“Wellness-Informed” Versus “Trauma-Informed” Foundations For Practice

Interdisciplinary knowledge expands our imaginations for who we can be. 

KEY POINTS

  • Wellness enhancement should be our goal, not just avoiding trauma.
  • Understanding human wellness requires interdisciplinary understanding of human functioning and development.
  • Wellness-informed requires understanding species-typical child raising (evolved nest).

“Trauma -informed” practice assumes the possibility that clients or students or workers have been traumatized, thus, altering the practices of the institution to be mindful. In contrast, a “wellness-informed” practice means understanding what helps children and adults and groups thrive. The institution applies this knowledge in its practices to enhance the lives of individuals and the group. As “wellness-informed” is a new idea, we need some background before specific practices in particular domains can be identified and discussed. The general background is the focus here.

When we take an interdisciplinary approach to human development and human nature, we find the foundations for wellness-informed practices. What can we learn?

Read the introduction and first chapter of this multi-award-winning book here. Click on the image to purchase from Bookshop.
  • How human nature can be much more peaceable than myths about the past relate, based on societal support and values (Fry, 2006, 2013; Fry et al., 2021).
  • The dynamic flexibility of social group configuration, that we are not on a linear path that we cannot escape (i.e., that we can return to egalitarianism) (Graeber & Wengrow, 2018, 2021; Power, 2019).
  • What it takes to support respectful, sustainable relations with the natural world
  • What is species typical for raising healthy cooperative people
  • What is species typical sociality and morality
  • What helps adults thrive

In this post, I examine the foundations for assessing pathways to wellness–i.e., wellness-informed practice. In subsequent posts, I will look at wellness-informed education, family and work life.

Our Ancestral Context

Many anthropological studies have focused on societies that are not industrialized, giving insight into the 200,000 years of our existence as a species, homo sapiens (Lee & Daly, 2005). Some human societies have been in existence for over 150,000 years, such as the San Bushmen (Suzman, 2017), whose germ line is shared with all existing humans (Henn et al., 2011). Like the Bushmen, most people who ever existed lived in hunter-gatherer communities. (Recall that civilization has been around for only part of humanity in the last few millennia.)

Going further back, comparative socioecology and ethology, through the tools of neuroscience, give us insights into millions of years of our genus’ existence as part of the mammalian line in existence for tens of millions of years (e.g., we still have social mammal needs) (e.g., (McDonald, 1998; Suzuki & Hirata, 2012).  We are social mammals, a line that emerged 20-40 million years ago, retaining many brain characteristics and basic needs of social mammals generally (Franklin & Mansuy, 2010; Panksepp, 1998; Spinka, Newberry & Bekoff, 2001). Basic needs are particularly important to meet in early life when the brain and body are under construction, including the fuller complement of those Maslow identified.

Our animal needs include nourishment and warmth but our social mammalian needs also include affectionate touch, play, extensive bonding, and community support (Carter & Porges, 2013; Champagne, 2014; Chevrud & Wolf, 2009). Anthropological studies show us that as humans we also grow best when we share intersubjectivity (“limbic resonance;” Lewis Amini & Lannon, 2001) with multiple adults, when are immersed in communal rituals and stories and when children apprentice in adult activities (Hewlett & Lamb, 2005; Hrdy, 2009; Sorenson, 1998; Weissner, 2014).

The genus homo has spent 99% of its existence—95% for our species, homo sapiens—in foraging bands (Fry, 2006). This indicates that our bodies and brains evolved and adapted to this ancestral context, called the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (Bowlby, 1969). Where it appears to matter the most for long term wellbeing is in early childhood.

Our Ancestral Context for Children

Discover the science, resources, podcasts, videos, and learning materials about our Evolved Nest at www.evolvednest.org

Attention to humanity’s ancestral context for children was first drawn by John Bowlby (1969) during the 1950s. He noted that the usual assumptions about child development given by behaviorism and Freudian psychoanalysis at the time could not explain the devastated reactions of family-separated children and orphans during and after World War II. Using an ethological approach, he realized that children need more than warmth, shelter and food from their parents. Like many other mammals, children are “designed” to attach to responsive caregivers during an early sensitive period and suffer when separated. Bowlby also noted a caregiver attachment system that facilitates nurturing child care and makes it pleasurable (Bowlby, 1969). Mammalian parenting is a thing! (Krasnegor, & Bridges, 2010).

Although all social mammals are vulnerable to poor outcomes from poor nurturing, human children are particularly vulnerable. Children at full-term birth are born with only 25% of adult brain volume; the brain triples its size in the first couple of years with nurturing care, whereas brain size and function does not grow in size or complexity with neglect (Perry et al., 1995). Children resemble fetuses of other animals till around 18 months of postnatal age, meaning that they have much to grow and self-organize based on physio-social experience.

With subsequent child attachment research, we now know that multiple brain systems are influenced by early experience with caregivers, so the effects of early experience have longterm neurobiological consequences (Schore, 2019). For example, the right brain hemisphere is scheduled to develop rapidly in the first years of life with nurturing care. Undercare underdevelops the right hemisphere potentially causing later mental health problems.

Male brains are more affected by undercare because of less built-in resilience and slower maturation than female brains (Schore, 2017). They need more nurturing but we give them less, leaving them to rely on more primitive innate systems of dominance/submission. In adulthood they are rigid because of right brain underdevelopment, as psychotherapists note (Tweedy, 2021).

