Managing Separations from Your Young Child with Erica Komisar

The Mind, Body and Soul in Healing

"Any separation, no matter how short the separation, requires a moment of reunion and repair. If you disregard the importance of that reunion and repair, collectively that starts to do great injury to that baby. Every time we have those missteps it is really important to repair them."

Episode Description: We begin by discussing the centrality of the newborn's experience of attachment and how that connection comes to serve as a foundation for all later attachments. Attachment includes managing separations and Erica describes the parents' vital function of recognizing the ruptures in their infant's sense of safe attachment. She makes common-sense and wise recommendations for how one can facilitate the repair of these ruptures. Central to these repairs is the parents' ability to recognize and tolerate their baby's experiences of loss, sadness, and anger. We discuss the neurochemistry of attachment and how it differs between mothers and fathers. We conclude with Erica sharing with us something of her own growing-up experience and how that has contributed to her devotion to this work.

Our Guest: Erica Komisar, LCSW is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert who has been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities and The New York Freudian Society, Ms. Komisar is a psychological consultant bringing parenting and work/life workshops to clinics, schools, corporations, and childcare settings. She is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Daily News. She is a Contributing Editor to The Institute of Family Studies and appears regularly on Fox and Friends and Fox 5 News. Erica is the author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, and her second book, Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety will be released in October 2021

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Upcoming Episode: Zen and Psychotherapy with Robert Waldinger, MD