Dr. Bruce Perry
Appearances
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
The other part of what you are sharing that's so important, and this is becoming a huge part of a revolution in medicine, is the recognition that these experiences influence the rest of your body, not just the mental health aspects, but your whole body, how your heart functions, how your GI system functions, how you metabolize food. It's the whole range of functions that your body helps us
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
kind of carry out so we can live, they're all impacted by developmental trauma. And so I think that that's a really important part of what you're sharing. For other people out there to hear that, you know, if you have developmental trauma, if you have traumatic experiences, it's not at all abnormal to have headaches and to have GI problems.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Yeah, this is part of the malleable, the changeable part of the human body is it is always trying to be responsive to the environmental circumstances. And when you're under stress and duress, it's telling parts of your body to change in ways that are theoretically adaptive in the moment, but aren't.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Over the long term, they're maladaptive because it wears out your system and it makes you much more vulnerable to whatever your genetic vulnerability is.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
The beautiful thing about healing from trauma and therapeutic positive change is that it's not about going back and undoing. It's about building new things. And so you have an opportunity in your life right now to have positive, trusting, relational interactions with the people around you. And the more you build on those relationships, the more you will ultimately get to the point where
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Right, exactly. And we all kind of have to do this every day in every aspect of our lives. Who do we really share a lot with? And if they're not going to be trustworthy, it's like, well, that's whatever. That's them. That's right.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Well, I'd been studying the development of people forever, you know, for 40 years.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Of the brain and of behavior and of the way people kind of grow and change and think and move and all that kind of stuff. And so I had this bias about, that was focused on the history of a person, which is really kind of the story of the person. And to understand where somebody was right now and why they were acting a certain way, you really needed to know their story. That's the bottom line.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And over that time, we've had many, many, many opportunities to talk about the impact of sexual abuse or domestic violence or poverty or racism on development and how that impacts people.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
That's the bottom line. And I think it's the bottom line Anybody, everything. You want to understand history? Understand the story of these people. Yes. Understand the story of the economics. Understand the story of an individual's personal life. You want to understand why your boss is an asshole? Understand their story. Understand their story. Yep.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
So regulation and dysregulation have to do with Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
There's a great quote by Abraham Lincoln who had, there's a legislator he didn't like. Yes. And he said, I don't like that man. I must get to know him. Wow. Isn't that amazing, right? Well, that's why he was Abraham Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln understood that if I knew his story, I would have a better understanding about why I don't like him and why he's unlikable.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And I think the thing, we see this with kids. One of the things that's true is that so many of these kids that drive educators crazy. kind of batty, when they learn about them, it's actually frequently heartbreaking.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
So you can't learn to play piano by just watching a video about playing the piano or by listening to music. You have to actually move your fingers on a piano key. And so what happened to you started in utero, which means that you need to do things that are going to be intrauterine-style experiences, patterned, repetitive, rhythmic activity.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
In utero, your brain is developing, and the stress response systems in your brain are developing. Ruta, ruta, ruta, ruta, ruta, ruta, ruta. continuous rhythmic exposure from maternal heart rate and so if you want to have doses of healing and positive growth in these lowest deepest parts of the brain keep doing intentionally and over with a pattern
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
pattern repetitive rhythmic things and there are ways to make change so in these lowest parts of the brain middle parts of the brain and top parts of the brain and you've been doing top parts of the brain right you know you probably have talking with people yeah yeah you're learning about it but ultimately that's so interesting the top part of the brain isn't what's going to really heal you you got to get down to the very root of what that thing is exactly yeah what that thing is
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
So kind of going back to what I brought up a couple of different times, really one of the things that you have to always remember is that the brain is capable of change. And the kind of change you want is going to require specific kinds of repetitive experiences. You can turn that trauma into wisdom. You can actually go through all kinds of relational experiences.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
You can go through sensory experiences. You can go through sort of cognitive intellectual experiences. And they'll all lead to growth. But the key to change, honestly,
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
is that you have a healing environment that's filled with people who see you, who make you feel that you belong because what they allow you then to do is that when you are in need of a regulatory interaction where somebody just is present, you can do that.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
When you're in need of somebody who is going to do something where you are needing some guidance, intellectual guidance, you have somebody who can do that. It's like having this big, beautiful, incredible extended family with people that are good at horseplay, people that are good at telling stories, people that are good at jokes, people that are good at teaching you how to do a fire.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And you use them in your life at the time you need them in the dose that you need them In other words, you don't just want to have one person responsible for every single thing that you're learning. The village is filled with an elder who's really good at telling stories, but he's not any good at teaching you how to knit.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And over here, the person who can teach you how to knit is different than the person who's going to teach you how to hunt. And the person who's going to teach you, who's going to be just a good listener, is going to sit next to you. If you have all of these people present in your life, you have this rich library of relationships that you can use as you grow.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And I think that because different people have different timing to their trauma and they have different kinds of trauma, they're all going to need different books from the library. Yes. And the problem with the current mental health system is that we give everybody the same book. Same book.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
It's like we need, instead of like having a little, you know, one shelf bookmobile, which is kind of what mental health treatment is right now. We need a library of Congress. of opportunities that are culturally specific, that can focus on movement and music and art and all the things that are part of the world that help us heal.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
If you are seen and you are relationally connected in a community, you have a rich library of resources that you can tap into To help you heal and to help you grow. That's right. And to help you buffer whatever current stressors you're having right now.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
It's a little dose of somebody, oh, I see you. I'm going to have a real conversation. Like the guy who drove me here today, we had a great conversation. He grew up in Beaumont, Texas, talked about his life. We talked about stuff. That was a little dose of goodness. It's like I remember telling the story of
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
I agree. I literally every day I get emails and feedback from people about the impact the book has had on the way they understand themselves and then the way they do their work.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And this is something that the field generally is doing more research on and learning a lot more.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Exactly. And what we're learning is that the earlier in life that you have these traumatic events, the more enduring the fundamental changes can be in these core stress response systems that are involved in everything we do.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And, you know, it's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of people because people generally think, oh, the baby doesn't understand what's going on or the two-year-old doesn't understand what's going on. They'll be fine.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Other issues. Exactly. And again, these are not irreversible issues, but they're significantly challenging issues. And the growth of the brain is so rapid early in life, and the stress and trauma of an experience are mediated through these really important foundational networks that go everywhere in your brain and out into your body.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
And when their functioning is abnormal, when their functioning is impacted through these stressful and traumatic experiences, they then send this cascade of sort of abnormal signals out to everywhere in the developing brain and everywhere in your body.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
You know, they can look at sleeping infants. And if parents are arguing in a different room, there's a physiological change in the baby's internal responses. Really? They literally are perceiving the fight, even though they're asleep and the parents are in a different room. Your brain is continually absorbing, as you say, the environment, the atmosphere around you.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Exactly. It's a little bit like the construction of a skyscraper, that 80% of the effort goes into the superstructure and the wiring and the plumbing and everything else.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
The foundational stuff is done. And now you're three years old. You haven't put in carpeting and you haven't selected what's going to go on the walls, but the foundational capabilities of that building are in place.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
So the first thing I want to do to help people appreciate is that they should be hopeful. The beauty of the human brain is that it's malleable, it's changeable. The challenge, however, is that in order to get sufficient change, you have to have multiple doses of the right kind of experience. And the right kinds of experiences are almost always relationally mediated.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
So if you have attentive, attuned, loving people in your life And that can be family and school. Or not be family. Or not be family. Just people around you who are present and attentive and attuned. You have this healing matrix, this healing environment where you can essentially have the reparative experiences that will lead to health.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
It's because there were people in your life who were present and helpful and loved you.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
All these things create an environment where you have opportunities for all kinds of healing. Social healing, cognitive healing, motor healing. But you need this environment.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
Well, first of all, the issue of forgiveness is one of the hardest challenges that we as human beings have. In fact, it's interesting. I don't want to get religious here, but the Lord's Prayer is not many words, but there's a whole line about forgiveness. And of all of the things you could bring into that foundational prayer, you know... Forgive us our trespasses? Yeah.
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
It's elevated because that's such a challenging thing to do. So here's what I would just say is that forgiveness is a process. It's not a switch. You know, you don't just go, I'm going to forgive you and then it's done. It's a process. And... I think as you grow and you heal and you learn more about the stories of your parents, you'll begin to develop some more understanding of
The Oprah Podcast
Dr. Bruce Perry
the reality that they probably were not intentionally trying to be as bad as it felt. And little by little, in tiny little bits of forgiveness, it'll come. But, you know, it can take a whole lifetime.