[MUSIC] Mental well-being depends on an ongoing relationship of renewal with the environment. As social beings, humans depend on communication and relationships with others for their well being. The individual mind is dependent on communication through language, using symbols to understand and participate in the world. From the beginning of life, humans have the ability to communicate. Babies are able to cry to express other emotions, to take turns, and respond musically to the rhythm and pitch of conversation. They do all of these things in relationship with parents or carers who engage with their baby in communication and play. It's a process that allows the baby to use the environment through other people as a means of growth. The human genome provides many potentials for each individual, but requires interaction with a good enough environment of responsive carers. This way, the infant can develop the capacities that will allow him or her to become a fully participating member of the human community. Compared with other species, human babies are highly dependent on adults. They take many years to develop the skills to care for themselves. Infants are not born with a sense of self. This develops over time as part of our second nature. It depends on early learning. The sense of self arises through the experience of feeling during communication and exploration. These aspects of mental life take time to become established. A sense of self is a positive achievement reflecting a sense of value in the individual. Positive and negative emotions need to be processed differently through early relationships. These relationships soothe distress on the one hand, and amplify a sense of aliveness in the infant on the other. This contributes to the sense of value in the infant, establishing a space for learning from others known as the Zone of Proximal Development. At birth, we are thrown into the human world, a world where one has a place in a complex matrix of relationships that has great meaning for each individual. Human beings, like all other species, operate within the physical world, but humans are unique in that we also operate in a symbolic sphere. This is to say, that humans grow inside a world of language as well as the physical world. They are able to participate emotionally and physically from the very beginning. Feelings and emotions are a component of all human experience, acting as an in-built value system that allows the infants and adults to asses their experience, selecting interactions that promote aliveness and growth. This can be described as using your gut feeling or instinct or intuition. The types of feelings that arise for each person as they engage with others in the broader environment become characteristic for each individual. Over the last few decades, research has reexamined the role of feeling in mental life. A sense of aliveness is central to well being and the development of mental life. All living organisms seek to explore the environment in order to find what they need to survive and thrive. This tendency has been called the seeking system. And is part of an innate repertoire that for humans extends to the relational and symbolic aspects of life. This underpins the yearning for connection, and the search for meaning that characterize human lives. It also means that a large part of mental life, in health, is oriented towards the future. A sense of meaning is not fixed or external to individuals but is created through communication, relationships, and building skills. Reality is confirmed by the recognition and response of others in communicative exchange, that is, in a conversation. This is one reason why people seek help for mental disturbances. They have a need for re-grounding their position through a safe and validating relationship. A sense of self can become disorganized through trauma, stress or illness. And healing relationships are needed to restore the self. For a long time, play was seen as a matter for children. This view has changed in recent decades. Play takes two forms. Physical play is shared in common with other mammal species and is probably crucial to the development of a broad emotional range and a sense of urgency and confidence in demanding physical activities. Another kind of play characteristically human is symbolic play, where the child, safe in the knowledge of having a secure base with a carer not too far away, will happily play with toys and other objects in the environment, often talking as he or she plays. The toys come to represent aspects of the child's imagination and have a symbolic rather than simply a literal value. This kind of play helps the child develop a strong sense of their inner world, which gives rise to the capacity for reflection in the sense of ownership of mental life. A sense of self is not fully present until these capacities have developed. Play is now seen as necessary for creative engagement throughout life. For these developments to occur, the infant depends upon a responsive environment, where there is interactive play between infant and carer. This is a situation which generates a particular kind of pleasure that neither could gain alone. It is these relationships that help generate personality and social character. In situations of trauma there can be a deficit in this type of relationship that means that the individual doesn't have the opportunity to gain a sense of his or her own value and capacities in relation to others. Psychotherapy seeks to use this model of affective development, emotional development, to provide a containing and responsive relationship where the patient can be recognized, validated, and responded to. In doing this, the therapist will bring something new into the relationship, something from the therapist's self. In this process of working with what is given by the patient and contributing something new is a strategy that actively promotes the growth of a healthy self. A person can then develop the ability to integrate difficult experiences into an overall affirming narrative and life experience. We seek to reestablish the zone of proximal development. [MUSIC]
