Bruce D. Perry Quotes

“After all, one of the defining elements of a traumatic experience — particularly one that is so traumatic that one dissociates because there is no other way to escape from it — is a complete loss of control and a sense of utter powerlessness. As a result, regaining control is an important aspect of coping with traumatic stress.”

“Although I do not mean to imply that all of these children will be severely 'damaged' by these experiences, the most moderate estimates suggest that at any given time, more than eight million American children suffer from serious, diagnosable, trauma-related psychiatric problems. Millions more experience less serious but still distressing consequences.”

“As you learn anything, in fact, your brain is constantly checking current experience against stored templates — essentially memory — of previous, similar situations and sensations, asking 'Is this new?' and 'Is this something I need to attend to?'”

“Biology isn’t just genes playing out some unalterable script. It is sensitive to the world around it.”

“But throughout history, while some humans have been our best friends and kept us safe, others have been our worst enemies. The major predators of human beings are other human beings. Our stress-response systems, therefore, are closely interconnected with the systems that read and respond to human social cues. As a result we are very sensitive to expressions, gestures and the moods of others. As we shall see, we interpret threat and learn to handle stress by watching how those around us. We even have special cells in our brains that fire, not when we move or express emotions, but when we see others do so.”

“Even in utero and after birth, for every moment of every day, our brain is processing the nonstop set of incoming signals from our senses. Sight, sound, touch, smell, taste — all of the raw sensory data that will result in these sensations enter the lower parts of the brain and begin a multistage process of being categorized, compared to previously stored patterns, and ultimately, if necessary, acted upon. In many cases the pattern of incoming signals is so repetitive, so familiar, so safe and the memory template that this pattern matches is so deeply engrained, that your brain essentially ignores them. This is a form of tolerance called habituation.”

“Fire can warm or consume, water can quench or drown, wind can caress or cut. And so it is with human relationships: we can both create and destroy, nurture and terrorize, traumatize and heal each other.”

“For years mental health professionals taught people that they could be psychologically healthy without social support, that 'unless you love yourself, no one else will love you.' The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.”

“Growth of the Body and the Brain. The physical growth of the human body increases in a roughly linear manner from birth through adolescence. In contrast, the brain’s physical growth follows a different pattern. The most rapid rate of growth takes place in utero, and from birth to age four the brain grows explosively. The brain of the four-year-old is 90 percent adult size! A majority of the physical growth of the brain’s key neural networks takes place during this time. It is a time of great malleability and vulnerability as experiences are actively shaping the organizing brain. This is a time of great opportunity for the developing child: safe, predictable, nurturing and repetitive experiences can help express a full range of genetic potentials. Unfortunately, however, it is also when the organizing brain is most vulnerable to the destructive impact of threat, neglect and trauma.”

“Human beings fear what they don’t understand. The unknown scares us. When we meet people who look or act in unfamiliar or strange ways, our initial response is to keep them at arm’s length. At times we make ourselves feel superior, smarter or more competent by dehumanizing or degrading those who are different. The roots of so many of our species’s ugliest behaviors — racism, ageism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, to name just a few — are in this basic brain-mediated response to perceived threat. We tend to fear what we do not understand, and fear can so easily twist into hate or even violence because it can suppress the rational parts of our brain.”

“Humans are social animals, highly susceptible to emotional contagion. Training, logic, and intelligence are often no match for the power of groupthink.”

“Hyper-aroused youth can look hyperactive or inattentive because what they are attending to is the teacher’s tone of voice or the other children’s body language, not the content of their lessons. The aggression and impulsivity that the fight or flight response provokes can also appear as defiance or opposition, when in fact it is the remnants of a response to some prior traumatic situation that the child has somehow been prompted to recall. The “freezing” response that the body makes when stressed—sudden immobility, like a deer caught in the headlights — is also often misinterpreted as defiant refusal by teachers because, when it occurs, the child literally cannot respond to commands. While not all ADD, hyperactivity and oppositional-defiant disorder are trauma-related, it is likely that the symptoms that lead to these diagnoses are trauma-related more often than anyone has begun to suspect.”

