Why Fierce Curiosity?

When courage is needed for questions

Hello friends and followers. Thank you for joining me here.

I have spent more than a decade talking with the public about the Science of Connection.  I’ve loved being able to bring my fascination with child development to a wider audience.  I’ve loved making peace with the risks I took when I stepped out of the safety of an academic research environment.  I’ve loved watching how people’s perspectives shift once they understand that human beings are born biologically, neurologically, emotionally connected to other people.

I began this journey in the public sphere thinking that the key challenge I faced as a developmental psychologist was figuring out how to translate the science so it was accessible for a wide range of people.  I was wrong about that.  I’ve learned that it is one thing to know ‘this stuff’ and another thing entirely to feel what it is like to know this stuff. It inspires not just a sense of wonder and surprise but also guilt, shame and anxiety. I’ve learned that pace and empathy matter as much as any information I convey, because tone creates containment for the uncomfortable feelings. The Science of Connection hits people viscerally, emotionally, existentially -- because it speaks to the nature of our shared humanity.

As a new parent, it takes courage to think deeply about the idea your baby was born paying close attention to you and that, as a consequence, their brain will be fundamentally shaped by the way you treat them. That feels like a lot of responsibility. As an experienced parent, it takes courage to learn how your child’s brain grew as a baby, because you realise you might have related to them differently if only someone had told you this stuff. Here comes the guilt. As a teacher, it takes courage to discover that a standard aspect of your classroom practice, over the past five or ten or twenty years, may have been inculcating shame in your pupils’ sense of self.  That intrudes on your sense of confidence. As a lawyer, it takes courage to consider that you may have misunderstood key drivers of human behaviour.  Might you have framed your cases more effectively, had you known? As an adult, it takes courage for any of us to hear the word ‘trauma’ being applied to aspects of our childhood that we had considered normal and ordinary. You have to work through the doubt: Does it render me in some way deficient? lacking? flawed?

Over the last decade, I have learned that the Science of Connection is disconcerting.  Most people find themselves unsettled by it.  They hadn’t realised how powerful they are in children’s lives, personally or professionally or politically. Nor had they realised quite how vulnerable they were as a child.  They end up re-evaluating their sense of self.  They reassess past behaviour and actions.  They encounter guilt, shame, grief, confusion.  Doing all that with openness can feel a daunting step.  Denial may be more comforting. Resistance is reassuring.

I intend to use this substack space for a particular purpose: to explore denial and resistance.  What prevents us from putting a relational lens at the centre of our practice and policy?  What stops systems and society from fully embracing the discoveries science has made about childhood trauma?  Why has attachment theory existed for almost a century but many professionals who work with children have never been trained in its application?  How is it our society fails to notice the emotional needs of babies and consequently fails to prioritise the needs of parents? When do economics eclipse thriving? Why do judgment and othering and complacency so often obscure solutions?  Where positive changes have taken hold in the past, how on earth were they achieved?

These are questions that fall into the territory of what I call ‘Fierce Curiosity’. These are the questions you wish you didn’t have to ask, the ones you would have preferred to ignore. The Science of Connection throws light on conundrums that can’t be resolved with ordinary doses of curiosity.  You need to dig down into your reserves.

In this series, I plan to explore the territory of Fierce Curiosity. That will throw light on the ways that denial and resistance operate. We will come to understand their power, why they offer a seductive sense of safety. We will discover how they have been countered in the past, and we’ll be able to reflect on how we use that wisdom in our own time. We will discover things about our society and ourselves that we’ll wish we didn’t need to know. I thank you in advance for your courage. 

Paediatric hospital practice? Corporal punishment? Chimney sweeping? Infant anaesthesia? Cholera prevention? Smoking in cars? Neonatal intensive care units? Boarding school ethos? Baby buggy design? War evacuation? Yep, we’re likely to wander into all these areas. I know, it seems an incongruous collection. It’s intriguing and tricky, this territory of Fierce Curiosity.

I envision our journey as crossing a bridge – one of those lengthy pedestrian bridges that span a massive chasm, swaying disconcertingly over the abyss.  It feels scary to step out onto such uncertain struts. Your stomach is tight, your breathing heavy.  Your psyche is urging you to turn back toward safety, toward resistance, toward denial. But the thing is: the vulnerability is worth it.  Crossing the bridge takes you somewhere new. The world looks different and so do the solutions.  You cannot unsee what you have seen. 

Our children need us to be able to step into uncomfortable insights. 

Change begins with a new idea about how the world works, how the world might be, how we might live within it.

Books begin with new ideas too. If this works as a substack series, my hope is that, once we have reached the other side, it will have grown into a book. First we (I) have to step into courage, vulnerability and risk.