The amygdala, along with related areas..., plays a crucial role in coordinating perceptions with memory and behavior. These regions are especially sensitive to social interactions.

Internal mental experience is not the product of a photographic process. Internal reality is in fact constructed by the brain as it interacts with the environment in the present, in the context of its past experiences and expectancies of the future. At the level of perceptual categorizations, we have reached a land of mental representations quite distant from the layers of the world just inches away from their place inside the skull. This is the reason why each of us experiences a unique way of minding the world. (pp. 166-167)

At the most basic level, therefore, secure attachments in both childhood and adulthood are established by two individual's sharing a nonverbal focus on the energy flow (emotional states) and a verbal focus on the information-processing aspects (representational processes of memory and narrative) of mental life. The matter of the mind matters for secure attachments.

When we begin to know ourselves in an open and self-supportive way, we take the first step to encourage our children to know themselves

Grief allows you to let go of something you have lost only when you begin to accept what you now have in its place. As our mind clings to the familiar, to our established expectations, we can become trapped in feelings of disappointment, confusion, anger, that create our own internal worlds of suffering.

We are always in a perpetual state of being created and creating ourselves. (p. 221)

Early experience shapes the structure and function of the brain. This reveals the fundamental way in which gene expression is determined by experience.