patterns
• Heightened affective moments — brief windows (50–60 seconds) of genuine emotional synchrony — are when lasting neurological change actually occurs
• The right brain uses wide-ranging attention (evenly suspended attention), while the left brain uses narrow, focused attention — switching between them is critical for deep connection
• Positive emotion (joy, excitement) is equally important to regulating negative states and is systematically underemphasized in both attachment theory and therapy

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Detailed Notes

Right Brain vs. Left Brain: Basic Architecture

• The right hemisphere processes emotion, implicit communication, subjectivity, intuition, imagery, and autonomic regulation
• The left hemisphere processes language, logic, explicit/conscious content, and objective reasoning
• The right hemisphere enters its major neuroplasticity growth spurt from the last trimester of pregnancy through age 2–3; the left hemisphere’s growth spurt begins at the end of year two into year three
• This sequence explains why all early attachment dynamics are non-verbal and implicit — language simply doesn’t exist yet
• Right-brain dominance cycles recur across the lifespan, including during adolescence, when another growth spurt begins with a right-hemisphere phase before shifting left

The Neurobiology of Attachment

• Attachment is defined as interactive regulation — specifically, the regulation of the infant’s limbic system and autonomic nervous system by the primary caregiver
• The mother regulates the baby’s states through face, voice, and gesture: reading facial expressions, vocal prosody, and tactile/gestural signals
• The caregiver tracks the baby’s arousal moment-to-moment, synchronizes with those states, and then up- or down-regulates them:
  • Down-regulation: softening voice tone, quieting facial expression to reduce sympathetic hyperarousal
  • Up-regulation: animated face, rising vocal tone to bring baby into positive excited states
• Key neurochemicals involved: dopamine (reward/positive states), noradrenaline/adrenaline (arousal), cortisol (stress response)
• The right orbital frontal cortex is the highest executive regulator of the right hemisphere; it forms connections with the amygdala, insula, and cingulate — this is where therapeutic change is neurologically localized

The Four Attachment Styles

Style	Regulatory Pattern	Adult Expression
Secure	Both auto- and interactive regulation available; integrates positive and negative emotion	Flexible, resilient, tolerates closeness and autonomy
Avoidant/Dismissive	Primarily auto-regulates; deactivates attachment system	Emotionally distant under stress; voice flattens; intellectualizes
Anxious/Ambivalent	Primarily seeks interactive regulation; cannot self-soothe	Hyperactivates attachment; highly sensitive to cues of abandonment
Disorganized (Type D)	Cannot use either strategy; uses dissociation to shut down attachment system	Associated with PTSD, borderline personality disorder

Psychobiological Attunement and Repair

• Psychobiological attunement: the caregiver regulates not only the infant’s psychological experience but also its physiological state (autonomic nervous system)
• Misattunement is inevitable and not inherently damaging — what matters is the repair
• A “good enough” caregiver mis-attunes and then re-synchronizes, teaching the infant that rupture is survivable and connection can be restored
• Failure to repair consistently → insecure attachment formation

In Utero Development

• Lateralization begins in the fetus; early memories are stored in the right amygdala even before birth
• The right insula and central amygdala begin developing in utero
• Autonomic regulation begins across the placenta — mother and fetus synchronize nervous systems prenatally
• Maternal cortisol crosses the placental barrier: chronic maternal stress during pregnancy can impair optimal development of the right amygdala during its critical period

Role of the Father

• Fathers typically become a primary attachment figure in year two, as the left hemisphere begins its growth spurt
• Father’s play tends to be more arousing and physically stimulating (rough-and-tumble play), teaching tolerance of higher sympathetic arousal states and risk-taking
• Dr. Schore proposes the mother primarily shapes the baby’s right brain in year one; the father primarily shapes the baby’s left brain in year two–three
• In single-parent households, one caregiver can provide both functions across developmental time

How Therapy Repairs Early Attachment

• Effective therapy recreates the mother-infant dynamic through right-brain-to-right-brain communication between therapist and patient
• The therapist must surrender — shifting out of left-brain analytical listening into right-brain, wide-ranging attention (Freud’s “evenly suspended attention”)
• Therapeutic process mirrors caregiving:
  1. Synchronize with the patient’s emotional/autonomic state
  2. Track crescendos and decrescendos of arousal
  3. Implicitly regulate through voice tone, facial expression, and gesture
  4. Co-create heightened affective moments — brief windows of genuine emotional synchrony where neurological change becomes possible
• The therapeutic relationship is the primary mechanism of change — not interpretation or cognitive insight
• Improvements manifest as new connections between the right orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala/insula/cingulate

Two Types of Attention

• Narrow attention (left brain): sequential, logical, word-by-word tracking
• Wide-ranging attention (right brain): simultaneous awareness of external emotional cues AND internal bodily states (via the right insula)
• Shifting to wide-ranging attention suppresses narrow attention — the two compete; you cannot fully occupy both simultaneously
• Intentionally widening gaze and relaxing analytical focus facilitates the shift into right-brain mode

Interpersonal Synchrony and the Right Temporal Parietal Junction

• The right temporal parietal junction (rTPJ) integrates face, vocal prosody, and gesture into a unified signal for emotional communication
• During genuine empathic connection, the rTPJ of one person synchronizes with the rTPJ of the other — confirmed by hyperscanning neuroimaging studies (fNIRS, EEG)
• This right-brain-to-right-brain synchrony is the neurological substrate of empathy and is relational — it requires two people
• The relational unconscious communicates continuously with another relational unconscious; the unconscious is not solely intrapsychic but fundamentally interpersonal

Positive Emotion and Regulation

• Attachment theory has historically over-emphasized downregulation of negative states; upregulation of positive states (joy, excitement, enthusiasm) is equally critical
• Two forms of love (D.W. Winnicott): quiet love (parasympathetic