Learning to self-regulate: Allan Schore and the neurobiology of why we transform in relationship

There is a question that almost everyone who has ever sat in a therapeutic process eventually asks, sometimes without words: how is it possible that talking with someone can change something as deep as the way I feel, relate, or react? Over the last thirty years, this question has found solid neurobiological grounding through the work of Dr. Allan Schore, neuropsychologist at UCLA.

The brain that builds itself in someone's arms

From birth, the right hemisphere of the brain develops at an extraordinary pace. This hemisphere, which Schore (2019) calls the seat of the implicit self, is the neurological substrate of the emotional and relational world. It houses the basic motivational systems, implicit emotional memory, and the attachment patterns that will organise an individual's affective life across the entire lifespan.

The most decisive thing is this: that developing right brain does not mature in a vacuum. It matures in synchrony with the right brain of whoever is doing the caring. Gaze with gaze, tone with tone, body with body, right brain with right brain.

From co-regulation to self-regulation

In the first months of life, the infant has no capacity to regulate its own emotional states. It is the nervous system of the attachment figure that acts as an external regulator. Through thousands of episodes of successful co-regulation, the infant's brain begins to internalise that regulatory capacity — slowly, implicitly building the neural circuits that will eventually allow it to modulate its own emotional states. That is self-regulation (Schore, 1994).

Relational trauma as a breakdown in nervous system self-regulation

Schore (2003) defines early trauma not only as a terrifying event, but as an experience of extreme dysregulation without the possibility of repair. This adaptive response becomes encoded in the implicit memory of the right hemisphere. That is why trauma is not remembered — it is relived, in the body, in relationship.

Psychotherapy as an experience of neurobiological repair

Schore (2012) proposes that the process of therapeutic change occurs through what he calls right brain-to-right brain communication: the right hemisphere of the therapist and that of the client enter a form of implicit, non-verbal resonance that activates the same relational circuits that were activated — or not optimally activated — in early attachment bonds.

What transforms is not the correct interpretation or the most sophisticated technique, but the quality of the therapist's presence, their capacity for attunement, their willingness to be genuinely affected while remaining regulated. The work does not happen left to left — mind to mind — but right to right: body to body, emotion to emotion, presence to presence.