YouSaid · the spoken record

Bruce Perry

lines on the record: 42
first: 2021-04-27
most recent: 2021-04-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Or anxiety, it's just that it didn't destroy them, and it gives those people tend to have tremendous empathy for others who are struggling, and they also tend to have wisdom. You know, they're wise about The ability to live with pain and not have so much fear from pain. You know, it's not like you're going back and undoing. You're moving forward. I mean, that's the thing. That's the nature of the human biological system. We always are moving forward. We're changing. We may think the same, look the same, but we're always changing forward”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, basically, that's referring to the experience where you've been able to kind of get through adversity and you're now at a safer place in your life and you can look back and reflect and take what you've learned and use that to see the world differently. You use your pain and transform it to power and help other people. I think of the most transformative people I've ever known, every single one of them had personal pain and traumatic experience that was a core element of who they became. And it didn't crush them. They learned how to carry the burden in a way. It's not like it goes away. It's not like you're free of distress or depression.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key is actually reaching the parts of the brain with sufficient repetition to cause change. And so children who have these early life insults that result in these profound abnormalities during development, if you end up getting opportunities for consistent, predictable, stable relationships over time, you will over time get better. Even if you had a bad start, you can get better. It just takes time.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To explain it, but go ahead. I won't explain it. Give it a shot. I'll give it a shot. So basically what we know is that all parts of the brain are malleable, changeable.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience is the density of healthy people in your life. If you've got somebody you can engage with, you're going to be able to heal.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Well, if you remember our conversation about activating the stress response system in unpredictable and chaotic or extreme ways, that leads to vulnerability. But if you activate your stress response in moderate, predictable, controllable ways, tiny little doses of positive activation that you control, the kind of thing that can happen if you do sports or if you are involved in drama or performing arts of any sort, you know, even conversation, you know, with somebody about a topic that's kind of hot, there's a little bit of activation, but it's controllable. So you have this pattern of activation that can take these sensitized systems and make them more normal. And that's healing. And so what really is a major determinant of whether or not you get these little doses of healing”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, after all these years and lots of research from our group and other groups, it turns out that the most important factor is what we refer to kind of as your relational health. How connected are you in a healthy way to family, community, culture? And if you have these connections, you can buffer present stressors and it also provides the healing environment to recover from past trauma. So what we find is children who've got this relational wealth actually do pretty well. But children who have relational poverty are really very, very vulnerable.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They started over. It was a reset. And they became like really good friends. And it was a really, really positive experience.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was clear that he had actually used that to cover the smell of alcohol because he was supposed to come to these visitations sober. And so I thought, well, I wonder whether or not there was a scent that was an evocative cue for the teacher. So I go to the teacher and I said, listen, is there any, you know, what kind of deodorant do you use? And he named the deodorant, the very same deodorant my dad used, the very same deodorant that Sam's father was using. And I realized that every day in that class, every time the teacher got close enough for Sam's brain to smell that scent, it was an evocative cue. It was triggering a trauma memory and resulting in these disruptive behaviors in the classroom. And once I asked the teacher to change the deodorant and I sat them down and explained what I thought was happening,”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't know what's going on. Sam doesn't know why he acts that way. So Sam was actually scheduled to have a visit from his father who had been his abuser. And so Sam comes into this room. He's sitting at a table waiting for his father to come. And I'm sitting in the corner just sort of daydreaming. The father comes in and they start playing checkers or chess. I can't even remember. But they started playing, some came. And I'm just sort of daydreaming. And I started thinking about my dad. And I started thinking about, you know, fishing in Canada. And all of a sudden found myself having memories of a certain deodorant and a combination of cigar smell and deodorant that my dad had that he always had when he wore his hunting shirt. And then I thought, well, maybe, you know, I'm actually smelling that smell. And so I went over to the father and sure enough, that same scent from his deodorant was sort of permeating the air.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I was working at a residential treatment center, and this was a place where all of the children who were there, they were all boys, and they had all come from the foster care child welfare system. So Sam had been there for a couple of years, and he was doing pretty well. And in fact, he was kind of a model student in school until he progressed into a math class where there was a male math teacher. And he started having all these behaviors where he was aggressive and rude and hostile and sometimes would just leave the class. So I observed, I couldn't figure out what was going on. But every time the teacher kind of got close to Sam, Sam Would like to push his desk, or he'd throw a book on the floor or do something just sort of disruptive.