Evolved Nestedness

Scholarship in industrialized cultures typically has a narrow view of personhood, so narrow that philosophers even ponder what a baby would be like on an island alone. Anyone who knows human prehistory would find such a question ridiculous. There is no baby without a mother nor thriving mother-child dyad without community support, as maternal support makes a critical difference for how the child turns out (Hrdy, 2009; Hawkes, O’Connell, & Blurton-Jones, 1989). A baby is so needy that it takes a set of responsive adults for the child to feel supported. The evolved nest provides the appropriate support all along the way of development, matching up with the maturational pathway of the child.

Conclusion

A wellness-informed orientation propels us to understand our species’ basic needs and how to meet them and what meeting them looks like (Gowdy, 1998). Through interdisciplinary work, we learn the effects particular needs or practices have on human development and wellbeing. Such insights help us to discern what promotes wellness or not in today’s world. This allows us to consciously select baselines for optimality and adopt practices that foster wellbeing, which we will examine in subsequent posts.

References

Bowlby, J. (1969/1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). New York: Basic Books (Original work published 1969).

Carter, C. S., & Porges, S. W. (2013). Neurobiology and the evolution of mammalian social behavior. In D. Narvaez, J. Panksepp, A. Schore & T. Gleason (Eds.), Evolution, early experience and human development: From research to practice and policy (pp. 132-151). New York: Oxford.

Champagne, F. (2014). The epigenetics of mammalian parenting. In D. Narvaez, K. Valentino, A. Fuentes, J. McKenna, & P. Gray,  Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing (pp. 18-37). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Cheverud, J. M., & Wolf, J. B. (2009). The genetics and evolutionary consequences of maternal effects. In D. Maestripieri & J. M. Mateo (Eds.), Maternal Effects in Mammals (pp. 11-37). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Franklin, T.B., & Mansuy, I.M. (2010). Epigenetic inheritance in mammals: Evidence for the impact of adverse environmental effects. Neurobiology of Disease 39, 61–65

Fry, D. (Ed.) (2013). War, peace and human nature. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Fry, D. P. (2006). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fry, D.P., Souillac, G., Liebovitch, L. et al. (2021). Societies within peace systems avoid war and build positive intergroup relationships. Humanities & Social Sciences Communication, 8, 17. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00692-8

Gowdy, J. (1998). Limited wants, unlimited means: A reader on hunter-gatherer economics and the environment. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2018). How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that’s already happened). Eurozine, March 2, 2018. Downloaded from eurozine.com (https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-humanhistory/)

Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: MacMillan.

Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J.F., & Blurton-Jones, N.G. (1989). Hardworking Hadza grandmothers. In V. Standen & R.A. Foley (Eds.), Comparative socioecology: The behavioral ecology of humans and other mammals (pp. 341-366). London: Basil Blackwell.

Henn, B.M, Gignoux, C.R., Jobin, M., Granka, J.M., Macpherson, J. M., Kidd, J. M., Rodríguez-Botigué, L., Ramachandran, S., Hon, L., Brisbin, A., Lin, A.A., Underhill, P.A., Comas, D., Kidd, K.K., Norman, P.J., Parham, P., Bustamante, C.D., Mountain, J.L., & Feldman. M.W.(2011). Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a southern African origin for modern humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (13) 5154-5162; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1017511108

Hrdy, S. (2009). Mothers and others: The evolutionary origins of mutual understanding. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Krasnegor, N.A., & Bridges, R.S. (1990). Mammalian parenting: Biochemical, neurobiological, and behavioral determinants. New York: Oxford University Press.

McDonald, A.J. (1998). Cortical pathways to the mammalian amygdala. Progress in Neurobiology 55, 257-332.

Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, J. (2010). The basic affective circuits of mammalian brains: Implications for healthy human development and the cultural landscapes of ADHD. In C.M. Worthman, P.M Plotsky, D.S. Schechter & C.A. Cummings (Eds.), Formative experiences: The interaction of caregiving, culture, and developmental psychobiology (pp. 470-502). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Perry, B. D., Pollard, R. A., Blakely, T. L., Baker, W. L., & Vigilante, D. (1995). Childhood trauma, the neurobiology of adaptation, and “use-dependent” development of the brain: How “states” become “traits.” Infant Mental Health Journal, 16, 271–291.

Power, C. (2019). The role of egalitarianism and gender ritual in the evolution of symbolic cognition. In T. Henley, M. Rossano & E. Kardas (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive archaeology: A psychological framework (pp. 354-374). London: Routledge.

Schore, A.N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind. New York: W.W. Norton.

Sorenson, E.R. (1998). Preconquest consciousness. In H. Wautischer (Ed.), Tribal epistemologies (pp. 79-115). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.

Spinka, M., Newberry, R.C., & Bekoff, M. (2001). Mammalian play: training for the unexpected. Quarterly Review of Biology, 76, 141-168.

Suzman, J. (2017). Affluence without abundance: The disappearing world of the Bushmen. New York: Bloomsbury.

Suzuki, I.K., Hirata, T. (2012). Evolutionary conservation of neocortical neurogenetic program in the mammals and birds. Bioarchitecture, 2(4), 124–129..

Wiessner, P. (2014). Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(39), 14027-14035.

Leave A Reply

Your email address will not be published.