I’m finishing up a report on a report and I included a series of quotes from Tronick & Gold (2020). I thought I’d share them with you.
“Repair is where the action is.”
From Tronick & Gold: “Moving through messiness turns out to be the way we grow and develop in relationships from earliest infancy through adulthood! This might seem counterintuitive as you might think that in healthy relationships, there is no place for discord. Shouldn’t two people in a good relationship always get along? Previous infant research has reflected the assumption that the more synchronous and attuned the interaction, the more optimal, or clinically “normal” the relationship. To many people’s surprise, the research revealed that messiness holds the key to strong relationships,.. In typical healthy parent-infant pairs, on average 70% of the interactions were out of sync!” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 37)
From Tronick & Gold: “Does it seem right to you that most relationships are mismatched 70% of the time? We found this again and again. In the field of developmental psychology, this 70-30 split has become famous, with some practitioners referencing it without actually knowing its origin. It comes from our detailed observation of the primary love relationship. In analyzing these videotapes, we discovered that the most important part was not the mismatch but the repair.” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 37-38)
From Tronick & Gold: “Repair is where the action is. We came to recognize that repair is the crux of human interactions. Repair leads to a feeling of pleasure trust and security, the implicit knowledge that I can overcome problems. Furthermore, repair teaches a critical life lesson: the negative feelings that arise from a mismatch can be changed into a positive feeling when two people subsequently achieve a match. One does not have to get stuck in a negative feeling state.” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 38)
From Tronick & Gold: “We came to understand mismatch and repair as a normal and ongoing experience fundamental to our species development as social beings. What a relief to learn that in primary love relationships, humans are in sync only 30% of the time! That the number is so low should relieve the pressure many people feel to seek perfect harmony in their relationships as adults. As long as there is an opportunity for repair, mismatch in 70% of interactions is not only typical but conducive to positive and healthy development in relationships. We need the normal messiness in order to trust each other.” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 39)
From Tronick & Gold: “We prefer to capture the range of a child’s experience with a different set of terms: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Good stress is what happens in typical everyday interactions, what we have seen in our videotaped interactions as moment-to-moment mismatch and repair. Bad stress is the stress represented in the still face experiment by the caregivers sudden inexplicable absence… Ugly stress occurs when the infant has missed out on the opportunity for repeated experiences of repair, as in situations of emotional neglect, and thus cannot handle any sort of bigger stressful event.” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 134)
From Tronick & Gold: “Children growing up with insufficient experiences of mismatch and repair are at a disadvantage for developing coping mechanisms to regulate their physiological behavioral and emotional reactions. We use the term regulatory scaffolding to describe the developmental process by which resilience grows out of the interactive repair of the micro-stresses that happen during short lived, rapidly occurring mismatches, the caregiver provides “good-enough” scaffolding to give the child the experience of overcoming a challenge, ensuring there is neither too long a period to repair nor too close a mismatch with no room for repair.” (Tronick & Gold, 2020, p. 135)
Tronick & Gold (2020): The Power of Discord. Once we return the the application of the established scientific and professional knowledge of the discipline, a wealth of professional knowledge becomes available.
Craig Childress, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist, PSY 18857
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 