Below is a full-book, chapter-by-chapter summary. The core concepts are distilled, and along with their direct applications for incest trauma, its long-term effects, why it’s so hard to heal, and what healing actually requires.

Trauma deserves reverence. Neuroscience deserves clarity.

The text establishes one central thesis:

Human nature originates in the unconscious, right-brain-dominant relational processes formed in early attachment. These processes shape stress regulation, emotional development, personality, trauma vulnerability, and the mechanisms of psychotherapy.

THE BOOK, SUMMARIZED CHAPTER BY CHAPTER

Introduction: The Emotional Right Brain, Stress, and the Unconscious

Schore sets the stage: our world is stressed, our nervous systems are stressed, and the right hemisphere is the seat of unconscious emotional regulation, attachment, stress responses, and the deep architecture of the “self.” He argues that modern neuroscience supports Freud’s original insights about the unconscious, but now with brain scans instead of couches.

Key points:

• The right brain develops earlier and governs emotion, attachment, stress, embodiment, intuition, empathy, and meaning.
• Early attachment experiences literally build the right brain.
• Chronic early relational stress leads to developmental trauma, dysregulated affect, and lifelong vulnerability.
• Psychotherapy works by right-brain-to-right-brain attunement, not clever conversations or cognitive tricks.

Schore argues that modern life generates chronic stressors affecting both individuals and culture as a whole. To understand how stress shapes the psyche, we must turn to neuroscience of the right brain, which governs:

• Stress Regulation
• Attachment
• Implicit Emotion
• Bodily-Based Communication
• Unconscious Processes
• Intersubjectivity

He distinguishes modern attachment theory from classical attachment theory:

• Modern Attachment = right-brain, implicit, emotional, preverbal (first 2 years)
• Classical Attachment = left-brain, cognitive, behavioral, verbal (after age 3)

Current findings confirm that early relational trauma disrupts right-brain development and shapes lifelong vulnerability to stress dysregulation, dissociation, and personality disorders.

CHAPTER 1: Modern Attachment Theory & Affect Regulation

Schore updates Bowlby: attachment is not a behavioral pattern; it is a neurobiological affect regulation system. Attachment is fundamentally a right-brain–to–right-brain process, beginning prenatally and shaping the child’s neurobiology across the first two years.

Main concepts

The right brain grows rapidly during the first two years; the caregiver’s attunement organizes it.

Optimal attachment is characterized by:

• Interactive Affect Regulation
• Nonverbal emotional communication (tone, gaze, facial expression, timing) shapes the infant’s internal world
• Attuned Caregiver-Infant Synchrony

Attachment determines:

• Stress Regulation Capacity
• Resilience vs. Vulnerability
• Foundational Personality Structures

Secure attachment creates a “flexibly integrated” self capable of both connection and autonomy.

Insecure attachment comes from chronic misattunement, not occasional mistakes.

Father’s role

Fathers also play a role in stimulating right-brain growth and regulation through affective arousal, rough-and-tumble play, novelty, and balancing maternal soothing.

CHAPTER 2: The Unconscious, Right Brain Laterality & Neuropsychoanalysis

Schore merges Freud with neuroscience. Freud’s model of the unconscious corresponds closely to right-brain processes, especially emotional, bodily, and relational material.

Main concepts

The unconscious mind is primarily:

• Right-brain
• Nonverbal
• Relational
• Bodily
• Emotional

In psychotherapy, transference and countertransference are right-brain-to-right-brain emotional communications, occurring beneath awareness.

Therapy requires right-to-right attunement, tracking:

• Tone
• Tension
• Silence
• Eye movements

The left brain = 

• Logic
• Language
• Conscious Narrative

The right brain =

• Implicit Self
• Emotional Meanings
• Affective Memory
• Intuition
• Body Signals
• Enactments
• Trauma Imprints
• Empathy
• Imagery
• Symbolic Thought
• Shame

Functional integration between hemispheres determines whether traumatic affect becomes:

• Repressed (left-hemisphere blockade)

or

• Dissociated (right-hemisphere metabolic shutdown)

Healing requires access to unconscious emotional states, not rational insight alone.

CHAPTER 3: Relational Trauma, Disorganized Attachment & Dissociation

This is the painful one.

Main concepts

Relational trauma in infancy (fear without solution) produces insecure disorganized attachment.

Disorganized attachment arises when the caregiver is frightening or frightened.