“If the experience is familiar and known as safe, the brain’s stress system will not be activated. However, if the incoming information is initially unfamiliar, new or strange, the brain instantly begins a stress response. How extensively these stress systems are activated is related to how threatening the situation appears. It’s important to understand that our default is set at suspicion, not acceptance. At a minimum, when faced with a new and unknown pattern of activity, we become more alert. The brain’s goal at this point is to get more information, to examine the situation and determine just how dangerous it might be. Since humans have always been the deadliest animal encountered by other humans, we closely monitor nonverbal signals of human menace, such as tone of voice, facial expression and body language.”

“Like people who learn a foreign language later in life, Virginia and Laura will never speak the language of love without an accent.”

“Memory is what the brain does, how it composes us and allows our past to help determine our future. In no small part memory makes us who we are.”

“Negative emotions often make things even more memorable than positive ones because recalling things that are threatening — and avoiding those situations in the future if possible — is often critical to survival.”

“Our conscious memory is full of gaps, of course, which is actually a good thing. Our brains filter out the ordinary and expected, which is utterly necessary to allow us to function. When you drive, for example, you rely automatically on your previous experiences with cars and roads; if you had to focus on every aspect of what your senses are taking in, you’d be overwhelmed and would probably crash.”

“Recognizing the power of relationships and relational cues is essential to effective therapeutic work and, indeed, to effective parenting, caregiving, teaching and just about any other human endeavor. This would turn out to be a major challenge as we started working with the Davidian children. Because, as I soon discovered, the CPS workers, law enforcement officers and mental health workers involved in trying to help the children were all overwhelmed, stressed out and in a state of alarm themselves.”

“Reducing economic inequality and helping victims of domestic violence and child abuse are critical if we want to cut violence and crime.”

“Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.”

“Surprisingly, it is often when wandering through the emotional carnage left by the worst of humankind that we find the best of humanity as well.”

“The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.”

“The core lessons these children have taught me are relevant for us all. Because in order to understand trauma we need to understand memory. In order to appreciate how children heal we need to understand how they learn to love, how they cope with challenge, how stress affects them. And by recognizing the destructive impact that violence and threat can have on the capacity to love and work, we can come to better understand ourselves and to nurture the people in our lives, especially the children.”

“The diagnosis of PTSD was only itself introduced into psychiatry in 1980. At first, it was seen as something rare, a condition that only affected a minority of soldiers who had been devastated by combat experiences. But soon the same kinds of symptoms — intrusive thoughts about the traumatic event, flashbacks, disrupted sleep, a sense of unreality, a heightened startle response, extreme anxiety — began to be described in rape survivors, victims of natural disaster and people who’d had or witnessed life-threatening accidents or injuries. Now the condition is believed to affect at least 7 percent of all Americans and most people are familiar with the idea that trauma can have profound and lasting effects. From the horrors of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we recognize that catastrophic events can leave indelible marks on the mind.”

“The fact that the brain develops sequentially — and also so rapidly in the first years of life — explains why extremely young children are at such great risk of suffering lasting effects of trauma: their brains are still developing. The same miraculous plasticity that allows young brains to quickly learn love and language, unfortunately, also makes them highly susceptible to negative experiences as well.”

“The more healthy relationships a child has, the more likely he will be to recover from trauma and thrive. Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love.”

“The most traumatic aspects of all disasters involve the shattering of human connections. And this is especially true for children. Being harmed by the people who are supposed to love you, being abandoned by them, being robbed of the one-on-one relationships that allow you to feel safe and valued and to become humane — these are profoundly destructive experiences. Because humans are inescapably social beings, the worst catastrophes that can befall us inevitably involve relational loss. As a result, recovery from trauma and neglect is also all about relationships — rebuilding trust, regaining confidence, returning to a sense of security and reconnecting to love. Of course, medications can help relieve symptoms and talking to a therapist can be incredibly useful. But healing and recovery are impossible—even with the best medications and therapy in the world—without lasting, caring connections to others.”

“The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.”

“They prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.”

“Through moderate, predictable challenges our stress response systems are activated moderately. This makes for a resilient, flexible stress response capacity. The stronger stress response system in the present is the one that has had moderate, patterned stress in the past.”