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They begin to shift the way they understand the child. They no longer take it personally. They ask what happened to you. Sometimes they may not know what happened, but they realize something.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of times when a teacher has a child who acts out in the class, they feel as if it's personalized, as if the misbehavior is directed towards them. And in fact, it very rarely is. If a child has a history of trauma, it's because the behavior is kind of a manifestation at times of the fight or flight response. You know, whether it's physical proximity becomes an evocative cue every time any other adult got close to me and came up behind me, they were going to hurt me. So when the teacher comes over my shoulder to try to help me and they blow up and say, get away from me, that's basically a completely predictable defensive behavior by the child, but a completely confusing, aggressive behavior to the teacher. And again, one of the things that we've been able to do with educators is if we teach them about trauma and about these responses,”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, exactly. I think that kids are resilient. They don't. I can't tell, I hear that all the time. Kids are resilient. And what we do know is that children, we're all malleable, and children are very malleable. And that basically means that you're changeable. You can change. And the good news about this malleability is that the ability to demonstrate resilience is changeable. So there are things you can do to make somebody more resilient, and there's things you can do to make somebody less resilient.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And that's one of the major kind of misconceptions of the adult world in general about young children and trauma. Yeah, you think you think you think”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a hangar, but it's got a weak place. And so that's more typical of the way human neurobiology is, is that even somebody who's able to demonstrate resilience at the beginning of the pandemic may not be able to manage the same level of challenge a year into the pandemic, for example.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, so again, resilience is one of those words that we use a lot. And I just want to clarify that resilience is something that is not a permanent trait. Like, you know, someone's not just born resilient and they're going to be the same level of resilience their whole life. Resilience is this capability to respond to a challenge and a stressor and manage it and get back to your previous level of functioning. But the reality is the way human beings are is we're a little bit more like the way we change in response to a stressor is that it's like bending a hanger. You know, you can bend a hanger to kind of, you know, if you have to open a car door or something, but if you bend the hanger and try to put it back to it where it was before, you can get it kind of there, but it's not exactly the same way it was.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things that go with learning how to read. We send kids to school and we practice and we practice and we practice and the brain changes repetition. The same thing is true for the systems in our brain that are involved in the stress response and in how we manage stressors. Remember that human beings are contagious to the emotions of others. And so the child will literally feel fearful in a way that the adult feels fearful. And if that is repeated enough and enough and enough, pretty soon the child, the biology of the child's brain will mirror the biology of the parent's brain. And that can get transmitted from generation to generation to generation.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, one of the things about human beings, and this is a quality of the human brain, is that human beings, unlike any other species on the planet, have the ability to absorb more information per second than any other species. And what that means is you can take the accumulated experiences, the distilled experiences of previous generations, and internalize them in a way that'll change your brain. The best example that everybody can kind of connect with is learning to read. I mean, I don't know, 10,000 years ago, there wasn't a single human being on the planet who could read because we had not invented the written word. So reading is an invention that we pass on to the next generation. And the way we pass it on is by repetitive, intentional exposure to all...”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that can be great. And you can actually be pals and be teammates in sports or whatever. And you can have lots of positive experiences. But to undo that original negative bias takes thousands and thousands and thousands of reasons. Very few people are willing to put themselves in a situation to continue to be open in what has been referred to now as anti-racist. So you literally have to intentionally put yourself in a position where you're made to be uncomfortable with your own bias, but you have to do it again and again and again. And that can make it change. But it takes a special person that's willing to do that.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it's the passivity going into the brain. Right. Or the passivity of watching your adult parent not. Not call somebody on making a racist joke. You see them laugh at a racist joke? That's endorsement, right? That's okay. Even though they never did have explicit overt racist teachings in the home, that you pick it up as a child. And so, if you grow up with all kinds of bombardment through the media, through these sort of filtered experiences in your home, in your community, that people who are black are other and not good as good as or have other attributes that somehow get assigned to them, that gets into your brain. And so let's say you then have a real experience with somebody who's a person of color.