I will use the term “affects” in a psychotherapeutic context, and not in a psychophysiological context, as we are accustomed to understand, as very strong short-term emotional reactions with specific behavioral manifestations. I will use the term “affects” as mental structures. After all, violent reactions are only part of the affective system, which includes emotions, feelings, mood, and actually strong emotional affective discharges. This is a fairly wide range of different affective emotional reactions and states. As psychotherapists now understand this, this is a rather complex mental structure that affects deep neurobiological and even reflex zones of the brain, and is also associated with higher nervous activity, recognition activity, consciousness and other complex mental processes. Affects as a mental structure include several elements - somatic, physiological (that is, we react bodily to all our emotional states), expressive (with the help of affective systems we express our feelings), and communicative (we share feelings, build relationships through affective systems). In particular, it is one of the first preverbal ways of establishing contact between mother and infant. Just as the senses are involved in cognition of the world, so the affective system is involved in the cognition of intersubjective interactions between the infant and the caregiver. The affective system is a guide to object relations, to understanding oneself and others. The affective system allows one to assess the situation, navigate the surrounding reality, giving it has an emotional evaluative coloring. Our emotional state influences how we interpret what is happening in the world around and within us. Anxiety primarily signals a loss of security, which, of course, is the case now. From birth, the affective system motivates us to two basic types of response - this is the desire to pleasure and avoidance of discomfort (according to Freud). Affects motivate us to engage in certain activities or avoid them. I would like to focus on several aspects. Firstly, this is the concept of affective (emotional) tolerance (resilience). Secondly, it is what failures that arise in the child-parent context lead to the fact that optimal maturation does not occur affective system and affect regulation skills. However, people and cultures are very individual, even different regions interpret feelings differently - a Spaniard and a Norwegian will be different in temperament, in understanding the norm of expressing feelings. What is maturity of emotional structures (affective tolerance)? I like one of the psychoanalytic descriptions, which, it seems to me, reflects what is currently happening in people's states. I will take anxiety as one of the most dominant affective states. The description reads as follows: “The ability to tolerate anxiety is an essential part of emotional maturation and the maintenance of a self-image in adulthood, which includes establishing oneself as a responsible, caring person who has emotional reserves both for himself and for anyone else in need of support.” help from people. It is this self-image that is also a prerequisite for the ability to tolerate the anxiety of the psychotherapeutic process and withstand painful confrontations in therapy.” I think this is a very good definition of emotional stability, the type of people who are able to face anxiety without collapsing, without regressing into uncontrollable behavior, without release mental stress through impulsive actions (drinking, drug use, self-harm). I think we all now face the challenge of being able to withstand this stress, to remain a person who can be responsible and care for other people. We have our profession, and we have children who also needsafety. Affective tolerance is also considered the ability to hold affects at a level of intensity and tolerance so that there are no obstacles to processing information about these signals. This is the ability not to freeze feelings. To withstand, to be sufficiently sensitive to emotional states, to the extent that allows you to collect the most complete information and answer the question: “What is happening to me? What am I feeling now?” Psychotherapists who described this ability drew a parallel with pain. Imagine: everyone has the experience of physical pain when something happens in the body. We can listen to this pain and find out where it comes from, when it occurs, collect more information - in order, for example, to describe it to the doctor: what and where it hurts, what kind of pain it is, cutting or pulling... Collect more information to understand what happens to the body. If the pain, due to, for example, severe injuries, becomes extremely severe, what in psychopathology is called “pain shock” occurs. When a person loses consciousness, or consciousness changes so much that it is impossible to adequately contact pain impulses. In wartime, by the way, these shock states were very well described. This metaphor with pain, I think, perfectly imitates a psychotherapeutic thought: our handling of affects is like dealing with pain. We need to maintain a degree of contact that does not destroy us and does not lead to shock, but at the same time does not allow us to ignore important signals from our limbic system, our emotional brain and body. Thanks to affective tolerance, three main goals are achieved: 1) familiarity with affects (receiving information from our feelings); 2) relief (when we experience and understand feelings, it becomes easier for us); 3) insight (awareness: what, how and why is happening to me). To summarize, we can say that affective tolerance allows you to: collect maximum information about your feelings, immediately realize the correspondence of the intensity of your feelings to the situation (without being subjected to panic and automated reactions, assess how well the feelings correspond to the context and interpret them). Also a very important sign of affective stability is the ability to distinguish how our emotional states change, to understand and withstand the ambivalence of these states, to capture contradictory emotional states. For example, anxiety can quite legitimately coexist with joy. For many, the crisis, the pandemic, is a relief that relieves certain responsibilities. Along with anxiety, the joy of being freed from the burden is experienced. However, the ability to understand this ambivalence is also about emotional maturity. The ability to articulate, express, convey these states in a verbal act is important. Also, one of the criteria used to understand affective stability is the transition from somatic forms of reactions to cognitive, more mentally formed ones. Strong emotional states are often unclear for children, which causes interesting reactions: stomach pain, headache, and other psychosomatic symptoms appear. This is an absolutely normative process, since the level of their mental development does not allow them to process these signals, interpret, and understand the contexts. Therefore, children react in an early evolutionary, ontogenetic way. Of course, I would like to stand up for adults and say that they also have the right to recourse. There is no need to shame others, now everyone reacts differently to the situation that has arisen, and not always in “adult” ways, regressing to the usual forms of processing affects. What signs of affective emotional regression in adults can we observe now? Firstly, fear of affects - generally any, when a person is afraid to come into contact with his emotional part in principle. It is clear that unpleasant experiences are avoided first of all, but there is also fear of any experience at all. Secondly, any self-consolation, any way of helping oneself in an emotional state is absolutelyforbidden. Such people resort either to chemical objects, or to exhausting physical activity, or to merging with other people in