The infant’s right brain experiences:

• Energy Depletion
• Disruptions in Synaptogenesis
• Dysregulated Autonomic Arousal

The child’s survival system collapses into dissociation, not regulation.

Right-brain development is impaired due to chronic, high-intensity stress with no relational buffer.

Dissociation emerges as a right-brain metabolic strategy to conserve energy during terror (a mechanism to avoid overwhelming affect).

These patterns become characterological defenses in adulthood (freeze, collapse, numbness, fragmentation).

CHAPTER 4: Repression, Avoidant Attachment, & Left-Brain Blocking

Main concepts

Avoidant attachment relies heavily on left-brain dominance:

• Language
• Intellectualization
• Minimization
• Hyper-independence
• Emotional Cutoff (Emotional Avoidance)
• Discomfort with Intimacy

Repression is a left-brain defense mechanism that blocks right-brain pain from reaching conscious awareness.

These individuals suppress affect so hard they can’t feel real connection.

Psychotherapy with avoidant clients must bypass their verbal defenses and access right-brain material.

CHAPTER 5: Narcissism, Hemispheric Asymmetry, & Repressed Shame

Main concepts

Shame is a deeply right-brain affect tied to:

• Early Attachment Disruptions
• Failure of Co-Regulation
• Emotional Neglect

Two types of Narcissism:

• Grandiose
• Inflated Self
• Defensive
• Emotionally Cut Off
• Left-Over-Right Dominance
• Rejection of Shame
• Vulnerable
• Chronic Shame
• Fragile Right Brain
• Relationally Hungry
• Emotional Sensitivity

Both reflect right-brain developmental failures around shame, regulation, and self-worth.

Therapy must access right-brain shame states safely, without overwhelming the client.

CHAPTER 6: Therapeutic Mutual Regressions & Hemispheric Rebalancing

Main concepts

Deep therapy requires temporary regression, accessing preverbal early attachment states stored in the right brain.

Therapist and client “regress together” into a shared emotional state.

This allows:

• Reprocessing Implicit Memory
• Loosening Rigid Repression
• Growth of Right-Brain Structures

Healing requires right-brain expansion and left-brain softening, not cognitive techniques alone.

Healing happens when the left and right hemispheres begin rebalancing.

CHAPTER 7: Right Brain in Intersubjectivity, Love, & Play

Main concepts

Human connection is fundamentally right-brain-to-right-brain synchrony.

It’s:

• Implicit
• Nonverbal
• Emotional

Intersubjectivity begins prenatally and is fueled by:

• Gaze
• Prosody (Parts of speech: tone, rhythm, pace, etc)
• Touch
• Emotional Resonance

Play and love emerge in the first year, if the environment is safe.

Love, bonding, and mutual play stem from right temporoparietal cortical networks.

The right temporoparietal junction is the “social brain,” tracking others’ minds and feelings.

Play is not frivolous; it is a core regulatory system for growth.

CHAPTER 8: Updated Development of Clinical Advances in Right-to-Right Psychotherapy

Main concepts

Right-brain-to-right-brain synchrony drives:

• Emotional Development
• Social Engagement
• Therapeutic Change

Therapy requires implicit work: 

• Tone
• Pacing
• Micro-Gestures
• Co-Regulation
• Silence
• Shared Affect

Words alone cannot touch early trauma.

Secure attachment in therapy rewires the right brain.

Therapy works through implicit emotional attunement, not insight alone.

CHAPTER 9: Hyperscanning & Two-Brain Synchrony in the Therapeutic Relationship

Main concepts

New hyperscanning research shows literal right brain to right brain synchronous activation between therapist and client during emotional moments.

Therapy literally becomes a “two-person nervous system.”

Emotional attunement is the mechanism of change.

Psychopathology involves right-brain desynchronization, and healing restores synchrony.

CHAPTER 10: Cultural Applications, AI, Gender Differences, Trauma, Stress & Future Directions

Main concepts

Our modern culture increasingly overvalues left-brain dominance:

• Independence
• Individualism
• Power
• Logic
• Cognitive Thinking
• Productive
• Disconnected
• Digitally Overstimulated

…while devaluing right-brain needs for:

• Affiliation
• Belonging
• Warmth
• Emotional Connection

Right-brain dysfunction contributes to:

• Violence
• Disconnection
• Emotional Isolation
• Psychiatric Vulnerability
• Rising Disorders
• Dysregulated Attachment in society
• Relational Collapse

Healing requires:

• Restoring the right brain’s primacy
• Connection
• Attunement
• Presence
• Embodiment
• Community.

