Quotes from Bruce D. Perry

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.

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.

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.

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

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

What happened to you as an infant has a profound impact on this capacity to love and be loved.

we all require some reciprocal social feedback to stay engaged.

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?

We tend to use the word stress in negative ways, but stress is merely a demand on one or more of our body's many physiological systems. Hunger, thirst, cold, working out, a promotion at work: All are stressors, and stress is an essential and positive part of normal development; it's a key element in learning, mastering new skills, and building resilience. The key factor in determining whether stress is positive or destructive is the pattern of stress

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

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

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.

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.

belonging and being loved are core to the human experience. We are a social species; we are meant to be in community—emotionally, socially, and physically interconnected with others.

the capacity to be connected in meaningful and healthy ways is shaped by our earliest relationships. Love, and loving caregiving, is the foundation of our development

You can't give what you don't have.

Connectedness regulates and rewards us.

In fact, some theories of language development suggest that humans learned to dance and sing before we could talk, that music was actually the first human language.

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.

The capacity to love cannot be built in isolation. I

We need to allow children to try and fail. And when they do make the stupid, shortsighted decisions that come from inexperience, we need to let them suffer the results. At the same time we also need to provide balance by not setting policies that will magnify one mistake, like drug use or fighting, into a life-derailing catastrophe. Unfortunately, this is exactly what our current "zero tolerance" policies- —that expel children from school for just one rule violation—do.

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.

The capacity to control your dissociative capabilities is very powerful. It allows people to be good at reflective cognition. It allows people to have intense focus on a specific task. Hypnosis, flow, being "in the zone"-all of these are examples of the trance state that dissociation allows. People who learn to control when and how they go into a trance state have a gift…be careful about labeling dissociation as a pathology…It can be an incredible strength.

My friend, the poet Mark Nepo, says that the pain was necessary in order to know the truth. But we don't have to keep the pain alive in order to keep the truth alive.