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The Development Of A Healthy / Mature Self Essay

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The Development of a Healthy/Mature Self: The Evolution of Development of Capacities to Contain Oneself describes the needed interactions between an infant and a caregiver for successful self-containment as a mature adult. This would be achieved by “providing containing functions of “good enough” care by the caregiver which would result in internalized capacities to contain herself and/or seek needed outside sources of containment as an adult (Candace Sunders, n.d.).” The following is my hypothesis of the self-containment of an 18- year-old living in a group home based on containing functions that were a result of her interactions with her mother. “The containing functions of comfort, protection, limit setting, non-verbal signaling, emotional mirroring, empathic communication, tolerance, and regulation of affect, which early in the child’s life are initiated and provided by caretaking outsiders, little by little, are emotionally and neurobiologically taken in and strengthen the child” (Candace Suanders, n.d.).The three specific functions focused on are the accurate reading of and responding to the infant’s signals of distress and needs, attuned interchange with infant of affect, and protection of infant and provisions of safety. Also addressed is my hypothesis of her cultural, systemic, environmental containment and aspects of my cultural identity that served as a sense of containment. Lisa was an 18-year-old Hispanic girl with two children that was living in a therapeutic

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