Schore warns that AI is a left-brain artifact lacking emotional processing, attunement, or somatic intersubjectivity.

Core Themes of the Whole Book

Human nature is right-brain first.

• Early attachment literally wires the brain for regulation or dysregulation.
• Trauma disrupts right-brain development.
• Healing requires right-brain-to-right-brain relationships.
• Words alone aren’t enough.
• The deepest wounds live in unconscious, preverbal, body-based networks.
• Emotional connection, not cognitive insight, is the medicine.

Holey House, Incest Trauma, and The Healing Journey

This is where Holey House becomes almost eerily aligned with Schore’s research. Incest trauma is the exact form of early relational trauma that damages the right brain in the ways he describes.

Let’s walk through it one step at a time.

Why Incest Trauma Devastates the Right Brain and is the Most Harmful Form of Relational Trauma

Incest is not just an event. It is a relational betrayal that rewires the entire architecture of the right brain.

Schore’s work shows that the right brain is where we learn:

• “Am I safe?”
• “Does my body belong to me?”
• “Do my emotions matter?”
• “Can I trust connection?”
• “Is my pain held or ignored?”

When the very person who should regulate your nervous system is the one overwhelming it, the child enters the state Schore identifies as “fear without solution,” the defining condition of disorganized attachment.

This is the exact neurobiology of incest.

The child’s developing right brain:

• Collapses into dissociation to survive
• Loses the energy required for healthy synaptogenesis
• Stores shame as identity
• Encodes intimacy as danger
• Internalizes aloneness

These patterns become the adult survivor’s:

• Hypervigilance
• Emotional Flashbacks
• Collapsing Under Stress
• Chronic shame
• Inability to trust
• Difficulty with intimacy
• Automatic self-blame
• Complex PTSD

Schore gives us the science behind what survivors already feel in their bones.

Using Schore’s framework:

The caregiver is both the source of terror and the only source of safety.

This creates incompatible survival imperatives:

• “I need you.”
• “You’re hurting me.”
• “I can’t escape.”

This produces disorganized attachment, the most severe form.

High-intensity stress + no relational soothing

Leads to:

• Dissociation
• Impaired right-brain growth
• Impaired affect regulation
• Fragmented self-concept
• Loss of interoception (can’t feel the body safely)
• No internal sense of safety or worth

Trauma becomes stored in unconscious, preverbal, right-brain networks

This is why:

• Survivors “know” things in their body before they know them in words.
• Emotional flashbacks feel like “becoming a child again.”
• Talk therapy alone rarely resolves incest trauma.

Why It Is So Difficult To Heal

Schore’s research explains precisely why survivors often say:

“I’m trying so hard, why isn’t this healing already?”

Healing is difficult because:

The injury happened before language

You can’t “talk your way out” of trauma that occurred before you could form words.

The injuries are stored in implicit, procedural memory, not words.

Talk therapy alone cannot reach them.

The right brain was harmed during its critical growth window

Relational trauma interrupts development itself.

You’re not just healing wounds. You’re building capacities that never had the chance to form.

Dissociation becomes a lifelong metabolic defense strategy

The body learned to shut down to survive. Your brain learned to survive by reducing energy to unbearable areas.

Bringing these areas online requires:

• Safety
• Slowness
• Co-Regulation
• Embodied Presence

This is why willpower cannot heal trauma.

Shame is neurologically embedded, wired into the right-brain self-image

Right-brain shame networks are laid down in the earliest years and become part of identity.

Not as a belief. As a felt identity.

It must be healed relationally, not intellectually.

Early relational trauma damages the capacity for trust

Connection feels unsafe

Intimacy feels unsafe.

Vulnerability feels unsafe.

Even safety feels unsafe.

Anything that feels familiar to your attachment system… feels unsafe.

The right brain holds the pain, but the left brain defends against it

Creating a split:

• Right Brain: 
• “I’m unlovable, unworthy, alone.”
• “I long for intimacy, closeness, connection.”
• Left Brain: 
• “I’m fine. I don’t need anyone.”
• “I can’t let anyone get close, because they might hurt me.”

Incest produces relational templates of

• Powerlessness
• Hypervigilance
• People-Pleasing
• Emotional Invisibility
• Sexual Confusion
• Chronic Self-Blame

These aren’t flaws. They are adaptive neurological programs.

