Bruce D. Perry > Quotes

“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”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“The truth is, you cannot love yourself unless you have been loved and are loved. The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“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.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“What I’ve learned from talking to so many victims of traumatic events, abuse, or neglect is that after absorbing these painful experiences, the child begins to ache. A deep longing to feel needed, validated, and valued begins to take hold. As these children grow, they lack the ability to set a standard for what they deserve. And if that lack is not addressed, what often follows is a complicated, frustrating pattern of self-sabotage, violence, promiscuity, or addiction.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“We elicit from the world what we project into the world; but what you project is based upon what happened to you as a child.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“It’s interesting-most people think about therapy as something that involves going in and undoing what’s happened. But whatever your past experiences created in your brain, the associations exist and you can’t just delete them. You can’t get rid of the past.
Therapy is more about building new associations, making new, healthier default pathways. It is almost as if therapy is taking your two-lane dirt road and building a four-lane freeway alongside it. The old road stays, but you don’t use it much anymore. Therapy is building a better alternative, a new default. And that takes repetition, and time, honestly, it works best if someone understands how the brain changes. This is why understanding how trauma impacts our health is essential for everyone.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“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.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Fire can warm or consume,
water can quench or drown,
wind can caress or cut.

And so it is with human relationshps;
we can both create and destroy,
nurture and terrorize,
traumatize and heal each other”
― Bruce Perry

“Because what I know for sure is that everything that has happened to you was also happening for you. And all that time, in all of those moments, you were building strength. Strength times strength times strength equals power. What happened to you can be your power. — Oprah”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Our major finding is that your history of relational health—your connectedness to family, community, and culture—is more predictive of your mental health than your history of adversity (see Figure 8). This is similar to the findings of other researchers looking at the power of positive relationships on health. Connectedness has the power to counterbalance adversity.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“you can’t give what you don’t get. If no one ever spoke to you, you can’t speak; if you have never been loved, you can’t be loving.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“To develop a self one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Relationships matter: the currency for systemic change was trust, and trust comes through forming healthy working relationships. People, not programs, change people.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“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.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“the most powerful form of reward is relational. Positive interactions with people are rewarding and regulating. Without connection to people who care for you, spend time with you, and support you, it is almost impossible to step away from any form of unhealthy reward and regulation.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Think about how you’ve handled difficulty in your own life. With things that are very hard to deal with, you don’t want to talk about the pain or loss or fear for forty-five minutes nonstop. You want to talk with a really good friend for maybe two or three minutes about some aspect of it. When it gets too painful, you step back, you want to be distracted. And maybe you want to talk more later on. It is the therapeutic dosing that leads to real healing. Moments. Fully present, powerful, and brief.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Now, as I’ve suggested before, what is adaptive for children living in chaotic, violent, trauma-permeated environments becomes maladaptive in other environments-especially school. The hypervigilance of the Alert state is mistaken for ADHD; the resistance and defiance of Alarm and Fear get labeled as oppositional defiant disorder; flight behavior gets them suspended from school; fight behavior gets them charged with assault. The pervasive misunderstanding of trauma-related behavior has a profound effect on our educational, mental health, and juvenile justice systems.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“They prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Trauma leaves your shipwrecked. You are left to rebuild your inner world. Part of the rebuilding, the healing process, is revisiting the shattered hull of your old worldview; you sift through the wreckage looking for what remains, seeking your broken pieces…as you revisit the ship-wreck, piece by piece, you find a fragment and move it to your new, safer place in the now-altered landscape. You build a new worldview. That takes time. And many visits to the wreckage. And this process involves both unconscious and conscious repetitive “reenactment” behaviors, or writing, drawing, sculpting, or playing. Again and again, you revisit the site of the earthquake, look through the wreckage, take something, and move it to a safe haven. That’s part of the healing process.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“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.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“The responses of traumatized children are often misinterpreted...Because new situations are inherently stressful, and because youth who have been through trauma often come from homes in which chaos and unpredictability appear "normal" to them, they may respond with fear to what is actually a calm and safe situation. Attempting to take control of what they believe is the inevitable return of chaos, they appear to " provoke" it in order to make things feel more comfortable and predictable. Thus, the "honeymoon" period in foster care will end as the child behaves defiantly and destructively in order to prompt familiar screaming and harsh discipline. Like everyone else, they feel more comfortable with what is "familiar". As one family therapist famously put it, we tend to prefer the "certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty".”
― Bruce Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Biology isn’t just genes playing out some unalterable script. It is sensitive to the world around it,”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Empathy underlies virtually everything that makes society work—like trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity. Failure to empathize is a key part of most social problems—crime, violence, war, racism, child abuse, and inequity, to name just a few.”
― Bruce D. Perry, Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered

“So often we use the word snapped when we don’t know where a burst of anger is coming from or why someone is having a violent reaction. Well, now we know: Something has happened in the moment that triggers one of the brain’s trauma memories. And because the lower, non-rational parts of the brain are its first responders, they immediately set off stress responses that then shut off the reasonable part of the brain. And so that “burst” of violence is actually the result of some highly organized processes in the brain. And in this case, the first thing the school is going to say is, What’s wrong with him?”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Relationships are the agents of change and the most powerful therapy is human love”
― Bruce Perry

“...the speed with which we're inventing our world is outpacing our avility to understand the impact of our inventions.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“We make memories, but memories make us, too…”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“Your connectedness to other people is so key to buffering any current stressor—and to healing from past trauma. Being with people who are present, supportive, and nurturing. Belonging.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“stress is not something to be afraid of or avoided. It is the controllability, pattern, and intensity of stress that can cause problems.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“Dr. Perry: That’s a wonderful example of the glue of love. It is in the small moments, when we feel the other person fully present, fully engaged, connected, and accepting, that we make the most powerful, enduring bonds.”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing