81
" You’ve probably heard of the “Romanian orphans.” It is likely that more than five hundred thousand children spent part of their early lives in the state-run institutional orphanages during the Ceauşescu regime in Romania; in 1989, when communism ended in the country, the public and press saw the horrible conditions these children had been subjected to. There were often forty to sixty babies or toddlers in a single large room, each in their own crib all day long, with only one or two caregivers rotating among them over the course of a twelve-hour shift. The children suffered deprivation, malnutrition, abuse, and more. Even after being removed from the institutions, they grew up with a range of deficits. Some had low IQs, others couldn’t walk, most had major problems forming and maintaining relationships. I worked with many children removed from these orphanages. In general, the longer the child was there, the longer the deprivation, the more serious the problems. Ironically, in some overcrowded institutions, children who had to share cribs ultimately did better. The Romanian orphans are now adults; for most of them, problems persist. As a group they are much more likely to be unemployed, have mental and physical health problems, and have difficulties with relationships. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
83
" This is incredibly unlike our modern world. We expect a single working mother to be the one to throw the baseball with her eight-year-old, rock the newborn, read to the three-year-old, and, by the way, cook a nutritious meal, help with homework, do the laundry, get everyone to bed, then wake up and get them all ready for childcare and school so she can go work all day, only to rush home to do it all again. All alone. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
89
" But speaking of decisions and choices, I want to turn to a question that baffles so many of us. Why is it that people who are victims of trauma are so often drawn to abusive relationships?
Let me broaden the question, because it is so important in understanding not just abuse but all behavior. The key point is that all of us tend to gravitate to the familiar, even when the familiar is unhealthy or destructive. We are drawn to what we were raised with.
As I’ve said before, when we are young and our brain is beginning to make sense of our experiences, it creates our ‘working model’ of the world. The brain organizes around the tone and tension of our first experiences. So if, early on, you have safe, nurturing care, you think that people are essentially good….But if a child experienced chaos, threat, or trauma, your brain organizes according to a view that the world is not safe and people cannot be trusted. Think about James. He didn’t feel ‘safe’ when he was close to people. Intimacy made him feel threatened.
Here is the confusing part: James felt most comfortable when the world was in line with his worldview. Being rejected or treated poorly validated this view. The most destabilizing thing for anyone is to have their core beliefs challenged….Good or bad, we are attracted to things that are familiar. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
92
" We see the same rationalization and avoidance in the face of large-scale or community trauma-war, famine, natural disasters, school shootings, the transgenerational impact of slavery. The privileged group turns their gaze from the pain. ‘Look how far they’ve come’, in the face of cultural genocide, ‘They need to assimilate”, in the face of trauma, “Isn’t it great that they are resilient?’ It is so easy for us to create an ‘other.’ Us-and-them is deeply ingrained into our neurobiology; it’s what makes connectedness a double-edged sword. We are strongly connected to our clan, but not so much to other clans-we compete for limited resources. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
93
" There were inquiries, Congressional hearings, books, exposés and documentaries. However, despite all this attention, it was still only a few short months before interest in these children dropped away. There were criminal trials, civil trials, lots of sound and fury. All of the systems—CPS, the FBI, the Rangers, our group in Houston—returned, in most ways, to our old models and our ways of doing things. But while little changed in our practice, a lot had changed in our thinking. We learned that some of the most therapeutic experiences do not take place in “therapy,” but in naturally occurring healthy relationships, whether between a professional like myself and a child, between an aunt and a scared little girl, or between a calm Texas Ranger and an excitable boy. The children who did best after the Davidian apocalypse were not those who experienced the least stress or those who participated most enthusiastically in talking with us at the cottage. They were the ones who were released afterwards into the healthiest and most loving worlds, whether it was with family who still believed in the Davidian ways or with loved ones who rejected Koresh entirely. In fact, the research on the most effective treatments to help child trauma victims might be accurately summed up this way: what works best is anything that increases the quality and number of relationships in the child’s life. "
― Bruce D. Perry , The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook
94
" The concept of resilience is used in our field. But if you look carefully at the biology after a traumatic experience-all the way down to the way genes are expressed-trauma will change everyone in some way.
And those changes will be there even if they don’t result in any apparent ‘real life’ problems for the person, even if the person demonstrates resilience. A child may continue to do just as well in school, for example, but it takes much more energy and effort. Or we may find that a child is able to return to his previous level of emotional functioning, but changes in his neuroendocrine system may make him more likely to develop diabetes. This is, in essence, what the ACE studies have demonstrated. Adversity impacts the developing child. Period. What that impact will be, when it may manifest, how it maybe ‘buffered’-we can’t always say. But developmental trauma will always influence our body and brain. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
95
" Why do money and possessions so rarely bring the happiness we expect? Because they often distance us from one another, rather than bringing us closer, emphasizing status gaps, not narrowing them. And, finally, what causes much of life’s most agonizing pain? This, too, is related to relationships—those we lose, fail to maintain, or that become one-sided or abusive. "
― Bruce D. Perry , Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential--and Endangered
98
" Adrenaline increases the sugar in your blood. Her stress response, overactivated by the recent trauma, increased her adrenaline—hence much more sugar in her blood. The dose of insulin that had worked in the past was no longer adequate. Furthermore, when she was exposed to any evocative cue, such as the sirens, her sensitized system had an overreaction, releasing very high levels of adrenaline and, in turn, leading to a huge release of sugar. "
― Bruce D. Perry , What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing