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the media, exactly, and/or translated through the people around you. You know, we don't talk about this much, but a lot of the toxic beliefs about others comes through the people we think are important. Our coaches, our teachers, our parents. And so if they have come from and are biased and are racist, that percolates into us even though we may claim that there's no, I don't have a racist bone in my body. It gets into your brain. And I think the combination of that”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So what happened was this initial sort of implicit bias that they had was based on lack of experience with anybody that looked like that. But over time, they overcame that implicit bias by building in a new catalog of experience with a white person. And so the next white person they would meet, their brain would go, oh, you're in the same class as this nice kind white person that helped us in our village. And the key opera is that first experiences are so powerful because they're setting... They're setting the template for the way your brain views the world. So if the first white person you meet turns out to be okay, and that's based on real experience, your brain's default to the next white person is they're good.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's their version of the way the world works. And so there was a woman whose daughter was basically a peace corps nurse, and she was going into villages in Africa and immunizing children. And some of these were very, very rural, and a lot of these children had never seen anybody who was white. She goes into the village and some of the little kids look at her and run. Some of them just break out and start crying. And in part, that's just because for those children, this was so unfamiliar and so different that it activated and frightened them.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So, first of all, you're born with a brain that's undeveloped, you know, and the top part of your brain, the cortex, is not yet fully organized. Other parts of the brain aren't fully organized. And the way your brain makes sense out of the world is it takes patterns of activity, things you hear and things you see, and it connects them. And that's how your brain kind of makes sense out of your world when you're little. And if your world is filled with people who are all white, your brain basically makes sense out of human beings as being white. And when it sees something that doesn't fit your pattern, it activates a stress response. And that's because the brain's default response to novelty, to anything new or anything unfamiliar. The default response is, what is this? And so everybody builds this internal catalog.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But going back to these microaggressions that I talked about earlier, if you're getting signals that you don't quite belong, you're not one of us, you literally feel dysregulated. And it's a stressor. And so anything that makes you feel marginalized, minimized, degraded, not heard activates your stress response.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, broadly speaking, it means being in balance. You know, your body has all these systems. Your lungs help you sort of manage and keep in balance your oxygen levels. And so if your oxygen level gets low because you're working really hard by walking up steps, you'll take deeper breaths. And so we have these, all of the systems that we have, the systems that have to do with sleep and wake, the systems we have to do with oxygen and sugar in our blood, for example, they're always trying to keep us in balance. And so these stress response systems that I kind of talked about that are in the lower part of the brain, they're continually getting information from the outside world and from the inside world. And so if you're getting signals from the people in your classroom, for example, that you belong, you feel safe. You feel regulated.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It has to get through this lower kind of reactive part of our brain, and then it has to go through the emotional part of our brain, and then it finally gets up to the reasoning part of our brain. If you really want to get to somebody's cortex, first of all, they have to be regulated. And then you have to connect with them as a person.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the dilemma is Down here in the lower part of the brain, we've got these regulatory networks involved in the stress response. And when they're activated and when you feel under threat, the first thing that happens is you shut down the top part of your brain. All of the things we're trying to do in education, parenting, therapy that are intended to reach the top part of the brain, they're never going to get there if we don't first deal with the trauma-altered stress response systems that originate in the lower part of the brain.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, and I think that the more everybody understands a little bit about how the brain works and how the brain changes, the better off we're going to be. We'll be better parents, we'll be better teachers, we'll be better in law enforcement. And one of the simple fundamental tools we do to help teach people these things is have them envision the brain as this upside down triangle. And down to the bottom are these regulatory systems that control heart rate, blood pressure, and so forth. And as you get higher and higher in the brain, you get to the cortex, the top part of your brain that's the most uniquely human part of our brain, those capabilities are the things that we're trying to basically encourage and build into the brain of a child when we teach them right from wrong, when we teach them language, when we teach them geography, when we teach them the story of our people. All of those things go into the cortex.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This sort of vicious negative cycle of misunderstanding and then actions on the part of the adult world that further traumatize the child.