order to regulate their emotional state. Now many who are undergoing therapy and are already more or less able to contain anxiety complain and talk about how aggressively families are forced to merge: “We are worried, and you come with us! Why are you so calm?”, etc. This is an attempt to be treated through another person, the inability to independently cope with these conditions, the active involvement of the object in this self-regulation. The next sign is that affects are experienced somatically only in the body. When people describe physiological states, but cannot verbalize feelings, this is what is most often called alexithymia now. The next sign is that the emotional state is vague and undifferentiated. If a person cannot differentiate subtle states of panic, anxiety, fear; if everything is divided into “bad” and “good” - this is also a sign of affective regression. Now, these are some of the signs, probably even clinical. The next question is why does this happen? I will focus on parent-child relationships. We must understand that this is not only the responsibility of the environment. Those who have children, I think, will understand me. Already in utero, many mothers can pre-determine the child’s temperament. Of course, when a baby is born, the mother very quickly becomes attuned to his temperament and basic affective systems, and already in infancy we can roughly predict how the child will handle his emotional states. There are calm children, there are hyperactive ones, there are those who have difficulty regulating emotions... This is a bidirectional process, not one-way. I will focus on the responsibility of parents, without touching on the neurobiology of the baby itself, although this also needs to be taken into account. The environment still has the greatest influence on how the child will regulate affects. Even if he is innately neurobiologically vulnerable in affective terms, the environment can make its own adjustments. This is what is called epigenetics now, a very important question of scientific research, about the influence of the environment on even such genetically determined biological types of response. What can affect the affective system? First, identification with parents. The child builds his identity through identification with parental figures. How parents generally deal with their feelings influences how the child will deal with his emotional states. Fear of affects, for example, can often be found in the history of psychopathic parents, excitable ones who show aggression only when they become furious. The child begins to identify with the fact that emotions are something scary and uncontrollable. Quite often there is a freeze of the entire emotional system, because it frightens with its uncontrollability. Another issue is that a child can identify with “frozen” parents who are not used to treating their feelings as something valuable. The next aspect is how the parent himself interprets and deals with the child’s affect. Let’s introduce Winnicott’s term - a good enough mother intuitively allows the child to withstand the intensity of affects of this level until the child is able to cope with them himself. Intervene only when these affects flood and destroy the child. The metaphor of how a child learns to walk is also appropriate here - we allow the child to get up, stumble, fall, but we catch him at critical moments. It's the same with emotions - we allow the child to exercise his ability to experience and cope with certain feelings himself. We don’t abandon him in critical conditions, but we don’t overprotect him either. This is all a very subtle process of the so-called intersubjective affective attunement, which, depending on age, context and developmental tasks, is solved purely individually. I won’t answer at what point you need to do thisor otherwise: this is a complex, dynamically developing process that concerns two people - a child and a parent. It is clear that if the negative experience is flooded and the child does not feel supported at critical moments, then symptoms and manifestations of affective regression arise. The following point is also very important: how parents are gradually ready to give up authority to regulate the child’s affects. Often parents are in a strong fusion with their children, and are jealous of the child's independence and ability to cope with his feelings. There are such critical cases: for example, a mother can be very jealous of the appearance of a transitional object in a child - that he is with a toy, hugging it, pressing it... In my practice, I have more than once encountered situations when, as if during cleaning, mothers threw out old toys, to which the children actually had a strong attachment. For a child this is a strong trauma and loss. Behind this is often negligence, which in turn is accompanied by repressed aggression and jealousy towards the transitional object. Experiencing such jealousy, parents inhibit the child’s ability to mature normally and self-soothe. Of course, when a person grows up, he begins to delegate these functions to other people or chemistry. The next aspect: how parents generally interpret feelings in the family. I propose free association as a simple group experiment. Continue with the first word that appears in your thinking: “Feelings are...?” Sometimes quite interesting responses arise: “this is a threat”, “this is chaos”... Often parents themselves have difficulty communicating and understanding why feelings are needed at all. For some parents, the fact that the child is alive and expressing himself is already chaos, this needs to be neutralized. It is necessary to understand that a one-sided negative interpretation of affects leads to the child introjecting this attitude into his mental space. The process of mirroring is also important: how much the mother can contain the child’s affects, using anxiety as an example. There are several scenarios when the process of mirroring is disrupted, containment is disrupted. The first scenario is an overly realistic reflection of the child’s feelings: the child is anxious, the mother returns this state to him in an unprocessed form, the same in which the child gave these feelings for processing. This also leads to traumatization, because returning in an unprocessed form, these affects flood the child. A feeling of confusion arises, the child is lost - where are his feelings and where are the mother’s feelings. An interesting observation: when studying mother-infant contact, it was found that borderline organized mothers tend to depict animals too realistically while playing with their children. Instead of the child experiencing joy and interest, he experiences fear. This is an example of what leads to escalation of affects - an overly realistic reflection. It is clear what subtle processes are involved here. It is impossible to learn to portray animals; this is a game process that implicitly arises between mother and child. Another scenario is a distorting mirror. It was too realistic, without introducing an adult element into the response. A distorted mirror is a serious distortion in the reflection of feelings. For example, a child smiles, a parent frowns. The child happily runs to his mother to show the worm on his palm, and she frowns and asks why the child did not wash his hands. In this case, of course, it would be optimal to rejoice, to say: “Wow, what a worm,” before sending you to wash your hands. Such strong distortions in response lead to distrust of one’s own emotional experience. Especially now, when everyone in an anxious state loses the ability to react congruently to positive affects, to mirror. The reliance on one’s own emotional experience as a significant informative element disappears. The third scenario: when the parent reacts congruently to the child’s affects, but too intensely, with intensification. This is what they call