What Survivors Actually Need to Heal (According to Schore’s Framework)

This is exactly the ethos of Holey House. 

Healing requires:

Right-brain-to-right-brain based healing relationships

Not lectures. Not logic. Not toxic positivity. Not “fixing” your mindset.

Survivors need experiences that work beneath language:

• Attunement
• Presence
• Consistency
• Emotional Mirroring
• Nonverbal Safety
• Prosody
• Facial Resonance
• Safe Gaze
• Pacing
• Co-Regulation

This is why Holey House focuses on voice, tone, art, symbolism, story, and embodied work, not just information.

Co-regulation before self-regulation

You can’t learn to regulate alone if you never had someone regulate you.

Permission to regress

Survivors need space to access younger emotional states without shame.

Relational repair through safe intersubjectivity

Survivors need relationships where:

• Emotions are welcomed
• Boundaries are honored
• Pacing is respected
• Emotional states are co-regulated
• Dissociation is met with warmth, not impatience

This mirrors the mother–infant attunement Schore identifies as the foundation of human nature.

Repairing disorganized attachment

This is the crux:

• Consistent relational safety
• Ruptures that get repaired
• Boundaries that are honored
• Shame that is met with compassion
• Emotional needs that are not exploited

Restoration of energy in the right brain

Healing must address energy depletion caused by chronic shutdown.

This includes:

• Somatic Work
• Breathwork
• Grounding
• Gently increasing tolerance for affect

The Holey Love app I’m developing, my artwork, my rituals, my writing…

They all engage the right brain:

• Wymbolism
• Imagery
• Metaphor
• Sensory Language
• Emotional Truth
• Shared Meaning

Holey House began two years ago, when I first began learning about the lifelong impact of incest abuse, long before I ever heard about Allan Schore or his groundbreaking theories. Yet, I intuitively knew what I needed and couldn’t find. I built Holey House to be a resource, but I stumbled upon a framework that touches the right brain, “weaving the psyche back together.”

Body-based healing

Because trauma is held in:

• The ANS
• Interoception Networks
• Brainstem
• Limbic Circuits

Modalities that help:

• Somatic Work
• IFS
• Breath Regulation
• EMDR
• Safe Relational Experiences
• Slowed Pacing
• Mindful Embodiment

Repairing Internal Working Models

Survivors need experiences of:

• Nonsexual Touch Safety
• Emotional Availability
• Trustworthy Presence
• Consistent Boundaries
• Rupture and Repair

These experiences rewire the unconscious, not just the conscious mind.

Attuned Therapeutic Relationships

Schore emphasizes that psychotherapy works through:

• Right-Brain-to-Right-Brain synchrony
• Mutual regression
• Implicit Emotional Sharing
• Co-Created Meaning

This is the heart of Holey House’s approach:

Healing through presence, not performance.

How These Concepts Empower Holey House

Holey House already embodies the principles Schore writes about.

My entire mission is a right-brain corrective experience.

• My voice.
• My art.
• My stories.
• My metaphors.
• My rituals.
• My imagery.
• My softness.
• My fierce truth-telling.

All of it is the exact medicine Schore says survivors never received.

Trauma-Inforied Literacy Grounded in Neuroscience

Holey House teaches survivors:

“You are not broken. Your brain adapted creatively to survive the impossible.”

Right-brain storytelling and symbolism

My imagery (matchsticks, kintsugi, fire and water, the Holey House metaphor) speaks directly to the implicit emotional brain where trauma lives.

Survivor-centered emotional pacing

Holey House’s voice offers:

• Co-Regulation
• Validation
• Humor
• Gentleness
• Honesty

This is the exact right-brain nourishment survivors missed.

A relational model of healing

Holey House programs emphasize:

• Community
• Attuned Guidance
• Embodied Rituals
• Emotional Regulation Holding
• Survivor Empowerment

Holey House is:

• The right-brain mother survivors deserved.
• A place where dissociated parts can come back into the body safely.
• A relational field where shame dissipates through connection.
• A symbolic world that rewires meaning-making.
• A community that provides co-regulation.
• A space where the “self” is allowed to reform.

Tools that integrate body, mind, and relationship

Schore’s work validates Holey House’s entire model:

“Healing must occur in the body, in relationships, and in the right brain.”

Holey House is a system of corrective intersubjective neurobiological experiences that rewire affect regulation, self-awareness, embodiment, and relational safety for incest survivors.

I’m building a right-brain sanctuary.

And that’s exactly what the science says survivors need.