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have more tools. You know, the older you get, the more tools you have to understand and make sense out of what's happening to you. But an infant doesn't have their brain is not developed yet to the point where they can really understand what is happening. And so if those stress response systems experience chaos, threat, and all kinds of extreme things, they'll literally be these genetic changes in the way those systems organize and they'll literally view the world as a threatening place. And so what that means is if even in a safe environment, if your brain is primed to respond to everything as if it's a threat, a teacher who comes up to everything and tries to be kind, your brain will go, what do you want from me as opposed to let me listen to you? And it literally leads to this.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right. So, first of all, I think there's a lot of work that's shown that adverse experiences or traumatic experiences during development change your biology and make you at increased risk for heart disease, mental health problems, substance abuse, all kinds of bad things. But if you actually start to look at when those adverse experiences take place, it turns out that the most important time appears to be this first start in life, the first couple of months. And so when we look at kids who have lots of adversity and few relational supports in the first two months of life, and then they get into a healthy environment after only two bad months. They have worse outcomes than kids that have a good two months, and then something happens where all kinds of bad things happen, lots of trauma, lots of adversity.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have labeled them microaggressions, but when those happen, your stress response activates. And because it's unpredictable, these little activations all day long slowly transform your stress response system to becoming what we refer to as sensitized. It's overly active. It's tuned up, and then it's overly reactive. And so what will happen is somebody who has a stress response system like that is going to have a predisposition for having hypertension, for having diabetes, for having asthma. And of course, if you look at children of color and youth of color in our society, their rates of asthma, heart disease, diabetes are higher than the general population. And I believe a lot of that can be...”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minority child in a majority community. You're continually getting these little doses of like, why are you here? And do you belong here?”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think that this is an area that I hope the book will help people understand better. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about this last year in our society is racism, right? And one of the things that we know is that the stress response systems in our body that are sort of housed in the brain predominantly these systems are very, very malleable. They change in response to the pattern of stressor that you experience. And if your experiences with stress are unpredictable and inconsistent and you have no control over them, you can have changes in the biology of that stress response system that look just like a big capital T trauma, even though you never had any big event. And examples of that are being, let's say you are a”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're going to have a much harder time than a child who has come from a stable, consistent, predictable background, and they'll both have some initial response, but the child who has that stable background is going to have a higher probability of getting back to a healthy baseline. The other child's more vulnerable. I mean, one of the classic examples is if you look at people that go into the military and then experience combat while they're in the military. If you take the people that join the military and they have a history of domestic violence, alcoholism in their family, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and then they go into combat, they'll develop post-traumatic stress disorder at a rate that's about three times higher than individuals who join the military and don't have that background, but experience the same level of combat.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Well, in part because both of them are going to have a slightly different ability to manage that event that they bring into it. So there may be somebody who has a history of inconsistent, unpredictable life experiences, and they're more fragile. So when they're in a school fire, for example,”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when we are talking about trauma in this book, and when I talk about trauma in my work, I'm actually referring to an experience that can literally influence the way your stress response systems work. And as a result, have long-term impact on the person. And this is an important thing because the experience itself is not necessarily the trauma. Two people can go into the same event and one will be completely overwhelmed and have long-term problems with sleep, anxiety, impulsivity. And another person...”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, everybody uses that term, right? They'll talk about how, oh my God, I was traumatized by something that somebody said to me at lunch, you know.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I think people intuitively understand that your life experiences influence who you are. But what I don't think they connect with is that those experiences literally change the biology of your body, particularly the biology of your brain.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's one of the most important things about that shift in frame of reference is that we know that the experiences you have when you're growing up, both good and bad, shape the biology of your brain. And so these early experiences literally have a major impact on your physical health, your mental health, your social health, and really every aspect of our society is impacted by developmental experiences. And particularly developmental experiences that are toxic, traumatic.”
2021-04-27 · Oprah's Super Soul · Dr. Bruce Perry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source